PRESTOPUNDIT -- "An intense brain-buzz, guaranteed" (2blowhards)

VIETNAMESE

AMERICANS FOR GEORGE BUSH.

TOM MAGUIRE

has more on the alternative reality of Andrew Sullivan.

X-PRIZE LEADER

takes over as head of the Feynman nanotechnology prize. Glenn Reynolds will love this story.

MATT KELLY,

the AP's Pentagon correspondent, continues to doggedly pursue George Bush's military records. 31 more pages have now turned up. Send Mary Mapes and Dan Ra^ther a note and let them know that no personal memos printed in Microsoft Word Times New Roman and signed by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian were found.

In other news, Matt Kelly continues to go missing in action on the John Kerry military records story.

KETCHUP

SECRETS. Quotable:

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker--it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar--so now ketchup was also sweet--and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating--about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researchers went into people's homes and watched the way they used ketchup. "I remember sitting in one of those households," Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer for Heinz, says. "There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and Mom intercepted the bottle and said, 'No, you're not going to do that.' She physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see that the whole thing was a bummer." For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. "If you are four--and I have a four-year-old--he doesn't get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases," Keller says. "But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It's the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize." As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.

There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate--tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts--and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.

GOING TO THE SOURCE.

The LA Times cribs its fake news directly from the pages of the NY Times -- and simply skips the page A2 corrections printed days later. Patterico has analysis and a suggestion, but I liked this comment from a reader even more:

I find your naivete appealing. What makes you think it was a mistake? I've seen the same discredited crap get put into headlines with a tiny correction days later. Take the Washington Post headline from last week. They [misattributed a recycled] David Kay quote for the story about the Duelfer report. How can that be a mistake? They issued a correction days later, but my liberal moonbat friends had already emailed me about how Bush-lied/People-died. They never read the correction or even the report, even after I had sent it to them. They're prejudices were confirmed. End of story.

I don't believe that many of those are mistakes, they are purposeful. Not coordinated, merely people with the same ideas doing the same things because they see it works. How many car dealerships use this advertisement, "If we make a deal we'll pay off your car no matter how much you owe."? .. Do you think they coordinated it? Nope, one did it and the rest saw that it was a good idea so they went with it. The media is playing with the election. They're trading on their reputation to screw with an election.

At this point a dose of scepticism about the press is very healthy thing.

"U.S. Marines Launch Attacks in Fallujah." Well, well. The LA Times lied to us again.

It's not like Smash didn't warned us about this one.

VIETNAMESE TOWNS PEOPLE

tell their side of the incident were in John Kerry shot a Viet Cong soldier in the back and was later awarded the Silver Star. ABC News couldn't be happier in repeating again and again their claim that the stories remembered by these villiagers contradict some of the statements of Swift Vet John O'Neill. Note well, ABC News went to the other side of the globe to find witnesses with stories different from John O'Neill, but they haven't picked up a phone or taken a cab across town to talk to witnesses right here in America who tell stories contradicting John Kerry and supporting John O'Neill. What more needs be said.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire:

The producers of ABC's Nightline have an interesting idea - go to Vietnam to research some of the questions about Kerry's medals .. Of course, we have our own questions. First, if ABC is so interested in Kerry's war record, maybe they could send a crew to Kerry's campaign headquarters and ask him to sign a Form 180 authorizing the release of his military records. And they wouldn't even have to hire a translator. But I doubt they are really that interested. Secondly, and I ask this without having read the story, what are the odds that ABC will run a Kerry-basher three weeks before the election? .. Third, what has ABC left on the cutting room floor? When CBS perpetrated the Killian forged documents debacle, they actually interviewed the son of the purported author of the forged documents. Killian's son told CBS he doubted the authenticity of the documents, and SNIP! - he was gone. Do we have confidence that ABC will hold themselves to a higher standard? We do not.

That's just a teaser. He's got lots more.

UPDATE: Tom is now ripping Andrew Sullivan's laughable take on the story. My respect for Sullivan continues to decline.

And this is worth looking at -- Captain Ed takes on Ted Koppel. Quotable:

ABC News makes one thing abundantly clear: despite taking the lead on covering Rathergate, they've apparently learned absolutely nothing from it. Their badly-misfired attack piece should embarass everyone who works in their news division.

AN INTERVIEW

with Swift Boat Vet George Elliott. Quotable:

Dean Esmay: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

George Elliott: I don't know if this is the place to put this, but, there's one thing that concerns me very greatly, and that is the approach taken by what's currently known as the mainstream media. And I am not saying this to bash the mainstream media, but I think that if they continue to act in such a partisan way that it's not good for this country. A free and unfettered press is an absolute necessity for this country to survive in the manner that was intended by the forefathers. But if the mainstream press continues acting in such a partisan way that they lose the support of a major part of the population, who is going to get us the real trut? Who is going to beat on the doors of congressmen and secretaries if various departments to answer the people's questions? ..

I have very grave concerns about the American people being able to trust what the mainstream media says unless something changes. Maybe our swift boat guys, maybe this will be a greater legacy, will be what we've exposed about the mainstream media than anything we've said about Senator Kerry. I'll give you an example. The closest example to our cause is the fact that CBS admits that they've been five years chasing down President Bush's national guard records. And they haven't spent five minutes trying to find John Kerry's records!

He has not released his records. The last I heard him say on the news was "I have released all the records I have in my possession." He always has a caveat for anything he says like that. But you will notice that one telling piece of paper that hasn't been released is the original writeup/recommendation for the Silver Star. He did release a recommendation that I wrote for the Bronze star. That's out there. The Silver Star recommendation is not there.

Even a reasonably competent news person would in my view ask "where is that?" It's as controversial as the bronze star. It's not there. Where are his discharge papers? He has not put up a copy of his discharge from the naval reserve. That should have taken place in 1978 when his service in all forms was completed.

The press seems to have no interest in this. They continue to call us liars when we mention these things. The facts in John Kerry's own words, as written in Tour of Duty from his own diaries, indicate to anyone who'd look at it twice can see that the third purple heart was a fraud. The shrapnel wound was admittedly from throwing a grenade into a bin of rice. They joked about getting shrapnel and rice into his butt. That's in his own book, Tour of Duty. So why are we liars to point it out? And why are reporters so interested in Bush's National Guard service but willing to call us liars when we've got eyewitnesses, sworn affidavits, and Kerry's own words backing us up? What is the world coming to if the people can no longer trust the press to tell them the truth and look at all candidates equally?

"JUST ONCE

I would like to hear a candidate for president answer a question by saying, "Sorry, the Constitution limits the role of the federal government -- the issue you're asking about is one for the states or the private sector, not Washington." There was no talk of limited government last night. Instead there was talk of: firehouses not having enough firefighters, a shortage of flu vaccine, the rise in health insurance premiums, how laid-off workers should attend community college, the need for more grade-school math and science, the high price of gasoline and medicine, a minimum wage for unskilled workers, education for parents who don't speak English -- and those are just the ones I managed to scribble down. There was even a mention of ceiling fans from China. Where does the Constitution say that any of these are properly the concern of the federal government?"

-- Jeff Jacoby.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

on the despicable John Edwards.

JOHN KERRY & VIETNAM --

a four count indictment against the mainstream press corp. Verdict? Guilty. The crime? Gross dereliction of professional duty. Quotable:

The central points presented by John Kerry and his supporters, then, at the outset of his campaign, and repeated since, are several .. When credible and well-documented contrary evidence to these .. points emerged during the campaign, the mainstream press failed almost utterly to correct those Kerry contentions.

1. He volunteered to serve in Vietnam (and, thus, would defend America now)

It was revealed that Kerry actually sought a deferment after graduating college, to go to Paris for a year. Only after that deferment was denied, Kerry enlisted in the Navy. It was revealed that when Kerry volunteered for the Swift Boats, they were an offshore patrol operation, not in combat. The mainstream press avoided these revelations ..

2. He served more than ably, indeed valiantly, witness his medals (and, thus, would be a worthy commander-in-chief today)

The weight of evidence presented by the fellow sworn witnessing 60-plus Swift Boat veterans was not conclusive .. But it was very weighty, and moreso than Kerry's supporters' counters. Only the conservative media presented it. Kerry's Cambodia fable was conclusively disproven, but the mainstream media if mentioning it at all only mentioned it very briefly at the end of long articles. When, several weeks ago, it was proven that Kerry's Bronze Star was based on his own misleading after-action report, there was silence in the mainstream media. There is much enough for the mainstream media to investigate, but with one exception it hasn't. Michael Dobbs in The Washington Post tried to investigate one of the incidents, ably, but admitted coming up against a wall of Kerry's refusal to release his private journals and his full military records. Dobbs has since been fed much more evidence, with which to continue his investigation, but hasn't returned to the subject. When I provided extensive documentation to the ombudsman public editor of The New York Times of the Times' failure to investigate, and of its reporters repeatedly parroting unsubstantiated before every mention of the Swiftees while presenting no facts to support that charge, Mr. Okrent has continued to avoid mention in his column ..

After a month of the conservative media highlighting the Swiftee charges, the Kerry camp finally replied, with screams of "lies" and with private investigators dredging up 10-year old affairs. However, Kerry still refused to release his documents to the press for resolving the issues. An attorney who publishes one of the most widely read blogs, Beldarblog, challenged the entire internet to disprove a single Swiftee charge. There were no winners.

3. He nobly spoke out against mistakes in Vietnam (and, thus, would be honest with the voters now, and the public in the future if elected president)

John Kerry may have sincerely believed his charges against Vietnam veterans and America's conduct in the Vietnam War. But he crossed the line into charging that all us Vietnam veterans were war criminals conducting a criminal war by the U.S., and publicly supporting the communist proposals to capitulate. Mainstream-media defenders of Kerry say that he just repeated what others told him. But Kerry said he witnessed these things, and evidence emerged in the conservative media that Kerry knew that his charge of prevalent atrocities was false and that most of those in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) who said otherwise were fraudulent.

When it was revealed that Kerry stayed in VVAW after he said he had, and that he attended a VVAW meeting that discussed assassinating pro-Vietnam war U.S. senators, without reporting this terrorism conspiracy to any authorities, the mainstream press ignored again ..

There was little if anything noble about John Kerry's antiwar activities, as the POWs tortured by their interrogators with Kerry's words know.

4. He would be honest with the American people (and, thus, be reliable to be trusted as president)

John Kerry has repeated his disproven scurrilous charges against Vietnam veterans and America in Vietnam to the present. John Kerry has continued to refuse to release his journals and full military records. John Kerry has not been honest with the American people, and thus cannot be trusted to be president. It's as simple as that. It's not so much what Kerry did 35 years ago. It's what he's done now. That's not the character or integrity that can be relied upon.

And where is the mainstream press? You know and can decide for yourself. By a four-to-one margin, veterans have decided. During August, when some of this came out through the conservative media, the public polls shifted heavily away from Kerry.

Now, other issues predominate in the media, and there are many other issues to predominate, and the polls are more neck-and-neck now. But, veterans have not forgotten. Only the mainstream media has forgotten or, more properly said, continued to ignore the facts, and what the facts say about Kerry's core points of qualification to be commander-in-chief and president.

"THEY SERVED"

And

"QUESTIONS FOR JOHN KERRY FROM THE SWIFT BOAT VETS & THE POWs HELD IN N. VIETNAM"

The latest Swift Boat ads are out.

CLICK

HERE and order BlogAds cheap. Get a big bang for a few bucks -- along with the best audience in the world.

IF YOU DIDN'T NOTICE

Patterico is back and blogging -- hammering hard on Proposition 66, the terrible measure which will gut the current "three strikes" law. There is important stuff happening in California, and it's time to call attention to it.

(And check out Patterico for occassional posting from the famed "Angry Clam".)

PROF. BAINBRIDGE'S BLUNT CHARGE --

"the Democrats have once again chosen a candidate utterly lacking a moral compass." A post-debate rant with lots of supporting linkage.

On a related matter, Outside the Beltway has a blogosphere round-up on Kerry's "let me remind you that Mary Chenny is a lesbian" gaff.

THE SKINNY

on ABC News political director Mark Halperin.

Halperin wrote a memo that .. seems to direct ABC reporters, anchors and producers to slant its coverage by downplaying the misstatements of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and by viewing negatively any misstatements by Republican candidate Bush ..

Mark Halperin�s idea of what is right may be what is Left. He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the [son] of hard-Left- connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his father�s [co-workers] and radical ideas. Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President of the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros.

ECONOMISTS

AGAINST JOHN KERRY. The signers include Nobel winners Edward Prescott, Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, and Robert Mundell.

Other signers include William Allen, John Baden, Charles Baird, Don Bellante, Bruce Benson, Michael Boskin, Roy Cordato, Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., Martin Feldstein, Fred Foldvary, Bettina Bien Greaves, James Gwartney, Arthur Laffer, Deepak Lal, Larry Lindsey, Donald Luskin, Doug MacKenzie, Yuri Maltsev, Paul McCracken, Allan Meltzer, Steve Moore, E.C. Pasour, Jr., George Reisman, Mark Skousen, Ben Stein, Robert Tollison, Gordon Tullock, Richard Vedder, Richard Wagner, and Walter Williams, among many others.

What I see when I read that list is a lof of folks who learned applied price theory from Milton Friedman & his students, a lot of people who know their Friedrich Hayek, a lot of people who know their public choice theory, and a lot of people who understand the various fallacies of Keynesian economics. I also see a lot of economists with experiences outside of academia -- in think tanks, in public policy, and in the wider world of multi-disciplinary ideas. These aren't ivory tower "idiot savants" who do nothing but mine data and play mathematical games inapplicable to social phenomena (although it should be said that plenty of the signers excel at math and do lots of statisticals work).

More here.

THOMAS SOWELL

on the perverse logic of leftist do-goodery -- social tragedies without personal consequence:

Lenin was just the first of the great vision-driven dictators of the 20th century. Like Hitler and Mao after him, Lenin was prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions of human beings on the altar to his vision.

Even in democratic nations, there are people who can impose their vision on other people, with no consequences for being wrong and no requirement that they prove themselves right.

Social workers have for years tried to stop white couples from adopting orphans from minority groups because that goes against their vision. They don't need a speck of evidence to back up their preconceptions.

Many a minority child has been ripped out of the only home they have ever known by social workers who have sent them off to live among strangers, or a whole succession of strangers in foster homes, simply because a vision says that this is better than having them grow up with a white couple who have raised them from infancy.

Everyone has visions but everyone is not in a position to indulge those visions, or to impose them on other people, without suffering any consequences for being wrong. Even the biggest businesses can find themselves looking red ink in the face if their idea of what the public wants turns out to be different from what the public will buy. Federal judges, however, pay no price for being wrong, even if the costs to others -- sometimes the whole society -- turn out to be catastrophic. When murder rates skyrocketed after 1960s judges started conjuring up new "rights" out of thin air for criminals, there were no consequences for those judges, who had lifetime appointments and were not likely to be living in high-crime neighborhoods.

THERE WILL BE A SYMPOSIUM

on the Califorinia "Three Strikes" ballot measure at Jeff Lewis's So Cal Law Blog -- more details here.

AND THE WINNER WAS . . .

my little boy, who turned off the TV and played cars with his daddy.

Tonight it was my wife's turn to watch the debates -- she caught the last 45 minutes of the debate and really thought George Bush did well, much better than John Kerry. She's always liked Bush, and liked him tonight. On a number of social issues my wife agrees more with Kerry than Bush, but she wasn't much impressed with Kerry, and didn't find him very likeable. She liked Bush's answers on religion and the women in his life.

I take it this is all good news for George Bush.

No word yet from the lefty sister-in-law.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has a round by round analysis and PoliPundit has great stuff, including a video clip of the President laughing at the credibility of network news.

Patterico picks up the wife theme:

Bush had a great answer on the wife question! .. This is a good example of why people like Bush .. Kerry doesn't really seem to want to talk about his wife. Don't blame him.

Kerry Haters might enjoy this Betsy Newmark pull quote from KerrySpot.

Bill Dyer channels PrestoPundit (I caught the first few minutes of the debate):

CBS News should have just dropped any pretense of fairness and sent Dan Rather to moderate this damn thing. The questions couldn't have been much more slanted if Michael Moore had been the moderator.

He also caught these, which I missed:

Take-away lines from the transcript, one from Dubya, and one from Kerry that Dubya & Co. will exploit: "A plan is not a litany of complaints." And "I think it makes sense, I think most Americans in their guts know, that we ought to pass a sort of truth standard." (Picture Chirac administering a lie detector test at the U.N., after he's graded the global test.)

And here's the wife thing again:

An aside, purely speculating, regarding Kerry's joke near the end: "Well, I guess the president and you [referring to Bob Schieffer] and I are three examples of lucky people who married up. And some would say maybe me moreso than others. But I can take it." In the next camera shot of Theresa, she looked like the furies of hell had swirled up inside her; she had the kind of grim smile a hungry tigress displays before she sinks a claw into a gazelle's liver. And fer pete's sake, besides saying she was "strong," which Shieffer's question practically required him to say, and the crack about her being rich, Kerry couldn't come up with another thing to say specifically about THK.

And Bill has more from The Corner on the same matter (scroll down).

Baldilocks live blogged the debate via streaming Internet feed (I think she said the other day she would be working tonight). If you skipped the debate, these are excellent Cliff Notes. Smash also live blogged the debate. Here's his post-debate analysis:

Kerry was confident, but he didn't bring anything new to the table. But Bush brought his "A Game," and he definitely outshone Kerry in style and substance. Bush did not stumble, and kept hammering his points home. He kept Kerry on the defensive. His whiney voice was gone. The President came armed with facts, and supreme confidence. Kerry made two big gaffes in this debate, that I noticed. First, he brought up Cheney's lesbian daughter, seemingly out-of-the-blue, which came across to me as a lame attempt at a low blow. Second, and most importantly, Kerry's finish was lame.

InstaPundit does the wife:

THE WIFE QUESTION: Both do the best of the evening so far. But Bush hits it out of the park. Kerry hits a double. Bush's problem -- is anybody still watching?

Tom Maguire also does the wife:

some of the early questions were absurdly pro-Kerry, all was forgiven with Bob Schieffer's last question about how Bush and Kerry have been affected by the strong women in their lives. This was a hanging curveball for Bush, since we all love Laura. At the other podium, Kerry did not mention Teresa by name; instead, he made the pivot to his belated mom, which is always defensible, but a bit awkward for his current wife. Fine, we are sure she polls badly, but now even Kerry is running away from her?

And has this on the men:

Kerry had a brief stretch for which his debate coach must have been Dr. Kevorkian - who in the Kerry camp thought it would be a good idea for Kerry to push the assault weapons ban and affirmative action back to back? Hard luck with the order of the questions, as disgruntled white guys everywhere lock and load for Bush.

Well time for bed. The kids exhausted me today.

THE DEATH

of free speech in Canada -- life imitates The Onion.

(via Barking Moonbat)

THE BLOGOSPHERE & THE MEDIA --

A SYMPOSIUM.

HEAD PATTING

millionaire John Edwards lacks "disability etiquette." (via PoliPundit).

DID KERRY'S "OTHER THAN HONORABLE DISCHARGE"

get "dry-cleaned" by Jimmy Carter? More from Tom Maguire and Bill Dyer.

OPEN BORDERS NIGHTMARE --

Chechen terrorists have entered America via the U.S.'s unsecured border with Mexico says an undisclosed foreign intelligence service trusted by U.S. officials. Bill Gertz reports for the WaTimes:

U.S. security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a group of 25 Chechen terrorists illegally entered the United States from Mexico in July .. Members of the group, said to be wearing backpacks, secretly traveled to northern Mexico and crossed into a mountainous part of Arizona that is difficult for U.S. border security agents to monitor ..

U.S. security officials have been concerned in recent months that al Qaeda or other terrorists are planning to enter the United States from Mexico. Intelligence officials said a suspected al Qaeda leader who has been in the United States was spotted recently in Mexico. Officials believe Adnan Shukrijumah, whom the FBI wants for questioning, met with alien smugglers in Mexico and Honduras and was seeking ways to bring al Qaeda members into the United States. Shukrijumah was seen in August in the Sonora province of northern Mexico, officials said. Since October 2003, authorities have arrested five Arabs attempting to cross illegally into the United States from Mexico.

THE CALIFORNIA BEAR FLAG LEAGUE

has quickly turned into a juggernaut of the blogosphere with scores of members and huge swaths of bandwidth. If you aren't yet acquainted with this mighty aircraft carrier of the blogs here's a Bear Flag League Roundup to get you started. Enjoy.

THE "BINARY OPPOSITIONS" OF KERRY VS. BUSH --

What would Jacques Derrida make of this?

IN DEBATE:

John Kerry vs. John Kerry vs. John Kerry (audio). And you thought John Kerry only had two positions on every issue! (via PoliPundit).

"TEAM AMERICA:

WORLD POLICE"

Early versions of the film had puppet sex so graphic that the Motion Picture Association of America gave the movie an NC-17 rating, which prohibits any moviegoer under 17 from seeing it. But the version of the movie submitted last week, with tamer puppet passion, squeaked out an R, which admits those under 17 if accompanied by a parent or guardian. To argue the studio's case, America producer Scott Rudin prepared a 45-page memo citing such explicit films as American Psycho, Eyes Wide Shut and In the Cut, all of which received an R rating .. The MPAA declined to comment on the controversy but released its explanation for the rating: "For graphic crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language -- all involving puppets."

"SAVE AMERICA:

Befriend a Neocon Today"

Posted at the LiveJournal Anti-War Community blogsite:

MORE QUESTION-MARKS, FEWER EXCLAMATION POINTS
a strategy for "reaching the lost" in our beleaguered nation

Last night I was .. ambling around the politico-blogosphere and .. I spent about an hour on a couple of ultra-conservative blogs .. [At last] I finally found something I can do [to end the war] .. For a certain time slot every day .. I'm going to completely forget Alternet, Buzzflash, DemocraticUnderground.com .. And spend an hour on conservative weblogs, reading and responding to their audiences ..

.. you need a different approach to befriend a neocon than you need to engage him or her in debate. The way to do this is ASKING QUESTIONS .. [But they] have to be questions of the type not designed to force them to confront their error, but instead to just talk honestly about why they think the way they do. Start with the blogs, then see if you can get some of them to exchange email which will be unseen by their conservative blog-buddies and thus give them more space for honesty ..

4. Gates to start your journey: A good place to start: http://polipundit.com. THIS MAY HURT YOUR BRAIN TO LOOK AT but put on the armor and venture into this hostile territory anyway because it's just too important not to. Sidebar on /prestopundit/ is good for links to branch out, and worthless in every other way, since it doesn't have comments enabled (cowards!)

These blogs should give you more maps to other "enemy" camps than you should ever care to see. It does show the depth of their entrenchment, though - if you live in California - ESPECIALLY in Berkeley or San Francisco, or in any other ["leftist"] stronghold (SeaTac comes to mind, there are others) you forget we are in a DIFFERENT COUNTRY ALTOGETHER than these people live in.

5. What you see on these pages will frustrate you. It will make you sad, angry, and most of all FEEL HELPLESS. Do not allow the emotions to guide you in these lands or you will fall flat down before you even get your bearings.

6. Repeat: ARMOR yourself. You are entering these places as essentially an ambassador from [Leftistan] and will likely be shot on sight as soon as your colouring shows, before anyone realizes you're there to help those among them who might be hurting .. You are there to offer something to those who would want it and when you first engage them, that thing is two ears and a brain, NOTHING more ..

I have said enough now. I would like to hear any "field reports" you care to send me. My @ddress is monde@*****.org. That's the name I go by - Monde, which means 'World' in French. (And yes, it was my name before all the French-hating, and I know this is a liability for me in their lands, but I care about being honest with them so I decided to stop using the aliases.)

Wishing you the best of luck and love,
Monde

To get the full embrace of lefty love you really need to read THE WHOLE THING.

DANIEL WEINTRAUB --

"Pundits in pajamas are biting more than ankles." Quotable:

After a century of relying largely on newspapers as self-proclaimed objective gatekeepers to the world of politics, Americans during this election season may be getting a sneak preview of the changing of the guard. Internet sites, especially independent but openly ideological Web logs, or blogs, are increasingly challenging the mainstream media for the hearts and minds of American readers ..

Hugh Hewitt drew more than 30,000 readers in an hour when he "live blogged" the first presidential debate, summarizing each question and answer while adding his instant analysis in real time. He has lately been posting "symposium" topics each weekend and inviting other writers to file responses on their own blogs, to which he links from his site. Markos Moulitsas Z�niga .. has 8 million unique monthly visitors to his left-leaning "Daily Kos". Moulitsas has been focusing of late on the presidential election, but he also tracks Senate and congressional races and regularly invites commentary from his huge audience. Last week, facing a deadline for his regular column on American politics in the Guardian of London, Moulitsas asked his readers what they thought he should say. Nearly 500 responded ..

It's impossible to know at this point how all of this will evolve. But it's not hard to imagine a future army of self-employed Internet journalists, writing with a well-advertised point of view, connected intimately to their readers, sharing their sources and changing, forever, the way the world interprets politics.

A TALE OF TWO HEADLINES.

The LA Times yesterday: "Major Assaults on Hold Until After U.S. Vote"

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration plans to delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race. Although American commanders in Iraq have been buoyed by recent successes in insurgent-held towns such as Samarra and Tall Afar, administration and Pentagon officials say they will not try to retake cities such as Fallouja and Ramadi � where the insurgents' grip is strongest and U.S. military casualties could be the highest � until after Americans vote in what is likely to be an extremely close election.

CNN today: "Iraqi forces raid Ramadi mosques -- U.S. says airstrikes targeted terrorist meeting sites in Falluja"

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi security forces, backed by U.S. Marines and troops, launched a series of raids Tuesday on seven mosques in the central city of Ramadi, the U.S. military said ..

In other action Tuesday, U.S.-led forces launched airstrikes in Falluja that destroyed a meeting center and a safe house used by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network, the U.S. military said.

ROGER KIMBALL

on Jacques Derrida.

IF YOU WATCHED

the last Presidential debate you might enjoy this Michael Ramirez Cartoon.

JOHN KERRY'S

road to serfdom -- forced national service for every young American. It's one of those many Kerry "plans". And it's exactly the sort of serfdom the powerful forced upon the ruled many years ago in France, Russia and elsewhere in Eurpope.

ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS

randomly polled by The Economist overwhelmingly favor tax increases and back John Kerry's economic policies over those of George Bush. These scholars see Kerry -- the candidate who plans to increase federal spending by something like $2 trillion dollars -- as the one with better policies for promoting fiscal discipline. They also favor Kerry on medical policy, energy policy, and retirement policy -- policies which increase the scope of the central government, decrease the decision power of individual agents, and ultimately favor bureaucrats over market mechanisms. Perhaps it's no surprise that 80% of those with an eye on a job in Washington would prefer working in a Democratic administration.

As I've here noted before, many top economic departments have a 5-1, 10-1 or even 20-1 Democrat- to- Republican composition, making the economics faculty only marginally more diverse than the English, Sociology, or History departments on those same campuses. The dusty old myth assumes that academic economics is overwhelmingly populated by free-market Republicans. Sadly, the truth is that economics departments are overwhelmingly populated by second-rate physics, math, and engineering students who were originally attracted by the math and data games which substitute for economic thought in today's academic journals. These folks are what the American Economic Association special committee on graduate education has called "idiot savants" -- they don't actually know that much about what happens in a real economy or even how it works. And they certainly aren't richly schooled in economic theory -- e.g. the history of economic thought has been removed from the curriculum and most economist today have never read the work of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, or any other economist you can name off the top of your head. What they do day in and day out is a lot of math and here and there bits of "blackboard economics" (see Ronald Coase) -- stuff premised on "simplifying assumptions" which make it inapplicable to the real world (e.g. the constant use of mathematical uncertainty rather than epistemic uncertainty -- see Donald Rumsfeld).

So in crucially important ways, a great mass of these folks aren't particularly good economists -- they've internalized a lot of mathematics but they exhibit no sound understanding of the severe limitations of all this mathematics, a problem which comes to a head when you closely study the singularly massive failure by economists to coherently use this mathematics to explain anything (for some sense of the nature and scope of this failure see the work of Alex Rosenberg or Bruce Caldwell).

The things which would lead one to favor markets over Democrats in a robust fashion are missing from the mind-set of perhaps most academic economists -- a deep understanding of economics theory, a hands-on familiarity with the real world, a genuine mastery of public policy specifics, and last (but not least) a multi-disciplinary framework for imagining the institutional foundations upon which markets and goverments rest. Lacking these, and having only their math and perhaps a "Leftist Arts" education to fall back on, it shouldn't surprise that the vast majority of economists from the ivory tower would prefer John Kerry-- not only in charge of public policy and the economy -- but also as boss.

UPDATE: Blogosphere reactions here, here, and here.

Scott Campbell from Blithering Bunny writes:

It was only after reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics that I started to get a feel for economics. More books like this need to be written, explaining the fundamentals of economics, and providing an overall perspective, with real-world applications. Hardly any academics that I know have any appreciation of how markets work, and some better intro books will help.

Some other good ones:

Free to Chose by Rose & Milton Friedman.

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell

Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.

Hidden Order : The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman.

A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics: An Introduction to Competing Schools of Thought by Brian Snowdon, Peter Wynarczyk & Howard Vane.

UPDATE II: Edward Prescott, the new Nobel laureate in economics, is calling for bigger tax cuts.

AMERICA'S #1 IMPORT --

POVERTY. Quotable:

Compared with 1990, there were actually 700,000 fewer non-Hispanic whites in poverty last year. Among blacks, the drop since 1990 is between 700,000 and 1 million .. Meanwhile, the number of poor Hispanics is up by 3 million since 1990 ..

there's no mystery here. If more poor and unskilled people enter the country � and have children � there will be more poverty. (The Census figures cover both legal and illegal immigrants; estimates of illegals range upward from 7 million.) About 33 percent of all immigrants .. lack a high-school education .. if the poverty persists � and is compounded by more immigration � then it will create mounting political and social problems. One possibility: a growing competition for government benefits between the poor and baby-boom retirees.

LEFTY EDITOR SAM TANENHAUS

gets a negative review from Winfield Myers, who'd expected better from the new editor of the NY Times Book Review based on Tanenhaus's "unusually accurate for a lefty" biography of Whittaker Chambers.

Here's what I wrote when Tanenhaus was first appointed last March. As a veteran of the routinely dishonest NY Times editorial page, I was not at all optimistic about Tanenhaus.

JUSTICE THOMAS --

Part 2 in the WaPo series.

FINN KYDLAND & EDWARD PRESCOTT

win the Nobel Prize in Economics. The betting market gets this one right.

Reactions:

From Tyler Cowen, and also here. From the Mises Institute -- with a comment by Roger Garrison. From Arnold Kling. From the NY Times. From Alex Tabarrok. From Brad DeLong. From the WaPo. From Mitch Townsend. From the Arizona Republic.

Google news search Kydland & Prescott & Nobel Prize economics.

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Edward Prescott Nobel Prize page.

List of Research by Edward C. Prescott -- Minneapolis Fed.

Edward Prescott Nobel Prize page -- Arizona St. U.

Google search "Edward Prescott". Google Search "Finn Kydland".

Barriers to Riches by Edward Prescott & Stephen Parente.

Business Cycle Theory by Finn Kydland.

A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics: An Introduction to Competing Schools of Thought by Brian Snowdon, Peter Wynarczyk & Howard Vane.

Conversations With Leading Economists : Interpreting Modern Macroeconomics by by Brian Snowdon & Howard Vane.

"Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations" by Edward Prescott & Finn Kydland.

"Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans" by Edward Prescott & Finn Kydland.

And don't miss a week's worth of blogging on business and economics at today's new The Carnival of the Capitalists.

THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS

will be announced today on the Nobel Prize web site. Or watch the announcement broadcast live over the internet at 1 p.m. Swedish time, which is 7 a.m. U.S. Eastern time.

FROM ACROSS AMERICA THEY COME

-- Swift Boat veterans and former POWs gather in Washington, D.C. to film an 8th Swift Vet/POW television ad bearing witness to Sen. John Kerry's unfitness for the office of the Presidency of the United States.

THE NY POST --

ABC's SHAME.

IS DERRIDA

DEAD?

Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida ? The obituarists� objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere �narrations� or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science � among them, Derrida�s own existence � which become problematised and relativised. This conceptual revolution has profound implications for the content of future postmodern and liberatory science of mortality. Is God dead? It was, perhaps, Alan D. Sokal who most heuristically challenged the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook in his brilliant exegesis of Derridian principles Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Dr Sokal�s inclusive review of the literature (see especially Hamill, Graham. The epistemology of expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time. In Queering the Renaissance, pp. 236-252. And also Doyle, Richard. Dislocating knowledge, thinking out of joint: Rhizomatics and the importance of being multiple), and his eerily exact summary of the complementarity principle (Instead of a simple �either/or� structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither �either/or� nor �both/and� nor even �neither/nor� while at the same time not abandoning these logics either) make his reading of Derrida irrefutable. We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us.

More on Dead Derrida from the London Times.

And a long and helpful piece from the LA Times:

"Of Grammatology," his most famous work, focuses on the submerged dualisms and hierarchies that Derrida considered the foundation of Western thought. He said that embedded in any text were oppositional pairs such as good/evil, mind/body, male/female, truth/fiction. He further said that the first term in any set of such "binary opposites" is valued or privileged over the second. It is these oppositions, Derrida argued, that must be deconstructed .. To illustrate how the greatest philosophers contradict themselves, he often cited Plato's declaration that oral discourse "is written in the soul of the listener." If speech, as the father of Western thought asserted, was superior to writing, how could it then be "written" in the soul? Like a Freudian slip, Plato's choice of words undercut his own argument, Derrida insisted, demonstrating that speech is not more authentic or closer to truth than writing .. What may have been most threatening about deconstruction was its embrace of disorder, of the view that the world is not a simple place, reducible to such absolute concepts as good versus evil, hero versus villain, sane versus insane.

DID JOHN KERRY TELL THE TRUTH

about about war crimes in Vietnam? Vietnam vet Winburne King speaks out:

As a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy assigned as an advisor to South Vietnam river forces near (but not in) Cambodia for a longer tour than Kerry served, I never once witnessed -- nor had reported to me -- a single act of the sort Kerry said -- and Snider believes -- was commonplace. Quite the contrary, I saw firsthand numerous acts of kindness and compassion toward Vietnamese. I served with decent, honorable people in Vietnam -- the ones called baby killers when they returned home -- due in no small part to Kerry's lies about them.

SWIFT VET STEVE GARDNER

vs. "Cambodia" vet John Kerry -- Gardner's home town newspaper reports.

"STOLEN HONOR" --

coming to prime time on televisions in 22 states.

CHRIS MATTHEWS

JOINS THE JIHAD.

Among the broadcasters gathered in Miami for the presidential debate earlier this month was a palpable sense of unease about Ra^ther's troubles and how they'll affect the industry's credibility .. [For example] Chris Matthews' comparison [of Ra^thergate] with the Watergate break-in made it clear how disturbing he finds the controversy. ``People say, `Well, you know, the president really did shirk his duties in the Guard, so maybe this thing about the [documents] isn't really that important. Because it really does just show what we know to be the truth.' 'I say yeah, and [then-DNC chairman] Larry O'Brien really was taking money from Howard Hughes. And Nixon was trying to prove that, too. And it was true. That's why they did the break-in. But that doesn't justify it. I'm sorry, the break-in is all that matters to me. The corruption, if you have it in terms of documentation by the network, is important.''

DING, DONG DERRIDA IS DEAD.

More blogosphere reactions to the death of the philosopehr of "deconstruction":

John Miller:

His intellectual legacy essentially is to have articulated a theory proposing that communication is impossible. Think about that for a second, because that's what deconstruction really is: a theory that argues communication is impossible. As one critic of deconstruction has pointed out: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length." My co-author Mark Molesky and I have written an entire chapter on Derrida and his fellow French intellectuals in our new book, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. (The chapter is called "Fables of the Deconstruction.") We discuss Derrida, Sarte, de Man, and others. Much of what these men wrote is abstruse -- after a dose of Derrida, it's just possible to believe that communication really is impossible, though not for the reasons Derrida supposes. At any rate, Mark and I tried to make sense of what these folks were saying, put it in historical context, and explain its influence on America.

THE PRESS CORP

division of the Democrat Party now moves its campaign for Kerry from the news pages to the editorial pages with these official endorsements:

From the Oregonian-Democrat.

From the Philadelphia Democrat-Inquirer.

From the St. Louis Post-Democrat.

From the Seattle Democrat-Intelligencer.

From the Detroit Free-Democrat.

From the Seattle Times-Democrat.

Fromt the Atlanta Democratic Party Journal.

More "Democratic Party Newspapers for Kerry" listed here.

UPDATE: Here's a newspaper endorsement scorecard.

THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS

will be announced later today. Will the award for economics simply another political platform for Swedish anti-Americanism? The Anal Philosopher has some thoughts. Paul Krugman is mentioned.

And here's a preview/backgrounder on the prize.

A JUSTICE THOMAS

PROFILE from the WaPo. Let's see, why might they be doing this now. Hmmm.

AN INTERVIEW

with Kerry economic advisor Roger Altman. Quotable:

[The] whole interview troubled me .. I just got the impression he had no idea what real people are like, that in reality there's not much for a person to go on in siding with a candidate besides trust, that in reality most people can't go to school and study economics .. Altman seemed out of touch.

.. I asked Altman what he majored in when in college. He answered Political Science, and I said I guess that explains a lot. He wasn't happy with my reply.

"A PIECE OF SHALLOW, PARTISAN GARBAGE."

-- Kerry in Vietnam expert Bill Dyer on the NY Times review of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."

AN ASTONISHING NEW BOOK

from the master of popular science Richard Dawkins -- The Ancestor's Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Here's a review:

Instead of tracing evolution forward from the primeval slime to the emergence of homo sapiens, it traces it backwards, from homo sapiens to the primeval slime, via a series of branching points on the evolutionary tree, or rather bush, where we meet hypothetical common ancestors, or "concestors" in Dawkins's terminology. The first concestor is the creature from which both man and chimpanzee (man's nearest biological relative) were descended; the second concestor is the creature from which the first concestor and gorillas were descended; the third concestor is the creature from which the second concestor, the gorillas and orang-utans were descended; and so on and so forth, back to the origins of life itself. According to Dawkins, about 40 such concestors (each of which is the subject of a chapter) are sufficient to take us back to the origin of life itself.

THE CBS NEWS

"DRAFT" HOAX.

JOHN KERRY --

"the 'not necessarily' candidate."

THE NY TIMES

takes on the multiple worlds of Orange County, CA for the cocooned Manhattanites in New York state.

"DECONSTRUCTIONIST" JACQUES DERRIDA,

the famed French language theorist, is dead. In recent years Derrida was an Orange Country, U.S.A. fixture teaching at UC-Irvine. He inspired otherwise serious folks of my acquaintance to use mimed "quotes" above spoken words with bouncing paired fingers raised over the head -- years before Saturday Night Live made fun of the practice. I first ran into the ideas of Derrida in early '80s studying literary criticism -- just before the real Derrida craze made its run through the grad schools. Soon enough even serious legal theorists and "continental" philosophers where taking up ersatz Derrida for their own purposes. By the time I began advanced studies in philosophy, the effect of Derrida (and Foucault) on marginally talented lefty grad students was a bit like heroin. You might say I saw "the second-rate minds of my generation destroyed" by the snake-swallowing language games of Jacques Derrida.

True enough, Derrida was right to oppose the Platonic theory of meaning -- but unfortunately he had nothing sensible to replace it with, only an extended reductio ad absurdum via a madness of puns and metaphor without end. His own approach could have learned much from infinitely more profound anti-Plantonic work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Derrida in his American years had no time for that, he was far more interested in playing word games, as he did when I saw him give the lectures published as Spectres of Marx. The Derrida I saw was a "joke" -- laughable and yet seriously repellent at the same time.

So lets give Derrida a thumbs up for his anti-Plantonism and a thumbs down for his mistaken view of language, truth, and literature. And a big, big thumbs down for his truly dismal influence on fashion hungry second-raters the world over.

From the London Telegraph:

Jacques Chirac, the French president, said yesterday that in Prof Derrida, "France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major intellectual figures of our time". Prof Derrida's work pioneered a complex and controversial form of philosophy which interpreted different kinds of human thought and knowledge as ambiguous "texts" with multiple and apparently endless layers of meaning. The method, though often impenetrable, had an enormous impact on literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture. Over a 40-year career, the flamboyant doyen of Parisian intellectuals became one of the best-known and controversial philosophers in the world - loathed, adored and seldom fully comprehended .. While his followers acclaimed him a playful genius of language, critics said he merely created an obscure form of relativism, in which anything could mean anything. His famously difficult and literary style made him particularly unpopular among many English and American philosophers, most of them reared in the tradition of plain-speaking Anglo-Saxon thought.

On the continent .. Prof Derrida was a celebrated figure - akin to a pop star among students. In recent years, he began to intervene regularly in political debates. In a debate on global terrorism, he refused to describe September 11 attacks as an act of "international terrorism", arguing that "an act of 'international terrorism' is anything but a rigorous concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we are trying to discuss".

From the NY Times:

Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.

While he had a huge following - larger in the United States than in Europe - he was the target of as much anger as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive political causes.

From the Guardian:

Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or interpretations, challenging the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning. Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of liberating the written word from the structures of language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not limited to language, Derrida's philosophy of deconstructionism was then applied to western values.

From Le Monde:

Il �tait le dernier survivant de ces penseurs des ann�es 60, catalogu�s "penseurs de 68", (Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, etc..), grands pourfendeurs de la notion de "sujet" .. Jacques Derrida, qui portait beau une �paisse chevelure blanche, propose, � partir de textes philosophiques classiques, une "d�construction", une critique des pr�suppos�s de la parole, une mani�re de d�faire de l'int�rieur un syst�me de pens�e dominant.

[English translation].

Google News search "Jacques Derrida".

Amazon search "Derrida".

Google search "deconstruction".

Google search "Jacques Derrida".

Amazon search "deconstruction".

BLOGOSPHERE REACTIONS: Michelle Malkin -- "DING DONG! DERRIDA IS DEAD":

Dan Flynn has a great chapter on Derrida in his new book [Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas].

Jack Balkin -- "Derrida was an important influence in my intellectual life":

Perhaps the most important thing to say about Derrida is that he was not a Derridean. Other people made use of his work in ways that would probably have horrified him.

David Carr -- "The End of an Earache":

.. to say that he has "died" is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.

Technorati search "Derrida".

A GREAT MORNING in the blogosphere with

Hewitt, Scrappleface and InstaPundit.

DEMOCRACY ..

the voting begins.

KERRY WAS A RELENTLESS, SOULLESS KILLING MACHINE -- AND A LOSER.

Kerry was utterly relentless. On the attack on every front in the most forceful manner possible. At some point this began to work against Kerry. He seems like a relentless -- and soulless -- killing machine, like a Mike Tyson or a shark. And at some point this no longer impressed -- what it began to do is suck all sense of sincerity out of Kerry's incessant attacking. The pile upon pile of double-barrelled attacking seems to have no other theme or depth than personal victory itself. Not a passion for the victory of America, not a passion for the security of the people in the audience, but a passion instead for the personal victory of John Kerry. And this is not the impression you want to leave with America. It was as if John Kerry were a defense attorney with no real care for the fate of his client, but who wanted to crush some witness for the sake merely of his own personal victory -- a transitory victory for the attorney which well could cost the client his liberty. The President tonight assured America that he does forcefully and sincerely care about America and its security. John Kerry did not.

UPDATE: Here's an entertaining scorecard of the debate from the Weekly Standard.

THE PRESIDENT

can take a punch and hit back hard. That's what America wanted to see and that's what it got. To this American the country feels more secure than it did even just a few hours ago. More later.

UPDATE: PoliPundit has already called it .. not only the debate but the 2004 election.

Read the debate transcript here. The President won the debate in the first round with this forceful series:

Two days ago in the Oval Office I met with the finance minister from Iraq. He came to see me. And he talked about how optimistic he was and the country was about heading toward elections. Think about it. They're going from tyranny to elections.

He talked about the reconstruction efforts that are beginning to take hold. He talked about the fact that Iraqis love to be free. He said he was optimistic when he came here, then he turned on the TV and listened to the political rhetoric, and all of a sudden he was pessimistic. This is a guy who, along with others, has taken great risks for freedom. And we need to stand with him.

My opponent says he has a plan. It sounds familiar because it's called the Bush plan. We're going to train troops, and we are. We'll have 125,000 trained by the end of December. We're spending about $7 billion. He talks about a grand idea; let's have a summit; we're going to solve the problem in Iraq by holding a summit. And what is he going to say to those people that show up to the summit? Join me in the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place? Risk your -- risk your troops in a -- in a war you've called a mistake?

Nobody is going to follow somebody who doesn't believe we can succeed and somebody who says the war where we are is a mistake. I know how these people think. I meet with them all the time. I talk to Tony Blair all the time. I talk to Silvio Berlusconi. They're not going to follow an American president who says "follow me into a mistake."

Our plan is working. We're going to make elections, and Iraq is going to be free, and America will be better off for it.

Kerry was utterly relentless. On the attack on every front in the most forceful manner possible. At some point this began to work against Kerry. He seems like a relentless -- and soulless -- killing machine, like a Mike Tyson or a shark. And at some point this no longer impressed -- what it began to do is suck all sense of sincerity out of Kerry's incessant attacking. The pile upon pile of double-barrelled attacking seems to have no other theme or depth than personal victory itself. Not a passion for the victory of America, not a passion for the victory of the people in the audience. A passion for the personal victory -- rhetorical, political, moral -- in this particular debate for John Kerry. And this is not the impression you want to leave with America. It was as if John Kerry were a defense attorney with no real care for the fate of his client, but who wanted to win on some legal side issue or who wanted to crush some witness for the sake merely of his own personal victory -- a transitory victory for the attorney which well could cost the client his liberty. The President tonight assured America that he does forcefully and sincerely care about America and its security. John Kerry did not.

UPDATE II: Here's Allah's blogosphere debate roundup.

This question shouldn't have been a hard one for the President:

President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision and what you did to correct it.

Correct answer: Yes I have made three mistakes as President -- and they were all named Paul O'Neill. Solution? I fired his ass.

But the President couldn't say that, could he?

This is the sort of question that Bill Clinton excelled at with zero pretence of credibility for those with any firm hold on the real world. Of course he did make the soft headed ones swoon. The President tonight did not.

UPDATE III: John Kerry, a man with a plan. See also this.

THE PRE-DEBATE CONSENSUS

looks like this -- if Bush wants to really help himself tonight he needs to lands some serious blows on Kerry. If he continues to play defense -- with hands tied behind -- he'll continue to lose ground in this race. People want the President to respond forcefully. When a man repeatedly calls you a liar, you don't take it lying down. And if you never call the man on these lies, well, the questions however bogus begin to take on a life of there own. The lies spread from the moonbat left and over time become part of the political culture among the badly informed "undecided" voting block. The President and his administration have a history of letting the lies go unanswered. Tonight's the night to squash some of those lies with dead-to-rights blows the average voter can understand. Land a couple of those round-houses on the "hit me" chin of John Kerry (as the VP did on Edwards) and this thing will be on its way to "fini" as John Kerry might say.

A STEADY 5.4% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

remains below it's 30-year average. Here's how Reuters is spinning the story. And here's the part that will matter for the debate:

Labor also said that .. the economy added about 236,000 more jobs than previously thought in the year ended March 2004 .. After including the projected change, it appears that about 585,000 jobs have been lost since President Bush took office in January 2001.

Here's the AP's pre-debate spin:

A lackluster unemployment report and fresh questions about President Bush's rationale for invading Iraq frame the second face-to-face encounter Friday night between Bush and Sen. John Kerry ..

Bush cast the addition of 96,000 jobs as proof his tax cuts have bolstered the jobs market and the economy overall while Kerry pointed out that the country has seen a net job loss under the Bush administration, a first since the Depression.

On the day the report came out, Bush's campaign unveiled an advertisement for national cable networks that touts "nearly 2 million jobs in just over a year," resulting in "nearly 2 million more people back working," and "nearly 2 million more people with wages."

Kerry called the number "disappointing" and contended that even the jobs that have been created under Bush pay less and offer fewer benefits than those that have been lost. "The president does not seem to understand how many middle-class families are being squeezed by falling incomes and spiraling health care, tuition and energy costs," he said in a statement.

See also this AP employment story.

UPDATE: The Heritage Foundation takes a closer look at the numbers here. Quotable:

The [current] 5.4 unemployment rate is .. lower than the average 5.76 rate of the 1990s.

See also this fuller analysis from yesterday. And Larry Kudlow weighs in here. Quotable:

The brightest spot in the Labor Department�s September report is a 3.2 percent annual rate of increase for third-quarter hours worked. This is the strongest quarterly rise in seven years. It probably foreshadows 5 percent real GDP growth for the third quarter, a number that will be released on the last Thursday before the Tuesday presidential election. As for wages, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.1 percent annually through September.

HUGH HEWITT

is conducting another blogosphere symposium. Topic -- John Kerry's press conference.

TIME FLIES --

it's been a year since we elected ourselves a new Governor here in California. Daniel Weintraub reflects.

(One year ago I blogged the recall day and night with a baby in hand. But this daddy no longer has a baby -- he has a wonderful little boy. Time does fly.)

UPDATE: Schwarzenegger gets a report card from the voters. Quotable:

Overall, 65 percent of poll respondents approved of the Republican governor's job performance, a figure that has held steady since May and approaches the popularity of former Gov. Earl Warren more than 50 years ago. But by nearly a 2-1 margin, the same voters opposed the idea of a constitutional amendment to allow foreign-born U.S. citizens to run for president if they have been citizens for at least 20 years.

See a related story here.

MARK

STEYN.

[The Duelfer report] renders John Kerry, on foreign policy and national security, either a complacent fool or an utter fraud. It's not about WMD, it's about the top-to-toe corruption of the entire international system by Saddam Hussein. The "global test" is a racket, and anybody who puts faith in it is jeopardizing America's national security.

THE U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL =

"THE COALITION OF THE BRIBED." Quotable:

"By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support," Mr. Duelfer writes. "Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime."

And the NY Post has more:

Duelfer estimates Saddam raked in $11 billion in illicit earnings while under U.N. sanctions from the early '90s to 2003. Direct Oil-for-Food kickbacks alone pulled in $2 billion. The program's head � Benon Sevan, a lifelong U.N. staffer � was himself on the take, Duelfer reports, paid via companies that he recommended, such as the Panama-registered African Middle East Petroleum Company.

Oil-for-Food helped Saddam create his own coalition to buy influence in the Security Council, blocking any U.S. attempt to enforce the U.N. resolutions. For all the French talk of Jacques Chirac's principled objections to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Saddam realized that the way to France's vote was through its pocketbook. Lucrative contracts for French companies, as well as firms from China and Russia, were part of Saddam's bid for diplomatic protection. A French legislator told Iraqi intelligence in May 2002 that France would veto any U.N. resolution authorizing war against Saddam. That promise proved more trustworthy than what the French were telling the Americans until January 2003.

THE FRIGHTENING THING

about George Bush.

"THE PRESS

has been curiously reluctant to report my constant public support for the president's strategy in Iraq and his policies to fight terrorism. I have been involved in the war on terrorism for two decades, and in my view no world leader has better understood the stakes in this global war than President Bush."

-- Paul Bremer in today's NY Times.

THE SKY

is falling and the Internet is the ruin of us all.

U.N.'s 'OIL-FOR-FOOD'

scam "pretty much was Saddam Hussein's weapons program."

See also this. Quotable:

Enriched with billions of dollars raised by exploiting the United Nations' oil-for-food program, Saddam Hussein spent heavily on arms imports starting in 1999, finding six governments and private companies from a dozen other nations that were willing to ignore sanctions prohibiting arms sales, the report by the top American arms inspector for Iraq has found. The purchases .. included components of long-range missiles, spare parts for tanks and night-vision equipment .. But the relative ease with which Mr. Hussein was able to buy weapons - working directly with governments in Syria, Belarus, Yemen, North Korea, the former Yugoslavia and possibly Russia, as well as with private companies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East - is documented in extraordinary detail, including repeated visits by government officials and arms merchants to Iraq and complicated schemes to disguise illegal shipments to Iraq.

A LEFTIST

"reporter" at Wired News attempts to smear the blogosphere and defend a corrupt ethically challenged professor -- but its all for naught. Dan Ra^ther and some fake documents are involved.

UPDATE: More here and here.

THE DAN

RA^THER PROBLEM:

DON HEWITT: .. here's the problem. Do you put him on the air election night with this cloud hanging over him? Or do you ask him --

BILL O'REILLY: Would you?

HEWITT: Boy that's an agonizing -- I'm glad I don't have to make that decision.

-- More.

THE UTTER RUINS

of John Kerry's Iraq "policy." Quotable:

It's hard to pass the "Global Test" when the people grading it are being bribed to administer a failing grade.

"THE OTHER SICK MAN"

Over-priced universities are shovelling student fees to the Democrat Party for electioneering on the eve of the 2004 vote -- in direct violation of colleges rules. These are corrupt institutions, and you shouldn't be surprised.

$1.78 BILLION

in U.N. aid ended up in the back pocket of French government officials, businessmen and journalists via Saddam Hussein. The coalition of the bribed and the bought, indeed.

One Iraqi intelligence report stated that a French politician assured Saddam in a letter that France would use its veto in the U.N. Security Council against any U.S. effort to attack Iraq.

2008 --

Boomer retirement Dooms Day.

IN THE RUNNING

for the Nobel Prize in economics.

AMERICA

is experiencing something new -- the left has gone mainstream via the Universities, radicalized unions, mass media, and the Democratic party. Where you have swamps you will also have snakes -- and so with the left. Were you have leftists you will also have violence, a pattern as predicable as clockwork and as old as the French revolution.

So we now have a mainstreamed, mainstreet leftist culture, from city to city across the nation, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that many of our fellow citizens captured by this ideology are violently attacking the rest of us.

It's what leftists do. Their ideology sanctions it. There culture encourages it. Their repressed bloodlust for violence demands it. It's going to get worse before it gets better, folks.

TRADE =

PROSPERITY & PEACE. Quotable:

the pacifying effect of trade might be even stronger than the pacifying effect of democracy

HERE'S AN IDEA --

PRIVATIZE FANNIE MAE.

GOOD JOB NEWS ..

... IN AUSTRALIA.

(via the Mises Blog)

THE POWER

of the Democrat dominated news media:

The kids all seemed to think that Cheney was scary .. The most common description of him was as Darth Vader .. I asked them why they thought he was scary and one girl said, "Well, that's the way the media always portrays him."

CAN WE

make sense of Saddam Hussein?

TEXAS LAWMEN

let CBS News off the hook in fraud case.

BELDARBLOG

vs. the Main Stream Media on the Swift Vets vs. John Kerry -- a chronology. And the winner is ... BeldarBlog.

THE COMPLETE

Cartoons of The New Yorker magazine, from Amazon for only $40.80. Unbelievable. Any guess how many pages this book might be? For sturdy coffee tables only.

But how do they manage to include all 68,647 cartoons ever published in the magazine? Well, the book comes with a searchable double CD set. The massive book itself includes merely the "2,004 best" cartoon ever published in the magazine, which is the largest collection ever assembled. OK, here's a hint. The book is less than 1,000 pages ..

A DEMOCRAT AUTHORED

bill to restore the draft was defeated 402-2. Even the bill's author voted against the plan. If your congressmen are either Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. or Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. you might consider voting for their opponents.

NO DECISION YET

on criminal probe of CBS News.

Also this -- CBS News will delay reporting on the outcome of its internal investigation of Ra^thgate until after election day, saying that the network doesn't want to interfer in the outcome of a Presidential election. Quotable:

"Obviously, it should be done probably after the election is over so it doesn't affect what is going on," said CBS head Leslie Moonves.

Make up your own joke.

(via Discerning Texan)

DICK

WON. Gwen Ifill did a much better job than Jim Lehrer. I loved the VP's "Senator Gone" flooring of John Edwards .. who did better than expected.

But enough VP debate analysis. The kids brought home a cold and I'm under the weather. Blogging will be light until I'm feeling better.

UPDATE: Here's how PoliPundit called it. And here is Hugh Hewitt's blow-by-blow analysis.

And Michelle Malkin has this on Gwen Ifill:

Gwen Ifill deserves strong praise for her role as moderator. Unlike the mess that Jim Lehrer presided over, Ifill asked focused, firm, relevant, and useful questions of both candidates. One major complaint is that Ifill neglected to ask a single specific question about the most pressing domestic homeland security matters of our time--illegal immigration/border control.

A GOOGLE SEARCH

for "Dan Rather" & "biased" returns 34,700 hits.

PATTERICO

went on vacation, so the LA Times thought it could get away with this classic LA Times lie. The blogosphere has your back, Patrick.

THE CHARACTER

OF THE FRENCH.

BRUCE BARTLETT --

"The Ghost Senator":

Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler, author of The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security .. starts by noting that there were certain senators that he always knew would be major players on defense issues. Whether he agreed with them or thought they were dreadfully wrong, the views of certain senators always commanded respect. They came to the Senate floor well prepared for serious debate, commanded facts and analyses supporting their positions, and always contributed something meaningful to every issue they engaged in. "But then," Wheeler writes, "there was also another type of senator I would run across in the elevator or see in the chamber -- the ones I could never associate with any deed or even articulated thought that had any lasting effect. The thought would dash through my head, 'Oh, yeah, he's a senator too; forgot that he was even still around here.' John Kerry was such a senator."

Kerry should have been a major player on foreign policy and defense issues, Wheeler thinks. He is a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .. But instead of being a player, Wheeler calls him a "ghost senator." Says Wheeler, Kerry "had all the physical trappings of a senator .. But, Kerry never seemed to make a difference. It was almost as if he was both a member of the Senate and yet not a member, at least not one that mattered. He was a 'ghost senator'; he had all the form, but none of the substance."

CHARLES WALDIE

has John Kerry's Global Test Plan.

HERE I BLOG,

I Can Do No Other.

When Martin Luther posted his blog on the Wittenberg door, he fact-checked Catholic theology against the text of scripture. He proved to the satisfaction of many that the typeface of the Purgatory doctrine was suspect, and that the kerning of faith vs. works was clearly a product of PopeSoft 1500's default settings ..

During Rathergate .. the CBS definition of fact-checking consisted of 1) the ambiguous assessments of four ludicrously under-qualified "experts;" 2) the assurances of two dishonest partisan nutballs, and 3) the journalistic instincts of one doddering news anchor whose world view is locked in his own private Groundhog Day, circa 1974 ..

If the MSM displayed its opinions and biases as completely as the blogs, it wouldn't affect so superior a tone. Had we seen Mary Mapes wearing a paper hat made of Kerry press releases and clapping her hands over the Rather memos while giggling "Bush lied, people died, memos gonna fly, Bush gonna FRY!" then the snide remarks about pajamas might subside ..

THIS STUFF MATTERS.

The ability of the human species to lengthen its lifespan .. has dramatic effects on the need for saving .. The bottom line .. is that the need for savings has grown tremendously in the past fifty years. However, because of Social Security and Medicare, many people feel insulated from this dramatic increase in the need for savings ..

in the middle of the 20th century many economists succumbed to anti-saving bias. John Maynard Keynes saw the "hoarding instinct" leading to reduced demand and unemployment. His followers shared his concern that excessive saving could reduce output and employment. This anti-saving bias was the basis for Social Security's design, in which contributions and benefits were decoupled. Interviewed by Randall Parker in Reflections on the Great Depression, Moses Abramowitz said,

"We wanted to increase incomes, and so demand for goods, and so employment, and so on around. And the structure of Social Security, the fact that benefits were divorced from previous contributions, was part and parcel of the business of supporting demand. We didn't want a Social Security system where everybody paid an employment tax and didn't get immediate benefits from it. We wanted something that paid immediate benefits. But we didn't want to increase saving..."

Social Security has a built-in bias against saving. This was deliberate, based on a Keynesian distrust of thrift. Economists no longer believe that saving is contractionary. Government's largest program is designed to implement a theory that is decades out of date.

-- Arnold Kling.

WALTER CRONKITE.

"I cannot understand how broadcast news should have gotten so entirely oblivious to the whole theory of libel and slander," Cronkite said. "How is it possible for these people to get on the air with any allegation they want to make, any statement they want to make, as if it were true, as if they were journalists, which they are clearly not? They are scandalmongers."

Ah, sorry. Correction. Make that read "the Internet" and not "broadcast news". My bad. But we caught it, right? No harm, no foul (or somesuch).

Source.

MICHAEL MOORE

was offered the fake Ra^thergate documents -- but they couldn't make it past Moore's vaunted truth verification procedure.

"He sought to alter the outcome of an election using documents not good enough for Michael Moore." -- someone should carve that on Dan Ra^ther's tombstone -- or on his forehead.

THE SWIFT VETS

are circulating a petition calling on John Kerry to provide the evidence behind his blanket 1971 slander on American servicemen in Vietnam. Read about it here.

A SEMINAR

in American foreign policy for John "Global Test" Kerry from Libya's from Moammar Ghadhafi:

America as any other states and individuals has the right to defend itself, either in accordance with article 51 of the UN Charter, that is actually inoperative or with else. Right of self defense is a legitimate matter . And America possesses the power enabling it to. In this regard America does not need anybody to defend itself, strike its enemy or even get assistance to justify that.

THE FOLKS

at "The Onion" are mere pretenders -- trust me on this.

I WARNED

you all about this.

THE SCIENCE

of the five second rule. (via Betsy).

DEAN ESMAY INTERVIEWS

Swift Boat vet Van Odell. Quotable:

DW: A couple of your group's members claim to have had their statements distorted by papers such as the Boston Globe. Have you experienced anything like that with any press you've talked to?

VO: The distortion that I have seen is that they say that my claims are unsubstantiated, specifically to the March 13th incident, even though we've got 10 other eyewitnesses who tell the same story I do. I have also been taken to task as a liar by the New York Times and the Washington Post by journalists who've never talked to me ..

DW: What do you say to those who say that because you were not on Lt. Kerry's boat, you did not serve with him?

VO: .. our boats served in combat together, we went on missions together, we knew each other intimately and fought together. This is like saying Major Reno and Captain Benteen did not serve with General Custer because they did not ride on the same horse with him.

But there's lots more.

PUT A "BUY" ORDER

in on Robert Barro for the Nobel Prize in economics.

Virtual markets and election outcomes are discussed in this article. Friedrich Hayek and the division of knowledge come up. And this is pretty funny.

AN ALL VOLUNTEER MILITARY =

FEWER MILITARY CASUALITIES. Here's just one reason. There are many more. Quotable:

the fact that average annual battle-death rates are so much lower in Gulf Wars I and (so far) II than in previous, conscript-using wars is suggestive, at least, of the effectiveness of the all-volunteer force at reducing the danger to U.S. troops.

FANNIE MAY UPDATE --

"The company was cooking the books. Big time."

ANDY ROONY --

What we really need is a nightly full hour of deception and partisan spin from Dan Ra^ther. Who's turn to change Andy, anyway?

NEWSWEEK VETERAN TO THE BLOGOSPHERE --

"quit trying to intimidate the rest of the media." heh.

(via KerryHaters)

ADMIT IT.

You weren't focusing close attention on what John Kerry really said about himself the other night. All the while you were distracted by George Bush's childish face making. And while you were distracted you missed it. You missed John Kerry's big reveal when he really told you who he is and what his real passion about America is. And that moment came when John Kerry really became angry -- when he really felt something deep that reached right into his core as an American. And that precise moment was the moment when John Kerry passionately discussed the what the senator called the single-most serious threat to the national security of the United States. And this wasn't the killing by terrorists of American soldiers and civilians. It was . . . nuclear proliferation. But look more closely. What really made John Kerry angry, what really brought out the raw human passion of the man was not what others might be doing at this very moment to destroy America -- but what America was doing at the present moment to defend itself. If you watched the debate you saw it -- the fullest deepest passion from John Kerry during the whole course of the night's debate. And it came just at this moment when he said:

Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons.

That's right. America is the problem. America is to blame. America is guilty and John Kerry is white hot mad about it. You saw it, but you didn't pay attention. You were busy paying attention to the President's stupid behavior. But while you were looking at George Bush's face, John Kerry was telling you who he is. He's the same man who watched America's totalitarian enemy in Vietnam kill millions of innocent civilians in the most brutal manner -- and who came home to denounce America and every American soldier in Vietnam as the real war criminals and as the real enemy of humanity. The problem with nuclear proliferation? The one that makes John Kerry really angry? America and American arms development. Are you still missing the picture? Are you still interested in George Bush's face?

What you've got here is what they call in television John Kerry's "big reveal" -- a reveal exposing the raw passions of the man when you bore down to his core where genuine anger exists. And that man is the same man we've seen often before -- the John Kerry who was deeply passionate about America's guilt in Vietnam, America's guilt in Central America, and America's guilt in the nuclear arms race.

Do I need to spell it out for you?

It's right there in your face folks, so say it. At the core of John Kerry -- when touch something genuinely angry, true and real, something that really fires his soul -- is a deep running BLAME AMERICA FIRST anger. It was there exposed to the country and the world, staring you in the face. But you chose to look away, you chose to watch George Bush make junior high school faces. You chose not to be serious. Is that the President's fault? Perhaps. But you're a grown up. It's also your fault. You didn't have the simple guts to look this truth in the face and speak it out loud. Because if you did, you would have.

UPDATE: See also this and for background read Hugh Hewitt's "virtual symposium on John Kerry's return to his nuclear freeze roots." A reader email's Hugh:

It is absolutely astounding that the principal specific proposal Kerry advanced in response to the "greatest threat" question was one to constrain the strategic options of the United States! It is also noteworthy that this answer was one where Kerry showed the most emotion. He really is outraged that the United States would seek to acquire a weapon not possessed by other states.

(emphasis added). UPDATE: You can hear John Kerry's most passionate moment of the debate in this clip from Hugh Hewitt. Listen for the point where Kerry says the words highlighted in emphasis. These come just after the words blockquoted above.

We're telling other people you can't have nuclear weapons but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapons that we might even contemplate using. Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down.

"NORTON'S BOOK --

� chock full of factual errors, personal smears and fatuous assertions � is valuable for what it tells you about the debasement of intellectual standards at our leading universities .. ". MORE.

Yes. The OTHER sick man.

THE PRODUCER --

Meet Mary Mapes:

Before she left Seattle to become a producer at Mr. Rather's "CBS Evening News," Ms. Mapes produced a sensational report on a killing of a drug suspect by police that rested on the shoulders of an unreliable source whose story collapsed under cross-examination .. Former colleagues of Ms. Mapes agree that she was a passionate practitioner of advocacy journalism. "She went into journalism to change society," says former KIRO anchorwoman Susan Hutchison. "She always was very, very cause-oriented."

And compare this puff piece on Mapes from the leftist WaPo.

UPDATE: "Great minds thinks alike." I posted the above last night. InstaPundit posted this today -- "puff piece" must be the natural and inevitable language anyone would use to describe the WaPo article on Mapes.

INCOMPETENCE AT

THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Don't they have editors? If they have editors, are the editors idiots?

JOHN LEO --

"Self-inflicted wounds":

Media handling of the charges by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was even more peculiar. Most major news media stayed silent for nine or 10 days as the story of the charges spread over radio and the Internet. A few bloggers argued that this was an attempt by big-time media outlets to rule the Swifties' charges out of bounds. It seemed that way to me, too. When big media finally did rouse themselves and address the issue, they tended to focus tightly on Democratic talking points ..

In the New York Times, Kerry's imaginary Christmas-in-Cambodia yarn was pushed way to the back of an endless story, along with the news that Kerry had told the Senate in 1986 that he had entered Cambodia on his swift boat. The Times apparently had no room to mention that Kerry had told this story many times over 25 years and had described it as a life-changing incident seared into his memory.

But the life-altering experience of Christmas in Cambodia apparently never happened. It was a Kerry fantasy. The press yawned and looked the other way. Kerry said he entered Cambodia with a CIA agent. But how likely is it that the CIA would choose to penetrate an illegal area with a clunky, noisy boat commanded by someone as inexperienced as Kerry?

.. Kerry refused to make public his journal or his military records, and the media seemed uninterested in pushing for him to do so. (Compare this with the energetic media demands for Bush's National Guard records.) Apparently only one media outlet, the Washington Post, made an effort to open up Kerry's records and received only six of 100 pages. On the whole, big-time media reporting on the Swifties was dismal. No wonder the credibility of the news media is headed south.

DAVID HOROWITZ

INTERVIEWED by Jamie Glazov about his new book Unholy Alliance : Radical Islam and the American Left. Quotable:

I have .. applied the same term that Trotsky used to describe the international [leftist] movement when he said they were "frontier guards" for the Soviet state. Since 9/11 the .. left and its "international solidarity" units have acted as frontier guards for the terrorists and the terrorist states .. As for the radical death cult, this parallel was noted before me, and quite eloquently by Paul Berman .. in his book Liberalism and Terror. [Leftists] are best viewed as social redeemers, people deluded into thinking they can .. usher in a future in which there are no fanatics, Islamic or otherwise. On day one of the revolution.. the Islamic lion will lie down with the Jewish, Christian and feminist lambs. People who believe that Palestinian suicide bombers are reasonable individuals acting out of political desperation and not sick enthusiasts of a religious death cult, are themselves partial believers in that cult. Their dementia is to believe that if only enough Israelis/Christians/neo-conservatives are eliminated, the world will become a livable and just place. This is the group psychosis that afflicts our time ..

STEYN.

He was in the same state he was in in early 2003, just before launching the Iraq war, when he was tired and punchy and stumbling round the country not making a case against Saddam but just droning the same phrases over and over: "He's a dictator." Smirk. "He gassed his own people." Smirk.

On Thursday, his own people seemed to have gassed him .. [Bush] said: "It's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard .. It is hard work," again and again .. [But it's also] tough and .. hard doing the title number of Singin' in the Rain, but Gene Kelly made it seem blithe and effortless and graceful. And the President of the United States owes his people a performance - in wartime especially. Churchill didn't just communicate the weight of the burden that he carried but also that he had the strength to bear it.

More. You can also find this in the Chicago Sun-Times.

A LESSON IN ECONOMICS 101:

Cuba plans to close more than 100 factories for all of October as part of a plan to deal with power shortages. Other measures to save energy include a shorter working week, reduced street lighting and scheduled power cuts. The power shortages have caused a range of problems - affecting the flow of drinking water in homes and causing fridges and freezers to stop working.

A LESSON IN PROPOGANDA 101:

Western diplomats say Cuba is finding it difficult to make the investment its power system needs because of a US trade embargo.

Source: The BBC.

ROY HOFFMAN,

founder of Swift Vets for Truth, profiled by the leftwing WaPo. Quotable:

Douglas Brinkley says he soft-pedaled Hoffmann's role in the book [Tour of Duty], but that he is "the most egregious example of blatant disregard for civilian casualties and for the lives of his men in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. He infected the lives of a lot of Navy guys down there, and he has a lot of answering to do," Brinkley says about Hoffmann. "He can either recognize he has blood on his hands and deal with his own ghosts or go where it's safe and reach for the flag. He can see a therapist or wage a new war, and he did the latter."

See also this, "Swift boat vets' stories hold up under fire" by Roy Hoffmann.

MORE UNSUBSTANTIATED

Ra^thergate lies from Democrat Tom Brokaw. And Dan "a bit too tightly wrapped in the flag" Ra^ther plays the victim. Gosh darn those Internet meanies are ganging up on poor little Dan when all he's trying to do is be patriotic. Quotable:

You know that the role of the patriotic journalist is to put your fear aside, stand up, look them in the eye, ask the rough questions. But you also know that when you do that, you're going to get hammered...

And Bill Dyer has a question for Tom Brokaw:

Would you care to show me where in the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics it says that Mr. Rather and CBS News were entitled to knowingly collaborate in the propagation of forged documents in an attempt to enflame the emotions and prejudices of the populace and thereby defeat a sitting United States President?

Democrat Howard Kurz has more. Quotable:

Dan Ra^ther, vowing to resist any "smear" campaign against him by the Bush administration or other critics.

As they say, you can't make stuff like that up.

UPDATE: More from Jeff Jarvis. Quotable:

Tom has been reading too much Tina Brown and listening too little to America.

JOHN KERRY WON'T RELEASE

his medical records, not even his military medical records -- and the NY Times neglects to report that -- but Kerry did let a reporter Democrat from the NY Times talk to three of Kerry's doctors. The doctors cross their heart promised not to lie to the NY Times.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has the goods on the Times. Here's a teaser:

It might be worth mentioning to the Times that when they reveal such ignorance about the charges made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they appear to be flacking for Kerry. Imagine that.

THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS TO KNOW --

Is John Kerry hiding his Iraq plan in his ass?

TIMES WATCH SPECIAL REPORT:

"Kerry in Cambodia" vs. "Bush was 'AWOL'" -- A Stark Double Standard. Quotable:

Sen. John Kerry emerged as the likely Democratic candidate for president after racking up primary wins February 3. The next day, in a foreshadowing of campaign controversies to come, New York Times reporters Elisabeth Bumiller and David Halbfinger compared Kerry and Bush on their Vietnam service. From the very first line, the Times found in favor of Kerry ..

OH, THAT LEFTIST MODERATOR:

When people .. note that Bush "seemed on the defensive," they ought to acknowledge that it was, at least in part, prompted by Lehrer's failure to ask Kerry questions that would put him on the defensive.

-- More Tim Graham.

THE LEFT SHOWS

it's true colors -- standing ovations for a Robert Redford movie celebrating the life of a Stalinist killer.

UPDATE: See also this. Quotable:

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian .. [he] presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system .. [Indeed] to get a lot of other people killed was central to Che's imagination.

And here are some typical reviews:

It's got poetry to it -- the poetry of humanity.

"Walter Salles's stirring and warm-hearted film reconstructs a journey across South America."

The film is like a series of pretty postcards with poor people - Masterpiece Theatre for Marxists

A deeply felt and beautifully acted hagiography.

A mesmerizing look at an asthmatic, rich-boy medical student in the act of discovering his insurgent spirit.

this soulful and reflective film, as gentle as it is potent ..

Salles presents the evolutionary course of a young man who coincidentally became the dorm-room poster boy for an idealistic generation, and captures the lovely, heart-and-eye-opening ode to youthful possibility with affection and compassion.

Imagine such things written in reference to a new movie about, say, Hermann G�ring or Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Hitler or Joseph Mengele.

EDITORS TO REPORTERS --

Give us dirt on the President. Quotable Bill Gertz:

Former Bush colleagues in the guard have been interviewed scores of times. They tell some interesting stories about their press contacts. One retired officer quotes a reporter for a major East Coast daily as telling him she wants off the Bush guard beat, but her editors tell her to keep digging. "I tell them there's nothing there," the retired officer quotes the reporter as saying. That officer recalls another reporter saying, "My editors don't want any good stuff on Bush."

A SIMPLE TEST

FOR UNDECIDED VOTERS.

31% OF "UNCOMMITTEDs"

in a CBS poll of "uncommitted voters" actually already preferred John Kerry for President. Scroll down here to see poll and the data.

INTERVIEWS WITH THE CBS NEWSIES

who gave us Ra^thergate will not opened to the public. CBS must anticipate that much will be said that won't stand up to public scrutiny. Remember this next time CBS get on its high-horse and demands open public hearings on this or that issue.

"WHAT

do you need, what do you need now, how much more will it take to get you to join us?" -- John Kerry stakes out a negotiation position for the U.S. at the U.N. Bill Dyer comments.

EVERYTHING BUSH

could have said, but didn't -- Bush/Cheney '04 fact check John Kerry's debate claims.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER.

I'd missed this one on Kerry, Vietnam and Iraq. Quotable:

Here is Kerry, after 30 years of torturous reexamination of Vietnam, coming full circle and running as Nixon 1968: mysterious plan, Iraqification, out in four years. A novelist could not have written this tale.

See also this.

(via Fish Food).

JIM LEHRER.

Unbalance and unfair -- Ace of Spades reports:

I have to preface this by noting that I didn't see the first half hour of the debate; I heard it-- or most of it. I missed the second half hour, and watched the third. I'll catch up on it all later. But I saw/heard enough to have an opinion ..

I had assumed that all the tough-on-Kerry questions were asked during the half-hour I missed. How does he explain his ever-shifting position on Iraq? Etc.

I said to a friend, "We must have missed the part where Lehrer grilled Kerry on his changing positions." "Maybe not," the friend said. "Maybe he never asked." "No," I said. "They couldn't do that.""Couldn't they?" was the answer.

Well, it turns out, gee willickers, they could simply ignore the all of the toughest questions for Senator Kerry. The debate resembled a Katie Couric interview -- tough questions with follow-ups for the Republican like "Please explain why you lied or screwed up so badly," while the Democrat is offered his own "tough questions," like "Please explain why your opponent lied or screwed up so badly."

I don't know why Bush keeps agreeing on Jim Lehrer as a moderator. I hope no other Republicans ever make that mistake again.

But we can cry bias all we like. The fact is, Lehrer asked Kerry very easy questions for him, tossed up high fat hanging curve balls, and Kerry, predictably, knocked them high and far and true. The net result is still that, in the public's mind, Kerry seemed more comfortable with the questions. As was Jim Lehrer's design.

THE EVIDENCE IS IN --

John Kerry wrote the Bay Hap River after action report.

JUST BACK FROM

the 2004 Society of Professional Journalists National Convention, Staci Kramer files this report at the USC Annenberg site -- "CBS Scandal Highlights Tension Between Bloggers and News Media". Kramer is a member of the SPJ ethics committee. Quotable:

While bloggers and others online pushed back at the CBS story with a lot of clever work, much of the "information" flying around the Net about the documents was inaccurate -- including claims that the font didn't exist in 1972 (Times Roman was first used in 1931; the IBM version was known as Press Roman in the 70s), that proportional spacing wasn't available on typewriters (IBM introduced it in 1941) and that the superscript "th" wasn't possible then (superscript capability could be purchased as an option).

Some of these mistakes where in the early postings by Powerline, and it wasn't until I'd heard an expert on Hewitt's radio show and I'd seen this at LGF's that I said "put a fork in it" and started posting on the faked documents here at PrestoPundit. My first posting was this one, linked that day by The Corner.

(via Discerning Texan, who always has the best cartoons.)

YOU KNOW

the debate didn't go well for George Bush when you get a post-debate phone call from your lefty Yalie sister-in-law. In my estimation, the winner of the debate was Jim Lehrer, who threw soft-balls and curve-balls to the immense advantage of Kerry, while no one noticed. For an example of a biased question, try this last question of the debate:

Mr. President, this is the last question .. It's a new subject, new question and it has to do with President Putin and Russia. Did you misjudge him or are you - do you feel that what he is doing in the name of anti-terrorism by changing some democratic processes is O.K.?

To get a sense of the bias, imagine a parallel question, circa 1940, for FDR -- "Did you misjudge Hitler or do feel its ok to kill Poles by the hundreds of thousands?"

A second example of bias? John Kerry talked again and again of his "plan" for Iraq, but he gave exactly zero specifics. In fact, a big part of the political buzz in recent weeks has been that fact that everyone knows he really has no special plan. As far as anyone can tell it's a Nixonian "secret" plan. But Jim Lehrer -- who stopped several times to ask for clarifications and specifics -- never stopped to ask Kerry to get specific about his constantly referenced "plan".

The bottom line is that a a conservative or a classic liberal would not have given you a debate environment so overwhelmingly favorable to John Kerry -- and a Republican certainly would have asked a very different array of questions than did MSN Democrat Jim Lehrer.

Here's the transcript of the debate.

Blogosphere commentary:

PoliPundit -- excellent and to-the-point analysis from the Poli crew. Quotable:

I�ve been watching the debate for five minutes now. Despite my partisan inclinations, I have to admit that Kerry has won this debate. And not just in the high-school debate-coach sense of the word. Kerry comes off as the prosecutor accusing Bush of incompetence. Bush comes off as his Meet-The-Press, press-conference version - dogged, arrogant and unlikable.

Hugh Hewitt -- he's got a round-by-round analysis of the debate, and nearly flawless pro-Bush spin. Quotable:

Bush gets a big win, by hitting all his messages over and over again. He wins on substance. Biggest mistake by Kerry: "The Global Test."

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear sees it the way I did:

I'm not hypersensitive about such things. But these questions are turning out to be extraordinarily biased. Every question seems to be "so, let's talk about the mistakes Bush has made...".

And Jim Geraghty puts words to my thoughts:

Every time Kerry opened his mouth, conservatives thought of the eight different responses and attacks that they wanted to see, and Bush mostly didn't use them.

Bush's slow, mostly fact-empty and halting speaking was aggravating. The President was emoting and repeating "core principle" talking points, but he wasn't engaging the detailed substance of the debate. Compared to this, Ronald Reagan in '80 and '84 was a think tank wonk brimming with facts, arguments, details and specifics.

John Derbyshire got it right: "The President is a dismally poor public speaker."

But don't get too excited about John Kerry -- more people than you imagine will have noticed things like this.

The post-debate verdict is in -- Jim Lehrer did turn in a more biased even than expected performance last night. N.Z. Bear has a blow-by-blow account.

(Note to INDC -- next time read PrestoPundit before you write something like this.)

Wish I'd know about this drinking game before the debate.

Smash goes multi-tasking while live-blogging last night.

AND FINALLY, don't miss Hugh Hewitt's "MEMO TO PRODUCER DUANE". Kerry may have won the debate, but he's going to get his ass kicked in the all-importnat post-debate round.