electoral-vote.com, the vital vote-predictor website for this election, points out that Bush’s hometown paper has endorsed Kerry, and that Kerry’s hometown paper (or one of them, I guess, since Kerry’s from Boston, which is likely to have multiple papers) has endorsed Bush.
Maybe it’s just a rule of thumb that newspapers should endorse whatever candidate is dramatically less popular among their readers?
Get this: Genetic Savings and Clone, which appears to be a real live business, offers cat (and soon, dog) cloning services for a “low five-figures” fee. They recently successfully cloned their first cat, the pet of their CEO.
Slate (yes, I pretty much read everything on Slate) has an interesting article today on how Kerry systematically inflates his speechwriters’ punchy applause lines to rambling, tangled paragraphs that sap his speech of force. Just to pick one example:
Kerry’s Script: Families will be able to choose from dozens of different private insurance plans.
Actual Kerry: Now George Bush is trying to scare America. And he’s running around telling everybody — I saw this ad the other night. I said, “What is that about? That’s not my plan. That may be some 20 years ago they pulled out of the old thing.” But here’s what they do, they are trying to tell you that there is some big government deal. Ladies and gentlemen, we choose. I happen to choose Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I could choose Kaiser. I could choose Pilgrim. I could choose Phelan. I could choose any number of different choices. That’s what we get. And we look through all the different choices and make our choice. You ought to have that same choice. The government doesn’t tell what you to do. The government doesn’t run it. It gives you the choice.
Now, on the one hand, I’m concerned that Kerry doesn’t have the ability to constrain himself to simple, punchy speech lines that may increase his appeal. On the other hand, the examples that the Slate article chose to highlight all show Kerry delivering windy, but essentially coherent and nuanced, inflations of his speech lines. This seems like a polar opposite to Bush’s tendency to render everything as over-shortened, almost telegraphic, sentence fragments that are genuinely incoherent, not because they’re too long or complicated, but because they just don’t make any sense.
I think I would still rather have the long-winded guy run the country.
Dana Stevens, a columnist for Slate, ordered a copy of Stolen Honor, an anti-Kerry “documentary” that the Sinclair broadcasting group was originally planning to force the majority of its stations, conveniently located in swing states, to air approximately 2 weeks before the election.
Sinclair backed down from this plan after intense public pressure (and a $90 million stock loss, apparently, although I’m not sure what that’s about), but get this: instead of the original documentary, Sinclair will now broadcast a
“a special one-hour news program” titled A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media. This film, which will draw from portions of Stolen Honor, purports to explore “the use of documentaries and other media to influence voting. …. The program will also examine the role of the media in filtering the information contained in these documentaries, allegations of media bias by media organizations that ignore or filter legitimate news and the attempts by candidates and other organizations to influence media coverage.”
Amazing! Anyhow, Dana Stevens watched the entire original documentary and confirms in her article for Slate that it was unquestionably a smear piece.
Ran 1/2 mile today, nonstop, on a treadmill. This is easily the furthest I have run since the accident. It would appear that I’m now limited mostly by stamina, not structural problems with my leg. This means I’m approaching the point that my broken leg is fully functional.
Just in time for snowboarding!
The New York Times Managine has a very interesting, long, article about the president’s reliance on faith and unwavering certainty, and his growing refusal to confront and reconcile uncomfortable facts with his beliefs. It has this revealing quote:
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
also, regarding the president’s unfortunate manging of the English language:
That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ”You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. ”No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final ”you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
Salon is running a hilarious, if amazingly slanted blow-by-blow recap of the debate. Some of my favorites:
Man asks Bush about the draft. Between convulsions, Bush distracts draft-age demographic by revealing the existence of a second Internet. Kerry says that using stop-loss policies to keep people from getting out of military service amounts to a back-door draft. Bush jumps off stool, barking and grinding his teeth. Moderator tries to pet him, sustains lacerations. Bush snarls: Tell that to the Italian guy and the Brits. Hey, we’ve got 30 countries helpin’ us out. Kerry says: You forgot Poland. Smoke coming out of Bush’s ears spells out these words: “Poland can kiss my grand coalition.”
Woman says to Kerry, So far so good, we haven’t been horrendously attacked again lately. Any thoughts? Kerry claims adequate homeland security could come in handy. Bush says he doubled, tripled the funding. Except that he did neither. It’s what you call PATRIOTIC license. Snaps: “I’m worried. I’m worried. I’m worried about our country.” Figures that oughta do it. Sheesh, nosy broad.
Woman asks Kerry, Why use embryonic stem cells? Kerry says not letting people die could be a viable way to show respect for life. Bush says, I can say the word “ethical” more times than he can say it. And I’m louder.
In the aftermath of the Presidential debate on Friday, nobody seems to be giving the Afghan election much play, but a wire story today casually mentions that
Afghans packed polling stations on Saturday for a historic presidential election that was blemished when all 15 candidates opposing U.S.-backed interim President Hamid Karzai withdrew, charging the government and the U.N. with fraud and incompetence.
This would seem like quite a big deal.
On further examination, the alleged irregularities apparently have to do with the fact that the ink poll operators were using to mark the thumbs of people who had voted, in an attempt to prevent people from voting multiple times, was shown to be easily removed. This may or may not end up being considered a showstopper when the dust settles.
However, consider the main fact here again: every single opponent to the US-installed government has withdrawn and denounced the elections as tainted. What legitimacy is there to an election in which the unelected, foreign-installed incumbent stands alone in expressing confidence that the election was conducted fairly?
I have no idea why this is so, but the wire story that most sites and papers are carrying seems to me to have a distinct pro-US tilt that minimizes the boycott:
The Bush administration trumpeted the vote as a “marvelous thing” and explained that “freedom is powerful”.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if the election results stand up to scrutiny.