October 2004 Archives

Showing voters waiting in line in Afghanistan. View it Here

The Osama Litmus Test:

Kerry did say that we are all united in the fight against bin Laden, but he just couldn’t help himself. His first instinct was to get political.

On Milwaukee television, he used the video as an occasion to attack the president: “He didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He outsourced the job.” Kerry continued with a little riff from his stump speech, “I am absolutely confident I have the ability to make America safer.”

Putz!

When I read this MSNBC article, I thought Kerry was going to be smart enough to take the high road:

Bush was informed of the tape aboard Air Force One late Friday morning by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. “Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country,” he told reporters at the airport in Toledo, Ohio. “I’m sure Senator Kerry will agree with me.”

“I also want to say we are at war with these terrorists,” said Bush, who added that he was “confident we will prevail.”

Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, was informed by his senior foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, who was briefed by the administration.

“As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists,” Kerry said as he boarded a campaign plane in West Palm Beach, Fla. “They’re barbarians, and I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes, period.”

Then I read the WaPo version:

“Let me make this very clear,” Bush said in Toledo, Ohio, standing next to Air Force One. “Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I’m sure Senator Kerry agrees with this.”

Kerry, too, said, “My reaction is that all of us in this city are completely united.” But he criticized Bush for not capturing bin Laden earlier, and he added pointedly, “I believe I can run a more effective war on terror than George Bush.”

Effing weasel. What’s wrong with saying, “no matter who gets elected, we’re coming for you!”? Why couldn’t Kerry have just said that. I’m going to start calling him Weasel-Boy.

[Update]

Well, at least the people on his campaign are a little smarter then Kerry. Here’s his official statement:

In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period.

So I’m still annoyed at him, because I think he’s going to turn this into an election issue based on the quotes in the Washington Post when President Bush tried to avoid that, but maybe he will take the high road.

From MSNBC:

U.S. officials told NBC News that in parts of the tape not aired by Al-Jazeera, bin Laden acknowledges that the recent Afghan elections were not a success for him because “they came off with minimal violence.” And he admits that “aggressive Pakistani operations” in South Waziristan, where he is believed to be hiding, have hurt his operations.

In what could be read as a bizarre endorsement of Bush’s Democratic challenger John Kerry, bin Laden, addressing the American people, said “best way to avoid another disaster” was to avoid provoking Arab anger. “Liberals do not neglect their security, contradicting Bush, who says that we hate freedom,” bin Laden said.

Yeah, even Osama won’t endorse Kerry, he’s just a member of the Anybody but Bush crowd.

Piss off Osama, Vote Bush!

But I’m going to do it anyways.

Megan McArdle of Jane Galt writes a very thoughtful piece on who she’s going to vote for. I didn’t agree with everything in it, but I definitely understood her point of view.

Here’s the conclusion, but as InstaPundit says: read the whole thing.

Ultimately, I’ve decided to take the advice of a friend’s grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he’d change. “If you can’t live with him exactly the way he is,” she told me, “then don’t marry him, because he’ll say he’s going to change, and he might even try to change, but it’s one in a million that he actually will.”

Kerry’s record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. For all the administration’s screw -ups — and there have been many — I’m sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.

The liberal magazine gives it to Kerry:

John Kerry speaks, not unfairly, of George W. Bush’s habits of denial. But Kerry himself is in denial. He is in denial about the United Nations. He is in denial about the Australian election that returned to office for an unprecedented fourth term its prime minister who has been, with his country, a pillar of the Iraq coalition. He is in denial about Japan, whose government, unlike Germany’s and France’s, does not carp at the United States. He is in denial about Afghanistan, where, for the first time in history, men and women, riding on donkeys and walking barefoot across great distances, have exercised the right to choose those who govern them. He is in denial about Iraq itself. The Jordanian daily Al Ra’i recently called Moqtada Al Sadr’s apparent retreat from armed struggle “a farewell to arms” that is as politically significant as the establishment of the provisional authority. Has Kerry come close to recognizing this? Has he acknowledged that the Bush administration has negotiated with nato a plan to send, starting in November, up to 3,000 soldiers to train Iraqi troops? These soldiers will be under the command of General David Petraeus, who is mustering the military might and political will to retake much of the Sunni triangle. Many Iraqis now have second thoughts about opposing the coalition. Even the BBC has said as much. But Kerry hasn’t.

From this article in the NYT:

All of these stories would be getting more play right now if it weren’t for the Al Qaqaa mess. Still, one can understand why the right is so upset.

After all, Al Qaqaa illustrates in a particularly graphic way the failures of Mr. Bush’s national security leadership. U.S. soldiers passed through Al Qaqaa, a crucial munitions dump, but were never told that it was important to secure the site. If administration officials object that they couldn’t have spared enough troops to guard the site, they’re admitting that they went in without enough troops. And the fact that these explosives fell into unknown hands is a perfect example of how the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat.

To which I wrote this idiot back:

You need to read something beyond your own newspaper:

1. Al Qaqaa wasn’t marked “critical” there were other more critical dumps. It was on the “medium” list if I remember correctly.

2. Out of 1,000,000 tons of explosives, you’re talking about 377? No, wait, 143, no wait, 3 tons?

3. All we really know is that there were IAEA seals, we don’t know if there was anything there for sure…

Contrast that with some actual physical facts:

380 tons would take 76 5 ton truckloads to “loot”. That would have been somewhat obvious seeing as how the road to the facility went through the 3rd ID. There’s no way the explosives were there when we invaded.

So if you consider these explosives truly important rather then just something to beat up President Bush about, then this really argues President Bush’s case. The US had asked the IAEA to destroy the explosives: no go. Then we stalled the invasion to try to get more world support. Meanwhile, the explosives get moved.

What’s your argument exactly? That Kerry would have dicked around with the UN longer before he got a no from the coalition of the bribed so that even more explosives would be missing?

Is reading expert opinion from experts unfiltered by the media “conflict bias”.

Here’s an interview with the Army Chief of Staff. Its interesting that there weren’t that many armored humvees in Iraq because the Army didn’t think of Humvees as a combat-related vehicle.

Hat Tip: Intel Dump

Alternative Energy has a long way to go, that’s why its “alternative”. When it works, it will just be “energy”. But here’s a good roundup.

I asked Joe if he thought there was bias in the media, and he asked me back if I was talking about at the local level or the network level. I said both. He said that at the local level, while occasionally he’ll get a request by a manager or a producer to slant a story one way or another, for the most part, at the local level they don’t really cover issues that can have a liberal or conservative slant. So it never comes up.

On the network level, he didn’t really know, but he thought that CNN seemed pretty fair to him, but that FOX was way out there.

He went on to say that TV really likes “little guy” stories, that they just make for great television. He said that at the local level, its very challenging for them to make their news compelling enough to get people to watch it instead of CNN or the network news.

I told him that I would watch a weekly show that had both the good and bad from Iraq, and his comment was that he felt that the Iraq coverage at the network level was being done as if it was “local news”, and that didn’t make any sense to him.

I then told him that I didn’t feel there was a liberal bias or a conservative bias as much as a “controversy bias”. He seized on that immediately as a “conflict bias”, and said that it was very much true, that they have to make the news interesting.

In the end, I found interviewing him more interesting then his interview of me. We bloggers like to complain about the MSM, but they’re just doing their job, which is to provide a half-hour of news-entertainment. It was interesting talking to someone from the other side, who has a much harder job then Dan Rather. He has to get Arizonans to watch his show instead of some network show.

I just got interviewed by Joe Dana from Channel 12 News in Phoenix (I live in Flagstaff). Joe used to live in Flagstaff, and somehow stumbled across my blog.

Here’s a picture of Joe (I’ll get around to posting a picture of me eventually):

(He’s better looking in person.)

Anyways, Joe contacted me the morning because he was doing sort of an “election opinion roundup” piece and so he was calling me and presumably others to talk about politics. After talking to me about various issues, in the context of a discussion about the Healthy Forests bill I mentioned to Joe in the context of that I lived a block from the Fort Valley Experimental Forest where they first showed that thinning the forest and controlled burns would be a good thing.

Guess what story Joe was covering at 6:10 this evening, live? It was a story about how “NAU researchers were at the forefront of the controversial issues relating to forest thinning”.

They wanted some local perspective on the election from someone knowledgeable about the issues. More tomorrow.

In my 14th amendment story, I said that Kerry went to Paris to talk to the VietCong on his honeymoon. It turns out that its not true, he made a trip specifically to talk to the VC. According to his website he honeymooned in Jamaica.

Thanks to a comment on this Blogs for Bush story.

Doesn’t matter in terms of the 14th amendment however, since he made at least 3 trips, and he’s only been married twice so this isn’t exactly news, just more weirdness from Kerry’s salad days.

So the NYT writes a story about missing explosives. What does our blogging Bush campaign member say?

Our team reads it and predicts (accurately) that those guys will assume the worst (about our military), ignore the reality (that Saddam had lots of weapons and was a threat), and sidestep their own previous sidesteps (around their convoluted position on the War).

So, the Stentorian Senator wants to talk about Iraq, Saddam’s weapons, and our safety in the world.

Ok, fine by us at the campaign.

Meanwhile, inside the US government, I know that hard-working military, intelligence and homeland security experts will continue to bust their tail-ends in the daily struggle to make us safer. They’re succeeding, folks, because we’re on offense and we’re fighting the worst of them over there, on their turf.

Then later in the day, NBC breaks with the fact that the explosives weren’t there on I-Day, and he writes:

Turns out, our troops (and NBC) took the facility the day after the liberation of Iraq on 4/9/03, and voila! The weapons weren’t there when the military arrived.

Our troops were on top of the site from the start and the material in question wasn’t there.

So, lesson seems to be, if you throw out your campaign playbook for the day because of one headline, better make sure it’s gonna hold up.

So while I think Tucker might be overly optimistic about how this story will play out, I think its very interesting that he was able to predict so accurately the end result. Its an interesting insight into the two candidates that Kerry’s weakness is his lack of trust…

Perhaps if Bush wore a shirt that said George Tenet made me his bitch, Kerry would wear one that said Al Hubbard made me his bitch.

Background: Al Hubbard, the Communist Party member who founded VVAW never served in Vietnam.

Earlier I wrote about whether Kerry’s anti-war activities disqualified him for public office. Today, a story broke that the Vietnamese specifically directed some of the VVAW activities.

Does this make Kerry ineligible?

Looking at the documents, its pretty clear that Kerry was a Communist Dupe not a Communist Stooge. Being a Stooge would invalidate him, being a Dupe won’t, except perhaps in the eyes of the voters.

Which was hardly a surprise.

But what struck me is the lukewarm praise from such a liberal newspaper…after some Bush bashing (they’re pretty much voting against Bush rather then for Kerry it seems):

We find much to admire in Mr. Kerry’s life of service, knowledge of the world and positions on a range of issues — but also some things that give us pause.

But even so, Afghanistan today is far from the failure that Mr. Kerry portrays.

The senator is far more likely than Mr. Bush to seek a range of opinions before making a decision — but is he decisive enough? He understands the importance of allies and of burnishing America’s image — but would he be too reluctant to give offense? His Senate record suggests an understanding of the importance of open markets, but during the campaign he has retreated to protectionist rhetoric that is troubling in its own right and as a possible indicator of inconstancy.

We have been dismayed most of all by Mr. Kerry’s zigzags on Iraq, such as his swervings on whether Saddam Hussein presented a threat. As Mr. Bush charges, Mr. Kerry’s description of the war as a “diversion” does not inspire confidence in his determination to see it through.

We do not view a vote for Mr. Kerry as a vote without risks.

Its interesting that even the Washington Post isn’t supporting Kerry so much as they’re sure he’s a better candidate then Bush as because they hope he’s a better candidate then Bush.

Kerry: Even the left thinks he’s a terrible candidate.

It’s not for the reasons you think.

Frankly, while I understand why many Vietnam Veterans might be angry at Kerry because of his activities in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, I think its a negative for Kerry for a different set of reasons.

I think it shows his lack of judgment.

If I listen to Kerry, I’m supposed to be upset with Bush because he listened to all of the intelligence agencies in the world, that Saddam had WMD, that perhaps President Bush should have checked his facts.

Except Kerry joined an organization:

• Founded by a Communist.
• Who was never in Vietnam.

He then:

• collected testimonials about atrocities from people who’d never actually been soldiers in Vietnam.

• He then testified about those atrocities in the Senate.

Perhaps President Bush should have been more skeptical about what Putin and all the Arab neighbors of Iraq were telling him. I don’t think Kerry would have been any more skeptical though, quite the reverse, he just has a different set of biases.

When my lefty friends ask me how I could consider voting for Bush, I ask them “Granted that you don’t like Bush, tell me something positive about Kerry?” There’s always silence. Then I tell them “Look, not liking Bush is fine, we can agree to disagree on his foreign policy. But how do you know Kerry isn’t worse if you don’t know anything about him? In my opinion, Kerry would be worse, and I formed that opinion from reading Kerry’s own website. He’s an empty suit.”

No, this isn’t about the election.

This is literally, how to trap a skunk.

Iraq is both good and bad, but of course, we never hear the good…

Here’s some Good News From Iraq

Ok, so first Kerry claimed he was in Cambodia, dropping off a CIA spy.

The he claimed various foreign leaders had said they preferred him to Bush, yet even the mainstream press noticed that he hadn’t actually met with any.

Now it comes out that when he said he met with all the members of the UN Security Council that he didn’t.

Now earlier, I’d blogged that if I had to choose between Bush, the crazy cowboy, and Kerry the empty suit, I’d have to choose the cowboy, because I’ve worked for crazy people, and I’ve worked for an empty suit, and it was much worse working for the empty suit.

With today’s news I may have to revise that.

It turns out Kerry is crazy too! He’s hearing voices in his head, voices he thinks are from foreign leaders. This has stunning implications for our foreign policy. If Kerry is President, he’s promised to consult those voices before taking military action. That means that we can invade Iran or North Korea with impunity, as long as the voices in Kerry’s head say its ok.

Wow, Kerry could end up being our most warlike President ever, because his foreign policy need not be limited by world opinion at all.

I really might have to reconsider voting for GWB.

(Tongue very firmly in cheek.)

There was some Vandalism at the local GOP office in Flagstaff, AZ where I live:

Not only was this evil, it was lame. Whoever did this was too stupid to actually vandalize the GOP office, what they actually did was vandalize the lobby of an office building.

I bet all the other people who work in that office are going to vote for Bush now!

Way to go morons!

Or, why its good to have a tank (quicktime movie)

Hat tip to Back to Iraq who used the footage for some whiny point about how fierce the fighting is, even though it was shot in Mosul in August, and its now October.

Wizbang pointed out this section from the New Republic:

The Security Council has authorized only three wars in its history: the Korean War (while the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council), a 1960s intervention in Congo, and the first Gulf war. That there have been numerous wars since 1945 would suggest that the U.N. Charter has been violated repeatedly. But while one could argue that all those wars were technically illegal, most legal experts concede the legitimacy of customary, not just statutory, law—meaning widely accepted actual practices can, over time, become as legitimate as written rules.

I would like to point out that it was the US in all 3 instances, that only the US has ever asked for permission to use military force.

It was a Russian General who pointed that out before Gulf War, Part 2.

I’d also like to point out that if you use the simple test that we’re at “war” when we send people to other countries to try to kill them, and vice versa, we’ve been at war with Iraq since 1991, that this is all just a new battle in an old war, one with UN approval.

Fuck France.

Germany, on the other hand, has been supporting us behind the scenes…

A metaphor even a Bush hater can understand.

President Bush is a crazy suit.

Senator Kerry is an empty suit.

I’ve worked for crazy suits, and I’ve worked for empty suits.

It was better working for a crazy suit, because they made the right decision about half the time, and the wrong decision about half the time, but they always made a decision. An empty suit wouldn’t make any decision (which is usually worse then making the wrong decision), and would blame everyone else when things went wrong because he couldn’t make up his mind.

Theresa just lost Kerry the election! You never dis Laura, everyone loves Laura, even Liberals, even Alec Baldwin! And then to same something that isn’t true about Laura but is true about Theresa!

That’s what I woke up to, my liberal wife ranting about Theresa…

Well, I saw the latest from the South Park guys. It was funny. I won’t get it on DVD, because I probably couldn’t watch it over and over, unlike South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

After 9/11, I read this great essay on the web that talked about how the terrorists shouldn’t have messed with America, because we were crazy. It was called, Only a Crazy Person Picks a Fight with Someone Who’s Nuts . It then went on to document all the wild and silly things found in this land of ours. While watching this movie, I was reminded of that essay, because I kept wondering, what will the rest of the world think of this movie? Will they realize that America does get “it”, that we know that violence can be a dead end, that life isn’t like a Bruckheimer movie? Will they also realize that in turn, you can’t always fight evil with sternly worded memos?

I managed to dig up the original link to the essay, but it seems the original site was eaten by the dot-com-bomb. However, through diligent searching, I found the author’s new blog, and found his most recent posting of it. Which you can read here

Here’s a taste:

To those extremists that perpetrated this crime against our nation, I have a warning for you. There are those of us who look at your actions as irrational, twisted, and completely inhuman. By all measures, what you have done can only be seen as insane.

I have news for you. We’re more fucking nuts than you, and it should scare you shitless.

We eat whole pizzas with a single diet Coke and think we’re eating healthy. Taking a single pill from GNC that can cause heart attacks, psychosis, strokes, and even death just so we can metabolize that pizza faster makes it even healthier. And then, despite countless numbers of starving people throughout the world that could have used the food besides us, we go to the bathroom and puke it all up just to stay thin.

We made a sequel to Police Academy 5.

From Froggy Ruminations:

As a SEAL Reservist, I have tried to maintain contact with my friends in the Teams who have remained on active duty. This President has authorized SOF operations that were unthinkable with the prior administration. If I told you the places my friends have been, you would be shocked. President Bush’s risk tolerance for operations in support of the GWOT is satisfyingly high. While John Kerry promises to double SOF which is impossible, the President has shown a detailed understanding of what the SEALs are up to and how they are getting it done. The President has mandated the creation of 2 additional SEAL Teams, but he told our top Admiral that he would not abide the degradation of training and selection of men. This is music to the ears of a Navy SEAL who places his life in the hands of his comrades in training and war.

Hat tip: Blogs of War

from the New York Times

From the Times UK. The most interesting part for me is where she talks about having met the leaders of Hamas:

On arrival in Gaza I was disturbed that the Hamas leaders I met would never look me in the eye. To them, it was indecent even to glance at a member of the inferior sex. All their answers were directed at my boyfriend, who was taking pictures. But they were co-operative and eager for publicity.

We were taken upstairs in a mosque and, to my shock, were introduced to a dozen or more would-be suicide bombers in their mid-teens, who declared their fervent wish to martyr themselves for their cause.

At the time, there had been no suicide bombs in Israel. Some Hezbollah members in Lebanon had blown themselves up, but they were Shi’ite Muslims: Palestinian Sunnis were not supposed to go in for that sort of thing. Yet here I was, looking at a bunch of boys with kaffirs masking their faces, brandishing knives and practising karate in a place of worship. These weren’t boy scouts in a church hall; they were being trained to become fanatical killers by their religious elders.

When I heard the other week that Cat Stevens had been refused entry to America, I thought good riddance.

When mosques are raided by US forces, I am not surprised. I know mosques are used as terrorist bases. I expect most of the young men I talked to are now either dead or sitting in an Israeli jail. They were triumphalist about the global spread of Islam and confident that it would one day dominate the planet. They hated the West, they wanted to kill Jews, and none of them had ever heard of George W Bush.

So has Bush inflamed hatred in the Arab world? Yes and no: he certainly did not start it. One of the most unconvincing arguments advanced by the Democrats is that the jihadists favour a Bush-Cheney victory. I don’t buy it. Their leaders are on the run and no government will afford them safe haven. They have not yet managed to pull off another attack on America. It is hard for Bush to boast about this, lest he tempt fate, but he deserves some credit.

Well, given that I had a Saturday deadline, I’m going to assume The Noise (the local paper I write for) is out in print, so here’s the long version of the article I wrote for it. (I’m limited to 900 words and no web links on paper…):

Since I got interested in politics, I get lots of strange emails from both the right and the left. About a month ago, I got this strange email claiming that Kerry was ineligible to be President due to the fourteenth amendment, specifically section 3. Now I didn’t take it too seriously, for one thing, the email had edited the fourteenth amendment down to be shorter. It seemed kind of silly to be saving electrons in an email, so that made me suspicious. I went to a Constitution website and got the full text of the 14th amendment:

It’s a given that President Bush has made mistakes.

It’s a given that a “President Kerry” would make mistakes.

My issue with Kerry is that he seems in many ways to be dead set on repeating President Bush’s mistakes, and making new, possibly worse ones.

Our fundamental problem in Iraq seems to be too much top-down imposition of “big projects” with “big goals”. In other words, all the things that bug me about the US government at home. America in civilian accomplishes most tasks with a sort of “positive chaos”. That is, you have millions of people every day making decisions that move us forward at a breathtaking clip. Mistakes get fixed quickly, and things move well. This even applies in our military: We run our military in such a way that we have more sergeants per soldier then any other army. That’s because we expect our sergeants to make decisions that normally only officers in other armies make.

The government on the other hand, being huge and unwieldy, tries to accomplish everything from the top down with huge, overly structured “positive order” campaigns. Its slow, and mistakes drag out for months, years, or decades.

Because God has a sense of humor.

Let’s hear it for tolerance and compassion, those sorely neglected Christian virtues.

We have a clear choice this November. Last time I talked about the President’s choice that terrorism was the enemy, not just Al Queda, this time I’m going to talk about how the world has changed, and how the President’s domestic policy reflects that.

When President Bush talks about the jobs of the 21st century, he’s referring to some sweeping changes that have happened to America and the world. It used to be that people had one job with one company. Now, the average person works for 3-7 companies in their life. Because of this, its important that your retirement plan and your health insurance be with you, not with the company you work for. When President Bush talks about ownership, he’s talking about making sure that when you change jobs, that you don’t have to change everything else in your life as well.

The second thing that it happening in this century is that it used to be that one guy worked at one machine making something. Now, one guy works at a computer, that talks to ten machines, that make ten things. That’s just progress, but because of that, manufacturing jobs all over the world have declined. We work smarter these days, not harder. That makes education even more important. America’s dominance in the world has always been because we have the smartest, most flexible workers in the world. We need to continue that in a more difficult world. That means better schools for kids, grants for people to upgrade their skills at community colleges so they can get better jobs, and tax credits for people going to school.

The world didn’t change overnight, it changed slowly. But the President is the only candidate who realizes that the government has to change when the world changes. Its a “big picture” viewpoint that Kerry doesn’t seem to have.

On the Arizona for Bush mailing list I participate in, I’m often the one who goes after the Kerry trolls. Despite my blog name, I’ve gotten a reputation for being the most civil responder. So here’s my guidelines for how to have a civil discussion with a Kerry voter.

Kerry’s blog claims:

Once again, the president is misleading America. I have passed 56 individual bills that I have personally written.” – John Kerry

It then goes on to list 56 “bills and resolutions” Kerry got passed. Except reading this list, it turns out that Bush is right. Kerry’s record is completely underwhelming.

First off, a resolution is not a bill, its not a law, its just a non-binding statement.

Here’s a resolution Kerry passed as an example:

S.CON.RES.62: A concurrent resolution expressing solidarity with the Sakharov family in their efforts to exercise their rights of freedom of expression, of travel, and of communication, as guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

So Kerry’s statement above is not true, he hasn’t passed 56 individual bills. Also, Senator Kerry needs to read his constitution again, as not all of the 56 “bills and resolutions” Kerry is listing passed both houses of Congress. So filtering Kerry’s list for bills that actually passed to become law, we get:

100th Congress:

S.2365: A bill authorizing the release of 86 USIA films with respect to the Marshall Plan.

101st Congress:

Nothing

102nd Congress:

S.1563 : A bill to authorize appropriations to carry out the National Sea Grant College Program Act, and for other purposes.

103rd Congress:

S.1206 : A bill to redesignate the Federal building located at 380 Trapelo Road in Waltham, Massachusetts, as the “Frederick C. Murphy Federal Center”.

S.1636 : A bill to authorize appropriations for the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and to improve the program to reduce the incidental taking of marine mammals during the course of commercial fishing operations, and for other purposes.

104th Congress:

Nothing

105th Congress:

S.469 Title: A bill to designate a portion of the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers as a component of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

106th Congress:

S.791 : A bill to amend the Small Business Act with respect to the women’s business center program.

That’s 6 bills passed. But all of these are pretty underwhelming legislation. Releasing some films? Renaming a building? This, from Kerry’s own website, is his legislative legacy? Give me a break! In 20 years, he managed to rename a building. Jeesh, I bet that was really controversial and he really had to fight hard to get that through both houses…

Update: I said it first! Nyaah to the Official Bush Blog

Overall, Kerry came out ahead. President Bush should have spent the day of the first debate relaxing, instead he visited the hurricane victims. If he had been rested like he was for the last two debates, he would have cleaned Kerry’s clock, and the election would be over. Since President Bush went into the debates with a strong lead, Senator Kerry really had to look “presidential” in that first debate, and he did so. He was therefore able to convince people that he was a “real” candidate.

The debates after that were enough of a tie that they probably didn’t shift opinion of the general populace one way or another. The townhall debate, as usual, was the best, because the general populace asks better, more informed questions then your typical pretty boy anchormen. What surprises me is that anyone is still surprised at how insipid anchormen can be.

From my perspective though, I now dislike Kerry even more. He had two debates where the moderators refused to give him any tough questions at all, and frankly, he didn’t do that well on substance. In general, he completely ducked the questions to claim “he has a plan”, which he doesn’t explain. Then, last night, reviewing Kerry’s website, I found out that he has an completely meaningless legislative record. His “plan”, which you can download from his website, is mostly quotes from his stump speeches, constrast that with the President’s highly detailed “Agenga”.

The man is an empty suit. He looks good, but he hasn’t authored a single interesting piece of successful legislation in 20 years. He is obviously not a leader. Looking at his voting record, his votes aren’t even courageous, they’re just weird. He has no accomplishments outside of the political arena, he’s never built anything or created anything. The only thing I can say in his favor, is that he was in Vietnam, and even that was only for 4 months.

You know, when I get hit by a Democratic troll, I always ask them to say 3 positive things about Kerry, without referencing Bush in a negative way, and without mentioning Vietnam. I have yet to get an answer.

So I’ve watched three debates now, and typically, the town hall debate had the best questions, while the two mainstream media representatives didn’t ask Kerry any tough questions at all?

However, I have a question for the mainstream media: Is Kerry really such a lightweight that you can’t ask him any tough questions? I don’t think you’ve done him any favors.

If I had to wait to find a political party where I agreed with every single one of their positions before I could vote, I’d be living in a cabin in Montana making bombs…