Sinclair Media

From TPM:

A thought.

I understand that George Soros is a rather wealthy man. Perhaps he should announce that he is interested in buying 90 minutes of prime time air time on Sinclair Broadcasting to show either Fahrenheit 9/11 or, even more appropriately, Going Upriver, the new movie out about John Kerry during the Vietnam era.

If Sinclair won't sell the time, they're exposed for what they already clearly are. If the FEC won't allow it, on the premise that it amounts to a de facto campaign contribution to the Democrats or the Kerry campaign, then the folly of our current campaign laws is exposed.

I doubt somehow that Soros would ever end up having to spend the money. But he has a big enough checkbook to force the issue.

Using a daughter for campaign fodder (rhymes)

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are engaged in the most cynical sick game that I can think of: they're exploiting poor Mary Cheney for the benefit of their campaign. (thanks to Jordan for that comment).

Memo: GOP to Kerry

Stop depressing the turnout of our bigoted base. Thanks.

More on Lynn Cheney

From TPM:

A reader (RS) notes another point -- a very perceptive one that I'm surprised no one else has noted. Lynne Cheney called Kerry's mention of her daughter "cheap and tawdry." Those are words redolent of associations with sexual deviance, not rough campaign tactics. She might have said what he did was 'mean-spirited', 'underhanded', 'devious', 'inappropriate', 'wrong'. She chose 'cheap and tawdry'. Interesting ...

And a good rebuttal of Mickey Kaus from Andrew Sullivan:

LET MARY SPEAK: Mickey posits a perilous race analogy:
"What if Kerry were debating a conservative on affirmative action, and that conservative had a black wife, and Kerry gratuitously brought that up in an attempt to cost his opponent the racist vote? Would Andrew Sullivan approve? I don't think so. ..."
First off, I don't buy the cynical explanation of Kerry's reference. But secondly, affirmative action isn't a strong enough analogy. Let's say the president was proposing the real analogy: a constitutional amendment to ban inter-racial marriage. Now let's say the veep's daughter was married to a black man. Would it be relevant then? Of course it would. But there is an obvious solution to this debate: let Mary speak. She's running the veep's campaign. She's an adult. Why can't she tell us if she's upset by Kerry's and Edwards' remarks? Give her a microphone, guys. What are you afraid of?

Check out my earlier post on Lynn Cheney...

For the record...

Bush's "senile dementia" didn't seem to be present last night. Maybe I was wrong. He was much more articulate than usual.

He's still an idiot. And the swarmy frat boy act that he put on didn't impress me either. And by "didn't impress me" I mean "nearly caused me to throw a brick through the television screen."

And now for some gossip

I hate for this blog to degenerate into some sort of gossip/rumor mill. Then again, I hate Bill O'Reilly...

On that note, here are some great quotes from deposition of the lawsuit against him:

On Al Franken: "...one day he's going to get a knock on his door and life as he's known it will change forever. That day will happen, trust me."

On what Roger Ailes will do to Al Franken: "Ailes knows very powerful people and this goes all the way to the top." [plaintiff: "the top of what?"] "Top of the country. Just look at who's on the cover of his book [Bush and Cheney], they're watching him and will be for years. He's finished, and he's going to be sorry he ever took Fox News on."

I'll let you check out the rest for yourself. This is a family blog.

A way to mobilize the youth

I love what Rock the Vote is doing this year: scaring up votes with rumors about a draft.

Is it dishonest? Nope. How can we continue to wage war after war without a draft? Has Bush promised to stop waging war? Nope.

Today's Friedman column

It's been about 6 months since I've referenced a NYTimes column, and today's Friedman column is particularly good. Check it out. Key graphs:

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear the president and vice president slamming John Kerry for saying that he hopes America can eventually get back to a place where "terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives.

If I have a choice, I prefer not to live the rest of my life with the difference between a good day and bad day being whether Homeland Security tells me it is "code red" or "code orange" outside. To get inside the Washington office of the International Monetary Fund the other day, I had to show my ID, wait for an escort and fill out a one-page form about myself and my visit. I told my host: "Look, I don't want a loan. I just want an interview." Somewhere along the way we've gone over the top and lost our balance.

That's why Mr. Kerry was actually touching something many Americans are worried about - that this war on terrorism is transforming us and our society, when it was supposed to be about uprooting the terrorists and transforming their societies.

Lynn Cheney, awful parent

So Lynn Cheney is angry at Kerry for:

1. Praising those who have the courage to come out of the closet
2. Mentioning Mary Cheney as one who has done so

Could it be that Lynn Cheney is embarrassed by her daughter? She's spent her entire life fighting to subjugate gays and lesbians like her daughter, so it wouldn't surprise me.

I don't pretend to understand the Cheney family, but I've seen Ordinary People and she reminds me of the cold-hearted and self-interested mother from that movie. This is the same woman who in 2000 denied that her daughter was a lesbian.

As for the charge that Kerry is trying to depress Bush's base with a homophobic appeal: Read his remarks. He had nothing but praise for gays and lesbians. In fact, I'd say he went way too far to the left in his rhetoric (he praised gays who broke up marriages by coming out of the closet).

Lynn Cheney needs to shut up and start worrying about more important things, like the death threats that the Republican base surely sends her daughter everyday.

Debate #3 - The drool debate

Forget the back and forth in this debate. If I had to score it, I'd score it a tie. No one was watching and no one cares about the 3rd debate. Everyone was watching the Red Sox/Yankees game.

Let's get straight to the point here: George W. Bush was foaming at the mouth (from Electablog):

Forget all of my earlier analysis. This thing could all come down to that weird spittle caught in the side of the President's mouth. I haven't seen that kind of foaming at the mouth since Tommy Chong was in his prime.

Please - someone tell the media to cover this important issue. They covered Gore's sighs. It's time to focus on drool. That drool remained on Bush's mouth for nearly 15 minutes. I couldn't focus on the content of his statements, because I was so focused on the saliva.

News or a farce?

This Newsmax story reads like an Onion article.

Bush is losing his mind

From Juan Cole:

David Lindorff, Salon.com:

"a technical expert who designs and makes such devices for the U.S. military tells Salon that he believes the bulge is indeed a transceiver designed to receive electronic signals and transmit them to a hidden earpiece lodged in Bush's ear canal."
(Referring to the apparent use by Bush of a wireless device to allow him to be coached during the Kerry debates. If true, this development is horrifying for several reasons. It means that Bush's disastrous performance in the first debate was the best he could do while cheating. It also means that there is something seriously wrong with Bush's mind, which must be apparent to those close to him. You begin to wonder if the rules laid down for the September 11 Commission, whereby Bush and Cheney were interviewed together, wasn't the first sign of a dirty little secret in official Washington: Nice White House, nobody home.

Yes...he did request for Cheney to be at his side at the 9-11 Commission meeting. And he flunked the Meet the Press interview...maybe this guy is losing his mind.

Maybe he's developing "senile dementia". For more on this subject, check out this video comparison between George W. Bush's debate performance against Ann Richards (most impressive...really!) and his recent performances. The difference is telling.

Tomorrow's debate

Let's hope that Kerry changes the subject to Iraq as much as possible, because he is incredibly weak on domestic policy and cultural issues.

Let's also hope that Bush continues to behave like a maniac.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Kerry's been holding back a line for this last debate. It's a simple line:

"Huh?"

When Bush says something completely ridiculous - when he invents a word or mangles a phrase, Kerry needs to capitalize. We need a soundbite where Bush says something in another language (mangled English) and Kerry has a "huh?" look on his face.

The flip flopper myth

Jonathan Chait, TNR:

The image of John Kerry as a "dishonest waffler" is so powerful in some voters' minds that it overcomes disagreement with George W. Bush on nearly every issue. You would think being consistently wrong would be worse than being irresolutely correct, but apparently not. And the notion of Kerry as a flip-flopper is so deeply embedded that it has penetrated the popular culture. Jay Leno, football announcer Al Michaels, and countless others have all cracked wise about Kerry as a flip-flopper.

You have to wonder, when was the last time a party nominated a presidential candidate of such low character? Oh, yes: That would be four years ago. In 2000, Bush painted Al Gore as a flip-flopper whenever possible. Voters, he declared, "don't want flip-floppers as president of the United States." Rather than dispute Gore's positions, he derided them as incoherent. When Gore criticized privatizing Social Security, Bush's spokesman mocked it as Gore's "third position in six months." This characterization was amplified in the media. "Mr. Gore has a bit of a reputation for flip-flopping and corner-cutting on issues like abortion and trade," reported a New York Times news story in August 2000.

The last candidate as opportunistic and unprincipled as Gore was Bill Clinton. In 1992, George H.W. Bush's campaign ran advertisements assailing Clinton's contradictions. "As the case of military service makes most clear, these differing positions are, in fact, more than mere flip-flops. They reflect a fundamental element of Governor Clinton's character," charged Dan Quayle. Bush mocked Clinton by visiting a Waffle House. This perception of Clinton became so ingrained that even liberal Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau depicted Clinton as a waffle. Four years later, reported the Times, Bob Dole spent "weeks portraying [Clinton] as a waffler without real convictions" and ran under the not-very-subtle slogan, "The better man for a better America."

Today's Bush vomit

"Now just this weekend, Senator Kerry talked of reducing terrorism to quote -- nuisance -- end-quote, and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling. I couldn't disagree more," Bush said, in reference to a comment by Kerry in The New York Times Magazine.

"Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance," Bush said. "Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorist networks and spreading freedom and liberty around the world."

Think the world is a great place?

Check out this story from China:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing will install about 1,000 condom vending machines in hotels, bars, universities and on construction sites in the Chinese capital this month to fight the spread of AIDS, the official Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.

The machines will dispense condoms for 1 yuan (12 U.S. cents) a piece and their quality will be guaranteed, a Beijing Disease Control and Prevention Center official was quoted as saying.

The new machines will supplement 1,700 machines already in the capital, many of which are often out of service or empty. Existing machines will be repaired this month, Guan Baoying, a city health bureau official, said.

China says it has 840,000 HIV/AIDS cases, but experts say at least 1 million poor farmers were infected in the central province of Henan alone as a result of a botched blood-for-sale donor scheme.

The United Nations has said the number of AIDS victims in China could quickly rise to 10 million if serious steps to fight the epidemic are not taken.

Low quality and sometimes unpackaged condoms made up nearly three quarters of the two billion condoms used in China last year.

1 million poor farmers accidentally infected with the HIV virus!

Debate #2

If you watched the Sunday talk shows this weekend, you'd get the idea that Bush trounced Kerry in Friday's debate. You'd almost certainly forget that Bush acted like a maniac for the first 45 minutes. He could barely control his anger. The volume of his voice was way over the top. He furiously interrupted Charles Gibson. He mispronounced/invented several words and phrases. Why wasn't that the story?

Kerry wasn't all that good after the first 30 minutes, and that should be taken into account. But the fact that Bush referred to multiple Internets should at least be grounds for censure, if not impeachment...shouldn't it?

I watched the debate with several Republicans and after seeing it they all agreed that Bush is a bit of a dim bulb. They thought Kerry won, and they were depressed.