Earth to John Kerry

[adios]

LEHRER: Ninety seconds, Senator Kerry.

KERRY: Well, let me just say quickly that I've had an extraordinary experience of watching up close and personal that transition in Russia, because I was there right after the transformation. And I was probably one of the first senators, along with Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, a former senator, go down into the KGB underneath Treblinka Square and see reams of files with names in them.


Hey John Treblinka was a Nazi death camp that was used as an instrument of the "final solution."

My wife did a double take on this comment by Kerry but I think (I hope /images/graemlins/smile.gif) she misinterpreted it:

KERRY: With respect to Iran, the British, French, and Germans were the ones who initiated an effort without the United States, regrettably, to begin to try to move to curb the nuclear possibilities in Iran. I believe we could have done better.

I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren't willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.

My wife thought he meant that the Kerry was stating that the U.S. should have offered Iran nuclear fuel but what Kerry's saying I believe (I hope /images/graemlins/smile.gif) that the U.S. should have provided Iran the opportunity to provide Iran's nuclear fuel to the U.S. for testing. Still a ridiculous position but perhaps not as dangerous.

[adios]

KERRY: Jim, let me tell you exactly what I'll do. And there are a long list of thing. First of all, what kind of mixed message does it send when you have $500 million going over to Iraq to put police officers in the streets of Iraq, and the president is cutting the COPS program in America?

What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we're shutting firehouses who are the first- responders here in America.

The president hasn't put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems. That's why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there. We hadn't done the work that ought to be done.

The president -- 95 percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.

Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X- rayed, but the cargo hold is not X-rayed.

Does that make you feel safer in America?

This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren't my values. I believe in protecting America first.

And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut -- and that's who gets it -- long before we do, I'm going to invest in homeland security and I'm going to make sure we're not cutting COPS programs in America and we're fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants.

The president also unfortunately gave in to the chemical industry, which didn't want to do some of the things necessary to strengthen our chemical plant exposure.

And there's an enormous undone job to protect the loose nuclear materials in the world that are able to get to terrorists. That's a whole other subject, but I see we still have a little bit more time.

Let me just quickly say, at the current pace, the president will not secure the loose material in the Soviet Union -- former Soviet Union for 13 years. I'm going to do it in four years. And we're going to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.

Supposedly the subways in NYC didn't close at all during the Republican convention accoring to Drudge. We'll soon see if Kerry's claims about the containers and the Soviet Union is true.

Having worked in dismantlement I'm not sure what Kerry means by securing the loose material. In the dismantlement process in the U.S. the material from each dismantled weapon had to be inventoried and be reflected in a database as to the contents and the weapon that was dismantled. This may sound simple enough but it's not as simple as it sounds. Given the corruption in the former Soviet Union I'd bet a lot of money that there standards for keeping track of their nuclear weapons and material were much more lax than the U.S. standards. BTW the U.S. hasn't accounted for all the plutonium it's produced in developing and dismantling nukes either.