I thought this was well known…
…but maybe not.
Yahoo! News – Redskins May Predict Presidential Winner
This election season, Washington Redskins cornerback Fred Smoot has a predicament: For Kerry to win, the Redskins have to lose on Sunday- at least according to a bizarre statistical correlation that’s been accurate for seven decades.
Gee, who do you think I’m gonna root for?
Otter Defense
From ??TBogg??
The Otter Defense
…but to us aficionados of the lowbrow, it is quite obvious that Bush is actually employing the time-tested Otter Defense:
Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the actions of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you … isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!
Early Voting
Lynn and I just got back. Turnout was really quite impressive – it took us 1.5 hours!
Please vote if you haven’t already!
A First…
…and probably a last: I link to the American Conservative.
Kerry’s the One
I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?
The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency – and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.
The Des Moines Register Endorses Kerry
DesMoinesRegister.com | Editorials
Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what’s to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals’ lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms.
I almost forwarded this to my Dad, who delights in calling the democrats ‘Fascists’. Then I realized he would never hear that last sentence anyway.
Dick Cheney Is A Liar, Too
U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight (washingtonpost.com)
The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.
vs.
Vice President and Mrs. Cheney’s Remarks and Q&A at a Town Hall Meeting in Carroll, Ohio
Q Good morning, Mr. Vice President. It’s a great honor. I appreciate the opportunity. John Kerry has stated on several occasions that the United States had Osama bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, and then in his characterization that we diverted our resources and troops to Iraq and outsourced that particular mission or job to the warlords of Afghanistan. I personally doubt the veracity of his statement and I would just like you to respond to that, please.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I happen to agree with you. (Laughter.) No, the facts are — and this issue was addressed just yesterday or the day before by General Tommy Franks. General Franks was the CENTCOM commander; he was the four-star in charge of or operations for that whole part of the globe, including both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was the man in charge of those operations. He was the one who developed and executed the plans that worked in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and he came just within the last 24 or 48 hours and said, it’s absolute garbage. It’s just not true.
The fact of the matter is that we get speculation about where Osama bin Laden might have been, but we went down and went in and took down a great many bad guys, and killed a lot of other members of al Qaeda. There is no evidence that there was any diminution of the effort in Afghanistan because of what we did in Iraq. We clearly are capable of doing both operations. We did both operations. The man in charge of both operations, who is a highly decorated, distinguished veteran of over 30 years service in the United States military says basically it’s hogwash. And he was there; he ought to know. (Applause.)
It Comes Down To This…
‘An open letter to George W. Bush’
Do you still think about voting for Bush? Read this.
Here is what you did regarding specifically the events of that morning: You vacationed before, during and after August 6th, the day you were handed the presidential daily briefing that said very clearly Vanessa Lang Langer and many other Americans were not safe. After the first plane hit tower I, the fact of the PDB did not click in your mind, did not cause you to act, to turn on a television, to contact the Pentagon. You sat so that you did not frighten a group of children. You did not worry about Vanessa’s brothers, or the young children who would certainly be directly affected by that event. You did not, like her fourteen year-old brother, rush from your seat and head for a phone, desperately trying to reach out, to fix, to save. You sat.
You said, two weeks to the day before the general election of 2004, that you would protect Americans; that is, according to you, your primary responsibility as Commander-in Chief; no terrorists would get us, no terrorists would attack us (you said this with your arm extended), and I you said and I quote, on your watch. You said this with no sense of irony, no sense, no indication of how that text would sound to those you failed miserably to protect. You never notified officially the airlines, flight schools, persons who lived or worked in our tallest structures. You failed in your watch and on it.
Hunter S. Thompson is a genius.
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.