A STOLEN MICHAEL YON PHOTO appears in campaign literature. Yon’s not happy, I think, as he sent me the link.

UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky sends a link to a later post reporting that the matter has been settled.

AN AMUSING PHOTO FROM IRAQ. Heh.

HAROLD FORD, JR. IS DEMANDING A KERRY APOLOGY:

“Whatever the intent, Senator Kerry was wrong to say what he said,” Rep. Ford said. “He needs to apologize to our troops.”

I wonder if we’ll hear from other Democrats today. Has James Webb weighed in? I can’t find anything.

UPDATE: Ah, here are some other Democrats criticizing Kerry, most notably Jon Tester.

ROGER SIMON interviews Dana Milbank.

IN THE MAIL: Sandy Weill’s new book, The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy. If I read it, will I become a millionaire billionaire, too?

LA SHAWN BARBER is defending John Kerry.

Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz asks:

Will John Kerry do for the 2006 campaign what he did for the 2004 edition?

Why couldn’t the Massachusetts senator have climbed out of the hole he fell into by just apologizing for saying something stupid, rather than getting out a shovel and digging?

Because he’s John Kerry, the gift that keeps on giving!

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson: “Kerry surely must be one of the saddest Democratic liabilities around. Some afterthoughts about his latest gaffe, which is one of those rare glimpses into an entire troubled ideology. . . . Today, Democrats must be wondering why they have embraced an overrated empty suit, and ostracized a real talent like Joe Lieberman.”

BAD REVIEWS FOR TRAFFIC CAMERAS IN BRITAIN:

Even if they agree that speed limits are necessary, many motorists resent having to obey them all the time. They say they hate being constantly on the lookout for cameras and accuse the government of treating them like cash machines.

“It’s just a road tax,” said Ian Murray, a sales clerk at an army-navy surplus store in Kelvedon Hatch. He understands the need for cameras in residential areas, he said, but feels aggrieved when he sees them on the highway, where the national speed limit is 70 m.p.h. but where the fast lane generally clips along at 80 m.p.h. or higher.

“What happens is you see the speed camera, and you put on your anchor and drop your speed, and then when you get past it you speed up again,” Mr. Murray said. Also, he said, the cameras cause people to brake suddenly, endangering themselves and the people behind them.

Paul Smith, head of an anti-camera group called the Safe Speed Road Safety Campaign, said that drivers spent so much time scouring the roadside for cameras that they forget to pay attention to the road.

“We’ve got a nation of people who have one eye looking out for the next speed camera, another looking for a speed limit sign and another looking at the speedometer — which is a bit of a shame, when you only have two eyes,” he said.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, there’s evidence suggesting that these cameras make things more dangerous, not safer. And it seems beyond dispute that the primary motivation for deploying them is financial.

Somebody’s just filed a traffic-camera lawsuit in Knoxville. You can see a copy of the complaint online here. I hadn’t realized that Knoxville’s system makes you pay $67.50 up front in “costs” if you want a hearing on your $50 ticket . . . .

UPDATE: Don Jacobs of the Knoxville News-Sentinel says that I’m in error about having to pay that $67.50 up front. But I’m looking at an image of a “Hearing Request” form that someone sent me and it says “To schedule a hearing you will be assessed a court processing fee of $67.50.” So am I missing something here?

PETER SCHAEFER: More MacArthur, less Marshall.

WHY THEY HATE US: In my seminar the other day, one of my students remarked that terrorism is probably based on sexual frustration. She may be right:

People in western countries tend to have more sexual partners than those in the developing world, a study says. . . .

This was despite developing countries having higher rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV.

Fewer partners, more disease. That would make me mad . . . .

UPDATE: Frank J. emails: “Uhh… How Many Sexual Partners Do You Have?”

Just one. That’s why having fewer would make me angry!

JOHN TAMMES: “So should I end up in Iraq next time I deploy, I guess I can just go ahead and shred my BA, MA and J.D.?”

Heck, he’s a battlefield professor.

TYLER COWEN on the future of European social democracy: “Much as I have enjoyed living in, working in, and visiting Western Europe, I have my doubts.”

Ilya Somin, meanwhile, says it’s even worse than Cowen thinks: “If European governments fail to improve the anemic economic performance described by Tyler, and remain unable to assimilate Muslim immigrants effectively, there is a real chance that voter frustration will increase, and the far right or far left will successfully exploit it and eventually come to power in one or more major European nations – with potentially disastrous results.”

That’s been my worry for a while.

MICKEY KAUS: “The Feiler Faster principle will probably take care of John Kerry’s Iraq gaffe long before it has any significant effect on the midterm vote–but the NYT’s Adam Nagourney wasn’t about to rely on that. Instead, Nagourney comes close to arguing that Kerry affirmatively helped the Dems because his remarks provoked an attack from President Bush, and “in the process, Mr. Bush brought renewed attention to the war in Iraq …” Hey, that’s the sort of wacky contrarian take a blogger might have! In applying such impressive ingenuity to the pro-Dem shaping of the news, Nagourney has triumphantly gone beyond cocooning–loosely defined as looking in a crowd of news stories for the most comforting friends–and into the realm of active spinning. A breakthrough, of sorts. … ”

Dana Milbank, meanwhile, simply accuses Karl Rove of having magical powers. I’m with Milbank!

HAVE A HAPPY SAMHAIN!

TIM BLAIR: “Bill Maher thinks he’s so politically incorrect. Then let’s see him in Mike Chaika’s Halloween costume.”

I mean, if you want to be brave and transgressive and all.

WHY THE REPUBLICANS think they can win.

MY EARLIER NEWS about the Addams Family coming out on DVD leads Fritz Schranck to email:

BTW, F Troop is also out in DVD, and my wife bought a couple copies.

Can Max Headroom be far behind?

Fritz has been waiting for that to happen for a while.

As for Max Headroom, I never watched that show much.

UPDATE: Peter Ingemi emails that he wants McHale’s Navy — and not the lame Tom Arnold film.

A LOOK AT the Panama Canal, version 2.0.

FOR A CONSTRUCTIVE RESPONSE TO KERRY’S REMARKS, how about donating to project Valour IT, which provides voice-activated laptops for injured troops?

You know, lemons, lemonade, etc.

HEH.

CAMPAIGNS HIRING BLOGGERS: Daniel Glover has a roundup of who’s hiring who.

MARY KATHARINE HAM posts a special Halloween edition of Ham Nation.

THE HOTLINE BLOG ASKS:

By making himself an issue, did Sen. John Kerry do the GOP a favor by giving them an issue to motivate their base? (Independents may not care, but the base hates Kerry… hates him.)

If Kerry is happy to let America know that he’s not going to take sleights, are Democrats happy to have Kerry in the spotlight seven days before the election?

Couldn’t Kerry have taken care of this imbroglio by admitting that he mangled his words?

Is it smart for any Democrat right now to take the spotlight? Shouldn’t the Dems want to keep the spotlight solely and totally on Bush and Iraq?

Does Kerry know how and when to pick his battles?

Lots more questions, basically boiling down to this one: “What was he thinking?”

Austin Bay comments:

In the spare space of 24 hours Kerry has resurrected the Vietnam Syndrome –at least his and the left wing of the Democratic Party’s Vietnam (loser’s) Syndrome. This is stupid but particularly stupid in the last week of a national election. Doubly stupid in the midst of a long, grinding war. Kerry is trapped, in an odd sort of amber. He’s stuck on stupid and stuck in the past simultaneously. . . .

Why didn’t Senator Kerry just apologize? “I’m sorry for what I said. I meant to crack a joke and it came out sounding like an insult to US troops. Forgive me. We owe our defenders so much.”

But we know why.

Some questions answer themselves.

UPDATE: More:

I’ll bet Senator Clinton absolutely loves watching her potential ’08 rival shoot himself in the foot.

BTW, I’m another National Merit Scholar serving in the active duty military. I missed 4 questions on the SATs. But the real insult to my intelligence came when Senator Kerry tried to pretend he was talking about Bush.

That was a pretty unconvincing response. I don’t think he’s used to the power of YouTube in politics. Bill Frist, meanwhile, joins those demanding an apology.

And here’s some more background on the quality of the forces in Iraq:

Our review of Pen­tagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005. . . .

In summary, the additional years of recruit data (2004–2005) sup­port the previous finding that U.S. military recruits are more similar than dissimilar to the American youth population. The slight dif­ferences are that wartime U.S. mil­itary enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on aver­age than their civilian peers.

Recruits have a higher percent­age of high school graduates and representation from Southern and rural areas. No evidence indicates exploitation of racial minorities (either by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). Finally, the distri­bution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than that of the entire youth population.

Just don’t wind up a clueless U.S. Senator.

Meanwhile, the American Legion is demanding an apology from Kerry, too.

MORE: Donald Sensing responds to Kerry:

In about 30 minutes I wll leave to attend the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Richard Buerstetta, killed in action in Iraq two weekends ago. He was a2004 graduate of Franklin High School, where both my sons knew him. He and my eldest son were actually scehduled to go to boot camp at Parris Island, SC, the same day, but a change by their recruiter sent them on different days. Lance Cpl. Buerstetta was a Marine reservist, enrolled in college at Middle Tennessee State University, when his callup came. Without a flicker of hesitation at being yanked from his college courses, he shouldered his seabags and went off to war. “His bags stayed packed,” according to a family member. He died about a month after arriving in Iraq.

Got that? High school graduate. College student. US Marine. Iraq. . . .

I dare you, Senator Kerry, to come to Lance Cpl. Buerstetta’s funeral and tell that to his parents. Tell them that their son, high school graduate, college student, was just too uneducated and too stupid to avoid enlisting in an all-volunteer military.

Read the whole thing.

STILL MORE: Brendan Loy is defending Kerry:

This is yet another example of a political kerfuffle where the response to the mistake is worse than the mistake itself. If Kerry had spared us the vitriolic bluster and just apologized for a poor choice of words — explaining that he absolutely, obviously never meant to insult the troops — this story might be dead by now. Instead, he’s given right-wing propagandists like Drudge a golden opportunity to run context-free headlines such as “I APOLOGIZE TO NO ONE,” implying that Kerry stands by an insult that he never intended to deliver. This is the very definition of an unforced error.

So, in conclusion, John Kerry an idiot. But he doesn’t think our troops are idiots. I mean, c’mon. Like Bush, he’s stupid, not evil.

Loy’s commenters don’t seem to be buying it. Tom Maguire notes a similar claim on Kerry’s behalf and comments:

As to the “context” question, the quote was clear enough and Kerry’s non-apology was absurd enough. The real explanation – the quip was a Bush-basher that went awry – is probably true, but how would we have known that (Kerry has not used a similar formulation in our presence)?

As to believing that Kerry meant this as a troop-basher – well, it is hard to believe that he would have reflected carefully and said this.

But, he notes, Kerry hasn’t been shy about bashing troops in the past. His bottom line:

Kerry should apologize for not being able to speak English as well as the typical recruit. But enough already with Kerry delivering “dumb” jokes.

Or, in another take: ” A Democratic congressman told ABC News Tuesday, ‘I guess Kerry wasn’t content blowing 2004, now he wants to blow 2006, too.'”

Indeed. Or are the Karl Rove mind-control rays just that overpowering?

FINALLY: Here’s a big roundup on this story, from Pajamas Media. And Chip Mathis reminds us that Kerry’s grades at Yale were worse than Bush’s. This explains a lot . . . .

And Ann Althouse comments:

The John Kerry “stuck in Iraq” story is dominating the news today. It’s rather unfair to the Democrats who are actually running in the election. I’d love to hear the behind-the-scenes cursing he so richly deserves. (And let me add that Kerry is outrageously lying when he says he wasn’t referring to the troops. This is only prolonging his time in the spotlight, when he should get out of the way and let actual candidates speak.) . . . . I’ve seen the video of the whole context, and it’s obvious what he was saying. His attempt to interpret it away is outrageous. It only makes it worse. I know exactly what he was saying and it is the sort of thing that antiwar people say, that the volunteer military is full of unfortunate, deluded souls.

They managed to stifle Dukakis. They can’t seem to keep Kerry quiet.

HUBBLE REPAIR APPROVED: “The 11-day rehab mission, likely launching in May 2008 using space shuttle Discovery, would keep Hubble working until about 2013. Its estimated cost is $900 million.”

NORTH KOREA agrees to return to the negotiating table regarding its nuclear weapons program.

A HALLOWEEN LOOK AT “slutty children’s characters fantasy costumes.” Which seem to be in plentiful supply these days.