More believable.

Joshua Micah Fauntleroy Marshall's "sources," meanwhile, say that both the Bush and Kerry camps' internal polling puts the lead at 4.

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (3)
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I have trouble believing this, but DJ Drummond at PoliPundit makes an interesting case.

As CrushKerry noted, the Newsweek poll sample had about 37% Republicans and 31% Democrats. (Most people believe actual party identification is something like 31-33% for both.) So, CrushKerry argued (and I agreed) that poll probably overstated Bush's true lead, at least by 20-25%. (And that doesn't even consider other problems the poll might have, like just hitting an unrepresentative sample.)

Well, looking deeper at the raw numbers, DJ finds, first, that independents broke this time for Bush 45-40, a big reversal from Kerry's previous lead with this group, and second, that the poll actually found even more people self-identifying as Republican, but the pollsters gave heavier weight to Democratic respondents in order to correct for a too-high sampling of Republicans.

Without that weighting, Bush's lead was even bigger. Huge, in fact. The technical mathematical term for it is "freakin' ginormous."

The dramatic shift in independents' sentiments alone should be plenty worrisome for Kerry.

I don't know what to make of that second point-- I don't think we can make much of it, since this country is obviously not 42% Republican, except to say that Newsweek did at least some counterweighting to reduce the Republican advantage in sampling.

Now, Fred Barnes has of course predicted eleven of the last zero poltical realignments in favor of Republicans. But if Time magazine similarly found they were getting a lot more self-identifying Republicans on the phone than they expected, Barnes might be tempted to write his twelfth column predicting that "the country is realigning to become plurality-Republican," and who knows? This time, he might even be right.

Susan Lucci eventually got her Emmy, after all.

(Take that, those who said I was unduly pessimistic last time out. I balance my undue pessimism with wild-eyed lunatic optimism.)

Update: I should have finished reading the analysis.

Actually, it's not as bad as all that for the Sinking Senator.

It may be worse.

But... Rasmussen shows just a single point lead. A lead of 1.2%. One point freakin' two.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 AM | Comments (4)
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24% of those whose minds were changed were changed by the "Mayor of America," as compared to 20% for both McCain and Schwarzenegger.

I don't know when this poll was taken. Is it possible that Zell Miller, Cheney, and Bush himself had no effect? Or did the NY Post suppress those numbers because a low showing for Bush would embarass him?

Or did they only ask about those three men-- and if so, why limit the field?

At any rate, good for Rudy.

More Good Polling for Rudy: 50% of all registered voters want Rudy to run for President.

But he can't actually win the nomination, you say?

65% of Republicans say they want him to run, too.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 PM | Comments (6)
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Hey-- it worked for Clinton, right?

Clinton had other good advice for the Sinking Senator, who by the way served as Michael Dukakis' Lieutenant Governor: when chatting up a willing young intern, never introduce yourself as the President of the United States. Always say that you are regional director for an auto-parts franchise based in Jupiter, Florida, and that your name is "Ricky."

Just Ricky. If she asks for your last name, just say, "What are you a narc or something?" and then deftly change the subject by telling her she has a "first-rate caboose."

If she's still hung up on that whole last-name thing, she's far too intrusive and clingy to become involved with.

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 PM | Comments (6)
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The other day Oliver Willis bitched himself an Instalanche by whining about Instapundit's simple statement regarding the Russian School Horror, something along the lines of For those of you who've forgotten, this is what we're fighting.

Pretty uncontroversial. But Oliver "Please link me, for I have precious little to recommend me otherwise" Willis cadged himself a couple of extra thousand of hits just by throwing a hissy fit.

I would have linked his bitching, but it seemed ludicrous he was already getting an Instalanche for such a trivial crying jag; I didn't want to add an Acelanche on top of the Instalanche. Why, that might have added another 5% extra traffic!

But now I don't have to, because Pink Flamingos takes Filet-O-Fish to task. He's got all the relevant quotes right there on his own damn site, so no traffic for Grimmace.

Upcoming: Ace accuses Instapundit of swiping his basic site design! Red, white, gray, black-- it's cyberspace brigandry, I tell you.

And if that doesn't work-- come to think of it, that red-baiting "reminder" of Why We Fight sort of was out of line, wasn't it? Who the hell does he think he is to presume to remind me about terrorism?

I'm with Captain Jollypants over there-- you know, the round kid that smells like soft cheese. File me under "outraged" to have my patriotism questioned as well. And horrified, appalled, sickened, and filled with "heart-ache" I can't manage to "dislodge from my consciousness" too.

I'm not easily offended, Lord knows, but this comment was gob-smackingly vile.

I think I might just start shrieking about Michelle Malkin and Allah, come to think of it. They're always saying things that I should probably be getting "upset" about.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 PM | Comments (6)
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At least it's not Amstel Light or peach schnapps.

Note: I asked, in a snarky way, what those yellow bands on Kerry's wrist were. Turns out they're Lance Armstrong bracelets, which I'm guessing has something to do with solidarity with cancer survivors.

I guess I shouldn't be making fun of that.

Posted by: Ace at 04:16 PM | Comments (14)
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He sees the futility in a McGovernite foreign policy; why can't John Forbes Kerry?:

"The moment we give in to their blackmail and succumb to panic, we will plunge millions of people into an endless chain of bloodletting conflicts.... One cannot but see that this is obvious.

“What we have on our hands is not the scattered acts of intimidation or odd terrorist sorties. This is direct intervention on the part of international terrorism in Russia. It is a total and full-blown war that keeps claiming the lives of our compatriots.

“But world experience proves that such wars do not end quickly. Given this situation, we cannot afford complacent treatment of it anymore."

No mention of first getting Russia's "important and historic allies" on board first. Why, you'd almost think that Putin might take action alone if necessary, and furthermore even against the counsel and criticism of Jacques Chirac, if you can imagine such a thing.

Children Shot in the Back, Babies Knifed, Fifteen Year Old Girls Raped: Inhuman. By their own actions and conscious choice, they have removed themselves from the family of humanity, and they ought to be treated as such.

They butcher and rape children, and no one on the left will say boo about it without being directly challenged to condemn it. And then they only do so half-heartedly and by rote.

But if the animals at Guantanamo don't have praying-mats of a certain thickness and comfort level, they scream "fascism."

Ilyka may have a Russkie-sounding subversive-type name, but she (?-- not sure) puts it well:

Bush didn't remove 'em [from the family of humanity]; Putin didn't remove 'em; failing to ratify Kyoto didn't remove 'em; they took themselves off the team roster.

Yeahp. They're on the morally-disabled list, all right. And the sooner we can cull them from the league, the better.

Correction: Well, here I was thinking this crime had been committed by (who could have guessed?) Arab/Muslim monsters who have decided that non-Arabs and non-Muslims are not human and therefore can be violated or butchered at will.

But I was wrong.

Turns out it was the Jews. Again!

Blow me over with a feather. I swear, those cunning Israelis are like Lucy holding the football, except instead of pulling the football away at the last moment, they fill it with screws and nails and C-4 explosives and detonate it amidst a mass of children maiming, blinding, and killing them and then blame poor innocent Muslims for the crime.

Jews
You'll like their craftiness.
But you'll love their insidiousness.

It's Funny How Acts of Terrorism Keep Being Committed by Non-Terrorists Department: Random Birkel on the "insurgents," "rebels," and, I'm guessing, "charismatic agrarian reformers" who cut the throats of babies and raped children.

[The agrarian reformers line is swiped from Ann Coulter.]

Michelle Malkin notes the NYTimes seems to have cracked open their copy of Roget's Liberal Euphemisms (Second College Edition, Revised) in order to call "terrorists" everything other than what they are.

"Armed captors?" Armed fucking captors?

The Indispensible Mr. Steyn is also slicing like an outraged fucking hammer:

Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.

Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas", said The New York Times. "Chechen separatists", ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers". "Insurgents", said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly . . . If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets – the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved – become targets because they are available."

And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions – each child was "a Pieta, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" – and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators.

Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use. Nor are the hyper-rationalist theories about "asymmetrical warfare".

Update: Dianna throws cold water on my hopes of a partnership with Russia in the War on Terror, reminding me that Putin is 1, a former KGB spymaster, 2, a onetime communist, and 3, a current tyrannical strongman.

Allah twists the knife by telling me that Putin is not my friend.

Posted by: Ace at 11:10 AM | Comments (11)
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Irony of ironies-- there's a two year period in which there are no records of him fulfilling his drilling requirements, and no pay history during the period in question, either.

Did Kerry go AWOL? I'm certain the media is about to pursue this story with the same aggressiveness it pursued the three-month gap in Bush's records.

Any. Minute. Now.

Another Right-Wing Smear?: Jimmy Page argues that this post is erroneous. He cites this document as proof that Kerry was transferred to "inactive duty" in 1970:

[Third Paragraph] at 2400 on 3 January 1970 you will regard yourself released from all active duty and transferred to inactive duty in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

Jimmy then says, Inactive duty doesn't require reporting or drills.

That sounds like a good rebuttal, but CrushKerry has already answered that:

Contrary to what Kerry's campaign flacks say, the wording on his Release from Active Duty (to run for Congress) does NOT put him in the Inactive Reserves - it puts him in Inactive Duty status, which includes Ready Reserves with attendant drill obligation. BIG difference - though the confusion is understandable.

My military experience consists only of a three-year tour of watching The A-Team so I am not competent to say who's right.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 PM | Comments (17)
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Eric tips me to this gushing review of a play starring Sigourney Weaver and John Lithgow.

The lead character (Weaver) claims she got knocked up by George Bush in college, and of course had an abortion, most likely at gunpoint. (The last bit is my guess.)

Mrs. Farnsworth's Subtle Act of Sedition

Yes, very subtle.

...

His uproarious new play, "Mrs. Farnsworth," is a devastating takedown of the commander in chief, in its serenely subversive way far more scathing than any attack ad produced by the Democrats or caricature perpetrated by "Saturday Night Live."

...

But the book for which she has come to Gordon, seeking his advice, is not even close to discreet. Egged on by the class -- other actors are planted among us -- she reveals the scandal at the heart of her story: She claims to have gotten pregnant long ago after a date with a Yalie, the hard-drinking scion of a wealthy family and the grandson of a U.S. senator. And she says she was offered money to have an abortion.

"It's Bush!" cries Gordon.

"I never say," replies the coy Mrs. Farnsworth, who, in the course of things, does.

More proof of Saint Susan of San Fransisco's thesis: those lefties are just too gentlemanly and virtuous to sink into the gutter of personal attacks and slanders.

More Proof Still: Liberals are just such paragons of restraint and fairness (and such connossieurs of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches) that they are forced by conservative Big Meanies to recycle Bush abortion charges from IndyMedia.

More in sadness than anger, you understand. They didn't want to do this of course; it just, well, Bush has a lead now. We've "bullied" them into doing this by besting them.

I just hope they don't pick up on this account of George W. Bush's FBI trained bisexual rapists/assassins, a Polymorphously Perverse Praetorian Putschsquad.

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (8)
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Karen Hughes earns her first several paychecks by going, quote, "apeshit" over the AP fiction about boos-for-Clinton. And getting the retraction.

He's also working on a "major" story linking Ms. Hughes to several New York crime families. He can't say more at the moment, for reasons which will soon become evident.

Sometime in 2053, when we're all zooming around in cool-ass flyin' cars.

Another Shock: Kevin Drum, Nitwit, Esq., actually posts the audio clip of the alleged "booing," and candidly admits there is either no booing at all or very little.

Boos Clues: The American Thinker dubs this smoking-gun evidence of deliberate liberal media dishonesty. He wants a forthright admission of deliberate distorition and a public apology, and that's just for starters.

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (8)
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