While US forces poke and prod restlessly at the outskirts of Fallujah, Baghdad Prime Minister Allawi warns the terrorist guerillas yet again, "Your time is running out. Really!"

Get on with it, already.

The good old Christian Science Monitor, which struggles mightily to try and look objective, helpfully points out that the world doesn't all hate George Bush.

Just before election day, the US economy continues to chug along with 3.7% growth in the Gross Domestic Product for the recently ended quarter -- a nice increase over 3.3% in the quarter before that. This is good, solid growth: not too sluggish, not too fast. Brisk, vigorous growth, you may recall, makes economists fret about an "overheated economy," like they did throughout the 90's.

Come to think of it...

The unemployment rate is at 5.4% (down from the high of 6.3% in June 2003, and the same as November and December 1996, at the end of Mr. Clinton's first term).

Inflation, even with gas prices factored in, stands at 2.5% -- less than at the end of President Clinton's first term. Without food and energy, it's just 2%.

And disposable personal income is rising too.

Just a few more reasons -- on top of his visionary leadership in the Terror War -- to re-elect President Bush.

Nobody ever accused him of being subtle. Four days before the election, Osama bin Laden appeared to lecture the US on how to vote. After making several points quoted verbatim from Fahrenheit 9/11, the mangy Islamic Supremacist urged americans to elect the candidate who "will not mess with our security."

So apparently he's for Nader.

FactCheck.org, which has been lending a measure of balance and rationality this campaign season, finally loses it over an anti-Bush ad that makes even Michael Moore look honest. Here's an excerpt:

"This anti-Bush radio ad is among the worst distortions we've seen in what has become a very ugly campaign. It states as fact some of the most sensational falsehoods that Michael Moore merely insinuated in his anti-Bush movie Farenheit 9/11 .

"The ad was released Oct. 25 by The Media Fund, an independent Democratic group run by former Clinton deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes. It falsely claims that members of the bin Laden family were allowed to fly out of the US 'when most other air traffic was grounded,' though in fact commercial air traffic had resumed a week earlier.

"The ad also falsely claims that the bin Laden family members were not 'detained,' when in fact 22 of them were questioned by the FBI before being allowed to leave -- and their plane was searched as well.

"And by the way, the man who gave approval for the flight wasn't Bush or even any of his close aides, it was former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, now one of Bush's strongest critics."

If we didn't believe so devoutly in the sanctity of free speech, the Gnomon might almost see this sort of thing as a powerful argument for further campaign finance reform. Unfortunately, it is difficult to legislate responsible speech.

Does yelling, "Evil President" during a Terror War amount to the moral equivalent of yelling, "fire" in a crowded theater?

So the Russians trucked some of the mystery ammo to Syria before the war, and now Major Austin Pearson of the 3rd Infantry Division reveals his men removed and destroyed 277 tons of what munitions were left when they got there.

The fact that there were still armaments at the infamous Iraqi site is seen by NPR (displaying their typical objectivity) as ominous, insidious, very bad news for President Bush. Oddly, they've made virtually no mention of the Russian truck convoys -- surely a mere oversight. Perhaps they should have talked to Major Pearson (or FoxNews, at least) before carrying on so.

Senator Kerry keeps beating the President up about those missing iraqi explosives. One would almost think from his rhetoric that Mr. Bush should have flown to Iraq and guarded them personally. Unfortunately for Mr. Kerry, Boston's World Series win may turn out to be the last bright spot for his campaign.

It is now known that spy satellites spotted convoys of trucks running those explosives over the Syrian border before the war began. Pentagon officials have evidence Russian special forces ran this operation. But Mr. Kerry continues to pound away at the story. At least he's getting some backing from the Russians.

The liberal cultists have faith that this story -- like all the stories before it -- will destroy President Bush once and for all. Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris is not so sure.

We don't think so either.

We're not really sold on this idea of the polarized electorate... but this guy certainly seems a bit that way.  Won't Florida ever have a normal election?

We're moving in the right evolutionary direction, at least.  A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics shows Americans are getting bigger and bigger.  Meanwhile, in a finding that inspired numerous Hobbit-based news stories, archaeologists have found an ancient race of little people!

This Lebanese newspaper is reporting that the terrorist guerillas have now taken 11 Iraqi National Guard members hostage. Iraq's Foreign Minister says he knows nothing of it, but photos of the men have been posted on the guerilla website.

After the 49 rookie Iraqi soldiers they slaughtered the other day and their kidnapping and exhibition of Margaret Hassan, one would hope the Iraqi people are finally getting sick enough to rise against these thugs.

In other space news, a flat-screen Toshiba TV in Corvallis, Oregon recently called the international COSPAS-SARSAT search-and-rescue satellite network for help. What disturbed the television so profoundly that it decided to emit a high-intensity distress signal has not been disclosed. However Toshiba assured the public that most of their electronics are trained to call 911 before resorting to such extreme measures.

What's the most likely place (other than here) in the Solar System to find life, according to scientists?  Nope.  No, not there either.

The answer is Titan, the smoggy, orange moon of Saturn.  It's the only moon around with a fully-developed atmosphere, and planetary observers have been intrigued with it for decades, because they believe that atmosphere may be rather like the one Earth had before we got the one we have now -- the one infested with life.  Of course, right now, Titan's air is mostly nitrogen and methane, probably smelling more like a Porta-Potty than an invigorating sea breeze.

Now, we have the Cassini-Huygens probe circulating through the Saturnine system of moons and rings. Today marks the first really close fly-by of Titan: only 750 miles up. Already it's spotted a strange, light-colored "continent" called Xanadu (but no stately pleasure domes, so far). That's been seen before with the Hubble Space Telescope, but this is our best chance yet to learn if the ethane lakes and proto-amino acids of scientific reverie are really there.

For one of the more hateful items on the Internet regarding President Bush, take a look at this gem.  It was originally published Friday on the site of Britain's Guardian newspaper -- never a terribly sane bunch to begin with.  Still, they had the good sense to take it down within a few hours. 

But you know, the Internet -- she remembers!

This article provides a good example of what it's like for the President to fight the Terror War:

You receive the best information available at the time; it indicates al-Qaeda intends to sway the US elections with an attack, just like they did in Spain. You go ahead and issue an alert. It's the only safe thing to do, seeing as you're charged with protecting the country from things like this.

As time goes by, things become clearer. As happens with most intelligence, you find much of the information has only a probability of being true. One source turns out to have been making things up. But the overall chatter still indicates an attack is coming; you just don't know the specifics -- when, where, who.

Your political opponents see this as opportunism on your part. "Ah, there was no threat. Bush just wants to scare the ignorant masses into voting for him."

Should you wait for apodictic certainty before you warn people there's a threat?

Others complain they aren't warned of threats soon enough. "We want to know everything Bush knows. Why's he playing things so close to the vest? This is the most secretive Presidency in modern times!"

Should you issue a warning every time there's the slightest whiff of a hint of an inkling of a suspicion of a threat? Then, of course, they'll write books within a year calling you a liar because some of your intelligence is later found to be unreliable. It's happened before, and with better-attested intelligence, too.

Wading through such a fog, one has two choices: Pull over to the side of the road and wait for it to clear. Or, if the situation is urgent, proceed resolutely as best you can.

The situation is urgent. Sitting on the shoulder, or dithering over what to do, or fiddling with cruise control so you look busy is not an option any longer. Dangerous and uncertain as it is (both geopolitically and politically), we must drive on.

That's why the Gnomon recommends you vote for George W. Bush this election day.

Ok, Iraqis.  This is where you need to stand up.  This is where you need to draw the line in the sand.  Margaret Hassan has devoted 30 years of her life to serving your people through thick and thin, and some of you know where she is right now.  If you are the civillized, educated country you fancy yourself to be, then this should be unconscionable.

This should be the point at which you either lead Coalition troops to her for a rescue, or storm the place yourselves.  And while you're at it, you should make short work of this interloper, Mr. al-Zarqawi. 

If you don't, perhaps you're not worthy of democracy after all.

UPI is reporting that our own William Jefferson Clinton is very interested in becoming the next United Nations Secretary General, once he's all healed up. And we would have to agree that he's certainly a logical successor to such history-straddling luminaries as Kofi Annan, Javier Perez de Cueller, and Kurt Walldheim.

Microsoft and Swatch have combined to make Dick Tracy's famous wrist-radio seem almost passe'.

Previously, we passed on a snippet Charles Duelfer's testimony before a Senate Committee to the effect that it's quite possible the WMD material we all knew Saddam had but now can't find went over the Syrian border.  But nobody can say for sure -- yet.

Add to that the role Mr. Duelfer tells us Syria played in arming and financing Saddam's Iraq in flagrant-but-not-terribly-unusual violation of the UN.

And, come to think of it, Syria was pretty interested in getting Saddam's complete, unexpurgated report on how he built his weapons, weren't they?

We don't know what you get when you multiply this together, but the Gnomon is really starting to feel a little nervous about Syria. Luckily their President Al-Assad seems for the present to be an easily intimidated little wimp.  But that may not last forever...

US News, a newsmagazine we generally respect (as opposed to high-toned scandal sheets like Time and Newsweek) features a strangely biased abberation in their lead article this week.

"Based on focus groups, polling, and interviews with voters across the country," Roger Simon writes, "it seems apparent that the debates have diminished Bush and enhanced Kerry... The 'bounce' that Bush got out of his nominating convention has all but disappeared, as polls show the race a virtual tie."

There are also rhapsodic passages about how, "Kerry's long and craggy face and sonorous speaking style also helped him look presidential to millions of Americans who were viewing him for the first time..."

"Sonorous?" Is that a synonym for "funereal" now?

But back to the polls: We don't think so! Take a look at this table from RealClearPolitics.com summarizing the polls: All of them since October 11th, prior to this article, show Mr. Bush leading except for two in the last two days, which show a tie.

Since October began, we would note, only two (or three, if you count the Newsweek poll that straddled September and October) showed Mr. Kerry in the lead -- despite his craggy face.

Computers are voting overwhelmingly for President Bush this year. And if they're to be trusted, the Gnomon's modest prediction of the margin of victory may be a bit on the conservative side.

That's ok; if Mr. Bush bounds away with 54 to 58% of the vote, we will admit our mistake with customary good grace.

Were the intelligence agencies of the world really as fooled as we've been told about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction? Maybe.

But then again, Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer mentioned in passing to the Senate Armed Services Committee that,

"A lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points. We've got a lot of data to support that, including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."

Now there's a persistent rumour the press has never properly followed up...

Euphemistically denominated "Iraqi insurgents" like Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi have as their main goal driving coalition forces out of Iraq, right? According to what Russian President Putin hears, it's a little more personal than that: What they really want to drive President Bush out of office.

In other news, Michael Moore -- the euphemistically denominated "filmmaker" -- has much the same goal. (Yeah, low blow, we know. But some temptations are difficult to resist...)

Matt Stone, who created South Park and that weird puppet movie that's out right now, urges undecided voters stay home on election day.

Military personnel and their families prefer Mr. Bush as Commander-in-Chief by 3 to 1, the AP incredulously reports. Well, but of course they proceed to conclude, struggling to make sense of the inconvenient: soldiers support him because the military is mostly republicans!

But they've got it backwards: They're republicans and support Mr. Bush because they're in the military. The Gnomon intends to bring this fact up the next time Al Sharpton or Charles Rangel insist there is a disproportionate number of oppressed minorities in the armed forces, sent off to fight wars for bloated, wealthy white men.

Meanwhile at the farside of reality, cushy filmmaker Michael Moore tells anybody that will listen that if Bush is re-elected, the world will end.

Quick! Before all the polls make it obvious: The Gnomon hereby predicts that the American People will display the communal wisdom for which they are justly famous, and re-elect George W. Bush to a second term as President by 51% of the popular vote. Senator Kerry will receive 48% and Nader, the Libertarians, etc., will have a healthy 1%.

We also predict that media pundits will be befuddled as to how this could happen, but will finally discover some reason why the nation really didn't want to re-elect Bush but did anyway.

Longtime readers will recall that we did pretty well predicting the mid-terms.

Rats! The Gnomon wanted to make its presidential election prediction while the polls still showed a tie between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry. It'd be more impressive that way when we turned out to be right. Not that we're taking back our oath against polls, which we swore off yesterday; we're not. But they're always there anyway, buzzing in the background like irritated houseflys.

Now, Reuters/Zogby of all people, always slanted in a liberal democrat direction and never terribly friendly to Mr. Bush, tells us he's opened up a lead as we head toward the election. Even with Mr. Kerry's three debatable debate-wins, democrats are apparently nervous enough to be planning ways to undermine the election process, just in case.

"If no signs of [republican] intimidation techniques have emerged yet," their campaign manual counsels party operatives, "launch a pre-emptive strike."

If it doesn't feel like you lost, you must've won -- whatever the votes say.

One more time, three weeks before Election Day, President Bush and Senator Kerry took their swings at each other, and both did well. Mr. Kerry gave the same steady, organized-but-bland performance he's churned out from the beginning. Mr. Bush was feisty and in command, which, following on the heels of his dynamic turn in St. Louis last Friday, demonstrates conclusively that the halting first debate performance was an aberration. And no, not because he had a radio strapped to his backside, as some conspiracy-mongers would have it.

CNN/USA/Gallup says Kerry won by a gigantic margin; the ABC News Poll found it was a tie. Hmmmm... verrrry suspicious. That Mr. Bush was not awarded what was a very obvious victory in the second debate has put the Gnomon off polls forever.

Except for one: the hackneyed and cliched "only poll that counts," the one on November 2nd. We'll be there, voting early and often. Hopefully our readers -- the ones with good sense, anyway -- will do the same.

Mt. Saint Helens, which has been exciting the curiosity of volcano groupies around the world recently with its ominous activities, has now settled down and is building a new lava dome. Watch it work here.

Thanks to various stoolies, the FBI has located an old Mafia graveyard in New York City and is already digging up bones and artifacts. They're not going to find Jimmy Hoffa, but this could be interesting.

Confident, dynamic, in control, charming. The George W. Bush we know and love (while others know and hate), the one on the firetruck with the megaphone, the "wanted: dead or alive" Bush, and the solomonic stem-cell decision Bush too -- That George Bush was back tonite.

Not that Senator Kerry did a bad job; not at all. He was calm, organized, forceful at times. Paradoxically for the Gnomon, we thought one of his best answers was on abortion. The dilemma he described as a Catholic-but-liberal-democrat politician seemed heartfelt (wrongheaded though it may be.

But, bluntly, Bush was better. He joked, he winked, he took charge, he connected with the audience. He explained himself and his policies clearly and decisively (except for that one little excursus on the Dred Scott Decision...). He refuted Kerry at every turn: this time Kerry was the one repeating his talking points ad nauseum -- even the very phraseology he used in the first debate. Bush was tied to nothing. He was, in the truest sense of the word, Presidential.

This is what the President had to do. The momentum is his once again, and the election is now his to loose.

"Saddam Hussein sitting in Baghdad, with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction is a different matter.

"In the wake of September the 11th, who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region?

"Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater -- a nuclear weapon -- then reinvade Kuwait or push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further his ambitions?

"Can we afford to ignore that possibility that Saddam Hussein might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons to slide off to one group or another in a region where weapons are the currency of trade?" (Senator John Kerry, Senate speech, October 9, 2002).

Question: Senator Kerry, how can you have the gall today to call the President a liar on Iraq when you -- with access to precisely the same intelligence he had -- said this back then?

From Senator Kerry's press conference yesterday:

"I said all the time, consistently, I've said Saddam Hussein presented a threat. I voted for the authorization [to go to war] because he presented a threat.

"There are all kinds of options available to a president to deal with threats, and I consistently laid out to the president how to deal with Saddam Hussein, who was a threat. If I had been president, I would have wanted the same threat of force; but as I've said a hundred times, if not a thousand, in this campaign, there was a right way to use that authority and a wrong way."

Question: But Mr. Kerry, which way did you vote for?

The almost lockstep spin in the media is that the Iraq WMD report, released yesterday, proves the President was a deluded fool to go to war. A bit of historical perspective -- strangely missing from most news stories we've seen -- is all it takes to see the speciousness of this view: That Saddam had WMD's was the consensus of the world's intelligence agencies (not just ours), and several independent studies at the time. Congresspersons with access to the same information as the President voted to attack -- including John Kerry, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The assertion of some that the UN Inspectors under the ineffectual Hans Blix would have discovered this if we'd only let them continue working is silly: 12 preceding years of that idea in action is its own refutation.

The real news from Charles Duelfer's report should be these facts:

• Saddam was producing the deadly poison Ricin right under Hans Blix's nose.

• Saddam, we now know, actively planned to wait out the Inspectors, have the UN sanctions (which he had circumvented anyway, thanks to the endemic corruption and naïveté of the UN), and then restart his dormant chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons programs.

Yes, we didn't have accurate intelligence on Saddam's weapons. No, we haven't found any. But was he still a real threat? Should we have trusted him -- or the UN Inspection process? Does this prove the President's judgement was flawed? No. It proves he is a visionary, even without reliable intelligence.

Find out what Mr. Duelfer's report REALLY says, here.

Older, wiser, more experienced Vice-President Dick Cheney essentially cleaned Senator John Edward's clock last night during their debate in Cleveland.

Mr. President: Go thou and do likewise.

Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury astronauts, the first american to spend a day in space, has passed away. That only leaves three: Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and John Glenn.

Cooper was an interesting man in his own right, quite apart from his place in space history. He was more willing to think outside the box and entertain esoteric ideas than some of his straighter-laced space comrades. His autobiography, Leap of Faith, is well worth reading.

One thing he was widely credited with, but stated catagorically that he did not actually do, is spot a UFO during his mission.

In Leap of Faith, after describing the UFO sightings repeatedly credited to him, Cooper writes:

"The only problem with these stories: never happened. I saw no UFOs from space. I made no radio transmissions about any object approaching my spacecraft, and have the onboard tapes of the flight to prove it... I have publicly denied this story again and again, but it won't go away," (Leap of Faith, pg. 76).

He was an inveterate believer in UFO's, though, and devotes the entire fourth chapter of his book to the subject.

Although he flew an extremely difficult mission on Mercury and the first long-duration flight on Gemini (which, incidentally, earns either him or Pete Conrad the distinction of the first american to defecate in space, according to his book) astronaut Cooper was not allowed to participate in Project Apollo.

According to Andrew Chaikin's book A Man on the Moon, Cooper's "let's just strap it on and go" attitude toward the rigorous lunar training did not sit well with the NASA brass. Plus, fellow Mercury astronaut Alan Shepherd -- by coincidence the head of the Astronaut Office at the time, and in charge of mission assignments -- was determined to make it to the moon himself at the first opportunity. Gordon Cooper was never more than a back up.

Still, he hung on until well into the '70's, and only quit NASA when it became obvious he would not even be allowed to fly the Shuttle. Ever the optimist, the end of his book leaves him hoping to fly to Mars someday.

The Gnomon bids a very fond farewell to one of the great pioneers of spaceflight, as well as one of our last links to that romantic, fascinating period when we took our first gawky, halting steps into the daunting deeps of space.