John Kerry, America's buffoon-in-chief

Okay, you get caught disparaging the troops. You do it on camera, and what came out of your mouth is pretty clear-you think the troops are stupid failures. So what do you do to extricate yourself from the situation? Blame Bush. At least, that's what John Kerry just did.

He said he had been criticizing Bush, not the "heroes serving in Iraq," and said the president and his administration are the ones who owe U.S. troops an apology because they "misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it."

"This is the classic GOP playbook," Kerry said in a harshly worded statement. "I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did. I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium."

This guy is the classic, shallow minded buffoon. I wonder if he gets upset because the media doesn't write his quotes the way he wishes he would have said them.

The quiet decider in '06?

In this off year election, motivating the base is huge because in a normal off year election, it is the base that makes the difference. I've been getting a little nervous about that independent, unaffiliated voter group this year, though. If they are motivated to turn out, they are going to decide this election, and nobody has really paid that close of attention to them this year. Stuart Rothenberg sounds the warning:

But even if Republicans turn out, GOP candidates could find themselves in hot water in dozens of districts that they ordinarily should hold. That's because independent voters are not acting the way they normally do.

Independents may not turn out at the same rate as strong partisans in midterm elections, but for dozens of Republicans trying to hold their seats in a potentially strong Democratic wave -- particularly those running in marginal districts -- independents will be plentiful enough at the polls to separate winners from losers. In Connecticut, for example, independents (unaffiliated voters) constitute a plurality of all state voters.

Normally, independents break roughly evenly between the two parties. In the 2000 presidential election, independents went for then-Texas Gov. Bush over Al Gore, 47 percent to 45 percent. Four years later, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) bested Bush 49 percent to 48 percent among independents.

This year, that's not close to being the case. "There just aren't any independents this year," joked one Republican strategist I talked with recently. "There are Republicans, Democrats and soft Democrats."

The good news is that if that unaffiliated, independent voter does swing congress to the Democrats, their victory may end up being hollow. That voting group can swing pretty wildly in two years and could end up back in the Republican court in '08 if mismanaged by the Democrats, which is a distinct possibility.

New York Times plays to stereotypes

The New York Times this morning does a marvelous job of playing to stereotypes, namely the ones that proclaim the Brits to be stodgy, cold, boring, fuddy-duddies.

This withering away of homegrown tradition makes people hate Halloween all the more. What could be more unattractive, they argue, than a bunch of rapacious, acquisitive children traipsing around the streets, demanding candy in exchange for nothing?

“Trick or treat? I don’t know about you, but my answer to this question, if I’m honest, would be unprintable in a family newspaper,” the critic A. N. Wilson wrote recently in The Daily Mail. “Let’s say it’s stronger than ‘push off.’ Yet the little beggars will soon be round, banging and ringing at our doors with this irritating refrain.”

Mr. Wilson blamed “the kitsch hotchpotch known as American Gothic.”

Hugh O’Donnell, a professor of language and popular culture at Glasgow Caledonian University, said in an interview that “the main complaint is that it’s just fun without any meaning behind it.”

“It’s no longer got any relationship to anything — not the old Celtic idea of the living and the dead, or the Christian tradition of Allhallows Eve,” said Mr. O’Donnell, who this week is the host of an academic conference at the university examining Halloween. He plans to dress as Dracula for the official dinner.

Of course, the Times could have found a good number of Americans with similar feelings. The fact is that Britain must not hate Halloween that much, as the article does state that British spending on Halloween has increased from about $28 million to $228 million in the last five years. But I guess they couldn't find any of those Halloween lovers to quote for the story.

Pat that headline writer on the back

I love the absurdity of this headline from the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune:

Truck lands in river after cheeseburger incident

You think politics are ugly now?

Then just wait. The media has set the scene for this election: The Democrats are going to be huge winners. Congress is their birth right this year. This is the year of the Democrat Revolution, the year the American people finally come to their senses and repudiate those cold and nasty Republicans. After all of that, if the Republicans can hold one or both houses of Congress, there are going to be a lot of loony lefties that will not be able to process it. The media will have no choice but give some air time and ink to conspiracy theories to protect their fading credibility. This could the ugliest of the past three elections...if the Republicans can just hold on to enough seats. I still think that Republicans will hold the Senate and also that there is an outside chance that they'll maintain a slim, slim lead in the House. If that comes to pass, we may have a perfect storm of post election anger from the left.

Of course, if the Democrats do pull off a sweep, prepare yourself for so much condescension that'll you'll be begging to be infected with the bird flu as an alternative because you'd vomit less.

The Heather Wilson for Congress ad

Wow, this is priceless. This commercial will be a classic if Wilson can pull off a win. Anytime your opponent is asked in a debate how she will assure that taxes will not be raised and she goes speechless, you've got some great footage.

St. Louis: Most dangerous U.S. city

St. Louis has the dubious distinction of knocking Camden, New Jersey out of the number one spot of most dangerous U.S. Cities:

A surge in violence made St. Louis the most dangerous city in the country, leading a trend of violent crimes rising much faster in the Midwest than in the rest of nation, according to an annual list.

The city has long fared poorly in the rankings of the safest and most dangerous American cities compiled by Morgan Quitno Press. Violent crime surged nearly 20 percent in St. Louis from 2004 to last year, when the rate of such crimes rose most dramatically in the Midwest, according to FBI figures released in June.

It is unfortunate because I really do like St. Louis. It has been a dangerous city for a while, though. 13 years ago during my senior year of high school, some of my classmates and I spent time in both St. Louis and Detroit. While St. Louis was the nicer, less scary city, it was just as dangerous. I'll spare everyone the personal anecdotes, but I will say that we had more moments in St. Louis where we were in potentially bad situtations than we did in Detroit. Even given that, I still enjoy St. Louis.

Congrats, condolences Cards

I'd like to start out by congratulating my old high school's football team. On Saturday, the Chi-Hi Cardinals upset previously undefeated Verona in the WIAA high school football playoffs 17-14. It was a game I wanted to attend but did not, and it sounds like it was a heck of an ending. Next up for the Cards is a venerable SPASH team.

Now for the condolences. Chi-Hi's longtime DECA advisor and marketing teacher Tim Lieding passed away from Hodgkin's disease. I knew Lieding as I had him as a teacher/advisor for two years. This was a guy who very easily could have had a dour outlook on life, as he had experienced more than his fair share of health problems. Instead students were treated to a guy who had an infectious enthusiasm, seemingly boundless energy, and a positive, free spirited approach to life. He was an influential person in the lives of many students who came through his program, and he will be missed.

The Aussies are coming! The Aussies are coming!

The Australian noticed that Tennessee Senate hopeful Democrat Harold Ford has a tenuous grip on international affairs.

His skilled oration on domestic politics may be flawless, but his grip on foreign policy is error-prone. Yesterday he stumbled into gaffes on the North Korean nuclear tests and then mentioned Australia in the same breath as rogue nations wanting to go nuclear.

"Here we are in a world today where more countries have access to nuclear weapons than ever before," Mr Ford said, adding that when he left college in 1992 he thought the nuclear age had come to an end "and America would find ways to eliminate the number of chances that a rogue group or a rogue nation would get their hands on nuclear material".

<>"Today nine countries have it - more than ever before - and 40 are seeking it, including Argentina, Australia and South Africa," he said.
[...]
On North Korea, he claimed Pyongyang had conducted two nuclear tests, the first of which he said occurred on July 4. This confuses the ballistic tests Pyongyang carried out on that date with the single nuclear test earlier this month.

The gaffes were lost on the audience and he was given a rousing standing ovation from Democrats and Republicans alike. Any chance of clarifying Mr Ford's remarks with the man himself was impossible as minders shielded any international media from asking questions, ushering Mr Ford away.

"You don't win us any votes," said his spokeswoman. And she might have added that it also means he is insulated from pesky questions probing his limitations on enunciating a foreign policy involving a trusted ally.

<>
It's kind of sad that it took the Australian news media to point this out. But of course, something like this could get in the way of the American media's preferred narrative, a Democrat revolution. God help us.

And the scales fell from their eyes

Peggy Noonan has a decent piece up at OpinionJournal today in which she wonders whether some Republicans want to lose this year. It is hardly a new thought, seeing that it has been debated amongst conservative bloggers for months. I do have one serious quible with it, though, and that is this statement:

But there's unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of "conservative."

He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn't go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, "This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm changing things, here's my thinking, here are the implications." The cynics around him likely thought this a good thing. To explain is to make things clearer, or at least to try, and they probably didn't want it clear. They had the best of both worlds, a conservative reputation and a liberal reality.

That is flat out incorrect. Has she forgotten about compassionate conservatism? Has she forgotten that this is, after all, the son of a man whom conservatives came to despise during his own presidency. No, playing the ignorance card is not acceptable here. We all knew as far back as 2000 that we were not getting a perfect conservative in George W. Bush. If we try now to say we didn't know, we're only being dishonest with ourselves. We knew we were getting a guy with deep conservatism on some issues, but who by and large was not that conservative.

If there has been any failure, it is that we conservatives have not acted to cultivate truly conservative candidates, elect them, and then pushed them to higher offices. We had a grouping in 1994. Some of them we didn't hold accountable enough and they went native. With others, we went along with the self defeating ideals of term limits, and watched them voluntarily leave office, true to their ideals. There are only a few left. And now, angry at how things have turned out, some conservatives are going to pick up their toys and go home by sitting out this election. We conservatives certainly do need to do some soul searching, but that soul searching should not start with the soul of conservatism but with our own individual conservative souls. We each own a piece of where things are at. Our only choice now is to roll up our sleaves and start fixing things. I'm of the opinion that it is easier to fix something while it is still operable. My fear is that a lot of conservatives have already decided that the only way to fix things is to completely dismantle the conservative movement and rebuild it again from scratch.

On politicians and second thoughts

I was amused by this paragraph in a Reuters story on Wednesday:

Politicians should think twice about allowing some flood-prone areas of the U.S. Gulf coast to be redeveloped in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a top research group said after studying floods around the world.

Well, there's most of the problem, actually. There are too many politicians that don't think the first time, let alone a second time.

The French butchery of language

There is this notion that French is a beautiful language. I don't really share that notion. I find the language, even when spoken in the native tongue, sounds like the speaker is both drunk and with a severely swollen tongue. So I should have known better today. I spoke with someone in Quebec. This person had a wonderful Polish last name. Despite the fact that I was calling Quebec, I brushed up on my Polish last names in an attempt to impress somebody, anybody, with a good pronunciation. I did well, I thought, until the person on the other end of the line, in a snotty French accent, corrected my pronunciation. It had been completely Francophied. I couldn't even understand it. If you want to hear gibberish, that's your recipe: Take a good Polish last name and translate it into French.

Jim Webb, the new Foley

Is Jim Webb running for Senate because he heard about the great Page program? Here's a suggestion for everyone. If you think there is even the most remote chance that you'll run for office one day, don't write a novel that includes pedophilia and incest like this (from Drudge):

– Lost Soldiers: “A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”

This will make Jim Webb, Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia, the new Mark Foley. It doesn't matter that it is fiction. Most Americans are repulsed by things like this, and I doubt that Virginians will send someone who wrote the above to a Congress already rocked by a virtual pedophilia scandal. Welcome back to the Senate, George Allen. Ya nearly blew it, but your opponent was dumber than you.

One's relationship with freedom

The Anchoress has an interesting piece at Captain's Quarters on the demographic death of old Europe. In it I found a quote that really struck me.

This article also addresses the inability and disinterest of secularist cultures (not, mind you secular governments, but the culture of the secular elite) to fight to keep what they have: In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

That is, in a nut shell, the free and developed world's biggest weakness today. Too many people know how to enjoy freedom, but they couldn't fight for it if they wanted to. They simply don't know how, or they are too ambivilant to learn. It is particularly true of modern Europe.

Home prices drop

Interesting.

The median price of a new home plunged in September by the largest amount in more than 35 years, even as the pace of sales rebounded for a second month.

The Commerce Department reported that the median price for a new home sold in September was $217,100, a drop of 9.7 percent from September 2005. It was the lowest median price for a new home since September 2004 and the sharpest year-over-year decline since December 1970. The weakness in new home prices was even sharper than a 2.5 percent fall in the price of existing homes last month, which had been the biggest drop on record.

Tell that to my local community. My house was just revaluated and they jacked up the property valuation 40%. Some of that 40% we were prepared for, but some of it put the house well above market value and what we paid for it just two years ago. If I ever leave Wisconsin, it'll be because of the property taxes, plain and simple. What a racket.

Editorializing ledes

If there were ever a text book example of media editorializing their ledes, this one would be it. From Reuters (who else?):

President George W. Bush signed legislation on Thursday to build 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border, an election-year move against illegal immigration aimed at helping Republicans.

This only helps the Republicans in some sectors. There is a reason that nothing was accomplished on illegal immigration this election year. It is because the issue cuts across party lines and any one stance helps a politician with one group of supporters and dings them with another. Could it possibly be that this poor compromise is just the best the weak spined Congress could come up with to address illegal immigration this year?

Shaw: Save Olbermann! Vote Dem!

Russell Shaw at HuffPo proposes a new fear to keep Americans up at night: The fear that if Republicans hold Congress, Keith Olbermann's show could be cancelled.

Fear that if a Democratic takeover doesn't happen in at least one chamber- or better yet, both- Keith Olbermann's corporate bosses may decide that, well, we gave him his say and although it was close, the results have shown America doesn't agree with him. That'd be the Anmerica (sic) who just might not want to buy products from advertisers on Keith's show.

That paragraph made me chuckle. That's right, America, fear for Keith Olbermann's job. If he loses it, his ratings, his angry neurosis, and his undeserved condescension will have nothing to do with it. It'll be the fault of voters and those nasty Republicans. The real fact of the matter is Olbermann's job will be less stable with a Democrat Congress than a Republican one. With a Democrat Congress, his loonie angry shtick will only have one target, the President. You take away that much of Olbermann's schtick, and he's done for because he is a one trick pony with a dedicated audience of angry nuts just like him.

'Environmentally friendly' celebs

Heh. This article that Drudge is pointing to is rather amusing.

Hybrid cars are all the rage in Hollywood. Celebrities drive them like they're a badge of honor. You save a few gallons of gas, you save the planet. Right? Well, not when you hop on a private jet and burn enough fuel to propel NASCAR through 2050.

Of course, the stars need to go here and there. The location shoots, the fabulous vacations, etc. But that's why God created United Airlines. G-IV's, on the other hand, were created in the image of precious celebs.

Go there to read about J-Lo's, Leo's, Julia's, Pitt's, and Clooney's eco-blind spot-private jets.

Random midterm election thought

At what point will Republican pessimism over the midterm elections become a self fulfilling prophecy? Hand wringing can get the base to the polls, but it can also turn off those independent and right leaning Democrats.

How to sell a book...

...by Barack Obama. I've been thinking about Barack Obama's little statement about running for President. Frankly, he has little to gain by doing so at this point. The 2008 primaries are going to be a meat grinder, and while his lack of experience may help him to some extent, the other Democratic candidates are going to use it to crucify his chances. On the other hand, if he holds out and the Democrats lose, he may be perfectly situated for 2012. If the Dems were to win, then he will still be plenty young in 2016 and he'll have time to build a pretty impressive Presidential resume. So I'm chalking this up for what I see it as...a clever way to sell some more books. I think the only way he'll run is if Hillary lurches hard to the left and he sees plenty of daylight to her, and everyone else in the Dem field's, right.