Mickey Kaus is a perceptive and fun writer. However, he does have one grating idiocy: He pretends to think that perhaps Al Qaeda actually wants George Bush re-elected president (scan down to June 20th item).

As he's a Democrat, I can understand his desire to engage in this fantasy. The fact that Al Qaeda is rooting for John Kerry is obviously not an endorsement that will help the Democratic candidate. So he likes to pretend that it's difficult to say precisely whom Al Qaeda is rooting for. Perhaps Zarqawi is rooting for Kerry, but oh heavens no, not bin Ladin himself.

There is one big problem with this goofy thesis. Al Qaeda announced that it hoped the Madrid bombings would drive the hawk out of office and bring the dove into office; it seems awfully strange that Al Qaeda would be pro-Zapatera and yet anti-Kerry.

But let's put that aside.

Mr. Kaus, it's your theory that Al Qaeda wants Bush to win the election, correct?

Answer me this:

If Al Qaeda wants Bush to win, why don't they make the one statement -- costing them nothing at all -- most likely to insure his re-election?

With one single statement, they can destroy John Kerry's candidacy and guarantee a Bush landslide in November.

It doesn't matter if the statement is true or not. I think it is, but that's irrelevant.

The one statement?

Saddam Hussein funded us, trained us, and cooperated with us in planning or executing terrorist attacks.

If Al Qaeda wants Bush to win, Mr. Kaus, why don't they just say that?

Why do they continue maintaining the position that hurts Bush and helps Kerry?

For an organization that you claim is so thankful to Bush for "playing right into their hands," they sure have a funny way of displaying their gratitude, now don't they?

Posted by: Ace at 05:23 PM | Comments (16)
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Devastating.

Yes, we all knew it was a pack of lies. We all knew every word in it was a lie, including the "the's" and "and's."

But it's nice to see the liberal media actually trouble itself to take note of this fact.

Update: Screw that, I just realized. Does anyone doubt that if there were a rightwing film filled with this sort of absurd deception that there wouldn't be "Truth-Squad" features running on the film on all the network newsmagazine shows, including 60 Minutes, and furthermore before the film even opened?

Why is the television media suddenly so indifferent as to whether a political film is actually, you know, accurate in its various slanders or not?

Posted by: Ace at 04:49 PM | Comments (10)
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Bush's numbers are improving in a bunch of crucial states -- Arizona (need it), Colorado (need it), and Wisconsin (want it), as well as Florida and Ohio (need it, need it).

But now Kerry's losing support in... Maine? Maine, whose license plates read "The Almost-Canada State"? Maine, which views vacationers from Boston and Burlington, Vermont as right-wing redneck yahoo invaders?

But yeah-- Maine too, now:

PORTLAND, Maine — John Kerry´s double-digit lead over President Bush evaporated Wednesday in a new statewide poll that also found a drop in support for a controversial plan to cap property taxes.

Bush and Kerry were tied at 35.5 percent, according to the latest quarterly survey by Strategic Marketing Services. But when those leaning toward the candidate were added to those who intended to vote for him, Kerry had a slight edge, 43.5 percent to 41 percent. Ralph Nader had 4.5 percent and 11 percent were undecided.

By contrast, the marketing research firm´s Omnibus Poll in March showed 51 percent intending to vote or leaning toward Kerry, compared to 38 percent for Bush, 4 percent for Nader and 7.5 percent undecided.

A poll conducted this spring by another Portland firm, Critical Insights, had Kerry leading Bush by a margin of 49 percent to 39 percent, with 12 percent either undecided or favoring another candidate.

Patrick Murphy, president of Strategic Marketing Services, said he was "a bit surprised" by the size of the drop in Kerry´s support. He suggested that the numbers may reflect Republican advertising that Kerry had yet to respond to as well as the blanket news coverage of former President Ronald Reagan´s funeral.

Look, I'm no Larry Sabato, but if Kerry has to fight for Maine, he's gonna have some problems in Pennsylvania, no?

But Let's Not Open the Champagne Yet: ARG, which I tend to find errs on the side of Democrats, finds that Kerry leads in absolutely-gotta-have-it Ohio.

Posted by: Ace at 03:22 PM | Comments (10)
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Dear Mr. Willis, Retard, Esq.,

Bite me.

Your Faithful Servant,

Ace

PS: I'm tired of the He Who Shall Not Be Named schtick. I'm not Voldemort and you're not Harry Potter. Are ya tryin' to deny me traffic, Odub? My traffic's higher than yours now, so you can knock it off with that nonsense.

PPS: And you should be grateful to me besides. You haven't done another one of those lame Britney Spears "fake news articles" since I humilitated you over the last one. Someone needed to tell you they weren't funny, and that task, sadly, fell to me, the internet's self-appointed one-man arbiter of not-funny.

I still haven't received a proper "Thank you" for my troubles, you ingrate.

PPPS: And I'm quite willing to end the juvenile taunting and debate your positions, the moment you actually figure out what your positions might be. Your only position seems to be that whatever Bush does is wrong, even if claiming that contradicts something you claimed just a week before. We can move past the nyaah, nyaah stage once you clearly explicate the "Willis Plan" for Iraq.

PPPPS: In fairness, I suppose I should allow that you are in an unenviable position, as you are requred to defend "Kerry's Plan," but as of yet Kerry has not told you what his plan might be.

You thus are required to defend a plan which has not yet been explained, and you don't know, yet, what plan it is you're supposed to be claiming is The Wonderfully Perfect Plan for Iraq Which Should Have Been Obvious to Anyone Who Thought Carefully About the Situation for Five Minutes But Too Bad That Bush Didn't Because He's So Damn Dumb.

Perhaps, when someone in the media actually bothers to pin Kerry down on his specific position on the War on Iraq and his specific plan for improving security there, you will then be in a better position to proclaim "Here is what I've been for all along, even though I didn't realize it before."

When that happy day arrives, I trust we will share further illuminating correspondence.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (31)
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Reuters always has a funny way of putting things, doesn't it?:

Saudi police killed a top spiritual guide for the Saudi wing of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network during a shootout in Riyadh on Wednesday, security sources said.

They named the slain militant as Abdullah al-Roshood, on a list of 26 most wanted suspects, and said his death was a hefty blow to the ideological hierarchy of al Qaeda in the world's biggest oil exporter.

...

"A police search of the militant's den showed that it was a factory for explosives," it added.

This "spiritual guide" had a bomb factory? What a shock.

Top Ten Other Items Discovered in Al Qaeda "Spiritual Guide's" Hideout

10. Explosive crystal unicorns

9. Cyanide-filled dominoes

8. One (1) special Magic: The Gathering deck with unique card, Osama bin Ladin: Half-Elf Ranger Lord

7. Three "organic" crystal balls which look suspiciously like severed human heads

6. Special tarot cards featuring grotesque anti-semitic caricatures, such as "Schlomo, The Hook-Nosed Rag Merchant"

5. A ouija board containing only two sections, "Kill Infidel Crusaders" and "Kill Jewish Pig-Monkeys"

4. A lockbox labeled Secret Scrolls of Righteousness -- For the Spiritual Guide Only, containing 40 back-issues of Oui and Juggs magazines

3. One cancelled membership card for the Uri Geller fan club

2. Four yoga mats upon which are written inspirational or humorous jihadist messages, such as "Suicide Bombers Do It With Their Belts On" and "Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life"

... and the Number One Item Discovered in the Al Qaeda "Spiritual Guide's" Hideout...

1. One reviewer's copy of Fahrenheit 911; cover signed, "Keep the faith -- Mike"

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (10)
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A good one. Almost as good as Hitchens'. He makes the obvious point (so obvious I've made it) that the liberal media has a bit more tolerance for this ham-handed, conspiracy-minded, often-flagrantly-dishonest dreck than it did for The Clinton Chronicles.

I guess a bit of wild-eyed conspiracy-mongering and flat-out lying is justified... in a good cause.

So many reviewers are cautious to point out the film is often dishonest while praising it to the nines. There's a reason for this, of course. They know the film is obnoxious, deceptive swill, but they want their bumpkin countrymen-- Middle America, which largely isn't employed in tony jobs like internet film critic and thus can't be expected to know better -- to believe the film anyway.

No harm, no foul, they think. It's important that Bush be put out of office, and they don't mind if people vote him out of office for proveably false reasons.

As the useless idiot film critic for the amateur leftist newsletter Slate said, the film is a "legitimate abuse of power."

Everything with the left is about "context" -- context, of course, always meaning "does this advance the liberal cause or not?"

Is political violence acceptable? It depends on "context." Right wing poltical violence is bad, but really, ELF is just using some violence to achieve a good end, right?

Are former terrorists deserving of cushy jobs in the academy? Well, if they were left wing terrorists, working with the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground, then yes, they can be forgiven for planting bombs. Somehow, though, no one ever suggests that perhaps Timothy McVeigh would have made a fine addition to the Columbia faculty.

Are books exhorting the reader to kill the President worthy of publishing by big publishers? Well, once again, it depends on which president, doesn't it? The Turner Diaries are rightly condemened as an exhortation to racial violence. But Alfred Knopf has no problem publishing a book containing a 115 page meditation on why Bush should be assassinated, and how to best go about doing so.

And are political lies permitted in heavily-promoted, media-praised documentaries? Well -- it depends on context. Sometimes, you know, a few lies here and there can be a "legitimate abuse of power."

We've appealed to their honor. No dice. We've appealed to their sense of basic fairness. No help. We've asked them to consider their actions in the light of the necessities of a functioning civil democratic society. Again, no movement due to that argument.

I don't know. I personally don't want my President assassinated (and neither did I want Clinton assassinated). I was, and am, and always have been against cutesy invitations to political violence or actual assassinations, no matter who the target might be.

But it appears that the left, as usual, is not willing to make such blanket prohibitions. As usual, it all depends on context.

Update: Hypothetically, if someone presented a book urging the assassination of a high-profile Democratic politician, would Alfred Knopf publish it, I wonder? Would the media defend it as being a legitimate expression of anger?

Or would they decide that the risk of inciting an mentally-unstable reader into violent action outweighed any conceivable literary merits?

Context, context.

By the way, this writer doesn't have a lot of literary merit. His first book, Vox, was an embarassingly slim volume about two people jacking off over the telephone. Honestly-- that's what the book was about. There was no narration; it was just dialogue between a man and a woman for 130 pages or so, like this:

Bill: I like big boobs.

Mary: I've got big boobs. I like big weiners. Let's rub ourselves vigorously.

I read it when it came out-- or I tried to, at least. Even though the book was thin and sparse (they had to use lots of white space and publish it in small-book format to even get it to barely break 100 pages), and even though it was about a man and a woman masturbating, I still couldn't finish it, because it was boring.

The sex-talk was boring. The not-sex-talk was even more boring, although there wasn't much of that. Just enough to make the onanistic protangonists "fully fleshed out characters." (Ahem.)

He became half-famous not because he was a deep thinker or terrific stylist, but because he had one kinda-good commercial insight-- people like reading porn under the guise of respectable literature.

Wait a minute...! Maybe people like reading porn under the guise of political satire as well!

Hey Knopf-- give me a call, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 12:10 PM | Comments (10)
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Consensus estimate: 250,000 in June, slightly beating May's 248,000.

There's the possibility of upward re-adjustments of previous months, which is something we've seen again and again during this boom. And of course we could get another pleasant surprise, and see even more jobs than this created.

But I actually think that the period of positive surprises is passing us; I think that economists have adjusted their thinking, and that therefore the estimates won't necessarily be lower than the real numbers anymore. We'll start seeing estimates that are high about half of the time and low about half of the time.

On to the cowbell:

WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) - U.S. employment likely surged again in June, taking gains this year to some 1.4 million jobs and bolstering President George W. Bush's economic record ahead of the November election, analysts said onWednesday.

Economists believe 250,000 jobs were created this month, virtually matching May's jump of 248,000, though the unemployment rate probably will not budge from 5.6 percent because newly hopeful job-seekers are returning to the job market.

"I think the gains will be quite widespread again, and as we saw in April and May, we are likely to create slightly more higher-paying than lower-paying positions," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Securities.

Even if the unemployment rate does not decline, analysts expect the Labor Department's closely watched payrolls report, due on Friday, to confirm broad strength in what months ago was still only a tepid economic recovery.

The creation of nearly a million jobs in the last three months ended years of worry about the slow recovery from the 2001 recession and cemented expectations the Federal Reserve will begin raising interest rates to head off inflation.

While 1.2 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office, that deficit could easily be erased if hiring continues at its recent pace, and talk of Bush being the president with the worst job record since Herbert Hoover has faded.

And how! As others have pointed out, we knew the economy was booming when the liberal media stopped asking Bush about it.

For three years they wanted to talk about nothing but the economy. Veritable economic Chatty Kathy dolls, they were.

And then, suddenly-- thin-lipped silence. No more talk of "the Bush economy."

There's your leading economic indicator, right there.

"The economy has turned very sharply in Bush's direction, so his biggest weakness is becoming a strength," said Cary Leahey, senior U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank Securities.

The shift in political rhetoric from the "jobless recovery" lament of the Democrats to "nearly a million jobs in 100 days" of the Bush administration appears to have reached consumers, whose confidence levels hit the highest level in two years in June, according to a Conference Board report this week.

Finally.

And yet no credit to Ace of Spades HQ.

Screwed again. I blame Instapundit for this slight.

...

Longer hours and fatter paychecks are seen by experts as evidence the economy is on the threshold of even stronger job gains in the months ahead.

Even stronger job gains in the "months ahead," which, I'm sure you all realize, are also the "months ahead" of the November election.

Three words:

Cow. Frickin'. Bell.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (13)
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You know, there's a great amount of psychological import in having an Iraqi leader I can call Prime Minister. We're going to feel the effects of this more and more as we go. As others have pointed out, from here on out, Al Jazeera won't be able to run footage of Paul Bremer issuing orders; all the orders will be issued by Alawi, an Iraqi, speaking his native Arabic.

But anyway.

The MRC catches Brokaw "correcting" the Prime Minister of Iraq on Saddam's Al Qaeda ties (first item). Eh, what would Prime Minister Alawi know. He's just Prime Minister of Iraq and all, and just a man who's been opposing Saddam for 30 years, while Brokaw and his buddies at CNN were coddling him.

Check out the last item, too. Once upon a time I was rooting for Dave Letterman to get the Tonight Show slot; and then I rooted for him to trounce Leno. No more.

He stopped being funny around five years ago, at least. Actually, some say he stopped being funny during the whole NBC dispute in 1991-1992 or so. And now he's also a partisan shill in addition to being unfunny.

I'd suggest boycotting him, except it seems that most people already aren't watching him for non-political reasons.

As a country song (I think) says, Dave, when that Nielsen box ain't pinging, that's me not watching.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (8)
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Greenspan raises the fed funds rate by .25%, as expected. The markets are trending slightly up on the news, apparently pleased that he didn't raise rates by a half-point.

I guess we're still waiting to hear Greenspan's report.

Update: No Greenspan news is good news:

There was little unexpected in the Fed's accompanying policy statement as well, which promised to continue a "measured pace" of rate increases to combat inflation. While the Fed admitted that there is a somewhat higher risk of inflation, the statement added that some of the inflation factors were transitory and that the risks were balanced.

The markets are up a little more. No big thing.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (7)
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This has got to be one of the best bits of blog-journalism I've read so far.

The AP finds a "typical Iraqi" to tell them what they want to hear about the transfer-of-power-- it's a sham, it doesn't solve anything, etc. One would imagine the "man on the street" should be kinda-sorta representative of other men on the street.

But the AP's man is not. In fact, he's a painter who prospered under Saddam and painted numerous portraits of him. And he's previously declared that he's not so hot on the whole "end of tyranny" thing:

The conversation shifts to the impending war. Qasim says if the US attacks he will sit with his Kalashnikov and wait in his house, "because this is my home and no one will take it away from me."

I'm too bad the AP couldn't find an actual typical Iraqi they could talk to. But I guess that's a danger you risk when news organizations

[rely] on Iraqi stringers filing by telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation.

The last bit from Andrew Sullivan, who manages to post a little on Iraq in between his reminiscences about Ptown. The previous link from Instapundit.

Nice work, Adeimantus.

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 PM | Comments (11)
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