Category: News

In this op-ed piece by John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate explains why residents of middle America have reason to be optimistic if they vote Kerry-Edwards.

Stephen Green reflects on the Democratic Party’s national strategy:

If Drudge has it right, then the Kerry-Edwards campaign is going to do its damnedest to turn our fine nation into a banana republic.

To these guys, winning office is more important than the sanctity of elections. Holding power is more important than the Constitution. Much as I despise at least half of what most Republicans stand for, they don’t seem nearly as willing to trash the system they’re trying to run. Too many Democrats, especially at the national level, just don’t care that our system, our nation is far more important than any single election.

I could mention the Lautenberg Trick in New Jersey. Or Gore’s ballot shenanigans in Florida. Or the voter-registration fraud currently going on in Colorado, Nevada, and elsewhere. Or the Democrat’s successful call to bring election observers into this country. Bring them in from where, Venezuela? Hey, no big deal sullying the reputation of the world’s oldest continuously-functioning democracy, just so long as we can make the Republicans look bad, right?

He forgets to mention Missouri’s decision to run a dead Democrat for Senate in 2000. Which, I believe, Al Franken approved of based on his comments in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

In some cases, I think it’s beyond a simple lust for power; with naked ambition, there’s some calculation. I think that at the base level, some vocal members of the Democratic party and some moonbat fringes of Left thought just must rule the Others in the lesser tribes; the rubes from the middle of the country, the undereducated (which means those who think differently), and those who have that dreaded Christian religion.

Because they’re Ubermensch, although undoubtedly there’s a nicer term that they use when discussing it amongst themselves.

— MfBJN Exclusive — Must Credit MfBJN —

Here’s telling quote from the debate last night:

KERRY: I want you to notice how the president switched away from jobs and started talking about education principally.

Let me come back in one moment to that, but I want to speak for a second, if I can, to what the president said about fiscal responsibility.

Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country.

Help me while I explain the “Interviewed by our WoT allies like Sudan” logic behind this bombshell:

• The president is fiscally irresponsible, although he really only gets to spend the money given to him by the legislature, which includes the Senate, which contains 98 state representatives who show up to vote on spending bills. But George W. Bush has truly not vetoed any spending, and he has not squeezed the great self-interested bureaucracies that he heads to offer rebates.
• John Kerry is fiscally irresponsible, at least in the vast volume of public spending and programs and giveaways he’d implement if President. Undoubtedly, he’s voted for gratuitous spending as a Senator (even though he’s tried to balance the social programs with unequally small cuts in military programs).
• Tony Soprano, a fictional character, is a criminal.
• Therefore, when George W. Bush (fiscally irresponsible) lectures John Kerry (fiscally irresponsible) about fiscal responsibility, it’s like Tony Soprano (criminal) lecturing John Kerry (?) about law and order.

Irrefutable logic that seems to have fallen and struck its head while taking photographs of a demonstration in Iran.

From various sources including Associated Press and the New York Times (links courtesy of Boots and Sabers and Little Green Footballs respectively), we get the dramatic fevered imaginings of a few:

What was that bulge in the back of President Bush’s suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week?

According to rumors racing across the Internet this week, the rectangular bulge visible between Mr. Bush’s shoulder blades was a radio receiver, getting answers from an offstage counselor into a hidden presidential earpiece. The prime suspect was Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s powerful political adviser.

In the hopes of elevating this line of thought from the absurd to the….well, there’s really nowhere more absurd to go as a serious story. So I will do my best to mock it.

The real reasons for the bulge under Bush’s jacket:

• It’s the wind-up key. Because President Bush, unlike other candidates in this particular race, actually shows up for the job for which taxpayers pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he had to send his wind-up body double to the debate. And it didn’t do to badly. It certainly looked less mechanical than, say, Al Gore.
• Missouri is a right to carry state. Since Bush can’t feel the comfort of cold steel in leather in Washington DC, which he frequently visits on the people’s business unlike his opponent, Bush wore a piece to the debate. He wore it McClane-style so as to not frighten the undecideds in the audience nor to stir controversy with the press should his jacket fall open to display it. Undoubtedly, they would say he was trying to intimidate Kerry and pander to the NRA.
• It’s where the mechanical arms attach.

  To manipulate oil prices, to violate the civil rights of every man, woman, and child in the world, to start wars just to watch them burn, and to conduct his other maniacal schemes, Dr. Octobush has devised a set of extra chimp arms to help him do all the evil that he does more easily. They attach via a special clip wired directly into his brain.

• Man, who knew how small devil wings folded up?

Hey, feel free to add your own. We’re on the Internet for crying out loud. It’s all tRuth.

(Note: Capital R truth does in fact differ from capital T truth, but it’s more accommodating to those whose personal feelings differ from the real world, so it’s capital E bEtter.)

Looks like Jim Talent, R. MO, is putting his, erm, talents to work on issues of national importance: lighting the Gateway Memorial Arch pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month:

108th CONGRESS

2d Session

S. 2895

AN ACT

To authorize the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, to be illuminated by pink lights in honor of breast cancer awareness month.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. ILLUMINATION OF GATEWAY ARCH IN HONOR OF BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH.

In honor of breast cancer awareness month, the Secretary of the Interior shall authorize the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, to be illuminated by pink lights for a certain period of time in October, to be designated by the Secretary of the Interior.

Passed the Senate October 5, 2004.

Swell. One of my two Senate representatives, purportedly of the small-government party, has wasted his time, his staff’s time, and other taxpayer-funded time not to mention sundry expenses to turn this idea into law.

And that’s before we get to purchasing a large number of pink light bulbs or pink cells and paying maintenance people to implement them…..

But that Jim Talent, he’s sensitive.

Another internal consistency pointed out, courtesy MfBJN:

Remember this nugget in the first debate between Kerry and Bush?

I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren‘t willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.

How about someone directly contrast this with 1994’s Agreed Framework, wherein the Clinton administration exchanged fuel for promises that North Korea would scrap its nuclear program.

John Kerry wants to apply the unsuccessful Agreed Framework to Iran.

But at least that foreign policy type is consistent. Consistently bad.

But hopefully, perhaps to them, a Republican administration will come along after a short failed Kerry era to take the fall for Iran’s nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, back in the Seattle Post-Intelligence, columnist Thomas Shapley decries an ad from a candidate for Senate. George Nethercutt, the Republican challenger, includes in the advertisement Senator Patty Murray from this immortal exchange:

“He [Osama bin Laden]’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful,” Murray told them.

Shapley tut tuts the despicable practice of using someone’s words against her and opens a can of whoop metaphor:

By that standard, fighting crime by trying to figure out what drove Gary Ridgway to murder 48 women is excusing him of the crimes. Sorry, that Doberman won’t hunt.

Perhaps Shapely took a Doberman hunting when he went crawling through the brush with John Kerry and a trusty shotgun while deerhunting.

(Link via National Review‘s Kerry Spot.)