September 2004 Archives

Yeah, Kerry won the debate. He got Bush off center early when he pissed him off with a bunch of attacks, and Bush never quite recovered. In Bush's defense, how do you argue rationally against lies? More on that tomorrow when I'm not so grumpy.

In one form or another.

I realized today that I've been blogging since I was in High School.

That's a bit of a stretch, but I realized that I had:

1. An underground newspaper in High School.
2. A weekly column in College.

Except for that long dry spell after College, I've been blogging for 20 years now. Blogging is somewhat natural, because I've always been opinionated, and I've always written about it. What blogging does for me is bridge the gulf been writing, and access to readership.

I remember seeing Bill Gates on the David Letterman show quite a few years ago. David asked him about "this Internet thing". Bill made some comment about how you could listen to music from over the Internet. David mocked him saying "isn't that called the radio". Bill Gates just shut up then.

Neither Bill Gates nor David Letterman got the Internet. The point of the Internet is that you can own your own radio station. Freedom of the press only helps those who own one, and thanks to blogging, we all own our own press.

As we say in Arizona, YEE HA!

Because they're just plain weird.

This article appeared before the debates even happened: Time Travel?

Its just weird that they can write about things before they happen, and make judgements before they happen...

Hat tip to Atrios one of the liberal blogs I love to hate.

More evil:

34 Children Massacred by Multiple Car Bombs

As I said before, I'm voting for Bush because I believe in evil.

Nope, you're not reading ScrappleFace. Here's a quote from the Bill O' Reilly Interview from last night:

PRESIDENT BUSH: That’s when you’re supposed to vote. You’ve got to stand tough with these terrorists. You cannot allow the terrorists to dictate whether or not a society can be free or not. Do you remember what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban pulled the four women off the bus and killed them because they had voter registration cards? I think there had been about three million Afghan citizens who had registered at this point in time. A lot of people said, well, the elections look like they’ve got to be over in Afghanistan, because the Taliban is, too violent to allow the elections to go forward. Today ten million citizens in that country have registered to vote, forty percent of whom are women, which is a powerful statistic.


O’REILLY: The South Vietnamese didn’t fight for their freedom, which is why they don’t have it today.


PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah.

See, we didn't lose the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese were just pussies.

(Yeah, Yeah, I know, I'm a pro Bush website, but this is just politics don't take live so seriously. Besides, its not President Bush who said it really, its Bill O'Reilly.)

In reality, President Bush has learned a lot from the Vietnam war. and one of the biggest lessons is that we've turned over as much as possible to the Iraqis as soon as possible, if not earlier. I think the benefits have been obvious.

When I read the media, I hear things are going to hell.

When I read the soldiers viewpoint, I hear things are going great.

Here's an entry from the WaPo:

The writer, an Army lieutenant general, commands the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq. He previously commanded the 101st Airborne Division, which was deployed in Iraq from March 2003 until February 2004. [read]

The best thing about Monday's is Chrenkoff's "Good News from Iraq" which is also reprinted by the Wall Street Journal:

Good News From Iraq

Here's news on Iraq straight from Iraqi's websites:

Carnival of the Liberated

According to this:

9 Million

New math and science textbooks printed and distributed with pro-Saddam propaganda extracted

Through extensive research, I've been able to recover and translate one of those pro-Saddam textbooks. Here's a quote:

In the late 1600's, our glorious leader, Saddam Hussien, traveled back in time to Poland, and, posing as a man named Leibniz, invented Calculus and then traveled forward to lead our glorious nation to victory defeat against the evil Iranian Kuwati American menace.

Kevin Drum is complaining, but as usual, the left is criticizing a Bush that doesn't exist except in their own imagination.

Kerry has been saying that Bush will reinstate the Draft. That's a damn lie.

The short and sweet answer:

We have 140,000 soldiers in Iraq.

Hypothetically, say we want to bring that up to 200,000. That's 60,000 more people.

We have 1.4 million soldiers on active duty. Why would we need to draft anyone?

The long answer:

What we need in Iraq is not soldiers, we need policemen. Most of our soldiers are trained to be soldiers against the Soviet Union (which doesn't exist anymore). Its even worse for NATO soldiers because the Europeans have been much slower to adapt to the end of the Cold War then we have (and we adapted too slowly as it was). So the reality is that while it might be nice to have more soldiers, of a certain type, those people don't exist. A draft wouldn't help that.

We need policemen who speak Arabic, and who understand the Iraqi culture. It turns out there's a whole country full of people willing to be policemen in Iraq. It's called...Iraq! President Bush's plan isn't to send more soldiers to Iraq, President Bush's plan is to train more Iraqis to be policemen.

This has some advantages beyond the obvious ones of language and culture. If an American soldier loses his temper and hits an Iraqi with a nightstick, its a war crime that reflects badly on America. If an Iraqi does it, its a personal crime that reflects badly on that policeman.

Bringing back the draft is just a damn lie by a damn fool.

Check my Stats

Juan Cole wrote this great piece called If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

Until the end:

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

The problem is, in order to make that comparison you also need to talk about what Iraq was like under Saddam. So I've taken Juan's article and interleaved it with a Before and After so you can understand where the Iraqi people are coming from, and why in all these opinion polls they are so positive towards the US. If you look at where they're at now, yeah, its pretty bad. But if you look at where they've been, you can see why they feel they're making progress.

Judging by my lefty commenters, they all seem to think I'm some sort of neo-conservative who's out for Rather's blood. That's not true, I've always been conservative. Or as I like to put it these days, small-l libertarian.

To be honest, about RatherGate, I couldn't care less. Dan Rather is just the pretty boy talking head. He doesn't research the stories, he comes in at the last minute and says the words someone else has typed. So if anyone deserves to be fired, it would be Mary Mapes.

Except I don't want to fire her either. Lets be brutally honest here. No one has ever watched 60 Minutes because they think its a bastion of objective journalism, because it never has been. It's always been a hatchet job, with facts twisted to match the story, interviews cut and spliced to make the person interviewed look as good (or bad) as possible, and just an overall atmosphere of slime.

We watch 60 Minutes because its the network TV news equivalent of the old American Gladiator TV show. Remember that show? You'd have these people wearing spandex in giant hamster balls trying to run into each other. The only difference between being in one of those giant hamster balls and being interviewed by Dan Rather is that there's less blood involved in being in a hamster ball.

Why fire Dan Rather or Mary Mapes? They we just doing their job, providing us not with news, but news entertainment. That isn't anything any different then what they've always done.

From the New Yorker

The Opinionated Wife can't stand Teresa. In fact, the first time I heard her say "I'm not going to vote for Kerry" was right after hearing Teresa's speech at the convention on NPR.

This startled me, as the Opinionated Wife leans to the left a bit, so I asked why. It seems that my wife feels that a good marriage requires teamwork. One of the things that really impressed my wife about Laura Bush was when after 9/11 she dramatically reduced the number of "First Lady" things she was doing in order to support her husband. My wife had heard the rumblings about Teresa but the convention speech was the kicker. She didn't hear a teammate, she heard a woman who was more concerned about herself then her husband. My wife thinks its good to have opinions (obviously), but she also thinks its important to shut up if you're a politicians wife.

Quote: "She probably figures that since she's paying for it anyways, she might as well have her say."

Ouch.

Anyways, the article is more bio then anything else, and tries to be balanced. Its worth the read.

Kerry thinks all will be well if we just get France and Germany to help us, huh?

The problem is the European armed forces are in sad shape. I've said before that they don't have the right type of troops (we need policemen in Iraq, and civil affairs troops mostly), but they also have outdated equipment.

Here is a link to a 90 page FBI document showing a variety of concealable weapons.

Ever since 9/11, I've thought that most of the airport security nonsense was just a placebo, meant to reassure the populace that it was "safe" to travel. That PDF showing me knife after knife that could be slipped past security convinces me even more. Remember that the 9/11 hijackers used boxcutters, not guns.

Perhaps the "Arizona" solution is correct, in that the real way to prevent hijacking is not through more airport security but through arming the pilots, and perhaps the passengers.

Either way, I'd rather we spent the billions of the TSA budget elsewhere, perhaps even Iraq.

Do you believe in evil? I do.

From Centcom:

Iraqi National Guard troops patrolling in the Wasit Province area of the Polish-led Multi-National Division Central South, reported that anti-Iraqi forces blew themselves up as they prepared an Improvised Explosive Device in Suwayra Sept. 19.

The explosion occurred just after midnight killing several anti-Iraqi force personnel as they prepared the IED for Iraqi forces, Iraqi citizens or Multi-National Forces to come upon.

But ABC found Walter Staudt and interviewed him.

"I never pressured anybody about George Bush because I had no reason to," Staudt told ABC News in his first interview since the documents were made public.

He didn't use political influence to get into the Air National Guard," Staudt said, adding, "I don't know how they would know that, because I was the one who did it and I was the one who was there and I didn't talk to any of them."

Atrios asks:

When Bush keeps giving speeches saying that “we’re making progress” in Iraq, just what the hell is he talking about?

Here you go Atrios:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

I used to think I was moderate.

Then I was talking the other day to a local teacher about No Child Left Behind because while I support the law, its a huge, ambitious piece of legislation and I expect it to have teething problems. (not that I trust Kerry to fix them, only Bush, but I digress)

She started on this long, granola-and-Birkenstocks rant about how children shouldn't be "forced to learn to read".

I was just dumbstruck. I couldn't have been more shocked if she pulled off her head to reveal she was a space alien. How do you even talk to someone who lives in such a bizarro land that they don't think that schools should do, well, their freaking job? This was from a schoolteacher? Arrgh! I'll say it again. Arrgh!

I just wanted to smack her. Its my goddamn tax dollars that pay her friggin' salary, and if she doesn't want to teach kids to read, I'd like my money back please.

Then I had to hear about how testing kids "stigmatized" the ones who didn't pass.

Let's see, which is worse. Getting an "F" once and having to get a tutor, or spending the next 80 years saying "Would you like fries with that?"

Then I came home and realized that if that's the friggin' left, then I must be way over on the right. "Should'nt be forced to learn to read." It still makes me shudder. I thought that many of the people who disagreed with me on politics must be lefties. Now I know that the people I was talking to must have been liberal Republicans or something, because we could still actually communicate as human beings.

Arrgh! I'll say it again. Arrgh!

First, Read This Article.

One of the things that has bugged me as a righty about the lefty criticism of Iraq is that what we need in Iraq is less bureaucracy, not more oversight.

I think this cartoon says it all:

We need to reform the state department. For decades, they've been the completely useless, filled with rich kids who have never had a real job. One of the main reasons that the rest of the world sees us as so militaristic is because the government ends up relying on our military to do much of our diplomacy because the State Department is such a joke.

How bad is it? We had to put a General in charge of the State Department...

A while ago I subscribed to the DOD newsbriefs. Rumsfeld is constantly holding Town Hall meetings with soldiers, who universally are better informed, and ask better, tougher questions then the news media. Through that I've learned that Rumsfeld gives our soldiers straightforward, honest answers to some tough questions about what we're doing.

Here's one from yesterday: [go to dod]

I admit it, I lost heart today when I heard about the 700 Iraqi police candidates being killed by a car bomb.

Then I read this from The Strategy Page. Yes, we're winning the war on terror. The War in Iraq has helped, but its tough, just like President Bush said it would be.

Not listed on the American B of Forensic Document Examiners, not listed in the White Pages or Yellow pages for Newport Beach which would be surprising for someone who seems to be a freelance document examiner. He's the "Stealth" document examiner...one wonders how he gets business...

He's not on the Superior Court of LA's list of Expert Witnesses though Matley is on that list.

Don't know if it means anything, but it seems like all the reputable document examiners have either given lukewarm endorsements of the signature (yes, its a photocopy of a signature), or outright said that the documents were fake. So one wonders how reputable James Pierce could be...

If you go to this story you'll find a link buried to these two documents:

MIcheal Matley

James Pierce

So the first one documents the signatures, but not the documents themselves, as has been pointed out before. Of course, having the correct signature on a photocopy is meaningless, since its trivial to copy a signature from another document onto the copy.

The second one documents the signatures too, but goes on to say:

In regard to the balance of the typed-written photocopied questioned documents, the same typed-face designs are strongly similar to corresponding samples that indicate the same typed-face existed prior to the date in question on the photocopied documents.

In my professional opinion, with what I know and have examined based on the photocopied questioned documents, the documents in question are authentic.

Uh, that's really bad English. The CBS expert can't even write? Beyond the bizarre phrasing and grammar, its typewritten, and typeface, not typed-written and typed-face. Something I would expect a "Forensic Document Examiner" to know. Strange that they would go all the way to Newport Beach California from New York to verify some documents...

From Andrew Sullivan:

"Just a personal observation about campaign organization which I think HAS to reflect on general organization(or lack of) as well: went to see Kerry the day after the convention in downtown Scranton. Showed up over two hours past scheduled start time, in the heat. Many people pissed off due to the caste structure of proximity to the stage. Had water trucks but ran out of cups. EVERYONE from Ben Affleck through Teresa through the Edwards' and finally Kerry, blathered on endlessly. Bush comes to Scranton day after convention at the local baseball stadium. Scheduled for 9:30. He and Laura step out of the dugout at exactly 9:30. Beverages and Krispy Kreme donuts for sale. Everyone happy because it is set up so everyone can see either from the seats or on the field." And people wonder why Bush is winning.

Bush is famous for always being on time. Kerry was 2 hours late to Flagstaff.

that Dan Rather has never even used Microsoft Word. I'm sure it seems incredible to the bloggers, but lots of executives of his age haven't even used email.

Sure, the younger staffers would have, and they're probably all snickering to themselves at CBS. I bet Rather has his secretary print out his emails, he scribbles on them, and she sends the responses.

From Winds of Change:

This would be great advice for Kerry:

Confronting the coyote mind head-on only locks us into internal conflict on a battleground favourable to our yetzer ha-ra. If you want to begin freeing yourself from your coyote mind, you must take a different path entirely and draw yourself toward the divine presence instead. Then it will simply fill your life until there is no room for yetzer ha-ra. Still, beware; when more obvious forms of the yetzer ha-ra are crowded out, more subtle forms will take their place. One breakthrough is not the end.

Read the whole thing

I’ve seen a lot of hysterical stuff around about how the Bush administration is going to “steal your vote” using “black box voting” unless the populace insists on having paper records.

Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a vote has been correctly recorded. A computer can display one thing, print a second thing, and record a third.

While paper is invaluable in testing, it becomes a more complex issue in actual voting, because now you have 60,000,000 pieces of paper to deal with. Which means machine counting of those pieces of paper, which brings us back to square one…machines we might not trust.

It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. We would like voting to be:

Easy: You shouldn’t need a computer science degree to be able to vote. We especially don’t want to disenfranchise people who don’t speak English well, are slightly computer-phobic, or who are just elderly.

Secret: There can’t be any way for an outsider to tell which candidate you voted for, so you can’t be forced to vote for any particular candidate. Nor can there be any way for you to “sell” your vote.

Secure: We want voting to be secure so that the ballot box (real or computerized) can’t be “stuffed”.

Verified/Accurate: Since the debacle in 2000, many voters would like to be able to verify that their vote has been recorded. This is especially important most feel with computerized voting.

Doing any three of these is easy, but doing all 4 is a pretty complex problem.

Admitting the documents were forged.

Of course, he links to some other non-existent document, that probably just refers to the fact that Bush was in the TexANG for 6 years.

Let's see if Kos has folded yet...Nope. Then again, he hasn't been defending the memos lately either.

So Flagstaff has a local free paper that comes out once/month called The Noise. After their last issue, I gave the author of a piece on voting machines a bad time, and I sent him my piece on No Child Left Behind.

So Thursday, I got this email:

We all enjoy the cool conservative tone to your articles. It’s something we’ve been missing, actually, with the tremendous amount of overtly-liberal submissions we get on a monthly basis. We were wondering if you’d at all be interested in writing a monthly column from the right (anywhere from 500-700 words). We could even call it “the opinionated bastard” and promote your website a bit. It doesn’t pay much now, but in a couple months, who knows …

Well, I did it, so now I’m a monthly columnist for the Noise. Tomorrow my first column comes out, which I’ll repost here. It’s basically about voting machines again and pulls my two blog posts relating to that together.

This isn’t my first professional writing gig, but its the first time anyone has paid me for my political opinions…

The lefty sites like Kos and Atrios have been trying to deny the whole Ra^therGate thing by claiming that perhaps there was some typewriter version of Times Roman, used with a proportional typewriter, etc.

Today, the Washington Post says:

Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font, disputed Glennon’s statement to CBS. He said “fairly extensive testing” had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths.

Ok, the guys who invented the font now say it didn’t exist in 1972.

In a word, duh. It was always so blindingly obvious that these were fakes. Not even good fakes either. Really bad ones.

Think Atrios and Kos will give up yet? I bet not. :-)

From Captains Quarters:

When you look at the action on the spot report, it reflects well on the young Lieutenant Kerry. Although it’s difficult to see how this action should have resulted in a Silver Star, it would seem a commendation of some sort would be appropriate. It’s all of the exaggeration, lies, and paperwork alterations after the fact that calls Kerry’s character into serious question.

The only reason this news is interesting is that it shows that the report correlates with the SVBT guys say, not what “Tour of Duty” or the Kerry Campaign says. My take on all this is still “fog of war”, but if the Kerry campaign gave voters a real agenda, no one would care.

From the Kerry Blog:

A poll of New Zealanders showed 60 per cent wanted Democratic candidate John Kerry to beat George Bush in the upcoming presidential elections.

Yeah, and? Who cares what someone in New Zealand thinks? I really don’t think they’ve been following the election that closely.

Kerry and those “foreign leaders” again.

September 11, 2001

Madrid, 2003

Beslan, 2004

This is from the Washington Post yesterday: “Aides say Kerry may soon apologize for some of his most heated comments during the Vietnam War protests of the early 1970s, a move that would rekindle the debate for a few more days.”

From The Corner

So I was talking to someone about Kerry from Blogs For Bush. He and his girlfriend were having an argument about how important Kerry really was in the anti-war movement.

I wrote him back and said it probably doesn’t matter to the veterans, that they were upset with the whole movement and Kerry just represents that.

From BlackFive some confirmation. For many veterans, Kerry has become the poster child for the anti-war movement. It may not be fair, but frankly, Kerry’s real problem for me on Vietnam is his obliviousness. He has yet to apologize for any of his anti-war activities. The best he’s said is that “he regets some of the words he used.

They’re two words John: “I’m sorry”.

Plenty of details at these sites:

indcjournal

example of how to reproduce this in Microsoft Word

Powerline broke the story

Basically, the CBS documents were really bad forgeries…someone typed them into Microsoft Word. Its stupidly obvious.

Which I think only highlights the importance of having each candidate sign a Form 180 so that we can be sure that all documentation of their service comes forward. Oh, wait, Bush did that already. Well, I guess Kerry needs to sign this form now.

One of the thing that bugs me about the Bush “AWOL” story is that no one ever talks to a National Guardsman.

As I’ve said before, yeah, Bush slacked off the last year, after serving 4.5 years in the guard. However, that’s not AWOL, that’s just slacking, and everyone did it.

As this guy puts it:

Bush didn’t avoid his service anymore than I did. We both did what we could to avoid the worst thing a young man can face: boredom.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Both the Bush Administration and former President Jimmy Carter were quick to bless the results of last month’s Venezuelan recall vote, but it now looks like they were had. A statistical analysis by a pair of economists suggests that the random-sample “audit” results that the Americans trusted weren’t random at all.

Previously, I’ve written about voting machines and my frustrations with the critics of voting machines on insisting on a paper trail. I think the case in Venezuela illustrates too things:

• Paper isn’t going to prove anything

• Its important to get this right, because if we do, we can clean up elections worldwide.

Facts:

• Bush served for 5.5 years in the TANG. 4 years of those were on active duty, because you don’t learn to fly planes one weekend a month.

• Only the last year (1973) is in dispute, when he was on inactive duty and was living in Alabama.

National Guard rules:

• Remember the “one weekend a month” ads? Well, its not every month. Its really 28 days/year you have to show up when you’re on inactive duty. You can do it in batches.

• If you’re in a different state while on inactive duty, you can show up at the local NG place and do your service there. They won’t have “extra” planes for you to fly, though. This rule makes sense if you think about it, people in the NG have day jobs.

Add all these up, and basically, his last year, Bush did his minimum number of days he had to do early in the year, and then didn’t have to show up after that. His time in Alabama mostly involved sitting around being bored, because a fighter pilot without a plane is like lips on a chicken.

The Texas Air National Guard discharged him early, basically because all the National Guard units were stuffed with people.

So this is just election year FUBAR.