Category: Main

Latest Nefarious MSM Plot

I’ve suddenly figured out something of vital importance to blogosphere’s ongoing struggle against the evil forces of Big Media. It occurs to me that the MSM has finally discovered a strategy to get troublesome bloggers to stop blogging: invite them to appear on TV and then stash them in the studio, from their comfy blogging environments.
Glenn seems to be soldiering bravely on, but from listening to his appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s election coverage tonight, I’m afraid John Hinderaker may have been effectively neutralized by MSNBC, who apparently have had him stashed in a studio since 3pm for only a few minutes of airtime.
On the plus side, NBC also got Wonkette. Every cloud, silver lining, etc…
Update: I told you so!

Like father, like daughter

Vanessa Kerry, on MSNBC, describing how character attacks drive young people away from politics: “It’s sort of a bummer, if you’ll take a colloquialism.”
I love it when the elite “get down” verbally with us….

Post-Election Peace Pledge

I hereby take Jarvis’s Post-Election Peace Pledge:
After the election results are in, I promise to:
: Support the President, even if I didn’t vote for him.
: Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
: Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
: Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.
…with my only qualification being that I pledge to uphold my standards of civilized discourse, not anybody else’s. For a man who loves Howard Stern, sometimes Jeff’s standards can be a bit lofty for a humble bear such as I…

Election Day 2004 Resources

Folks: I’ve collecting as many election-day web resources as I can find and listed them below. Please add additional resources to the comments / via TrackBacks, and I’ll continue to update this page throughout the day.
Results Tracking: Blogs & LittleMedia
Results 2004 Page: A nice clean single-page listing of all state’s results.
Electoral-Vote.com: “I will stay up all night election night and update the site in real time. I am NOT promising to stay up until we know who the president is. I would definitely like to go to bed sometime during the month of November…”
RealClearPolitics
ElectionAtlas.org
TownHall.com
Results Tracking: Big Media
MSNBC
CNN
FoxNews
The New York Times
The Washington Post
USA Today
Note: Some of the BigMedia pages are their generic election pages; I’ll update them to point to their results pages when they post them.
Blog Coverage
The Command Post: Detailed group-blog coverage including bloggers from every state.
ElectionHell.com: More voting fraud coverage than you can possibly tolerate.
The Horserace Blog
FraudWatch at Backcountry Conservative
Note: I’m not listing individual bloggers unless the blog’s explicit focus is the election (i.e. ElectionHell), as I’m assuming pretty much everybody is blogging today.
UPDATE: I am also maintaining a simplified version of this listing suitable for use as a Mozilla or IE sidebar: electionsidebar.html.
For Mozilla, you can make this into a sidebar by:
1) Bookmarking it
2) Opening your Bookmarks folder by selecting Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks
3) Highlight the bookmark you just created by left-clicking once.
4) Right-click for the menu and select Properties
5) Check the box which says ‘Load this Bookmark in the Sidebar’
For Internet Explorer, bookmark the following link: TTLB Election Tracker
For Opera: I have no clue! I don’t use Opera. Can anybody who does offer suggestions / instructions?

NYT Will Correct Kos Daily Visitors Error

Last Thursday, The New York Times published weblog story which included the following statement:
“A recent posting on DailyKos, a liberal Web site visited by more than 500,000 people daily, according to blog rankings posted on a site called The Truth Laid Bear…”
Friday, I contacted the Times requesting a correction, as the quote misrepresents what the SiteMeter “daily visits” tracked on my listing really means. But as the exchange I posted showed, I was unable to convince Bill Borders of the Times that a correction was needed.
After Glenn, Jeff, and Bill posted on the matter, I forwarded their comments to Bill and to the NYT’s Public Editor, Daniel Okrent.
And finally, yesterday: results! Bill Borders replied once again, and said: “I finally got an explanation that I understand, from the research director of the New York Times Web site, and now — belatedly — I see the point you were making. So I think now that we probably DO need a correction. Thanks for your patience. ”
So keep an eye on the Corrections page, and credit the Times for being willing to learn; albeit a bit slowly.
Update: The correction has been published.

Kerry Discharge: Broad Hints

The latest installment in the Chinese water torture that is the Kerry discharge story is out:
sec to Kerry: Open up your records
The short summary is simple: William Middendorf was Secretary of the Navy from 1974 to 1977. If you believe the less-than-honorable discharge theory, Middendorf has direct knowledge that Kerry was not honorably discharged (the first time), but is specifically barred from discussing the matter by law. This article is the closest he can come to confirming the previous stories without committing a crime.
Beldar has more, and seems pretty convinced that the less-than-honorable storyline is genuine.
And so am I, as I just don’t see any other plausible explanation for the facts as we know them. But: I’ve pretty well given up on it being proven definitively enough to break through in any way in the major media before the election.
But if Kerry wins tomorrow, I’ll wager that this story will be back, with a vengeance..

Fallujah Holdouts Threaten Use of Chemical Weapons

Via indispensible Command Post:
From The Australian :
Rebel commanders said chemicals such as cyanide had been added to mortar rounds and missiles that would be deployed against coalition troops reported to be preparing for a major assault on the town west of Baghdad.
A military committee made up of former officers in Saddam Hussein

Bin Laden or Alaa?

MEMRI is reporting that the version of Bin Laden’s speech that we heard Friday was in a key section:
The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera(1) on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to “each U.S. state,” designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words “ay wilaya” (which means “each U.S. state”)(2) to mean a “country” or “nation” other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: “Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.”
The Islamist website Al-Qal’a explained what this sentence meant: “This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, ‘Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,’ it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn’t treat all American people as if they’re the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.”
So: Bin Laden is now accepting surrenders on a state-by-state basis. Now read this:
Alaa, an Iraqi, writing at The Mesopotamian: “Thus, regardless of all the arguments of both candidates the main problem is that President Bush now represents a symbol of defiance against the terrorists and it is a fact, that all the enemies of America, with the terrorists foremost, are hoping for him to be deposed in the upcoming elections. That is not to say that they like the democrats, but that they will take such an outcome as retreat by the American people, and will consequently be greatly encouraged to intensify their assault. The outcome here on the ground in Iraq seems to be almost obvious. In case President Bush loses the election there would be a massive upsurge of violence, in the belief, rightly or wrongly, by the enemy, that the new leadership is more likely to

New York Sun on Kerry’s Discharge

The New York Sun this morning on the work of Mark Sullivan, a former captain in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve, in researching John Kerry’s discharge from military service:
The “honorable discharge” on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry’s record, according to Mark Sullivan, who retired as a captain in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve in 2003 after 33 years of service as a judge advocate. Mr. Sullivan served in the office of the Secretary of the Navy between 1975 and 1977…
With the only discharge document cited by Mr. Kerry issued in 1978, three years after the last date it should have been issued, the absence of a certificate from 1975 leaves only two possibilities. Either Mr. Kerry received an “other than honorable” certificate that has been removed in a review purging it from his records, or even worse, he received no certificate at all. In both cases there would have been a loss of all of Mr. Kerry’s medals and the suspension of all benefits of service.
Certainly something was wrong as early as 1973 when Mr. Kerry was applying to law school.
Mr. Kerry has said, “I applied to Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. I was extremely late. Only BC would entertain a late application.”
It is hard to see why Mr. Kerry had to file an “extremely late” application since he lost the congressional race in Lowell, Mass., the first week of November 1972 and was basically doing nothing until he entered law school the following September of 1973.A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar.

The theory Sullivan presents in this story matches the analysis presented in the piece WorldNetDaily ran on Sunday, which argued that Kerry must have been hiding something based on the odd 1978 date of his honorable discharge.
Why might Kerry have received a less-than-honorable discharge? The most likely reason would be his meetings with representatives of the North Vietnamese government. Earlier this week, WorldNetDaily ran the following story providing documentary evidence showing that the antiwar activities which Kerry took part in were very much in line with the desires of the North Vietnamese:
Jerome Corsi [and co-author of Unfit for Command], a specialist on the Vietnam era, told WND the new discoveries are the “most remarkable documents I’ve seen in the entire history of the antiwar movement.”
“We’re not going to say he’s an agent for Vietnamese communists, but it’s the next thing to it,” he said. “Whether he was consciously carrying out their direction or naively doing what they wanted, it amounted to the same thing

The Mesopotamian’s Endorsement

Don’t want to believe me that George Bush should get your vote on Tuesday? How about listening to Iraqi blogger Alaa at Mesopotamian:
“Thus, regardless of all the arguments of both candidates the main problem is that President Bush now represents a symbol of defiance against the terrorists and it is a fact, that all the enemies of America, with the terrorists foremost, are hoping for him to be deposed in the upcoming elections. That is not to say that they like the democrats, but that they will take such an outcome as retreat by the American people, and will consequently be greatly encouraged to intensify their assault. The outcome here on the ground in Iraq seems to be almost obvious. In case President Bush loses the election there would be a massive upsurge of violence, in the belief, rightly or wrongly, by the enemy, that the new leadership is more likely to

NBC Whitewashing for Kerry?

Captain Ed points out that appears to be covering up Kerry’s critical slip in which he admitted that his military records have not been disclosed.
The rumor mill from which the allegedly forthcoming discharge story comes has indicated that Kerry’s brief moment of honesty was actually part of what led to that story coming together (if it comes together). So for NBC to remove that quote is more than a little bit suspicious.

Kerry Discharge Rumor: Again

As states, the rumor mill is heating up to critical on the Kerry discharge story. Spoons, myself, and many other bloggers have received a message from an individual who claims to have direct knowledge of the story, and indicates that it is definitely breaking tonight.
We’ll see. I guess if you want to know where I stand on this, if you asked me “Do you believe this is going to break tonight?”, I’d say “yes”. But it isn’t fact yet, and I’ve been wrong before.

Blogsphere Motto of the Week

With apologies to I’ll share with you the internal motto I keep muttering to myself as I juggle real life, the Day Job, and the blog in the target-rich news maelstrom that is leading up to the election:
If it’s not close, we get to sleep on Wednesday!

Osama’s Outtakes

Apparently, there is more interesting stuff on the Osama tape that shown on al-Jazeera:
Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape

OK, but I have to be home by 10

So Clinton is on his feet again and for Kerry:
Seven weeks after his triple-bypass heart surgery operation, Clinton appeared with Kerry in the beginning of the last full week before the presidential election to help give the Kerry campaign an extra nudge in the final stretch of the campaign…
A stray

Swift Vets on Capitol Steps: Cancelled

Well, didn’t take long:
Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2004 10:23 am
I have been asked by the highest authorities (No — I will not expound) to not hold this Rally.
Although our actions and intent has been nothing but honorable, this effort will not serve our purposes.
My sincerest apologies for this but I must ask that we stand down…
I certainly hope the “highest authorities” know what they are doing and I don’t like this anymore than anyone else but I must ask you to stand down.
We can however, return to our previous effort in getting the truth to media outlets, Congress, and other influential organizations.
This was a great idea and I’m very disappointed — I hope you will forgive me for this. I’m assured that all will be clear in time (yeah right).
– Troy Jenkins (aka “Navy Chief”)
No word on what this means, if anything, in relation to the rumors of a break in the Kerry discharge story.