THE INSTAWIFE says she sees a lot of Kerry bumper stickers, and wonders if he’s ahead in Tennessee. Apparently not:

President Bush would beat Democratic challenger John Kerry in Tennessee by 16 points if the election were held today, a new statewide poll indicates.

Bush would do a better job handling the war in Iraq, the issue of terrorism and homeland security, and issues related to the economy, poll respondents said.

Kerry, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, did his best on the economy question but still lagged Bush by 8 points on that issue.

Well, Knoxville is a college town.

UPDATE: Uh oh. Somebody’s getting the bends.

MARK STEYN WONDERS why Ra^therGate has been allowed to fester so long:

Why has CBS News decided it would rather debauch its brand and treat its audience like morons than simply admit their hoax? For Dan Rather? I doubt it. Hurricane Dan looks like he’s been hit by one. He’s still standing, just about, but, like a battered double-wide, more and more panels are falling off every day. No one would destroy three-quarters of a century of audience trust and goodwill for one shattered anachronism of an anchorman, would they? . . .

The only reasonable conclusion is that the source — or trail of sources — is even more incriminating than the fake documents. Why else would Heyward and Rather allow the CBS news division to commit slow, public suicide?

Power Line speculates that the only thing more incriminating than falling for a forgery is falling for one that came from the Kerry campaign. But in light of this meta-story, maybe that doesn’t even matter.

SUMNER REDSTONE DUMPING STOCK? My first thought is that this has nothing to do with Ra^therGate — but of course, my first thought on Ra^therGate was that CBS’s case couldn’t possibly be as flimsy as it looked.

On the other hand, betting on Sumner Redstone being an idiot looks to be longer odds than the same bet regarding Dan Rather.

UPDATE: A reader emails that insider knowledge couldn’t be involved:

National Review wonders if Sumner Redstone sold his stock based on “knowledge unavailable to the general public”. How could that be? Within a day or two of CBS’s promotion of the inept forgeries, anyone who was interested was well aware that CBS had – at the least – screwed up horribly. By September 14th Dan Rather and his producers were the only ones left who claimed to believe that CBS news hadn’t just driven off a cliff.

That works for me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A less charitable take on the subject here. I still don’t think Redstone’s that dumb, and expect that this will turn out to have an innocent explanation. But this point is a good one: “Where is the Viacom board of directors, by the way? . . . Boards of directors of public companies, particularly in our Sarbanes-Oxley world, have the obligation to act like Johnson & Johnson in the Tylenol crisis, not like Arthur Andersen or Enron.” Indeed.

MORE: Professor Bainbridge thinks he knows what’s going on, and it’s not nefarious.

STILL MORE: More on the non-nefarious side, at Power Line.

GERMAN ELECTIONS: Bad news for Schroeder, who continues to learn that you can’t successfully organize a party around anti-Bush sentiments. But it’s also bad news in general, given that it’s the extremist parties who are doing better.

NATO: A fraudulent coalition?

RA^THERGATE UPDATE: Howard Kurtz has more on CBS’s rush to broadcast while questions remained unaddressed:

An examination of the process that led to the broadcast, based on interviews with the participants and more than 20 independent analysts, shows that CBS rushed the story onto the air while ignoring the advice of its own outside experts, and used as corroborating witnesses people who had no firsthand knowledge of the documents.

This is quite embarrassing, especially given the political cast. But in my opinion, their behavior since the broadcast has been worse. Anybody can make a mistake, even a stupid one. It’s their consistent refusal to admit it, amid a fog of counteraccusations, that has been really disgraceful.

UPDATE: A Ra^therGate Web of Connections, at PoliDock.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Newsweek:

CBS insiders are increasingly worried that the credibility of the network’s news division has been grievously damaged by anchor Dan Rather’s persistent defense of a story which relied on questionable documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service. “This has clearly hurt us,” one veteran correspondent told NEWSWEEK. Network sources describe finger-pointing within the news division, with concerns greatest among “60 Minutes” producers, who fear the issue has tainted their entire program. While CBS News president Andrew Heyward has publicly backed Rather, the network has quietly assembled a team of additional producers to work the case. Rather is privately telling colleagues he remains “confident” that the story, and the memos, will be vindicated. . . .

Emily Will, a documents expert approached by CBS to examine the memos, told NEWSWEEK that she was told by a CBS News producer that the network’s source had received the memos anonymously through the mail.

Hmm. Sounds like an L.A. Times headline: “Rather aides increasingly confident!”

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES WRITES ABOUT BLOGGERS: Professor Bainbridge writes back. Shockingly, he discovers errors and misrepresentations.

A RATHER NEGATIVE ASSESSMENT of John Kerry’s military career, in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I still wonder why he decided to make Vietnam the keystone of his campaign. Even without problems like this, Vietnam doesn’t have positive associations for most voters. As I’ve said before, it seems like bad “branding.”

RA^THERGATE, explained.

I’VE POSTED SOME NEW IMAGES over at the Exposure Manager site, on subjects ranging from UT street scenes (always much in demand from UT alumni and Knoxville expats) to “suburban wilderness” images. The pictures shown here, and some others (it’s indicated in the galleries) were taken with the Sony 5 megapixel pocket camera that I bought a while back. They’re not as good as the ones that the Nikon D70 produces . . . but the Nikon doesn’t fit in your pocket, either.

I hope you enjoy them.

I’ve got a lot more to process and upload, alas. The problem is that driving around and taking pictures gets me away from my desk and the computer. Processing and uploading them, alas, does not.

And I like getting away from the computer now and then. I spend way too much time here as it is.

Maybe I should go back to darkrooms and film. . . .

THE FOLKS AT NRO fought off a bogus libel suit. They were successful, but are asking for contributions to defray the cost.

TOM MAGUIRE REMAINS ON NICK KRISTOF’S CASE: “Kristof may have deliberately crafted his statement in a way that is misleading, but accurate.” Hey, that’s better than fake, but accurate! And there’s a reflection on “the question Kristof does not ask (although Don Imus did!).” Ouch.

UPDATE: More on Kristof’s problems here, here, and here.

Don’t these people have editors?

“FAKE, BUT ACCURATE:” Heh.

OVER AT THE MEDPUNDIT SITE you can read this quote:

“When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable” -Anton Chekhov

Over at RealClearPolitics you can read this:

Advice For Mr. Kerry: Leon Panetta | Donna Brazile | Bob Kerrey | Paul Glastris
Kerry’s New Call to Arms – Richard Wolffe & Susannah Meadows, Newsweek
Kerry’s Muddled Message – Gloria Borger, US News & World Report
To Win Kerry Will Have to Answer Hard Questions – Clive Crook, Nat’l Journal

Hmm.

JEFF HARRELL’S SHAPE OF DAYS BLOG was nine days ahead of the big media in looking at the Selectric Composer and realizing that it couldn’t have produced the Ra^therGate documents.

I THOUGHT THAT FOOTBALL FANS FOR TRUTH was just an amusing bit of election-year distraction.

But having seen this incriminating video, well, I think it’s a serious matter. . . .

HERE’S AN EVEN MORE DEVASTATING COMPARISON OF CBS DOCUMENTS WITH THE REAL THING, courtesy of The Washington Post. If Dan Rather still has a job tomorrow, well, CBS is in even bigger trouble than I thought.

IRAQ UPDATE: StrategyPage reports:

September 19, 2004: Anti-government forces are desperately trying to shatter the morale of police and reconstruction personnel. But suicide bombing attacks on police facilities, and gun battles against police patrols in Sunni Arab areas have not worked. The police continue to recruit, and police patrols grow larger and more aggressive as they move into Sunni Arab neighborhoods in cities like Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul, and arrest known, or suspected, terrorists and armed anti-government activists. There is less aversion, among the majority of Iraqis, to playing rough with the Sunni Arabs who comprise nearly all the anti-government forces. A growing network of informers in Sunni controlled areas provide targets for daily bombing attacks on buildings the anti-government forces are using. The government has said that it will hold national elections, as scheduled, even if voting is not possible in some Sunni Arab areas. It’s thought that an 80-90 percent vote is better than a delayed vote. This is because a national vote will be concrete proof, to dubious Shia Arab Iraqis, that Saddam is truly gone, even if thousands of Saddam’s thugs are still running around killing people. The vote will also make it clear just how much power the Kurds hold, on a national scale, and get started negotiations to sort out how much autonomy the Kurds will have in a predominately Arab country.

Partial elections, disenfranchising the rebellious? Like Mickey Kaus, I think that’s the right approach. I also think that for the widely-disliked Sunnis to put themselves into this position is extremely unwise. But, then, “extremely unwise” is a pretty good description of their strategic approach all along.

This tidbit is also interesting:

September 19, 2004: The Pakistani army says it has cleared foreign (al Qaeda) fighters from the Pushtun border areas (Waziristan) along the east Afghan border. Some 70 foreigners were killed in a week of operations, plus a dozen or so Pakistani soldiers and civilians. But there are still several hundred foreign fighters still on the lose, mainly men from Chechnya and Central Asia. The army says it knows where these men have fled to, and will move on them next. The border areas north of Waziristan contain Pushtun tribes less receptive to Taliban activities.

Of course, an item beginning “the Pakistani Army says,” is only slightly more reliable than one beginning “CBS News has learned. . . .” And there’s this:

September 19, 2004: Russia is opening a terrorism liaison office in Indonesia. Because of recent terrorist acts in Russia, there is renewed enthusiasm for sharing terrorist information internationally.

I suspect that Russian anti-terror operations will emphasize assassination and covert ops rather than the more straightforward approach that has marked (most) U.S. operations.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, The Command Post notices that a lot has been going on below the radar. You don’t say.

UPDATE: It’s also worth reading this piece by Thomas Bray: how Europe became a 90 pound weakling.”

In Bosnia, where the French and Germans did collaborate in the sort of coalition Kerry favors, the United States had to deliver an embarrassing 85 percent of the missile strikes because of the primitive condition of the European air forces.

Why is Europe so weak? The trend began well before the end of the Cold War. Increasingly, Europe opted for the free-rider approach, happy to let American taxpayers shoulder the major share of the burden. But Europe’s continuing power-slide strongly suggests there may be an even more fundamental reason for its weakness: the debilitating effect of the vast European welfare state. . . .

A broader European coalition to help out in Iraq? Don’t count on it. There isn’t much that France and Germany could contribute, beyond some marginal peacekeeping forces, even if they wanted to. And they are likely to remain unwilling to do so even if John Kerry is elected.

Europe just doesn’t matter much on the military front. That’s unfortunate.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Who do you believe? Sometimes it’s easy to know, sometimes it’s not.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Carnival of the Liberated, the regular roundup of Iraqi blog posts, has moved. Dean Esmay is hosting it now. Be sure to check it out. It’s not all cheerful by any means, but it’s different from what you hear from Peter Jennings. Much less Dan Rather.

MORE: Daniel Drezner notes that Anthony Cordesmann thinks Bush hasn’t done well, but that Kerry’s approach is vapid.