The Opinionated Bastard

Reconciling Kerry with the swift vets is pretty simple.

In Vietnam war movies, there's always the gung-ho 2nd lieutenant who goes around shooting everything that moves, and who's always trying to get medals. In the Army, that guy probably would have gotten fragged, or his sergeants would have just ignored him.

In Kerry's case, he was in the Navy, so after putting up with his crazy antics for 4 months, they figured out a way to ship him home. People aren't perfect, and every service has ways to deal with an officer who's a bit whacked.

At some point after being sent home, he must of realized what he had been doing in Vietnam, and Kerry decided that the atrocities he committed weren't his fault, but rather the fault of his commanding officers, and the government who sent him there. Pretty typical behavior for a very young man: "its not my fault".

So he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and started testifying about the "atrocities our soldiers were committing in Vietnam". Never mind that he was really testifying about atrocities he'd committed...

This angered his ex-compatriots no end. Here they have some nut who's committing atrocities, so they get rid of him, and he proceeds to go home and tell the world, and tar them with the same brush. From their point of view the "soldiers committing atrocities" was Kerry himself, and they got rid of him, so they were the good guys, and he the bad guy. So having Kerry portraying himself as the "bad guy who learned to be a good guy and warn about all the other bad guys" was especially galling. Especially later on as he got deeper into VVAW and started to fudge the truth. Nixon sent me to Cambodia in 1968 using his magic time travel powers!

So now its 33 years later, and Kerry runs for president, pretty much on the platform: I was granted mystical powers in Vietnam. It doesn't surprise me that these swift vets have come forward, and that they are so vehement. It doesn't surprise me either that the Kerry campaign hasn't responded directly. Kerry has admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam, but I'm a crazed killer doesn't seem like much of a political platform.

Whether its important what Kerry was like 33 years ago is a different question. Personally, while all this is interesting, I find it much more telling that Kerry criticized Bush for finishing reading to the schoolchildren for 7 minutes on 9/11. Given that on the same day Kerry sat dumbstruck for 40 minutes, one has to wonder at his abilities today: clearly he had less presence of mind then Bush on that day, and he has less memory today.

My wife surprised me during the convention. After listening to Teresa’s speech, she said she would no longer be voting for Kerry. She’s a Reagan Democrat, but she thinks Teresa has no class, and the speech cinched it for her. If Teresa had been willing to stay in the background, great. But since she insisted on making this lame speech, my wife thinks that Teresa would consider herself to be co-president. She didn’t mind Hillary so much because she considered Hillary to be sharper.

Surprised me. She still won’t be voting for Bush, because she’s adamantly pro-choice though.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that its a bad thing because it makes it harder for 3rd party candidates to matter, but I’m not sure that’s true.

1. In a battleground state, a third party candidate can have a magnified effect.

2. In a “safe” state, voters can feel free to vote for a 3rd party candidate without wasting their vote. That seems like it would be an effective recruiting tool for someone like Nader, because if you live in California say, its ok, to vote for Nader because Kerry will probably take that state anyways.

I’ll be writing for awhile about why I’m supporting Bush in this election, and trying to talk about both his good and bad points. This first part is about Iraq, because I consider that the most important issue this election. I probably won’t be talking about Kerry much, because he seems to be running on the I’m not Bush platform. That doesn’t impress me, Joseph Stalin isn’t Bush either, that doesn’t mean I’d vote for him if I was upset at Bush (which I’m not).

To me, the number one issue this election is the war in Iraq. To me, this issue breaks down into four parts:

• The decision to enter Iraq in the first place. Grade: A
• Building Worldwide Support. Grade: C-
• Winning the War. Grade: A+
• Planning for the Peace. Grade: A
• Winning the Peace. Grade: B
• Going the distance. Grade: A

I’ll cover each of these in detail.

Come to think of it, that’s most days.

So Bush announced that we’ve figured out that Russia isn’t going to invade West Germany any more, probably because:

1. The Cold War ended 13 years ago.
2. West Germany doesn’t even exist any more.

That is, he announced he’s going to move about 70,000 troops from where they are in Europe back to the US. Basically, it costs us a lot of money to have bases in Europe that make less and less sense every year.

So this should be a no-brainer, right? Clinton or Bush Sr. should have done this years ago. Instead, we have these political flacks talking about how its a bad idea. And by political flack, I mean Retired General Wesley Clark.

One of the things that bugs me the most about the Kerry campaign is that they just don’t seem to know how to pick their battles. Why are they arguing about this? All Bush has to say is “Well, none of the people at the Pentagon seem to be worried about Russia invading Germany anytime soon, so it was time to reduce our presence in Europe.” If he does that, or more likely, if his proxy does that, it will just be yet another time I’ve seen the Kerry campaign make an issue of something Bush does that is obviously the right thing.

Plus, to be perfectly honest, its time the EU nations started providing for more of their own defense instead of mooching off us so much. Bush probably can’t say that publicly, but the line about us not being worried about the Soviet Union, since it no longer exists, is just too obvious.

Ok, so Kerry took too much LSD in 1968, and just thought he was in Cambodia.

Everyone happy now?

A European asked me the other day if the US was heading towards fascism. I said that while the Democratic party wanted to write laws to make everyone nice, and the Republican party wanted to write laws to make everyone good, that by playing one off against the other, the population had been doing ok.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that the Republicans are evil fascists while the Democrats are civil libertarians, its just not true. Both parties believe that their curtailing of individual freedoms is ok, but the other guys isn’t. Both parties are wrong.

In my not at all humble opinion. It bugs me just as much when the Democrats mess with the second amendment as when the Republicans mess with the first.

Then of course, you have Democrats who mess with all of them, like John Kerry.

Read what Reason magazine has to say: John Kerry’s Monstrous Record on Civil Liberties

First read this

Does it seem to anyone else that the Democrats have lost their sense of humor? Lighten up guys…

We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world._

That would be that Struggle against IEWDNBIFSWHTUTAAWTTTSCOFTFW.

I don’t always believe anything any campaign says, but when factcheck.org an independent de-spin site says Bush nailed Kerry, you know he’s been nailed. Here they are backing up Bush’s claim that Kerry missed 75% of the Senate Intelligence Committee meetings: full thing: excerpt:

A Bush-Cheney ‘04 ad released Aug. 13 accuses Kerry of being absent for 76% of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s public hearings during the time he served there. The Kerry campaign calls the ad “misleading,” so we checked, and Bush is right.

Yow!

Here’s the script for the ad:

Intel

Announcer: John Kerry promises…

Kerry: I will immediately reform the intelligence system.

Announcer: Oh really…as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Kerry was absent for 76 percent of the committee’s public hearings.

In the year after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Kerry was absent for every single one.

That same year he proposed slashing America’s intelligence budget by 6 billion dollars.

There’s what Kerry says and then there’s what Kerry does.

This is the same ad that the Kerry campaign “rebutted” by saying that John Kerry was Vice-Chairman of the committee when it was actually Bob Kerrey.

Kerry: up the Mekong without a clue

They believe their own talking points. They love to say stuff like Bush was AWOL when he wasn’t. My reaction is always anger, because I think they’re intentionally lying. After all, that’s how the spin game is played. You blow a fact out of proportion, and you use it to beat the opposition over the head with it.

But I just realized that they fervently believe their own talking points. That’s one of the reasons they hate Bush so much. One of their spinmeisters twists something out of proportion, and then they all repeat it as the gospel truth like little robots. So then we end up with prominent Democrats repeating ridiculous stuff about Bush. So ex-President Carter slams bush for being AWOL when he wasn’t. Since Carter truly believes Bush was AWOL, naturally he thinks Bush is Evil with a capital E. In practice, Bush has been much like Clinton in many ways, but none of the Democrats know that, because they’ve all been brainwashed by their own spinmeisters.

Now of course, Republicans play the spin game too, but they seem to either be better at briefing their people, or perhaps they’re just better at spinning. Maybe its just too easy to spin Kerry since he seems to love both sides of every argument. When ever I get some “de-spin” from spinsanity or factcheck.org they always say something like “Well, the Republicans are exaggerating”. When its a Kerry spin, it seems like they say he was just wrong. Thing is, these sites tend to be kind of anti-Bush!

Here’s some samples from FactCheck.org:

Bush Nails Kerry’s Poor Attendance at Intelligence Committee Hearings

Bush says Kerry missed 76% of public hearings. He could have missed even more.

Media Fund Ad Misquotes Bush

Pro-Kerry group’s ad claims “Bush says he’s going to help companies outsource jobs.” But Bush never said that.

Kerry’s Dubious Economics

He says new jobs are paying $9,000 less than the old ones. That’s not a fact.

Which explains a lot about this election. I’ve been annoyed for awhile, because while Bush is far from perfect, all I saw the Democrats talking about seemed to be bogus charges instead of anything of substance.

Now I realize. They’re talking about this stupid stuff because they don’t know most of these charges aren’t true.

And I’m supposed to trust these people to run the country? Not!

Here’s the best coverage I’ve found.

Seems like Bush served in the National Guard, did his training, and was never AWOL. He was on active duty a total of 25 months, over 6 and a half years.

Quote: “Looks like perfect drill attendance to me.”

But not in any detail The problem though is that the way he did it, he sounds like a bit of a whiner.

It will be interesting to see if Bush responds to Kerry, since Kerry seems to be trying to make this a Bush/Kerry thing instead of a Kerry/Swift Vets thing. That’s not surprising, since Kerry loses if he has to go toe to toe with such a small group. He’ll either diminish in stature by doing so, or look like a bully. By complaining to Bush, he surrenders the initiative to Bush. I suspect that Bush will just deny the connection, and repeat that he condemns all 527 ads, that they’ve attacked him as well. That will make Kerry look even more whiny.

In reality though, its the Democrats with moveon.org that get the most benefit from 527s. It seems to me that Kerry’s a bit a of whiner if he’s complaining about what the Republicans can do with $100,000 vs. moveon.org’s $30M.

Kerry should have planned ahead better on this issue when he decided to make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. This organization was around before the DNC, so it can’t have come as much of a surprise when this stuff broke open. They were saying the same stuff 2 months ago they’re saying now. The fact that all this caught the campaign by surprise to my mind says quite a lot about Kerry’s ability as a leader, and that’s the most damning of all. Kerry has to realize that his Vietnam service won’t sit well with some number of Americans, and his anti-war rhetoric won’t sit well with some others.

If he had done something since then, we’d all have something more interesting to talk about.

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

Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a voters 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…

It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. Voting has to be:

1. Secret
2. Anonymous
3. Verified.
4. Easy.

Out of 1, 2, and 3, any two of these would be easy, but doing all 3 is pretty complex. #4 is important because we don’t want to disenfranchise people who are slightly computerphobic, or just elderly. Right now, the EAC (Electoral Action Commission) is concentrating on #4, while they are relying on an IEEE commission to deal with 1-3.

Now verification is a new requirement, that we never had before. If you think about it, no one at any previous polling place gave you any garuntees that your vote was recorded. You just trusted the polling place workers to do their job. With electronic voting, some sort of verification seems necessary, but insisting on paper isn’t going to help solve the real problems with electronic voting, and it won’t ensure that votes get verified.

I think the new voting systems deserve a lot of attention, but they require someone to dig in and really understand the issues involved, not just report hysterically about votes being stolen. Once you dig in, you’ll find that voting is actually a pretty complex process, and anytime you add computers to a complex process, things get complicated quickly.

Adding verification to the mix makes it even more complicated. You want people to be able to double check that their vote was correctly recorded, but you also want to ensure that they can’t then turn around and use that to prove that they voted for so-and-so, or people can buy votes.

My take on this whole issue is that people are thinking too simplistically. For example, if I went to vote, if that vote was transmitted a third party like the ACLU, and I had someway to confirm that, I’d be happy with that. Once I left the voting place, the ACLU would then refuse any confirmation requests for me, which would preserve the secrecy requirement. Of course, each vote would be transmitted to multiple people, like the Democratic and Republican parties, CNN, etc.

Perhaps I could even confirm it over my cell phone, laptop computer, whatever. There would be lots of different ways.

And none of that would involve paper.

No, because 4 years ago was before 9/11, so thats a stupid question.

Am I better off now then I was on 9/12? Yes.

Before his 4 months in Vietnam, Kerry served on the U.S.S. Gridley. Here’s some statements from two people who served with him:

U.S.S.Gridley

His commander thought he was a fine officer, but he also strongly dislikes his anti-war activities, which seems fair. Another gentleman feels he exaggerates his experiences, which has been pretty much proven true by others.

While I couldn’t find the “Unfit for Command” book at Barnes & Noble yesterday, the human events online people sent me another free chapter. This one talks about his Senate testimony and vents about the “Winter Soldier” stuff that Kerry was involved in.

Its pretty obvious from reading the swift boat vets website that what they’re mad about is not so much the medal flap as his testimony against Vietnam soldiers as war criminals.

Reading about the Winter Soldier stuff though, it strikes me.

The SwiftVets, having been accused of war crimes by Kerry have done the reverse to him…lots of allegations by people without doing background interviews and such.

I don’t know what the truth is here. I wish Kerry talked more about his record, and less about his 4 magical months in Vietnam.

However, as you sow, so shall you reap, and Kerry pissed off these guys 33 years ago, and they’re striking back. I don’t know what it means, but I’m not sure Kerry going toe to toe with them is a good idea.

So I read both the Bush and Kerry campaign blogs, and comment on both.

I’ve been trying not to be a troll on the Kerry blog, and just criticize how they’ve responded to things, not criticize the candidate.

Seems I just got banned? When I tried to comment on the campaign response to the latest Swift Vets ad on this thread

I found out I’m no longer allowed to post comments.

Which is interesting, because I’ve found that I’ve been blocked from commenting.

Here’s what I was going to post in the comment:

Kerry did speak out against the war, and some veterans resent him for it. In a word, “Duh”.

However, I don’t think that this sort of stuff is the appropriate response:

http://blog.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/archives/002518.html

Seems to me that this response is just as bad as the swift vets ad. Calling people republican partisans because they gave money to a political party? That doesn’t mean they’re lying…if it does, I guess there are just as many lying Democrats…

However, what has Kerry done since 1971? That’s the campaign issue.

Its interesting that the Swift Vets website allows dissenters and from what I’ve read in their forums, tries to convince them, while Kerry (and no doubt Bush too) just kick them off.

The strident left is annoying me.

Read it Here It shows that none of the accounts agree 100% which is pretty interesting. Fog of war and all that, some of what Kerry says doesn't jive with the physical evidence and some of what the other guys say doesn't jive either.

You know, I don't 100% agree with the swift vets. But if I had been a POW and my captors had played tapes of Kerry testifying in Congress as part of torturing me, I'd probably hate his guts. If 35 years later, he'd come up to me and said "Well, I was young, and stupid", I'd duly consider it, and then I'd still hate his guts. If I wasn't a Republican before, I would become one after they nominated Kerry.

So ultimately, Kerry brought this on himself. It was his decision to run on his war record and not what he'd been doing since then. I thought it was a stupid decision when I saw him salute during the DNC, and so none of this surprises me in the least.

Here are some fun quotes for you:

John Kerry on 8/6:

“Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whispered in my ear, ‘America is under attack,’ I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to — and I would have attended to it.”

_John Kerry on 7/8: _

“And as I came in, Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid were standing there, and we watched the second plane come in to the building. And we shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized nobody could think, and then boom, right behind us, we saw the cloud of explosion at the Pentagon.”

There were 40 minutes between the 2nd plane and the Pentagon attack.

Teresa Kerry:

“I think the president behaved correctly in terms of being quiet amidst stunning news like that in a classroom of kids,” she told the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” during an interview before the Democratic National Convention last month. “You know, what can you do? It takes you a couple of minutes to digest what you have just heard. And then he was … not in his White House and in his office with all of his people. He was in the school in Florida.”

The real significance of the 7/40 minute thing is that Kerry criticized Bush for 7 minutes, when he was stunned for 40. So that shows a rather convenient memory, and it doesn’t demonstrate a lot of competence that he goes on “attack” on an issue where he’s even more vulnerable. In a word, “Doh!”.

Though it seems to be a trend, Kerry’s campaign seems to be only minimally competent.

Perhaps they were just having technical difficulties.

From Carly Fiona of HP

Perhaps we should call globalization “Privately funded foreign aid, that actually works.”

Kerry calls for Rumsfeld to resign:

“Yesterday, the Schlesinger panel released their report which found that much of the responsibility for setting the conditions for the abuse at Abu Ghraib can be attributed to failures at highest levels of our government. Today the Fay report will be released and will recommend punitive action for those in our military who were directly involved.

Er, actually, the report said that most of the responsibility was the fault of the guard and supervisors of the prison, but that the Pentagon should have done a better job of managing in the first place.

“But what is missing from all these reports is accountability from the senior civilian leaders in the Pentagon and in the White House. From the bottom of the chain of command all the way to the top, there needs to be accountability. The Schlesinger report makes clear that Secretary Rumsfeld was responsible for setting a climate where these types of abuses could occur.

Er, no, it actually didn’t go all the way to Rumsfeld. As the civilian head, he’s not supposed to be messing with operational details. ScrappleFace has the funny version of this.

“By failing to plan to win the peace, by failing to make sure our troops received the proper training, equipment, reinforcement and command guidance, and by failing to take corrective actions once all of this became apparent, Secretary Rumsfeld did not demonstrate the leadership required from a Secretary of Defense.

Well, he fired the person in charge the prison, and started the investigation that brought up all these charges.

“That is why today I am calling on Secretary Rumsfeld to resign effective immediately. In addition, I call on the President to appoint an independent investigation to review the entire decision making process that led to these abuses and provide a comprehensive set of reforms so that we can ensure that this never happens again.

Did anyone here read “Plan of Attack”?

One of the things I like about Rumsfeld is that he is constantly questioning himself and the Pentagon. While Woodward’s thesis was that Rumsfeld made it “too easy” to go to war, I didn’t see that. What I saw was the ideal Secretary of War (we haven’t had a Secretary of Defense since 9/11): Someone who brought the military around to the diplomatic and political realities. He pushed the Pentagon to give the President real options. The original plan which read like a 1950 invasion plan: bomb the shit out of the Iraqis until they surrender. There would have been 100,000 civilian casualties, easy.

So while 150 prisoners may have been abused, its also true that it was the Pentagon that independently found out it was going on and shut it down. Meanwhile, because Rumsfeld pushed the Pentagon out of their comfort zone, thousands of Iraqi lives were saved vs. the original battle plan.

If you fired everyone who made a mistake, there would be no one working. Rumsfeld’s job is to be the bad cop to Powell’s good cop. That is, don’t mess with the US or we’ll sick Rumsfeld on you!

The Bush/Cheney campaign feels that one of the best ways to beat Kerry is to provide a feed of his acceptance speech for the nomination

Look for:

Americans have a clear choice in November. See the first installment of John Kerry: In His Own Words.

So Kerry sent Max Cleland (lost 3 limbs in Vietnam) to Texas to try to pull Bush into the Swift Vets quagmire by delivering him a letter. (Yes, I’m using the Q-word intentionally)

Here’s Kerry’s side.

Here’s Bush’s response

Here’s my take: I really have no idea about the SBVT thing. Kerry’s been caught in some misstatements, and correlating all the information, its pretty clear that there’s a reason for the term “Fog of War”. Some of Kerry’s eyewitness accounts don’t agree with the official Naval records any more then the SVBT accounts. In fact, it seems like the official accounts are the least accurate of any of them.

However, I think its a new low to send a cripple to do your fighting for you. Kerry needs to call a press conference, not send Cleland on secret missions to Cambodia er, Texas.

So I tried to comment on this thread:

Cleland and Rassmann Go to Crawford

And I was allowed to comment. I refreshed the thread to look for responses to my comment, and found out it had gotten deleted.

I was wondering why everything was so pro-Kerry on his blog in such a divided election. I’ve been trying to criticize only the conduct of the campaign, but I guess Kerry only wants to preach to the choir.

So I’m allowed to post to the Kerry blog, but no one is allowed to read it?

Nope, I guess I got removed again. I got this after I tried to post a followup to a couple of responses.

You have been prevented from posting by the Administrator. Please contact the Blog administrator for details.

To be fair, the Bush blog doesn’t have any commenting at all, vs. the Kerry blog which has flip-flop blogging. :-)

read scrappleface

My #1 complaint about Bush is that he has the cowboy thing that you don’t talk, you do. That’s a good rule in life, but as president, part of the job is talking up why you do things, and he doesn’t do enough of that.

Ignoring Kerry and doing a positive campaign would be great.

Just watched the feed from cspan from yesterday’s RNC convention. What strikes me the strongest is that they clearly don’t believe in any sort of moral relativism. Terrorism is evil, we’re good.

Which in my opinion is a good thing. Terrorism is evil, and civilians should never be intentionally targeted by anyone.

Here’s the feed

The Bush campaign seems to have decided to mostly ignore Kerry, judging by their blogs…

Or perhaps Bush is just running a more positive Campaign. Here are the latest blog entries by the official Kerry blog vs. the official Bush blog.

From Command Post

In an interview, Bush told NBC’s “Today” that Kerry “going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets. He was in harm’s way and I wasn’t. On the other hand, I served my country. Had my unit been called up, I would have gone.”

Of course, the Kerry campaign and others will keep complaining about the Swift Vets.

After watching the DNC, I was depressed. It was overwhelmingly negative. I realize that conventional wisdom is that the challenger has to go on the attack, but it was just draining.

After watching the RNC speeches tonight, I feel refreshed and proud to be an American. Despite a couple of attacks on Kerry, It was overwhelmingly positive.

This is good news, because negative campaigns don’t win. This is one of the reasons that Carter lost to Reagan. Watching Reagan talk about “Morning in America” was so much better then watching Carter.

Its ironic that the Kerry campaign keeps saying that Bush is negative, from reading both of their blogs, its Kerry who’s the most negative.

Ahhnold’s poke at economic girlie men was right on target too. Economic projections tend to be self fulfilling prophecies, and having Kerry constantly playing up everything bad in the economy helped prolong the recession.

If Kerry wants to have a snowballs chance, he needs to start talking positively about himself, not trash talking America.

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.

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

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!

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)

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.

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.

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. :-)

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.

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.

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...

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."

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.

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.

Reading the transcript, I think President Bush was doing OK in the debate until this moment where Kerry said this:

I've met kids in Ohio, parents in Wisconsin places, Iowa, where they're going out on the Internet to get the state-of-the-art body gear to send to their kids. Some of them got them for a birthday present.

I think that's wrong. Humvees -- 10,000 out of 12,000 Humvees that are over there aren't armored. And you go visit some of those kids in the hospitals today who were maimed because they don't have the armament.

This president just -- I don't know if he sees what's really happened on there. But it's getting worse by the day. More soldiers killed in June than before. More in July than June. More in August than July. More in September than in August.

I think it was the implication that President Bush didn't care about our troops more then anything else that made Bush lose his temper. His response to Kerry was this:

First of all, what my opponent wants you to forget is that he voted to authorize the use of force and now says it's the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place.

I don't see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. What message does that send our troops? What message does that send to our allies? What message does that send the Iraqis?

No, the way to win this is to be steadfast and resolved and to follow through on the plan that I've just outlined.

Which wasn't that great a response. It would have been better to just let it slide rather then do a response, especially since that response wasn't very articulate.

I think the President got mad here because he sees that Kerry's constant criticism and calling Iraq a "colossal mistake" as making the war harder. To a large extent he's right, if you had to choose it would be much better to have Kerry shut up then it would be to armor all those Humvee's, because less soldiers would be dying in Iraq. Those months that Kerry rattled off? They correspond to when Kerry started campaigning. Remember that the President has made a huge effort to meet with the soldiers and their families, and I think he truly does feel their pain. So being criticized like this with outright lies would piss me off too.

Now don't get me wrong, I think that the challenger in a Presidential race, even in wartime, has to question the President. What I object to is the smarmy way Kerry is doing it: Style over Substance. Senator Kerry really doesn't have any idea what he would do in Iraq past January. So instead of talking about real alternatives, he makes these smarmy attacks.

Because I think it means people have been paying attention for awhile.

I was gritting my teeth during the debate as I saw Kerry make these baseless attacks, and watched Bush fumble his responses. Personally, its OK for me that Bush isn't super-verbal. As a UI designer, I know that verbal people tend to be better on details, worse on the big picture. Clinton was great on details, but terrible on the big picture, which was why he was worse on terrorism then President Bush.

However, according to Gallup, Kerry may have won on style, but Bush definitely won on substance.

I think that shows that people have been paying more attention to this election then typically, and doing it earlier. The Opinionated Wife was unimpressed by Kerry. She thought President Bush didn't do very well, but she noted that Kerry really didn't have a plan for Iraq. I was worried that Kerry would sound like he had a plan, because after all, its Bush's plan, but she wasn't fooled, because she'd done some reading on her own.

So perhaps its a good thing that the electorate is fired up.

Is it weird to imagine what you would have said in the same situation? I don't know, but I hope not because I do it all the time.

I realized that part of what frustrated me about last nights debates is that I wanted President Bush to verbally bitch-slap Kerry, and he didn't. So here's my version of some of the debate.

Of course, I have a huge advantage over President Bush in that I have infinite time to respond, I was able to Google the COPS program Kerry talked about, and I don't have to be presidential, but its still fun.

But this time, before the VP debate. Maybe someone can send this to Karl Rove. :-) I really like the "mashed potatoes" line...

Edwards: Blah, blah, Halliburton.

Cheney: You know, I'm glad you brought that up. I've been quiet up until now, because I felt that the country had more important things to talk about then me. But since you brought it up, here goes.

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…

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!

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

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”.

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.

Bush, with 279 electoral votes.

Done with the help of these two websites:

TradeSports, which has state by state betting.

Electoral Vote Calculator

And of course Marketocracy which leads me to trust traders over pundits.

I just heard a very upset Kerry voter on NPR, and spent an half hour iChatting with a friend who was surprised that Kerry lost. Here are my open answers to them.

So first, a blogger writes a funny post called CANADIAN ARMY FORTIFIES BORDER TO REPEL REFUGEE ONSLAUGHT FROM THE SOUTH.

Then CNN posts No Canada safe haven for Democrats.

That’s just funny!

I subscribed to Kos for a bit, but eventually I dropped him because he was too crazy.

Today Wizbang pointed a Redstate (sorry, he messed up the link) posting out showing that all of the candidates Kos endorsed lost.

Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. I’m trying not to gloat, but my problem with the Democrats is the whole moonbat thing. I was talking to one of my friends today, and he had bought into the whole moonbat line.

Barack Obama won in a landslide.

He’s Black, but no one really sought to comment on that but me, and I think that’s pretty cool.

Colin & Condi in 2008!

Surprising conclusion? Let’s follow that up.

I subscribe to a wide range of political magazines, some of which are far left. I like to get sample from a wide range of opinions. That’s why I blog, and read lots of Blogs.

When President Bush made the decision to go into Iraq, I started reading in the far left magazines (Adbusters was the most entertaining) a lot of bogus charges about President Bush:

• He was invading for the oil.
• He was invading to make Halliburton more money
• He was invading because Saddam shot at his daddy
• He was invading because the big corporations told him to

Meanwhile, in Foreign Affairs, for a year prior to that, I was reading serious articles that boiled down to: “What the hell are we going to do about Iraq with the UN being so corrupt?”. So the real foreign policy mavens didn’t believe that we were going into Iraq because we wanted to, but because we might have to if the UN didn’t pull its head out of its ass. So the conspiracy theories were clearly moonbat nonsense, because Foreign Affairs would have no problem criticizing the President if they thought there was no reason to go into Iraq.

Bush is a sellout to the corporations fit in with a certain far left mindset, so they started repeating it to each other constantly. Because they took it on faith that Bush was Evil, anyone opposed to Bush must be good. So Iraq became the land of butterflies and happiness, Saddam just misunderstood.

However, repeating things doesn’t make it true. If it did, we’d all go around constantly saying I’m rich. In a busy world though, if you hear things enough times from a number of different people, you start to wonder. I did, and I investigated. Basically, while the media can scream all they want about “no-bid” contracts, the reality is that the government has to buy stuff all the time from sole-source providers. So by law, those contracts are limited to somewhere between 2-7% profit over cost. The only way to get 7% is to deliver things ahead of some deadline, and the government reserves the right to “disallow” certain costs, so its actually quite challenging to make money on those sorts of government contracts. In fact, out of $9B in revenues for the Engineering and Construction group in 2003, they ended up losing $36M.

So the Halliburton dog won’t hunt as they say. None of the other stuff I looked into was any more valid then that.

Now none of that would have mattered until Michael Moore came out with his movie which repeated this and some other charges. When he did that, while the more rational left called the movie what it was, a complete distortion, too many people on the moderate left embraced the movie because it was against President Bush, rather then critically evaluating it.

So the moderate left, which could have reasonably criticized the President on a number of fronts, bought into the whole mindset of the far left.

Now Kerry had a chance here to set the direction and tone of the debate. If he had, we might be have a different President in the White House right now.

At some point, Kerry had a chance to tone done the rhetoric from the left. He could have booted Carter and Moore from the convention. He could have found some real things to criticize the President about.

He didn’t do it. In fact, he started embracing those points, probably in an effort to solidify his “base”. That’s the moment he started losing. Something that particularly stands out to me is when he repeated Moore’s “Bush did nothing for 7 minutes” line. It was a stupid, pointless, criticism, made even more pointless when it turned out that Kerry did nothing for 44 minutes.

By embracing the pointless charges of the far left, Kerry made the election about nonsense, and ultimately about Bush. Its an old marketing rule: never mention the competition, because it only helps them. Kerry’s stump speeches were always about Bush, never about Kerry.

And that’s why he lost. Reading a Kerry speech was like listening to hours of reasons why you shouldn’t vote for Bush, but 5 minutes of why you should vote for Kerry. In a weird way, Kerry was campaigning for Bush, because Kerry never really provided himself as an alternative.

One telling example for me was reading both of their position documents. Kerry had a 265 page download that was mostly copies of his stump speeches but no actual “plan”. Bush had a 41 page download that was filled with details.

So ultimately, it was Kerry’s decision to embrace the Michael Moore segment of his supporters and their message that lost him this election. Kerry needed to produce his own message, and he never did.

First a review of that Kansas book so no one wastes their money.

Here are some facts debunking the “moral values” poll:

If the Los Angeles Times’ pollsters, which allowed multiple choice answers, are to be believed (a big caveat), 40% of voters voted on “Moral/Ethical Values”, with Bush leading, while only 15% voted on “Social issues such as abortion and gay marriage”—where the vote was evenly split!

Here’s a rant by the same guy on the subject. He’s a gay bush voter if I remember correctly. I had an interesting conversation with him about a constitutional amendment, how it might be a good idea in a different form if it just explicitly let states go their own way.

And finally, here’s a survey by the BBC with a lot of good responses. Sounds to me like a lot of people made informed decisions.

Here’s a 3D version of the red county/blue county map.

Kind of debunks the whole “we’ll all join Canada” thing…big parts of even Oregon were red…

Look at it here

It shows relative percentages of blue, purple and red by county.

Of Ayn Rand’s two most famous books, the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged I prefer the Fountainhead. Ayn Rand wrote about the Artist vs. the Political Correctness in 1945. It really says everything I wish the Left understood about why I detest their rhetoric. It’s quite possible to be both liberal and fascist, I don’t fear the right’s obsession with abortion with nearly the same dread as I fear the left’s obsession with political correctness.

Yet its Atlas Shrugged that I find most useful in my life. Like Fountainhead, Atlas clearly displays Rand’s contempt for those who talk versus those who do. This time the hero is not an Artist, he is a engineer and industrial magnate. In Atlas, rather then fighting the good fight against the forces of evil (and losing), the people who actually do all the work just leave the forces of evil (the talkers and parasites) to their own devices.

Of course, civilization collapses…

Which brings us to the election. The Democrats would really like to believe:

• Losing wasn’t their fault
• Republicans are Evil
• The Voters are Stupid

None of those are true no matter how much the Democrat’s might like to believe it. The real issue is much more simple, but to really understand why the Democrat’s lost, Atlas Shrugged is required reading.

Here’s are chart for you to look at that really illustrates what happend:

Here you go

I notice that many of the academic bloggers who voted for Bush identified themselves as “Libertarians”. That seems to be code for “Republican”, because you can’t admit you might be conservative in academia I guess. Being a “Libertarian” is ok though?

You can’t be a conservative, but you can be far enough out on the right that you don’t believe in government at all?

Glad I’m not an academic…

The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has issued this report assessing claims that the discrepancy between exit polls and actual vote in certain jurisdictions provides evidence of voting machine fraud. The report finds no evidence that electronic voting machines or any other type of equipment were used to “steal” votes.

Hat tip: Equal Vote

From a moderate woman, Open Letter to the Democratic Party, How you could have had my vote. Like many of us, see seems upset by the “screaming over substance” tone of this last election.

Hat tip: Winds Of Change

Alleging 130,000 extra votes in Florida, here’s an analysis.

Even taking at face value the findings that the paper makes, those findings don’t support the conclusion that electronic voting caused the increase in votes for Bush.

The Berkeley working paper warrants more careful analysis. I’m sure that more able empiricists than I will, in short order, scrutinize their findings and conclusions. But as I’ve repeatedly warned, we should be wary of making accusations that the election was “stolen” before all the facts are in and have been analyzed carefully. In the end, such hasty judgments will do great harm to the vital objective of making our election system more fair and equal.

It’s also a “working paper”, which means it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. My personal opinion? They’ve worked really hard to find the result they wanted by cherry picking their data. It doesn’t mean Bush got extra votes because e-voting machines were used. There could be a number of reasons why that happened, the most obvious being that Gore was not Kerry, so perhaps some voters switched. All that statistical analysis works about as well as polls do, since its based on the same technique.

And shows the Berkeley guys have been smoking too much crack

The conclusion that President Bush was more likely to improve his vote in counties with e-voting is laughable on its face. Using the Excel spreadsheet provided by the authors, I totaled the votes for counties with and without e-voting, and came up with this:

Percentage Change for Bush in Counties WITH E-Voting: 2.25%

Percentage Change for Bush in Counties WITHOUT E-Voting: 2.54%

It looks like e-voting suppressed the President’s vote by about 0.29%_ — or 7,800 votes!

Taking each of these counties as data points, was the President “significantly more likely” to have increased his support in counties with e-voting? Again, no.

E-Voting Counties with Increased Bush Vote: 13/15 (86.7%)

Non-E-Voting Counties with Increased Bush Vote: 46/52 (88.5%)

Bad science loses to E-Voting again. Thanks to Pat for doing what I was too lazy to do.

From Equal Vote:

McCullogh & Plassmann assert that the Hout study “is entirely without merit and its results are meaningless.” They find that Hout and his colleagues made a basic error in their model, in attempting to quantify the number of “excess votes” for Bush. This can be shown, McCullogh and Plassmann explain, by relying on the same data and model to reach the opposite conclusion — namely that electronic voting favored Kerry.

I said it was bogus when it came out, Patrick Ruffini found it didn’t pass the smell test, and now its been bludgeoned some more.

So during our recent flooding, one of our neighbors was venting that “The County should take care of this”. My wife just laughed at him, that he thought that the government was actually going to fix it for us.

Now this was the same neighbor who took it personally when our power was out for a good chunk of a weekday during a storm. I guess he’d lived in town his whole life, and now that he was a bit further out of town, it kind of rocked his world to realize that electricity wasn’t 100% reliable.

So my neighbor believes that Government is the solution to all his problems? Wanna bet he was a Kerry voter? Lifelong Democrat I bet…

Patrick has another interesting analysis of the Pew Report.

This paints a clear picture of:

• Why Clinton Won and Bush Lost
• Why Gore Lost (yes, he really did), and Bush Won
• Why Kerry Lost and Bush Won
• Who the best choice may be for 2008

I won't bother excerpting it, it's short, and worth the trip.

Just felt like a Rant. I’m in California on a business trip, and I’m in the worst part of California, the North Bay in San Francisco, so I’m surrounded by elitist-yuppie-scum who think they are so enlightened and liberal, when really they are the worst sort of snobs, Mercedes-driving-hippies. I got stuck behind this car on the freeway that was belching black smoke as it proudly proclaimed that it ran on “free used vegetable oil”. No doubt that was why it smelled like burnt french fries.

It’s only been 2 days of gritting my teeth while listening to this claptrap about how the US has killed 100,000 Iraqis (27,000, and that’s about 1/12th of what Saddam would have killed in a year), how our soldiers are nazis, how Iraq is Vietnam, how their free speech is being oppressed, all the same tired rhetoric I became a blogger to escape, and already I’m about to explode.

So here goes.

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