YEAH, I guess this would do it. Heh.
Archive for 2004
August 6, 2004
ANOTHER FLIP-FLOP: It’s hard to stay on message from one week to the next, I guess.
BILL HOBBS rounds up some items on newspaper websites and registration. I’ll add another point: the registration schemes suck.
The Insta-Wife got interviewed today by someone from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who bragged that the paper had over 300,000 registered users. “Yeah,” I responded. “I’m five or six of them.” That’s because their site, like a lot of others, doesn’t remember me, and often won’t accept my username/password. I had assumed that was technical ineptitude, but maybe it’s a clever scheme for inflating readership stats. . . .
More thoughts on this stuff in this column.
STUART BUCK looks at Judge Charles Pickering’s first desegregation opinion.
TOM MAGUIRE IS PARSING SWIFTBOAT STORIES and (with help from Spinsanity) looking at Kerry’s military service in general.
Yeah, I agree with Lileks that Vietnam is old news. But I’m not the one who made it a centerpiece of this campaign.
UPDATE: More here!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Polipundit says he’s changed his mind about the SwiftVets ad.
If anyone needed evidence that the explosive growth of so-called 527 independent expenditure groups is a blight on our politics, it’s obvious in the form of the controversial new ad attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam War service. . . . If good government types really want to clean up politics, they should explain how campaign reforms such as McCain-Feingold — which made the creation of more 527 groups unavoidable — are helping to do that.
So far, I’m unimpressed with campaign finance “reform.”
EARLIER, I noted a story saying that one of the Swift Boat Veterans against Kerry had recanted his story. But now he’s saying that he stands by his story, and that the earlier report misquoted him. And the author of the earlier report, a Boston Globe reporter, turns out to also be the author of what seems to be the official Kerry campaign biography. Sounds fishy.
UPDATE: More on this story and the background of Kerry’s service here. Lots of links and information.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Interesting connection between conflicts of interest at the Globe and campaign finance reform: “What we have here is an unpaid, ongoing, every day commercial for the Kerry campaign on behalf of the Boston Globe. The Boston Globe is nothing more than a Kerry campaign house organ when this guy Kranish writes the stories, and nothing about campaign finance reform can stop it. In fact campaign finance reform has empowered the media.”
The whole thing seems kind of fishy to me, and I’m not convinced we know the whole story. I wish we could count on media watchdogs like Romenesko to get to the bottom of stuff like this, but his coverage of news that impacts badly on Kerry’s campaign has been rather thin.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Kranish here.
In a Cali Today poll, 90 percent of Vietnamese Americans said they would vote for Bush, and only 10 percent said they would vote for Kerry.
Vietnamese living in Vietnam, on the other hand, favored Kerry over Bush. (Via SOTW).
DOES VIETNAM MATTER? Some perspective:
Vietnam doesn’t matter. Vietnam was almost 40 years ago. Some will argue that if what the Swiftboat Vets say is true, then that reflects poorly on Kerry’s character. Personally, I can’t hold something from that long ago when he was a young man in difficult times against him. It says a lot more about his character to me that he made such an issue of his service in the first place. What really matters, though, is that the war on terror is right here and now. I don’t care if Bush was a slacker national guardsman or if Kerry was a war hero (or not). I care about how we are going to fight this current war.
Indeed.
NEW ZEALAND AND ANTISEMITISM: ANOTHER EXAMPLE of why bloggers should try to always have a digital camera handy. (Did Helen Clark establish the climate that makes this sort of thing more likely?)
These sorts of images don’t often make the mainstream media, and somebody should be out there capturing and publicizing them. You can’t do that if you don’t have a camera with you. And they’re cheap and easy-to-use now.
UPDATE: Apparently, some newspapers have picked these pictures up, which is more evidence of the power of the blogosphere. And some people want to know how to contact the New Zealand embassy to express their concerns. Here’s the contact page. Be polite.
And this story suggests that Helen Clark’s behavior may have encouraged this sort of thing.
ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader suggests contacting the New Zealand tourism industry. There’s an email link here. Again, politeness pays.
TOM W. BELL offers a lesson for Arnold Schwarzenegger, drawn from the short reign of the Emperor Pertinax.
DARFUR UPDATE: It looks as if “cheat and retreat” is the order of the day. And read this post, too.
JEFF JARVIS has some useful thoughts on the blogosphere and freedom around the world.
MORE BABIES AND BATHWATER: Daniel Drezner has a very useful roundup on intelligence reform. “The more I think about it, the more I believe that the Commission has put forward a serious proposal — but there should not be an a priori assumption that it’s the best proposal.”
INSTAPUNDIT READERS will recall that I’m something of a Gary Hart fan. He’s back, with a new book coming out, and an oped in the Los Angeles Times, and — most significantly — big blog posts on his foreign policy thoughts from David Adesnik, Phil Carter, and Robert Tagorda.
Revisiting Vietnam in 2004 seems about as useful as debating the Phillippines war while the troop ships are sending Doughboys to the trenches in France. We have more pressing issues, I think. The news today noted that the men arrested at the Albany mosque were fingered by some documents found at Al-Ansar sites in Iraq, of all places. Iraq! Imagine that. I would sleep better if I could snort sure, it’s a plant and tell myself that it’s all made up, it’s all a joke, a phony show designed to make us look the other way while a cackling cabal of Masons and Zionists figure out how much arsenic they can put in the water next year. (Arsenic: the fluoride of the left.) But no. I am one of those sad little pinheads who think it’s really one war, one foe, with a thousand fronts. And I want us to win.
If you bridle at the terms “us” and “win” you really are reading the wrong website.
Indeed. But don’t miss the G.W. Bush corn photo. And if you are interested in the Philippines war, read this.
HOWARD KURTZ writes that Kerry is experiencing a “reverse media bounce:”
Four years ago, the pundits trashed Al Gore’s convention speech. He sounded like a “vice president on speed,” Sam Donaldson said.
But then a funny thing happened. Gore shot up, by as much as 17 points, in Newsweek, USA Today and Washington Post polls. And the tone of the coverage was dramatically altered. The previous blather was inoperative — the convention was a smashing success!
Who ya gonna believe, journalists seemed to be telling themselves, your own eyes or the polls?
Now the opposite seems to be happening. Kerry’s tightly scripted convention drew lots of favorable coverage, especially his address (“I’ve never seen the man speak so well”–Joe Klein), and yet the Boston bash didn’t move the polling meter. Kerry may even have dropped a couple of points. So now the media — who ya gonna believe? — are in full reassessment mode.
Maybe it was a lousy convention after all!
They should have been reading more blogs.
STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE writes on California’s business climate and being nibbled to death by ducks.
MICHELLE MALKIN has posted a long and detailed set of responses to criticisms of her new book.
DESPITE YEARS OF EFFORT, journalism still has a diversity problem.
ONE OF THE SWIFTBOAT VETERANS is retracting his statement about John Kerry.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s what looks like some good advice for Bush on how to handle this.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts here.
MORE: Apparently, the retraction story isn’t true.
RICHARD NIXON: Not the President, in Christmas of 1968. Er, wouldn’t John Kerry know that?
August 5, 2004
IN RESPONSE TO A LINK TO A CNN TRANSCRIPT I POST BELOW, reader Carter Wood emails: “Perhaps folks should laud CNN just now and then for posting all their transcripts. It’s a real service.”
Yes, it is. Thanks to CNN, and all the other outfits that make things like that readily available. It’s a major contribution to informed discourse.
MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: It seems that the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry Campaign are making a habit of trying to use lawyers’ threats to keep critical ads off the air.
Somehow, I think this would be getting more attention if Republicans were doing it. It’s rather thuggish — and it carries more than a whiff of desperation.