No word yet on a "Very Special Episode" of the pro-terrorist series, in which conflicted-terrorist Abdul rapes and then beheads Mayim "Blossom" Bialik.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (9)
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Not as bad as I had feared.

And this is interesting: It appears that, at least in this poll, Bush has actually increased his lead over Kerry since the before the debate.

My powers of prognostication are pretty weak, I'm realizing. I'll stick to making D&D jokes and Star Wars references.

Update: Scan down to the breakdown for question 3.

Bush is beating Kerry among Independent LV's 50-39.

That's up from a 39-36 split in the last FoxNews poll.

Wow.

Now, that's such a huge move that I suspect it's mostly wrong-- bad sample, etc. But I don't think it's completely wrong. Some of that movement must be real.

Thanks to ConservativePoet.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (8)
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Ralph Peters and Travelling Shoes have a good rebuttal to Kerry's plaintive whining over Iraq.

Inside-Baseball Update: My sitemeter is going berserk with Travelling Shoes referrals. Something tells me that he just got Instalanched, or Allahlanched.

He's been lanched by someone. Good on ya.

(Update: He says it was a Powerlinelanche. Nice.)

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (1)
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10. To appear less like a callow ambulance-chaser and more like a man of action, he's lightened his hair and wearing a white tunic to look more like Mark Hamill in Star Wars

9. He'll also note that we could have spent that $87 billion to "go to Tashya Station" to buy some wicked "power converters"

8. James Carville is making sure he gets at least 8 hours of sleep every night; new rule: no spooky stories after 9pm (they keep him up all night!)

7. He's been studying his briefing book like a madman, because Bob Shrum says that if he wins the debate, Shrum will buy him a pony

6. He plans on naming the pony either "Princess Prettyprance" or "Dumpling"

5 Under absolutely no circumstances will he fall for any of Dick Cheney's wily rhetorical tricks, like the old "Douchebag says 'what'?"

4. Old John Edwards Mood-Enhancer: Diet Coke
New John Edwards Mood-Enhancer: Institutional-strength Ritalin

3. In order to boost his "gravitas," he's radically cut down on the number of mentions he makes of Trading Spaces and Extreme Make-Over: Home Edition; he's learned to avoid saying things like "I think matching pillows could really bring Fallujah together" or "What Baghdad really needs now is a 'pop' of color in Sadr City"

2. IN: American flag pin on lapel
OUT: Ocean Pacific t-shirt showing a man surfing on a dolphin

... and the Number One John Edwards Debate-Prep Secret...

1. Has memorized an extensive list of economic talking-points by making up a mnemonic song to the tune of Clay Aiken's If I Was Invisible

Update:

"Do I seem soft to you?" -- John Edwards, in an interview with Judy Woodruff

I don't know quite how to answer that, John.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (10)
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You have little time left.

And bear in mind the Democrats are registering a lot of new voters. And, wouldn't you know it, some of the Democratic-leaning organizations are being investigated for potentially-criminal incompetence in failing to register some voters.

Just put that in the "Whoopsie-Daisy" file, I guess!

(There is no word yet from Oliver Willis about whether this Democratic-leaning organization's gross incompetence in failing to register voters constitutes "racism," as he alleged regarding Republican efforts to reduce voter fraud. When he speaks authoritatively on this issue, I will of course let you know.)

Update: Rusty says that the registration deadline for many states has passed. However, some states allow registration for a few days yet.

Correction: I initially echoed Florida-Cracker in saying that Republican applications were beign tossed out. That seems to be her interpretation of the events; it is not actually stated in her articles. Since I don't have evidence for that specific claim, I've edited to omit it.

Thanks to Dave Pasquino for keeping me honest. Although I'm really getting sick of these "partisan political operatives" conducting an unfair "jihad" against me.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (5)
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But more importantly, it's expanded every single month of this year.

Which is pretty good, considering we're in the midst of a Herbert Hoover style great Depression, as John Kerry tells me every day.

Posted by: Ace at 09:37 AM | Comments (2)
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The hysterical left-wing blogosphere thinks they've gotten hold of their own little Rathergate. It seems that Fox reporter Carl Cameron, covering the Kerry campaign, inserted joke-quotes -- obviously parodies -- into a preliminary news-script and those quotes were taken as real by someone on the FoxNews website.

These "Kerry quotes" got posted as real:

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

Now, these are obviously fake, as Joshua "I'm working on the story of my life" Marshall immediately realized. And FoxNews immediately realized they were fake, too-- the story was pulled almost immediately and FoxNews has issued a retraction and an apology:

Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporterÂ’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.

They also "reprimanded" Carl Cameron. A fuller FoxNews explanation can be found here.

The new policy states that no such humorous bits are to be included in any preliminary news script.

Now, how did these obviously-ludicrous "quotes" make it on to the website? FoxNews isn't saying, but there seem to be three possibilities:

1) The person who wrote the story is in fact a functional retard.

2) The person who wrote the story is rabidly-anti-Kerry, so much so as to cloud his sense.

3) The person who wrote the story is, like many of the people who work at FoxNews, a liberal who hates FoxNews and wishes he or she had gotten a better job offer at a more liberal news organization, and posted the story deliberately to embarass FoxNews.

But who knows.

Josh Marshall whines:

[A FoxNews spokesman says] “Carl [Cameron] made a stupid mistake which he regrets. And he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. It was a poor attempt at humor.”

So the Fox reporter covering the Kerry campaign puts together this Kerry-bashing parody right out of the RNC playbook with phony quotes intended to peg him as girlish fool and somehow it found its way on the Fox website as a news item.

Imagine that.

More to follow ...

More to follow? Isn't there always, Joshy?

Joshy wants to get to the bottom of this. He asks:

1. [Re: Cameron's reprimand] How? Are there any consequences? What happened to him? How was he reprimanded? Fox spokesman Paul Schur, who first spoke to TPM yesterday afternoon, told The Daily News "We're simply moving on from this, we have no further comment." And that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that the 'reprimand' is anything more than a 'Carl, Don't post any more fabricated quotes on the website.' Meanwhile, Schur declined to tell the LA Times what if any discipline Cameron faced.

3. Just for the sake of discussion, can there be any question that Carl Cameron has contempt and disdain for John Kerry -- contempt and disdain that he has great difficulty keeping a lid on?

4. Shouldn't Cameron be taken off the Kerry campaign beat? Assume for the moment that Cameron's fabricated story wasn't supposed to run on the site. If Cameron sits around writing up phony news stories only for Fox News colleagues which portray Kerry as a swishy fool, can he really credibly cover the campaign as a straight news reporter? The answer is obvious, I think. Of course, he can't.

The trouble for Joshy is that this isn't the first time a partisan has been caught inserting snide jokes into a partial script-- or pool report. One of Joshy's favorite reporters, I'm sure-- Dan Milbank of the Washington Post -- had lots of snide anti-Bush "jokes" in a pool report he prepared for the media who could not attend a Bush function.

Milbank repeatedly calls Bush "our protagonist" and "our hero" -- which might be seen as cute and playful coming from a Republican or moderate, but which are definitely insulting coming from a rabidly-partisan Bush-hater like Milbank --
and works in a few more "jokes" which might have, in the hands of a senseless website hack, made it into the official WaPo record:

Our protagonist departed the White House near unto 9:20 this morning, bound for the Capitol in a determined effort to find Gary Condit. Actually, he was to meet with the House Republican caucus.

Your pool watched as POTUS descended into the bowels of the Capitol's west side accompanied by Speaker Hastert at 9:30. "We're going to talk about a lot of things," the president informed the pool. "We're going to get a lot of things done for America."

The president and the caucus got so many things done for America so quickly that the hour-long meeting lasted only 45 minutes: a 25 minute speech by the president and 20 minutes of schmoozing. ...

The big news of the day was made when our protagonist spoke about education. He declared that education is "a passion for me." In addition to this startling revelation, he made a case for free trade and his faith-based initiative.

Now, you may say that Milbank's snideness didn't make it into print. But I'm not sure that's relevant, as Carl Cameron didn't print his jokes as real; that was some dope working for the website. And furthermore, it seems that Milbank's deceptive little bon mots do occasionally make it into the Washington Post.

In a "news analysis column," "our hero" Milbank shows himself to be very fair-and-balanced and quite the cut-up by inserting this at the end of his news story:

The Quotable Bush

"I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein." -- President Bush, meeting Iraqi amputees at the White House on May 25.

As Nick Kronos pointed out:

One little detail left out from Milbank's attempt to make the President look like an insensitive idiot:

The President was shaking the man's new hand because all the "amputees" had just received new limbs courtesy of American charity.

And you want to hear something really funny? Here's how the column ending with that straw-man snideness began:

For President Bush, this is the season of the straw man.

It is an ancient debating technique: Caricature your opponent's argument, then knock down the straw man you created.

I guess Milbank studied the technique well enough to develop some level of expertise.

I hope Joshy points me to the posts in which he chastised Milbank for his snide anti-Bush "joking" and suggested that Milbank be reassigned because of his partisan animus.

Because I just know that Josh "Story of My Life" Marshall wouldn't resort to blatant partisan hypocrisy on such an issue. He's a "real reporter," and he'll tell you so if you just lend him your ear.

Posted by: Ace at 12:15 AM | Comments (14)
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I've mentioned Snausages twice in the past week. If I've ignited some sort of Snausages fetish in anyone, SondraK has pictures.

Of Snausages.

And even Snausages being fed to dogs.

Very, very hot. Not work-safe, at least not if you work at a kennel.

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 PM | Comments (1)
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Bush succeeds by lowering expectations and then exceeding them. When he gets into trouble, it's because he raises expectations and can't match them.

Nevertheless, that seems to be Bush's favored mode for the past couple of years-- overpromise, underdeliver.

If I were in the White House, I wouldn't be telling the press that I expected a significant upward revision in the number of jobs created in the 2004 fiscal year. I would leave that sort of thing to its pajama-wearing partisan political operatives on the internet, such as myself, as well as smooth anonymous sources like Deep Stoat, who I'm pretty sure looks like a young Hal Holbrook, minus the chainsmoking.

And then, if it came to pass-- big, sweet surprise. If it didn't-- no harm, no foul.

But I'm not in the White House. I can keep my name a secret, but there are a lot of West Wing Chatty Kathy's who can't hold their expectations of about the Bureau of Labor Statistcs' end-of-year jobs revisions on the QT.

They're raising expectations, which could cause a crushing disappontment on Friday if those expectations aren't met, and accusations of "political manipulation" if they are.

But here is what they're saying:

NEW YORK, Oct 5 (Reuters) - White House economists expect that this week's revisions to nonfarm payrolls data, the last released before the Nov. 2 presidential elections, may show substantial labour market gains for the March 2003 to March 2004 period, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper cited a memo by U.S. President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers as stating that revised data for March 2003-March 2004 could be revised upward by 288,000 jobs, and [even] as much as 384,000.

...

The White House estimate, prepared by career CEA technical staff, has no effect on what the independent Bureau of Labor Statistics will actually report on Friday, the article said.

...

According to the article, the CEA memo uses publicly available unemployment insurance records to calculate that employment from March 2003 through December 2003 grew by 288,000, or 32,000 per month, more than previously published BLS estimates.

The Journal also cited the memo as saying "it is tempting" to extrapolate the monthly figure out to March 2004, producing a total increase of 384,000.

But it downplays the higher figure, warning that employment in the first three months of the year could well be revised down, not up, citing other data revisions that tilt in that direction.

Anything that's "tempting" is probably something you shouldn't do. That's half of what makes it so tempting.

So, now we've established a Bar for Success for the liberal legacy media, which the Bush Administration is required to clear and beat just to be considered to have not failed. And anything lower than 300,000 revised FY 2004 jobs will be called a failure.

Dumb. Very dumb, guys.

The White House needs a new man as Chief of Staff, and that man's name is Vinny Falcone.

Since they've already raised expectations, I'll speculate a bit further. Bush is down, what now?, around 900,000 jobs, right? 250,000 jobs created in September plus 300,000 revised 2004 jobs knocks that deficit down by another 550,000, leaving Bush's fabled "jobs deficit" at around 350,000 -- a number of jobs he'll almost certainly create by the end of his first term, if not the November 2 election.

Anything better than that is gravy. It is not inconceivable that a big September combined with a very big upward revision would almost entirely eliminate the jobs deficit by the end of the week.

But let's not get hopes up. Job creation has been inadequate for the past three or four months.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 PM | Comments (9)
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I have an rule about how links are supposed to work. I wonder if everyone agrees.

Basically, I think that when you link someone else's find or analysis, you're permitted to excerpt a taste of what they're quoting or saying, but it's always important to leave something fairly important behind to click on. After all, if you just quote all the good parts, you've left your audience with no reason to click on the link-- the blog that tipped you gets the link, for what that's worth, but very little traffic at all.*

I'm pretty good about observing this rule, although sometimes the site I've gotten something from is just a one-line mention, so it's hard to describe the article linked there and still leave something behind for a reader to click on.

Just to show you what a good guy I am, I'll mention that I once linked a one-sentence blurb from Marcland. I really couldn't leave anything behind for readers to click through to, so I scanned his site for something else interesting, and found something quickly (he has lots of interesting stuff, after all): photos of Saturn's rings from the Cassini spacecraft. So I stole his link, but then linked to something that was just on his site.

And I left out lots of good stuff in the Six Meat Buffet story I just linked-- including a link to the actual article. Yeah, in a way, I'm making it less convenient for my readers. But then, my readers are only getting the story due to Six Meat Buffet's work (assuming they didn't find the story through some other source), so, inconvenient or not, it's the tax that has to be paid to Six Meat Buffet.

My own pet peeve is when someone just republishes an entire top ten I wrote. The whole thing, start to finish. Bloggers always link me when they do this, but with 10 through 1 already published on someone else's site, what's the point of the link? Might as well call the link Honestly, there's no reason to click on these red words whatsoever. Spend your time doing something more productive, like calling your mom and thanking her for the birthday afghan. **

I also think there's gray area: What do you do when someone just quickly links an article with a one-sentence digest, but you find it more interesting and want to quote and analyze at length? It seems silly to withhold the direct link to the article from your readers in favor of linking to the blog where you found the link; and yet, if you don't do that, you're stealing traffic that the blogger-source actually earned.

Again, in that case, I think it's best to find something else interesting on that site and then link that. Link the article directly, but make sure that your actual source gets some traffic somehow.

I think that most people do observe the Thou Shalt Always Share Traffic For a News Find rule; I think most people understand it implicitly.

And I know that I have violated the rule myself. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue and all that. But I do try to observe it.

I'm not sure if this is an agreed-upon rule or what. It seems to be a sort-of rule, but maybe it's more of a guideline. Maybe I'm wrong.

Just tossing it out there.

* I guess Instapundit is the past-master at leaving everything behind. One tenth of Instapundit's links are just: "Heh." I don't know-- that seems to be taking the rule to extremes. "Heh."

I've dabbled with the idea of publishing no original words whatsoever on this blog whatsoever, except "Heh." No headlines, no comments. I'll just out-Instapundit Instapundit and link everything with a "Heh."

Maybe Friday.

** Ann Coulter did exactly just that to me, but given that this link actually moved me from the three-digits to four-digits of traffic after three weeks of prominent exposure.

Plus, you know, it was Ann Coulter. You don't fuck around with Ann Coulter. Lest she call you a girly-man.

Posted by: Ace at 08:12 PM | Comments (15)
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