Ace of Spades, Teenager in Turmoil, learns his best friend is addicted to speed. He must decide to keep the secret, or tell his friend's parents. Special Guest Appearances by Tony Danza, Meredith Baxter-Birney, and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.

My own blogging will be light this weekend -- I have a major pain-in-my-ass commitment, though I'll try to get on the damn hotel computer and do some posting -- but I'm proud to announce the site's first guest host.

Is "proud" the right word, really? I don't think so. Overstates it by at least 80%. Let's just say I'm required to announce the site's first guest host.

I had actually hoped to get someone you might have sorta-mighta heard of to guest-blog this weekend, but the best I could come up with was Hoke Malokey.

Hoke is a smart analyst and damn funny too. He's funny in that dry, erudite witty manner -- you know, pussy-shit. College-boy crap. While I was out there bustin'-ass on a tuna boat in the Berring Straits, Hoke was standing around at a fancy-pants university club in his pansy tweeds and spats making cutting remarks about the pate.

But seriously: he's good. He knows politics inside and out; I've learned a lot from him.

He's also technically incompetent, so if he does anything stupid, like turn the entire site upside down or set the default font to "Sanskrit Sans Serif," try to alert him to that.

Be nice to him, but not too nice to him. I don't want to see anything even close to "You're much better than Ace; why don't you start your own blog?" I'm not going to get on Paula Zahn with that kind of crap being posted on my site.

If you need to contact him, either about a tip or about how badly he's screwed up the coding for the site, drop him a line at hokemalokey-AT-yahoo.com (replace the "-AT-" with @).

Anyway, assuming Hoke doesn't completely nuke the Munuvia software, I'll see you sporadically over the weekend, and then again Sunday night.

Playing the Expectations Game: Incidentally, Hoke Malokey is coming off the bench cold. This is all very last-minute, and he hasn't had time to prepare or anything like that. So, while I imagine he'll have interesting stuff to say, it will be all off-the-cuff and posted on borrowed time.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (9)
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Good gossip today. Dan Rather's being grilled over his complicity in peddling forgeries to the American people, while John McEnroe is being paid one million dollars to host a show that, out of 834 cable shows, is coming in... 833rd.

The one show he's beating? The Food Network's How to Boil Water.

You think that's a joke. And yet, you'd be wrong.

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (6)
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Bill From INDC has been nominated for the Washington Post's Best Inside the Beltway blog, and he's up Wonkette and the Daily Kos and... Joshua Micah Cougar Mellancamp Marshall.

And NRO's The Corner, too, which isn't so much a blog as a "coordinated Republican assault." Great little blog, of course, but it's not like they need the exposure.

Be sure to vote for your favorites, including IMAO and of course Little Green Footballs.

It takes five seconds to register, plus after you register, you get to read Charles Krauthammer and George Will to your heart's content. And, hey, we just can't let the Daily Kos and Wonkette walk off with major-media credibility without a bit of a fight.

And if Joshy Marshall wins...?

Can you imagine how much more insufferable he'll be?

Bill from INDC, on the other hand, has personally promised me that, should he win, he'll remain the same down-to-earth guy he is now, except he'll buy a Corvette and disown all of his current friends in favor of "better friends" -- better-looking, richer, more fabulous friends. Better people, in other words.

Which is only to be expected.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Add Comment
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Well, others seem to be crowing about their traffic, so I'll join in.

I really want to thank everyone who's coming to the site, and, of course, those wise, generous souls who've donated. And of course I need to thank all the bloggers who've been nice enough to link my nonsense from time to time.

It's very gratifying, and it really helps keep me sane.

I think Instapundit was dead-on when he said something like "When you're sick of yelling at your television, start a blog." Well, I was sick of yelling at my TV, and I was also sick of arguing with people -- friends, family -- about politics.

The great thing about having a blog which a good number of people read is that I can now pose as one of those sweet-natured apolitical types in my real life. I don't have to argue with actual people anymore; I get it out of my system on my blog.

One of these days, when I'm not so anonymous, I'd like to be in the early stages of an argument with someone and just walk away, telling my would-be opponent, "Eh, you're just completely ass-backwards wrong, as I explain in great detail on my blog."

Son of Nixon (almost out of hiatus!) and I giggle each other up with that joke, but so far, I've not had the chance to use it in real life.

One day. One day soon.

In any event, I had a ridiculous 270,000 daily unique visitors in September, a number that Instapundit laughs at, but I'll take it gladly. 400,000 visits/pageviews in the past month, and I've finally cracked the top fifty by traffic on the Truth Laid Bear's ranking.

Actually, it's a little better than that, since so many blogs are actually double-listed, first under an old address and then under the current one, as mine is. For a few days there, right after the Burkett forgery story broke, I managed top 25 and was even a Playful Primate-- briefly.

Again, thanks for coming, and thanks for the tips and links you send me-- it sure makes this a lot easier to have the combined intelligence of several thousand sharp-eyed readers sifting through the day's hot stories.

And thanks too for all the comments. I really like the liveliness of the comments, the jokes and the substantive arguments alike.

Basically-- thanks.

I can pretty much smell that Paula Zahn appearance.

And soon thereafter, I will be America's most beloved television host, with lots of stunts and "wacky characters" spicing things up.

And then -- dare I dream? -- the crazy blog-money that I'm doing all this for.

Not Quite So Big as Imagined Update! Look, I don't really know what any of these stats mean, but I just want to make it clear that my "daily unique visitors" for the month of September seems to just be a total of each day's daily uniques, all added together -- which means that they're counted multiple times for the entire month.

They're not monthly unique visitors, i.e., unique people who came at least once during the whole month. They're just all the daily visitors, summed up, multiply-counted.

If there's a "monthly unique visitors" count on SiteMeter, I don't see it anywhere. If I had to guess at the number of unique visitors here in September, I'd guess around 60,000, maybe a few more, maybe 80,000. I know I got linked by big blogs who hadn't linked me before -- Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham's web-site; and a couple of big blogs who link me infrequently -- Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, Beldar, Just One Minute, etc. -- but I don't really know for certain. (Allah and ASV link me more frequently, of course.)

Anyway, just wanted to clear that up. Bill from INDC's first number seems to be his actual total count for uniques coming to his site for the whole month, which must be a lot bigger than mine.

Update: Bill now says that the first number he was using was a goofball number he doesn't understand, whereas I was in fact using the commonly-accepted numbers for gauging monthly traffic. So it looks like my numbers were as big as I thought they were, at least as they're most-typically measured.

Bill's first number seems to measure the same thing as mine; he deleted the old one.

He's winning. For now.

Sean Connery Impersonation ON: The game is afoot! Well that washh naughty, sshunsshhine. Pusshy Galore...? I mussht be dreaming.

Sean Connery Impersonation OFF.

Posted by: Ace at 10:38 AM | Comments (17)
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John Kerry makes much of his Vietnam War experience. Because he was in Vietnam for four months before filing Paperwork for Papercuts and getting his white ass home early and intact, he says he knows what it means to put men into battle, and he knows what it means for men to die in war.

He has a respect for the solemnity of war, he says, which George Bush doesn't.

Very well.

If that's the case, can Senator Kerry explain why he voted in favor of authorizing a war which he claims he did not intend to authorize? According to his own statements -- or at least most of them, since he tends to be all over the map -- John Kerry voted to authorize war not to actually go to war, but to simply give Bush the "leverage" he needed for diplomatic maneuverings at the UN.

Authorizing war is the gravest decision a Senator can make. There is no vote that is more solemn or important or fraught with peril.

And yet John Kerry, by his own account, voted to authorize war -- war, which he claims he knows the solemnity of so well, from first hand experience -- not because he had made the difficult choice that men must die in order to secure some important military goal, but because he wanted to give Bush some leverage when fencing with Dominique de Villipain.

John Kerry-- the man who knows well the lessons of Vietnam, because he fought in that war.

Funny. There was a little resolution in 1965, I think, that authorized the President to go to war, if he determined it was necessary. Many Senators voted for that authorization for war, they later claimed, in the understanding that it was just needed to convince the enemy that we were serious. It wasn't really an authorization for war, they claimed later; it was an authorization for the threat of war. War is bad; threats of war, apparently, are good.

That resolution was of course the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and, surprise suprise, it turned out it wasn't merely a "threat" of war, but, get this, a full-blown authorization for war (as the text of the resolution plainly stated), and President Johnson relied upon it as such.

Given John Kerry's history, can he plausibly say he was unaware of this?

How can he now say that he has a better appreciation for the solemnity and gravity of war, when he admits to voting to authorize war for some secondary diplomatic reason?

And of course we are too charitable to credit his account as being accurate. We all know he voted for war for one reason-- to preserve his viability as a candidate for President. He never wanted war; he never wanted to authorize war or even the threat of war. He wanted to avoid the charges that he is anti-war, and counterweight his 1991 vote against the first Gulf War.

The man who claims to know first-hand the viciousness of war voted for war so he could attain a higher office.

Liberals are always arguing that "being against the war is an honorable position." I actually agree.

But that isn't John Kerry's position. John Kerry's position was to be in favor of the war for political reasons, and then to be against the war for other political reasons.

Do liberals argue that that too is an "honorable position"? If that's honorable, what on earth could possibly remain dishonorable?

War may be a solemn consideration, but John Kerry's political aspirations have always been, to him at least, even more solemn.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Add Comment
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I have to preface this by noting that I didn't see the first half hour of the debate; I heard it-- or most of it. I missed the second half hour, and watched the third.

I'll catch up on it all later. But I saw/heard enough to have an opinion. (Go figure.)

First of all, the great Deborah Orin sums up my basic feeling:

Kerry seemed far better prepared than Bush, ready to counter the president's points while Bush often repeated himself and at times seemed at a loss for words or defensive. The president even audibly sighed at times.

By the time the debate was over, it seemed clear that Kerry had given himself a new lease on life and guaranteed that the campaign has a long way to run.

Kerry was rated the clear winner in a CNN/Gallup poll immediately after the debate. It found that 53 percent said Kerry won the debate, compared with 37 percent who gave the nod to Bush.

Deborah Orin had a more opinion-y piece in the Post which I can't find at the moment. She said that Kerry appeared sharp, concise, effective, and clear, while Bush seemed more like a Senator, speaking of "6-way talks" and frequently repeating himself.

Bush did repeat himself-- a lot. I said "If he says 'hard work' one more time I'm going to scream." In his closing, he said "hard work" again, and a Kerry partisan I didn't know and didn't speak too cried out "Hard work!" and laughed. She, too, had been tracking the "hard work" repetitions.

I had assumed that all the tough-on-Kerry questions were asked during the half-hour I missed. How does he explain his ever-shifting position on Iraq? Etc.

I said to a friend, "We must have missed the part where Lehrer grilled Kerry on his changing positions."

"Maybe not," the friend said. "Maybe he never asked."

"No," I said. "They couldn't do that."

"Couldn't they?" was the answer.

Well, it turns out, gee willickers, they could simply ignore the all of the toughest questions for Senator Kerry.

The debate resembled a Katie Couric interview-- tough questions with follow-ups for the Republican like "Please explain why you lied or screwed up so badly," while the Democrat is offered his own "tough questions," like "Please explain why your opponent lied or screwed up so badly."

I don't know why Bush keeps agreeing on Jim Lehrer as a moderator. I hope no other Republicans ever make that mistake again.

But we can cry bias all we like. The fact is, Lehrer asked Kerry very easy questions for him, tossed up high fat hanging curve balls, and Kerry, predictably, knocked them high and far and true. The net result is still that, in the public's mind, Kerry seemed more comfortable with the questions.

As was Jim Lehrer's design.

Bush continued to frustrate me, as he has always frustrated me. When Kerry made a big issue of our boys not having all the armor they needed, Bush did not mention the fact that Kerry voted against that same armor when he voted against the $87 billion supplemental.

Only later, in an entirely different question, did he even mention that vote, and he did not mention the body-armor aspect, nor link it to Kerry's hypocritical complaint.

What the fuck could he have been thinking? Bush is simply not a good debater.

Kerry's litany of complaints wasn't anything new, but he delivered that litany well, and, for the most part, Bush did not rebut them. Many of these criticisms were either false or tendentious, but the fact is that Bush let them lie on the table unchallenged, which most non-partisan, uninformed viewers will take as conceding their fundamental accuracy.

Which is not a crazy position to take, after all. Most media-savvy folks, like us, know that when a spinner dodges a question or doesn't challenge a charge's truthfulness directly, that question should be taken as answered against their interest, and the charge should be taken as probably accurate.

Repeatedly, Bush allowed Kerry to lay charges against him without contradicting them. He just kept saying that Kerry "changed his position."

And on that point: Look, the flip-flopping charge is already reflected in Kerry's low-ish level of support. That's not new information to the public; that's not the sort of new argument that can move, or solidify, voters on behalf of Bush. That charge is already baked in the cake, as it were, and continuing to pound that issue is of low marginal value.

Yes, you want to build on your strengths and reinforce the perceived weaknesses of your opponent, but you don't want to do that exclusively; it would be nice if you could occasionally slip in a new argument or a new line of attack.

From what I saw, Bush didn't.

I think that Kerry is incoherent and that Bush has a coherent and wise plan for fighting terrorism. But that's what I know from information gathered outside the debates.

In the actual debate -- again, from what I saw and heard -- Kerry presented himself well enough to overcome doubts about his fitness to lead, and furthermore Bush did his own cause some harm by not seeming more authoritative.

Sorry. That's the way I saw it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 AM | Comments (22)
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Especially interesting is this:

Although the headline figure showed a dip in factory activity for the month of September, Paulson said the employment portion of the report showed a rise.

The ISM index fell to 58.5 percent in September from 59.0 percent in August, in line with expectations. The employment index however rose to 58.1 from 55.7 in August.

"What the employment uptick really does is tell us that maybe next Friday we're going to a better-than-expected employment report," which suggests the soft patch in the economy may be ending, said Paulson.

Posted by: Ace at 08:37 AM | Comments (1)
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