The Opinionated Bastard

His speech seems to have been a litmus test.

If you liked it, your from the right.

If you laughed, but didn’t take it too seriously, you’re centrist.

If you hated it, and are now vehemently bitching about it, you’re lost to the left.

From ScrappleFace:

Bush Campaign Shift: Now, It’s a One-Man Race

So the Kerry campaign is calling for Karl Rove’s Resignation

Which is just funny. Kerry is now threatened by what a campaign worker said? What a pussy. They made Rove a celebrity with their conspiracy theories.

For the record, here’s what he said:

“It was a period of intense feeling on both sides for and against the war, but I think that was painting with far too broad a brush to tarnish the records and service of people who were defending our country and fighting communism and doing what they thought was right,”

But he also said this:

Rove also said Kerry “served with valor” in Vietnam.

Here’s a link: abc news

More amateur hour at the Kerry campaign. I wouldn’t even had known Rove said this if they hadn’t brought it up.

Here’s some comeback:

Well it’s sort of sad and I knew there was something weird when he started getting up on stages and invoking my name and taking a couple of whacks at me. I can’t imagine that this President ever standing up and invoking the name of an operative from the Kerry campaign. I think it’s sad and demeaning. I also think that it is a sign of something deeper and I hate to be personal about it, but Senator Kerry stood up on a stage in Pittsburgh and attacked me saying that I’d gone to great lengths to avoid service in Vietnam and then on the flight between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia at his next rally, a reporter asked him what do you know about Karl Rove’s draft status and he said I don’t know anything. So, here he stood up and took my good name as a cheap campaign ploy and knocked me around a little bit and admitted that he didn’t have a bit of evidence or knowledge how old I was or where I was during the Vietnam . . when he was in Vietnam, I was in high school.

This is a must read by Ginsberg documenting the Democrat connections to MoveOn.org vs. his relatively minor connection to the swift vets>

From the Washington Post

Which kind of bums me out.

Then the Kerry campaign responded positively, or rather Edwards did.

Except its Kerry who’s running, not Edwards.

From Here:

While I’m (sort of) on this topic, why doesn’t the United States address the Afghan opium trade by just buying the stuff up? Presumably, farmers would be just as happy to sell their poppies to us, and that would keep them off the market, as well as depriving bad guys of a revenue source. Am I missing something here?

Yes Glenn, you are. In a capitalist society, you have to watch out what you reward. If we started buying the poppies, that would just drive up the price, but the poppies are cheap. If the price rose more farmers would start growing poppies instead of say, food. In other words, in a capitalist society, if you start rewarding something, you get more of it.

You’re obviously not a professor of economics. :-)

I wish the Democrats would learn this simple fact. Paying money to single moms leads to more single moms.

Because the Kerry campaign is so badly run.

While I see the right side of the blogosphere agonizing over whether it was over the top or not, I see the left side of the blogosphere frothing at the mouth.

While the Bush campaign will be negative for a day, the Kerry campaign is going to be negative for all of September.

Outside the Beltway quotes the London News Review:

If there is a hell, and most likely Zell Miller believes in such a thing, then Democratic Senator Zell Miller is going to burn in it. Spin hotly on a giant griddle. For something close to eternity.

Oh yes, siree. He is going to burn in hell.

If hell exists; which one can only hope that it does, because if God exists then he’s no kind of God unless he creates a hell for Democrat Senator Zell Miller to burn in. In fact, even if the universe exists without a God, as many would contend, then it may still be within the inarticulate power of this vast mass of galaxies, nebulae and planets to create - within itself - a dark and steaming corner of itself where Mr. Zell Miller can dwell, for eternity, in unspeakable pain. We can call it hell or we can call it Georgia. Just so long as Senator Zell Miller suffers in it.

The discussion on the Kerry blog was similar.

Kerry, thinking 0 moves ahead since 2003.

Economy-Ohio

Negative. Negative economic ads really bug me for a couple of reasons.

1. Negative economic messages always bug me because they can be self fulfilling prophecies. Every time Kerry runs this ad, someone gets laid off.
2. It doesn’t tell me anything about the candidate.

Time

About as positive as Kerry gets. Vague promises of what he’ll do. Bread and circuses.

Guiliani asked both the R's and the D's to have their convention in New York. The R's agreed immediately, the D's refused as long as the R's were having their convention their.

Which party is the most partisan?

NCLB has been getting trashed a lot, and pretty unfairly, so lets talk about what NCLB is really about.

It’s about using phonics to teach reading.

It seems that there are two camps in education: the phonics camp, which is pretty much how everyone in the world actually learned to read: Sounding out words.

Then there is the whole language camp, which basically consists of putting books under kids pillows and hoping they learn how to read.

You’re probably assuming that I’m rabidly partisan in the phonics camp. Nope, I’m not.

More stupidity at the Kerry Campaign:

Which party presented an agenda for the future at its convention? Below is a topic-by-topic comparison between John Kerry’s remarks on July 29 with Vice President Cheney’s speech on September 1.

This is just stupid, because Kerry has to compare himself to Bush, the President, not Cheney, the Vice-President. But I guess he’s too much of a lightweight to compare himself to Bush. But that means he’s too much of a lightweight to be President…

Nails the DNC:

It’s kind of like Chinese food. It filled up people for about a day and then everybody was hungry and just John Kerry doesn’t compare well next to the President.

Read about it here:

Endorses him for fighting terrorism.

Wow.

Zell pushed Kerry off the deep end. He felt he had to have a “post midnight” campaign speech. All politicians with class usually don’t bother to respond to the acceptance speech. Kerry seems to be class-challenged. Perhaps we can have a government program for him?

Isreal. Kerry didn’t.

George W. Bush

John Kerry

Extra credit:

1. Count the number of times Kerry feels he has to slam Bush.

   1. Add up the cost of the Kerry proposals vs. the Bush proposals.

   2. Count the number of graphs in the Kerry document vs. Bush.

I thought it was funny earlier that the Bush campaign felt the best way to discredit Kerry was to stream his acceptance speech. Here I am discrediting Kerry by linking to his platform.

Kerry: All hat, no Cambodia.

Bush calls his platform an Agenda for America

A list or program of things to be done or considered

Kerry calls his platform his Plan for America

A scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective: a plan of attack.

Ok, I know I’m being biased/silly. But Kerry seems more Stalinist.

Well, its 263 pages vs. Bush’s 49, but about 90% of what Kerry is talking about is stuff Bush is already doing. In other words, its the status quo.

Ex:

We will:

Make security of vulnerable nuclear material in the former Soviet Union a central issue in U.S.-Russian relations so that we can break through bureaucratic logjams and secure these dangerous materials within four years.

Yeah, yeah, Bush has been working on that for awhile now. and helped push through the initiative where we’re helping the Russians with nuclear security. Kerry devotes a bunch of pages talking about the Medicare prescription drug thing that Bush pushed through.

Also, only the first 100 pages are policy, then there are 20 pages of photos, and the other pages are excerpts from speeches.

Funny, typical political thing: Anything Kerry doesn’t like, “Bush did”. Anything he does like, “Congress enacted”.

Here’s a weird one:

A new $250,000 gratuity for families of service members killed in a combat zone,

A gratuity you mean a tip? Elitist snob. Sorry someone died, here’s a tip. Perhaps our soldiers can go around with tip jars. Ugh. I know, I know its just a word. But gratuity?

So with 60 days left in the election, we have a great speech, and a real agenda from Bush.

From Kerry? Reiterations of what Bush has already done, no cohesive plan, and the new things he does propose (having the government run health insurance) are just a disaster in the making.

PIctures not for the faint of heart

This is so sad. For those who don’t believe in moral absolutes, I tell you.

There is true evil in the world, and those who would purposefully harm children are evil.

I’ve seen a lot of comments on Bush’s speech saying that he was short on details.

They don’t get it, or they missed the line that said “for the details go to www.georgewbush.com”. Its the new media guys, you have to download the booklet. Its no longer the press release or pre-release of the speech that matters it the website.

So Kerry is going to “fight back” now huh?

Bah. I’ve been reading both of their websites and campaign blogs and its Kerry who’s been the most negative. Stupidly negative too, if Bush said the sky was blue, Kerry would say it wasn’t.

Bush has been ignoring Kerry more then he’s been talking about him. I think the Bush election strategists have decided that the best way to beat Kerry is to motivate the current Bush voters to get the polls, and you do that by going positive.

By going negative, Kerry might rile up his current crop, but the more he responds, the more he’s going to fracture his base as:

1. The anti-war Kerry voters realize he would have gone into Iraq too.

2. He becomes more incoherent and alienates everyone else.

It’s audio

This is by the guy who wrote Losing Bin Laden. He makes the point that most of the guys on Kerry’s team are the same guys from the Clinton administration who dropped the ball for 8 years.

Actually, there are 2 million more people employed in the US then when Bush took office.

Read it and Weep, Kerry

So Time and Newsweek are now reporting poll numbers showing Bush leading by 10-11 points, which are huge numbers. Even the conservative bloggers are skeptical.

I’m not.

If I have one overriding criticism of W, its that he takes that cowboy thing of don’t talk, do, a bit too far. For the President, sometimes, talking is the doing. While I think it would be a waste of his time to answer every pointless negative charge aimed at him, I really wish he would give the American people a status report once/month. Not an interview with a journalist because they ask stupid questions, but a briefing.

One of the things I noticed watching the Republican convention was how it seemed like every speaker took the opportunity to thank our troops. I didn’t remember that happening at the Democratic convention. Well, I just checked, and the only mention they had of any soldiers besides John Kerry was in a closing prayer. I think a hidden theme at the Republican convention was definitely a big thank you to our troops.

For comparison, here’s what I found looking for “troops”, “soldier” or “thank” on both websites.

Jay Reding says much the same thing

It's official, the terrorists are morons

The Russians are now going to ally with Israel. First they pissed off the French:

only now they want money

Now they've pissed of the Russians, who are going to get advised by Israel.

You know, it didn't really matter that Bush left the Europeans behind, it looks like they're going to catch up.

In the Boston Globe

It's all about how/why Kerry chose to make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. For some perspective on that, when I talked to my wife about the Swift Vets thing, she was pretty underwhelmed. I think the voting public has been pretty well immunized against negative attacks.

However, she said "Kerry was only in Vietnam for 4 months?"

The effect of the swift vets ad may not have been what all the blog writers think. I suspect many people are ignoring it, but they would have expected to hear more from Kerry by now. Since they haven't, there's this assumption that he must have been this really incredible war hero. He wasn't on say, the Patton, Powell, or Eisenhower level. He was an ensign, and he only saw 4 months of combat. Intense combat, sure, and he gets points for that. But we require our Presidents to have more then just a one-line resume.

So now the Kerry Campaign is trying to regroup

The problem is, they were never "grouped" in the first place.

In an expansive conversation, Mr. Clinton, who is awaiting heart surgery, told Mr. Kerry that he should move away from talking about Vietnam

The problem for Kerry will be that reading that the Campaign is on the rocks is probably worse for him then any of the Swift Boats stuff. Well, not the problem, _a problem.

The problem for Kerry is that none of his platform makes sense. He's going to provide health care for every American by getting the government into the health insurance business? Please. One of the reforms Bush did for Medicare (which has only partially taken affect) was that Medicare was willing to pay for a $29,000 operation, but not $5 worth of preventative care. Not even HMO's are that stupid.

States that have implemented medical tort reform have had their health care costs rise 10-15% vs. the 44% for states without tort reform. If you do the math, medical costs are high because of John Edwards. So Kerry can't fix the real problem, which is to kill all the lawyers.

Now he's claiming Bush is a liar because Medicare went up by $12/month. Maybe Bush could lower it if he took the $60M Edwards made suing doctors and gave it seniors.

Here's Kerry on Foreign Policy: If I Were President—Addressing the Democratic Deficit

Americans’ security depends on helping the people of the Middle East see and act on a legitimate vision of peace.

Yeah, we should have democracy in the middle east so that can happen! Oh, wait, that's Bush.

Read the whole thing here

Positive Highlights:

“George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy Is Revolutionary”

No Bush’s goals of sustaining a democratic peace and disseminating America’s core values resonate with the most traditional themes in U.S. history.

“The Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War Is Unprecedented"

Wrong Preemptive strikes to eliminate threats are a strategy nearly as old as the United States.

“Bush’s Policies Are a Radical Departure from Clinton’s”

Lovely nostalgia. What is striking about President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy is that it actually increased U.S. military preponderance vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Some negatives too, which I don't agree with, but still an interesting article.

I often fantasize about what would happen if I was the questioner at the Presidential Debates…

Gallup has the best history

Not as much fun as 11 percentage points, but still, its pretty significant. No wonder the Kerry camp is freaking out.

Hat tip to California Yankee

From FindLaw a legal website.

Here are some choice bits:

14-year-old girl rendered quadriplegic from neck injury resulting from improperly supervised dive into shallow end of defendants’ pool.

Ok, don’t allow other peoples kids to swim in your pool, because Edwards might sue you.

Infant born with cerebral palsy after breech birth via vaginal delivery, rather than cesarean.

Which is pretty much why doctors try to talk all their patients into cesareans now even when its unnecessary.

38-year-old female committed suicide after psychiatrist discontinued suicide watch.

Oh, yeah, clearly it wasn’t her fault for being suicidal, it was the psychiatrist’s fault.

There are some very anti-Edwards links at the bottom of the page. FindLaw’s analysis is positive, but they’re lawyers, so they think its good to drive people out of business.

but not quite how they thought…

From The Corner:

Volunteering at the convention, I spoke with numerous police officers, one of whom spelled it out for me very succinctly. “I’m 16 hours deep in a 20 hour shift, and I spent the first half of it being harassed, cursed at, and attacked by protesters over on Eighth Ave. One of them bit me on my hand, so I got sent back here to wat ch over the delegates for the second half of my shift. Since I showed up, I’ve gotten nothing but smiles, thank yous, and salutes from these delegates. One of my friends just offered to relieve me, but I told him I didn’t mind staying around for a while longer. I voted for Gore last time, and Clinton before him, but I’m voting for Bush this time, without a doubt.” Hearing that made up for all of the vitriol I’ve had to deal with being a Conservative at NYU.

Ok, it was a cheap shot. but I thought it was funny, and that’s what matters.

Godwin’s Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

Which means the left has lost the election! Atrios and Kos can stop blogging! Yahoo!

Not even a soldier, but some working for an NGO: Inside View From Iraq

Hat tip: pawigo

This simpliest way is to read each candidates website, but ignore anything they say about the other candidate unless its positive.

Read what Kerry has to say about Kerry. Read what Bush has to say about Bush.

Because the candidates tend to be more honest about the positive things about themselves.

Don’t read in the media about a speech, read or watch the speech yourself (and again, ignore anything they say about the other candidate). cspan.org, the parties themselves, or the candidates websites are good sources for speeches. (Weirdly, the Bush campaign streams Kerry’s acceptance speech)

Weather you support the war or not, all our soldiers lives should be precious.

Here’s a great site with the actual numbers. icasualties.org

It interesting that non-hostile deaths are still about 1/4th of all fatalities in Iraq.

There’s some weird stuff if you look at cause of death by detail. 12 soldiers drowned in Iraq.

Read about Yanis Kanidis

In an act of unlimited devotion and dedication, to the bitter end, an elderly teacher insisted on remaining with his students. He protected them, bandaged their wounds, and with his death, saved their lives.

Read the whole thing. It’s about a brave teacher in Beslan.

So over on Blogs for Bush a commenter writes:

I need some support here. I’ve been in a pretty heated argument with my girlfriend over this issue (Kerry and the Swift Vets) for the past couple days now. She’s been getting on my case about being so negative about Kerry all the time and not actually talking about issues.

Here’s my answer:

Yeah, I get that too from my wife, that’s why I started blogging about the election. That’s probably why I’m going to volunteer for Bush today, so I can have some fellow travelers to rag about Kerry to.

But I think you’re asking the wrong question. Here’s my take:

• I give Kerry 10 points for going to Vietnam
• I give Kerry - 1 point for speaking out against the war in the way that he did at the time (which at this point everyone agrees was FUBAR),
• I give Kerry -5 points for not apologizing since then and the generally bad way he’s handled this issue.

Net: 4 points.

So Kerry comes out ahead 4 points for me.

A candidate has to earn at least 25 points for me to consider voting for them, and Kerry hasn’t done that. I’ve tried very hard to find positive things about Kerry, I’ve read both his and bush’s web site, and I come up with zilch.

Bush has earned about 75 points in my book based on reading his agenda.

So stop being negative, start talking up Bush. Read Kessler’s book a matter of character, and start talking about the importance of phonics in reading education and NCLB.

You can read my take on No Child Left Behind here.

So this paragraph from this article pissed me off:

Bush is proposing a tax credit of no more than $1,000 to individuals and $3,000 to families to purchase health insurance, though the health care premiums for a family of four come to roughly $9,000 a year. A huge aggregate increase in opportunity, if you define opportunity as risk.

But I suppose its a chance to clear up something about Bush’s Health Insurance plan.

Bush's plan is twofold, and you have to put them together to see how they will work as a whole. Its a combination of a medical savings account, so that minor stuff is tax-free, and _catastrophic_ health insurance, which is much cheaper then the "We'll do everything for you, but badly." HMO insurance many people have now.

The catastrophic health insurance takes most of the risk out of health care for much smaller premiums. After that, you can save money away to pay for visits to the doctor, band aids, etc., but those are much smaller risks. You can get a catastrophic health plan for whatever level of risk you’re willing to take. Last time I researched this, it was $60/month for me to get a catastrophic insurance plan that would pay 100% after the first $2000 worth of expenses.

Since a medical savings account would carry over from year to year, that means that once I’ve saved up $2000, my insurance could drop to $720/year, for which I would get a tax credit!

Compare that to an HMO, which would charge me a bunch of money every year, but then they pay for the doctor visit, and catastrophic insurance can look like a pretty good deal. That combined with a tax-free savings account just makes sense.

So this paragraph from this article pissed me off:

So, too, with a privatization of Social Security, which is a generational transfer of income from workers to retirees. If workers divert, say, one-sixth of their Social Security savings into private accounts, then retirees’ incomes will be diminished, unless the government cares for deficit spending to the tune of, say, a half-trillion dollars. And those private accounts themselves could very well go south: It’s been known to happen; it’s called a slump, a recession, the occasional breakdown of a sector of the U.S. economy. Call it opportunity, properly defined.

Which is missing the point. Right now, the best retirement deal is a 401K, but in practice, only employees of large corporations can really participate, such as the reporter at the Washington Post who wrote this. IRAs are supposed to be the alternative, but since you’re severely limited in the amount you can donate put into an IRA, its not really worth it compared to a 401K plan.

So the government takes 15% of my salary to put it in a shoddy retirement plan. If I try to be responsible and supplement that plan, the government won’t let me.

That’s just stupid.

What President Bush has proposed is basically a 401K for everyone, that you can take from job to job, and manage yourself. It just makes sense. Any risk after that is a personal choice, there’s no reason you couldn’t choose a private account consisting of only T bills.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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

September 11, 2001

Madrid, 2003

Beslan, 2004

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.

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.

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. :-)

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…

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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...

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...

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.

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]

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...

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!

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

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."

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.

Do you believe in evil? I do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

More evil:

34 Children Massacred by Multiple Car Bombs

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

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.

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!

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.