A recorded edition of Extension 720 will air after the 7:05 Cubs game tonight. You can listen to the program at around 10 p.m. central time here.

THE HAND OF THE DNC IS VISIBLE....in today's N.Y. Times lead story purporting to give the background on the mounting of the ads by the Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry. But some quite useful detail does get through!

AND THEN THERE'S THE CAMBODIA "SEARING!" The Kerry campaign is attacking the "source" (i.e. some Texans who know the Bushes) of the Swift Boat Vets ads rather than the basic content of those ads. Here, from today's N.Y. Post, is something else they need to explain but may side step. Perhaps they should ask the Post to fire the reporter, just as they have asked Regnery to withdraw Unfit for Command from circulation.

SORTING OUT THE VIETNAM ANGLE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN....is the task that John McIntyre set for himself in today's Real Clear Politics. We think he's on the money in his prediction that today's assault by the Kerry campaign upon the Swift Boat vets and their sponsors will amplify rather than diminish the problem now facing the Kerry candidacy.

THE STANDARD OF EQUAL COVERAGE.....has so far been more honored in the breach than the observance says the Media Research Center.....at least, when it comes to accusations about the past "military performance" of each of the candidates.

KRAUTHAMMER ON MILITARY REDEPLOYMENT: As usual the sage of the Washington Post makes good (and common) sense as, this time, he analyzes the mistaken critique of the recent announcement from the Pentagon.

COLIN POWELL AND...UUHHH, P.J. O'ROURKE? Well..why not? That's as interesting an interview combo as we have encountered this year and, in this piece from the current Atlantic Monthly, it does yield some increments of revelation as well as amusement.

AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON "RADICAL ISLAMISM:" This article from the History News Network site introduces a view of Jihadism (as formulated by a Yale military historian) which says that it has little or nothing to do with provocations from the West. Hmmmm.

DID THEY SET THE MODEL FOR CONTEMPORARY GENOCIDE? The Nazi Holocaust against the Jews began, not with the extermination camps, but rather with roving bands of killers not unlike those now ravaging the population of the Darfur region of Sudan. This definitive article, summarizing what we know about the Einsatzgruppen, is from the Holocaust History site.

A CURIOUS DEVELOPMENT HERE IN ILLINOIS....has come to our attention and we thought it worth sharing with those who continue to ponder the "crisis of scandal" in the American sector of the Roman Catholic Church.

ROWING AROUND PIRAEUS THIS WEEK....and 2,500 hundred years ago. If the Battle of Salamis had gone the other way, says the author of this striking article from the Boston Globe, this year's Olympic Games might have been held in Istanbul. Except, of course, that if a Persian victory had been scored, Greek culture would have gone into the discard and that ancient festival of naked runners would, probably, have been forgotten.

DO YOU HAVE A CANDIDATE IN THE CONTEST FOR PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY? Ours is a former guest on our program, Richard Dawkins who, according to this report in the U.K. Telegraph, is facing some stiff and worthy competition.

SAY IT ISN'T SO! Not only was Patrick O'Brien (the greatest novelist of the sea since Conrad) not really an O'Brien..it is now reported, by the BBC, that he did not know how to sail!!

ARGERICH, VENGEROV AND FRIENDS....at the Lugano Festival take on (and serve well) Brahms, Faure, Dukas and Shostakovich. In fact, the trio by the last named is, in this performance, an absolutely arresting experience.

Tonight on Extension 720, Milt celebrates those who are engaged in the art of voice-over acting by welcoming a panel of voice actors to discuss and demonstrate their craft. More information on this and other programs is available at our monthly program guide. You can listen to the show from 9 to 11 p.m. central time here.

"KNOW YOUR ENEMY" WAS A WWII SLOGAN. And know where and how they live...because you (someone) may have to go after them. Here, then, is a report from inside the Imam Ali Shrine where Moqtada and his friends are hanging out these days. This report from a Turkish source was written before the black-turbaned one said he would yield and it will remain of interest until the Mehdi militia clears out.

THE HIGH PROBABILITY OF TERRORIST NUCLEAR ASSAULT...is examined in a new book by Graham Allison (who, on September 29th, will discuss it with us on Extension 720). Ben Howe, writing in the Boston Globe, discovers that John McPhee got a similar forecast from a high-ranking nuclear weapons scientist some thirty years ago!

ROY FAIR (YALE ECONOMETRICIAN AND DEMOCRAT) PREDICTS THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE...and infuriates many of his friends by projecting Bush as the winner. The method he has used for his succesful predictions of past elections is described (sort of) in this interview from the New York Times.

AND HERE'S HOW HE DOES IT. This paper by Roy Fair gives a possibly comprehensible account of the variables (and their weights) that are included in the predictive equation for presidential elections (and other events).

A SAMPLING OF LETTERS ABOUT KERRY IN VIETNAM...sent to The Illinois Leader, an avowedly conservative publication. The issue does seem to "have legs" despite its being somewhat under-reported by the mainline press.

KERRY IN VIETNAM AS SEEN FROM THE FAR LEFT. The source is Counterpunch, Alex Cockburn's activist and always angry journal. In this article by Cockburn and St. Clair, the Kerry record in Vietnam is found to be, to say the least, dubitible. The last paragraph quoting Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (a post-career Republican activist whom we knew in the last few years of his life) is--if correctly attributed--close to devastating.

POPULATION IS DESTINY...and the demographic projections reported yesterday suggest that western Europe will, indeed, be close to an Islamic takeover by 2050 while India will surge forward to over 1.5 billion. This report is from the Daily Times of Pakistan which may or not welcome the news that its population will increase by 70 percent in the next 46 years.

YOU WANT THE NUMBERS? HERE'S NUMBERS, PROJECTIONS, INTERPRETATIONS...as they were released yesterday in the annual report from the Population Reference Bureau. The devil--and the problems to come--are in the details!

SIPPING WHITE WINE WITH THE GURU OF THE RED BRIGADES. This compelling account of a recent encounter with Antonio Negri "who poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy's youth," appeared yesterday in the U.K. Independent.

TERRY EAGLETON GETS HIS COME-UP-ANCE...or, more accurately, his put-down-ance. This properly acerbic review of his Marxist mangling of the history of the English novel exploded (Eagleton is the British academy's almost-most-esteemed literateur) in the UK Telegraph about six months ago but we just stumbled upon it today.

JOHN DID HIS BAPTISING HERE...or maybe he didn't. Archaeological certainty is hard to come by at a site over 2000 years old. Still, this sounds--in a rather understated report from Canadian TV--more persuasive than the "discovery" last year of the ossuary for Jesus' brother's bones.

ANOTHER FINE APPRECIATION OF JULIA CHILD. This lovingly remembered portrait appeared in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. And it has motivated us to go looking for the tapes of her appearances on our program so that we might put one of them up on the audio archive. We will keep you posted on whether the search yields a usable tape.

WHO IS THE BEAST OF BARABOO? Or, to put it another way, is Al Qaeda developing new techniques for the disruption of otherwise peaceful American towns? Or is it the Fairman kid and his Goth buddies? America--and the Department of Homeland Security--wants to know!! Knowledge, of course, includes understanding the source.

SONG CYCLES BY RAVEL AND POULENC...as performed two months ago at the Argerich Festival in Lugano. Ravel's Don Quichotte a Dulcinee is superbly rendered even with the glitch in the first of the three songs.

A recorded edition of Extension 720 will air after the 7:05 Cubs game tonight. You can listen to the program at around 10 p.m. central time here.

Milt's File is taking the day off, but will return tomorrow.

Tonight on Extension 720, Milt takes calls from listeners after the 7:05 Cubs game. More information on this and other programs is available at our monthly program guide. You can listen to the show around 10 p.m. central time here.

WHAT'S IN A NAME: ISLAMISM BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD BE AS TERRORISTIC. Dan Pipes, as the academic he was, favors vocabularistic precision. And in this case to get the terms right may well help clarify the policy.

FROM ONE OF THE BOYS ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIN...and a senior one, at that, comes this account of merry Kerry campaigning with an eye to the polls. Robert Sam Anson, writing here in the New York Observer, might properly be designated as a critic from the left...but colorful!

COULD A PRINCETON PROFESSOR WHO WRITES FOR THE TIMES POSSIBLY BE WRONG? More pertinently one might ask: could he be engaged in disingenuous propaganda? Tom Bevan, in today's Real Clear Politics, takes up the case of Paul Krugman's Florida election fantasy.

WITHOUT AMERICAN PRIMACY--A CHAOTIC AND REGRESSED WORLD. That vision of a dark future if the U.S. were to retreat from its international dominance is presented here by Niall Ferguson in Foreign Policy magazine. The thesis is more fully developed and persuasively supported in his recent book, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire.

A VIETNAM VET--AND PRESENT JOURNALIST--ASKS SOME QUESTIONS...about the revelations in the book, Unfit for Command. He asks, as well, why Kerry has not responded to the serious accusations levelled by his former Swiftboat colleagues...and why the press is, in large part, ignoring so important an issue.

HER BRAIN MADE HER DO THE MURDER...as, in fact, we are all radically unfree and enslaved by our neural networks. In the argument raging over this form of special pleading in the criminal courts of Italy, one may find the history (or, perhaps, the revival) of the argument between "free will" and "determinism." The U.K. Guardian does rather well in summarizing this instance of the return of one of the three irreducible philosophical disputes.

IN THE WAKE OF THE MARXIST REVIVAL...on the American campus, it would be instructive to examine what the veteran western Communists had to say after they had recovered. Alan Charles Kors does just that in this essay, from Reason magazine, in which he examines the classic volume, The God That Failed.

THE PSYCHOBABBLING PRESIDENT...and the first of that variety, according to Theodore Dalrymple, was William Jefferson Clinton. This brief, but unmincing, note in reaction to the former President's "memoir" is from the current issue of City Journal.

THE CAPTURE OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION. He who controls the books (and the videos, and the websites, and etc) controls the minds of the patrons. The radical anti-Israeli takeover of the ALA is documented in this article from today's Front Page magazine. Follow the links as you read. The case made is devastating and the scandal exposed calls for strong corrective response.

FROM THE ONLY YIDDISH-LANGUAGE NOBEL LAUREATE. And from the Library of America (already!!) come the collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, reviewed here by Steve Vineberg for the Boston Phoenix.

A MAGISTERIAL ARTICLE OF CORRUSCATING COMMENTARY...about the use of cliches (like magisterial and corruscating) in modern book reviewing. Published just a few days ago in the U.K. Telegraph, it wears its erudition lightly!

JAZZ IS ALIVE AND WELL AT NEWPORT...and the festival has just had its fiftieth instantiation! And one gets the impression that "Plus ca change, ca change!" The story is from today's New York Times.

SPEAKING OF JAZZ...was it ever better than this? From one of the fathers of the genre--Armstrong, of course--these classic recordings with the Hot Five. They put "West End Blues" on the Voyager that has now got beyond the solar system. When it gets to the Andromeda galaxy some extraterrestrials are going to enjoy it as much as you can now.

Tonight on Extension 720, Milt talks with Alan Keyes about his campaign for Senate here in Illinois against Barack Obama. More information on this and other programs is available at our monthly program guide. You can listen to the show from 9 to 11 p.m. central time here.

Milt's File is taking the day off, but will return tomorrow.