Ohio's recount shows Kerry gaining substantial ground on the President.

Depending on how you define "substantial."

Less than a 1% pick-up? That's how I define it.

Posted by: Ace at 05:22 PM | Comments (6)
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Morris, who's correctly forecast zero of his last twenty predictions, says Hillary will win in 2008.

I honestly don't know if he's perfectly candid here or just a scribe with a deadline needing something provocative to write about:

Longtime presidential strategist Dick Morris had words of caution yesterday for those who say Hillary Clinton can't generate the kind of national support she needs to put herself back in White House in 2008.

Not only will Sen. Clinton win her party's nomination in a walk, the former Clinton adviser contends, her chances of beating the GOP four years from now are "superb."

...

"The problem is," added the top consultant, "she has an awfully good chance of winning the election."

Explained Morris:

"She generates black turnout that's about 10 points higher than [John] Kerry got. So that's one extra point for the Democratic Party.

"She probably is going to restore the Hispanic margin to 30 points, as opposed to the 10-point margin Kerry had. That's two points extra for the Democrats.

"And she'll probably carry single women by 4-to-1. Kerry carried them by 2-to-1. So that's another two points [for the Dems]."

That's five points' worth of support the Democrats didn't get in this year's vote - enough to trump President Bush's 51 percent to 49 percent margin of victory.
...

Are there no Republican candidates on the horizon who can stop the former first lady?

Morris named three possibilities: Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

...

"Condoleezza Rice takes the black base and she takes the female base that's absolutely essential for Hillary's victory."

Said Morris: "Rice is the only person who can stop Hillary Clinton from being president."

I keep saying this about Rice, but no one seems to listen. Yes, everyone's thrilled at the prospect of the Republicans running a female black candidate with impeccable foreign policy credentials (of the tough-guy sort, too, unlike Madeline Somewhatbright), but the woman has never once stood for public election before.

People treat this as if it's some minor thing. It's not. Politics is a strange business, and not many people have the skill-set to be successful at it.

Toss in the fact that she's almost certainly too pro-choice and pro-Affirmative Action for the Republican base and you've got additional problems. Problems that a very skilled politician like Bill Clinton might be able to finesse, but we have no evidence that Condi Rice has any real political skill at all, much less Clinton-level skill.

I like Condi Rice a great deal. I'd love to see her be President. But I think some in the blog world, and some in the somewhat mainstream media like Morris, are thinking with their hearts and not with their heads.

And as for Hillary?

I don't buy her carrying women 4 to 1 for a second. A lot of women love Hillary, but a nearly equal number despise her.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (37)
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Kinda funny, kinda sad story about Green Day really wanting to burn an American flag, but deciding not to, as it's "illegal" and they don't want to face jail time.

Except, you know, it's not.

How have these people formed such an erroneous impression of this country? Perhaps if they spouted off a little less and read a little more they'd be more appreciative of the freeest country in the history of the world.

Then again, probably not.

Thanks to Alarming News, which you should visit, because there's a whole host of guest bloggers while Karol is away.

Except that she's still posting a lot. From Honduras and the like. She is committed.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 AM | Comments (10)
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Good news:

Employers are expected to create as many as 225,000 new jobs each month in 2005 to more than absorb the 125,000 who enter the job market every month, economists predicted.

An informal survey of economists indicates that unemployment could fall from its current 5.4 percent to as low as 5 percent, a nearly 10 percentage point decline.

"It may be the best year since 2000 in terms of the general job market," predicts Mark Zandi of Economy.com. "There will rising labor force participation and fewer underemployed."

Play that funky music, white boy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 AM | Comments (19)
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This is just that Drudge-linked piece about our contribution to Asian disaster relief being "stingy," but I liked this bit:

But U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.

"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."

"There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy," he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe "believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more."

And here's what he looks like:

Bear in mind, he's whining about the "stinginess" of the US aid package and the need for us to pay more in taxes while the UN is covering up the greatest theft/embezzlement in human history.

Europe, the UN, and especially the fucking Scandavian socialist tax-weinies have to pour themselves and nice big tall cold glass of shut-the-fuck-up juice and just chill out for four years.

I don't give a damn about European internal politics. Why are Europeans so goddamned interested in ours?

I think it's for the same reason that I, as a conservative, used to hate Sweden.

Sweden was always offered as a utopia where socialism worked. As such, it was always a potent, or at least useful, point to raise against conservatives preaching lower taxes and such.

The US now occupies that same position among European leftists-- as a place of (moderately) free-market capitalism that seems to work a hell of a lot better than their systems. As such, it's a frequent embarassment to them, and they collectively wish the US would just get with the tax-'em-'till-they-bleed program so they wouldn't have our economy shoved in their faces everytime they want to do something economically retarded.

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 AM | Comments (25)
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The generally-useless Tim Noah at the amateur leftist webzine Slate has a piece that's almost worth reading. Except a, it's fluff, and b, it's well-covered ground.

What the hell are we supposed to call this decade? Noah's topical hook for re-writing this piece for the six-thousandth time is that we are days away from the decade's midpoint, and yet no one's figured out what to call these years. And I guess he has a point there-- you'd have figured that, by now, we'd have all collectively settled for a shorthand nickname for these years begining with a zero.

The eighties, the nineties, and then the... what?

The "oh's" has been suggested, and the antique "aughts."

Look, if no one else is going to step up to the plate, please, allow me. We are currently living in the nils. It's short and it doesn't roll too badly off the tongue and it even sounds a little bit cool.

We're in the nils, and then we'll be in the teens.

Until someone comes up with something better, I say we just all agree on "the nils" and be done with it already.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 PM | Comments (19)
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One of the raps conservatives got a lot of during the nineties was that we were inordinately fixated on scandal. Why, we were spending all of our time fussing about Whitewater and Loral and, yeahp, perjury and obstruction of justice regarding a "purely private sexual matter."

We weren't engaging on questions of policy; we didn't enter the public dialogue with Bill Clinton and offer solutions which would build bridges to the twenty-first century.

Perhaps some of that rap was well-deserved. I don't know. Clinton did (and still does) seem to me to have been a fairly corrupt guy, economical with the truth, as they say, but perhaps there was a point at which mere scandal-mongering became a proxy for substantive political discussion.

For me, at least, and people like me. Maybe for some people like you, too.

What a difference a change of the President's party makes though, huh?

Let's start with left-wing bloggers. Josh Marshall is supposed to be the cream of the lefty crop. But browse through his past year of blogging. Is there anything but scandal-mongering on his site? How frequently, exactly, does Josh Marshall weigh in on policy question?

Now, I don't trust any politicians, including Republican ones, and I think that it can't hurt to have sharp-eyed critics, ever-eager to pounce, on the left. I confess my enthusiasm for pursuing Republican scandals isn't as high as it probably ought to be, and so, to some extent, people like Marshall are doing some necessary work that I am constitutionally incapable of.

But.

I do seem to remember a time during which a fixation on scandal -- both real and wholly imagined -- was denigrated by those on the left as whining and griping and refusing to simply come to terms with the fact that a popular President was in office, and that policy fights ought to be on actual policy, rather than proxy fights over the scandal-of-the-week.

Josh has weighed in on the emerging Social Security debate in a predictable fashion. His take? The President's coming initiative to convince the American people that Social Security must be changed is rank dishonesty of a scandalous nature.

Where are the Belmont Clubs of the left, I wonder? Where are the considered policy arguments? Not among the best-known lefty blogs, apparently. I'm sure there are a few policy-oriented lefty blogs out there, but they don't seem to get an awful lot of attention.

The Democratic Party seems nearly as fixated on scandal as a proxy for policy disputes. True enough, there will occasionally be a policy position offered, but let's face it, the Democratic Party is primarily interested in attacking Bush. When a leader like Hillary Clinton treads down the same path as certified-moonbat Cynthia McKinney and brandishes an infamous NY Post bearing the slammer "BUSH KNEW," one knows immediately the mindset one is dealing with.

And the media? Well, they seem to follow the Democratic Party's lead, strangely enough. They're currently attempting to bring down Donald Rumsfeld, and, while policy questions do weigh into the mix, they're currently all in a fuss about an "insensitive" truism he uttered and the scandal that condolence letters to soldiers are signed by an Auto-Pen.

Is this serious debate?

A case can be made that this is what out-parties do with their time-- not having much actual political power, they are forced to resort to often-petty sniping from the sidelines.

Trouble is, I don't remember the Republicans getting much of a pass on that basis when Bill Clinton was cleaning our clocks. (And man, did he ever!)

And I'm not quite sure why the media-- previously rather reluctant to follow up on important stories like Clinton's claim he'd never been previously informed about Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, when in fact he proveably had been (and Tim Russert embarassed former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson badly on this point) -- now spends most of its time cracking important stories about "plastic turkeys" and letters signed by Auto-Pen.

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 PM | Comments (6)
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Now's your chance. Yes, for a low price, you can "register" yourself as owner of a plot of Michael Moore's ample dumper.

I've got my sights on a nice piece of property somewhere west of his gooch.

Worth reading, if you're in that kind of mood.

Thanks to Rachel Lucas, who isn't even Rachel Lucas anymore, but is instead Blue-Eyed Infidel.

She says she'll be cussing and stuff more now. I don't know, BEI. You'll never get invited on Paula Zahn working blue. Trust me on this.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 PM | Comments (8)
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He wanted to die with his family:

A Fort Valley man walked nearly 2 miles with a bullet hole in his head after being shot in a robbery, determined to die in the presence of loved ones if that was his fate.

On the plus side, he survived:

``If I was going to die, I wanted to make it home to Mama's and die there,'' said Taylor, who was recuperating at his sister's house.

On the negative side, after walking for miles with a bullet in his brain, he discovered that his mother had moved:

Larry Taylor, 37, finally made it to his mother's house, but didn't realize she had moved away to a nursing home. Still, Taylor managed to eventually reunite with his family and spent Christmas recovering from his trauma.

I guess things like that slip your memory when you're...

Bleeding severely from the bullet wound over his left eye and the exit wound over his left ear

It's good he made it home. It's good he survived.

They arrested the bastard who shot him-- over his refusal to allow him to use his cell-phone.

Thanks to Dalek's Weblog, who's also got a piece about something I've never heard of-- privately-run offshore jails to which parents send "troubled teens."

It's a little creepy.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 PM | Comments (5)
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Vengeance? Killing a witness to the government's crimes? Suicide? No one knows yet.

But the Ukraine may be cursed to now be living in interesting times:

A UKRANIAN minister accused of being behind the plan to move tens of thousands of government supporters around the country to engage in illegal multiple voting in NovemberÂ’s annulled presidential election, was found shot dead last night.

The body of Heorhiy Kirpa, the minister of transport, was found in his country house just outside the Ukrainian capital Kiev, said Eduard Zanyuk, a spokesman for the countryÂ’s railways.

...

Speculation in Kiev last night among demonstrators and diplomats was that he may have been assassinated by those fearing he would give investigators details of the extent of NovemberÂ’s vote- rigging operation.

However, local press also said he may have taken his own life.

Posted by: Ace at 06:35 PM | Comments (3)
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