Here’s a story about a survey looking at the browsing habits of voters.

My boss attended the Gartner Symposium/ITXPO last week in Orlando, FL, and heard Craig Barrett, Intel’s CEO, deliver a keynote speech about the future direction for Intel. Just now, my boss handed me a copy of the current eWeek Magazine, which features an interview with Barrett. Although, the on-line version is different than the magazine version of the interview. The magazine interview deals more with Intel’s shift away from higher speed processors, towards making the current processors more efficient. And the effort Intel is spending on incorporating wireless technology into its chipsets.

It seems winning a World Series isn’t everything after all.

I think the same thing happened to Tennessee fans after 1998. First, with beating Florida and getting off the short end of the series, the rivalry hasn’t been as rowdy since then. Mostly, I think, due to the competitiveness of the games lately. Also, winning the National Championship removed the perennial underdog status, for a little while at least, although in recent years, as the program has slipped a bit, the underdog status has somewhat returned.

The New York Times has a story today detailing how the increase in early voting has affected both Presidential candidate’s campaign strategies down the stretch.

Victor Davis Hanson on the cultural divide in America these days:

Yet the true nature of our loud divisiveness is rarely remarked upon. In the last three decades, there has been a steady evolution from liberal to moderately conservative politics among a majority of the voters, whether gauged by the recent spate of Republican presidents or Bill Clinton’s calculated shift to the center. Now the House, Senate, presidency and the majority of state governorships and legislatures are in Republican hands. A Bush win will ensure a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.

In contrast, the universities, the arts, the major influential media and Hollywood are predominately liberal – and furious. They bring an enormous amount of capital, talent, education and cultural influence into the political fray – but continue to lose real political power. The talented elite plays the same role to the rest of America as the Europeans do to the United States – venting and seething because the supposedly less sophisticated, but far more powerful, average Joes don’t embrace their visions of utopia.

I haven’t posted about the story of the Al-Qaqaa missing explosives (some background details, more details, still more details, and even more details) before, but here are two new developments.

Bill Gertz writes in today’s Washington Times that Russian soldiers were responsible for helping Saddam’s forces move weapons out of Iraq prior to the U.S. military action. In addition, the Russians were to destroy evidence tying the Russians to Saddam’s government.

A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam’s government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq’s Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.

The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.

A small portion of Iraq’s 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq’s largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.

However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. “The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict,” Mr. Shaw said.

The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.

Also, ABC News is reporting that Iraqi officials may have over reported the amount of missing explosives.

The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control.

But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing – presumably stolen due to a lack of security – was based on “declaration” from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.

But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency’s inspectors recorded that just over three tons of RDX were stored at the facility – a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

A couple of items on the election from PoliPundit.com:

• First, Jayson gives his over/under on the Senate races. He thinks the GOP could pick up at least 4 seats. While I’d like to see things turn out that way, I’m thinking that his appraisal is overly optimistic.

Real Clear Politics has the Senate races in South Dakota(Daschle/Thune) and Florida(Martinez/Castor) for the Republicans, but both by razor-thin margins. Jayson figures that in Alaska(Murkowski/Knowles), Murkowski will hold on to her seat, because “…we’re not even hearing much if anything from the liberal media about the Murkowski-Knowles race, which must mean, by definition, that Murkowski is poised to hold the seat”, whiich is a dubious proposition since Real Clear Politics shows Knowles ahead in every poll, although the margin is shrinking. In the Louisiana(Vitter/John/Kennedy) race the lastest polling data Jayson points to is promising, as it shows Vitter clearing the 50% hurdle to avoid a runoff election, but the same article also points out that in the 2003 governor’s race, Bobby Jindal lost an 11 point lead in the polls in the last four days to lose by 4 percent. He makes a good point about the Colorado race(Coors/Salazar), drawing a comparison to the 2002 Senate race in Colorado. This is possible since Bush is polling well in Colorado and has the coattails to help Coors, and Salazar seems to be avoiding John Kerry.

• Next Lorie Byrd posts on the “Myth of the Undecided Voter”. Consider this bit of conventional wisdom, like so much other conventional wisdom this year, debunked.

Pete Du Pont on why Bush will win:

President Bush is not going to win because of Mr. Kerry’s style or Boston blue blood, as out of sync with most Americans as they may be. He is going to win because he believes in things, while Mr. Kerry is a candidate of concern, consensus and compromise.

Mr. Bush believes in the “transformational power of liberty”; that “freedom is on the march”; that the spirit of liberty that created America in 1776 has brought freedom and opportunity to Afghanistan and will bring it to Iraq and every other nation that grasps its principles. It is a powerful message that Americans understand. Mr. Kerry believes we are imposing democracy on people, instead of which we must bring everyone together in international forums where America’s decisions must pass a “global test.” As the New York Times noted, Mr. Kerry “sees himself as an ambassador president,” intending his first act in office to be a speech to the United Nations to recast American foreign policy.

Mr. Bush believes free nations should have the right to make their own decisions about trading with America; he has negotiated trade agreements with 12 countries and is working on 10 more. Mr. Kerry is against free trade because he believes America must “establish core labor rights around the world.” He would repeal Nafta and other trade agreements until he decides what the wages and working conditions of the citizens of Chile, Mozambique and other nations must be.

Mr. Bush believes in an ownership society in which individuals have the resources to improve their lives, owning their own health-care and retirement accounts. Mr. Kerry is against such individual ownership, believing a wise and benevolent government should have the tax revenues to make the decisions it believes are best for you.

And

The presidential analogies would be Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson. Truman dropped the atomic bomb to end World War II, gave aid to Greece and Turkey to stop the expansion of communism, established the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe, launched an enormous airlift to keep Berlin free, and had a sign on his desk saying “The Buck Stops Here.” Truman was a strong man; like Bush, he believed in things.

Mr. Kerry, on the other hand, thought “communism was not a threat to our country,” probably would not have used the atomic bomb without international approval, and would likely have thought the Berlin airlift too threatening to the Soviet Union. He is more like Woodrow Wilson, who after the Germans sank the Lusitania, killing 128 Americans, did not respond, saying he was “too proud to fight.” He committed U.S. troops to World War I, but through his 14 Point Plan and League of Nations proposal sought “peace without victory.” And of course Wilson imposed America’s first income tax after the ratification of the 16th Amendment. The Kerry analogies abound.

Read the whole thing.

If at first you don’t succeed…

News of missing explosives in Iraq – first reported in April 2003 – was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crisis mode.

Drudge Report has more.

This from the network that won’t conclude its investigation into how fake Texas Air National Guard memos were used as part of a Sixty Minutes II report until after the election, “so as not to interfere with the presidential race”.

As we continue down the stretch in this election season, OpinionJournal has a look at the Bush and Kerry campaigns’ get out the vote specialists.

With all indications being a tight race this year, GOTV efforts could make the difference for either candidate.