I’m sorry, but what exactly does a t-shirt stating, “I had an abortion” have to do with womens rights?

These shirts are being sold by Planned Parenthood.

Nice.

So far for me it was Jimmy Carter of all people delivering the ‘foreign policy’ speech, criticizing the President on that issue.

Sorry, but Jimmy Carter lecturing others on foreign policy is like Ken Lay giving a speech on business ethics.

Joe Wilson’s website, Restore Honesty (ha!), was paid for and funded by John Kerry’s campaign. It almost read like a parody site after Wilson was exposed as a liar. It is now gone.

John McIntyre and Tom Bevan both expand on the point I was making about Kerry and Bush.

Today was my wife’s 35th birthday, and we just got back from her party which was complete with excessive beer intake (by me and a few others anyway). Lot’s of fun.

However, I am still lucid to note a few things:

1. Oliver responds to my post below claiming that Bush has run the most negative and divisive campaign ever, which is complete and utter bullsheot. It’s been a normal campaign, and the historians agree. Look it up. I’m too buzzed to do so. The fact of the matter is, the idea that John Kerry is a “relatively unknown senator from a small northeastern state” is absurd. Massachusetts isn’t Rhode Island or New Hampshire. The Kennedy factor has kept it in the know for the last 40 years. Also, John Kerry’s mug has been all over television and in the news since February. He’s had plenty of time to ‘introduce’ himself to the voters. Kerry has also outspent Bush this past month in advertising (Bush is no doubt saving his cash for an August blitz). I have seen more Kerry commercials here in Florida than I can count, and he still cannot gain a foothold in the polls. Kerry and his people know that he should be leading by 8-10 points. It’s the only reason why the DNC is launching lame attacks against the White House regarding the Sandy Berger issue and Bush’s Natl Guard records. The 9/11 report never came close to what the Democrats where hoping and that’s why they’re reduced to having Eleanor Clift writing that the findings are a ’setback’ for Bush. And Oliver is saying that Bush will lost the popular vote. When you consider the demographics and how the numbers are breaking down so far, that’s not going to happen. A 5% shift in votes from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004 gives Bush a bump of 2 million votes. Kerry’s the one that is desperate and Oliver knows it.

2. Glenn Reynolds often wonders why people would spend money on books that they can get for free. The choice to me is easy. Reading articles and weblogs online is one thing. Trying to read a 250-500 page book on a computer screen is nuts. I’d much rather have a book I can hold in my hands and read at my leisure, and that includes on the bathroom throne.

3. The Red Sox had their World Series win today. Really. Did you see the way they reacted? I know they played the Yankees and it was one hell of a (sloppy, poorly pitched) game. But all that was missing from their reaction was champagne. That’s about as close as they will get. Somehow, the Yankees will land Randy Johnson and it will be all over. Prediction: The Red Sox don’t even make the playoffs this year. The wildcard will go to Chicago, Anaheim or Oakland.

Good night.

When you cling to the wet dream that Bush’s National Guard record is going to help your guy out.

Of course, when one supports a candidate that is totally devoid of ideas, a vision, or passion for anything other than getting to be President, and is still tied in the polls when he should be leading by 8-10 points, I guess it’s the best they can do.

It’s all in the 9/11 report:

“In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted,” the report says, citing a May 1, 1998, Central Intelligence Agency memo summarizing the weekly meeting between Messrs. Berger and Tenet.

In June of 1999, another plan for action against Mr. bin Laden was on the table. The potential target was a Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan known as Tarnak Farms. The commission report released yesterday cites Mr. Berger’s “handwritten notes on the meeting paper” referring to “the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.”According to the Berger notes, “if he responds, we’re blamed.”

On December 4, 1999, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Mr. Berger a memo suggesting a strike in the last week of 1999 against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Reports the commission: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack Al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, ‘no.’ ”

In August of 2000, Mr. Berger was presented with another possible plan for attacking Mr. bin Laden.This time, the plan would be based on aerial surveillance from a “Predator” drone. Reports the commission: “In the memo’s margin,Berger wrote that before considering action, ‘I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.’ ”

Folks, this is why I am not voting for John Kerry. I have no doubt he’s going to bring the same kind of attitude to the White House and have people around him who think the same way. It’s no longer something we can afford.

Some editorials:

Washington Post

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Philadelphia Enquirer

USA Today

The NY Times doesn’t have one yet. No doubt they’re looking for ways to spin it so that everything is President Bush’s fault.

The headline blares:

9/11 Panel Says ‘We Are Not Safe’

Twenty paragraphs later, we get to what is important. After all, when is America ever going to be completely safe? We won’t. However, the question is, are we safer now than we were 3 years ago?

The answer in paragraph 21:

Three years later, Americans are safer because of improvements in homeland security and the war against terrorists, the report said.

The report is a major blow for the Kerry campaign, who remember were hoping to score political points. John Kerry’s response to the report was this:

“Nearly three years after terrorists have attacked our shores and murdered our loved ones, this report carries a very simple message for all of America about the security of all Americans — we can do better.”

Duh. Of course we can do better. However, the talking point amongst Democrats is that we’re not safer now than we were in 2001, a conclusion that is at odds with the 9/11 commission.

I happened to be listening to Howard Stern (who’s back on the radio here in FL) and he had on everybody’s favorite lying ‘documentary’ filmmaker, Michael Moore.

I was laughing at first because he was talking about how the “other side” didn’t want to have a debate about the issues. This from a guy who will only go before a friendly audience so he can preach to the choir.

One thing really stood out. He said the report would show that since 9/11 the United States has spent only $500 million on homeland security, and that we’re spending that amount every 2 days in Iraq.

His figure for what we’re spending in Iraq is wrong because the total figures that have been cited include Iraq and Afghanistan.

His figure for how much we have spent on homeland security is a flat out lie. From page 378 of the 9/11 Commission’s report:

The nation has committed enormous resources to national security and to countering terrorism. Between fiscal year 2001, the last budget adopted before 9/11,and the present fiscal year 2004, total federal spending on defense (including expenditures on both Iraq and Afghanistan), homeland security, and international affairs rose more than 50 percent, from $354 billion to about $547 billion.The United States has not experienced such a rapid surge in national security spending since the Korean War.1

If Moore wants to have a true debate, he should take his chances with somebody who will directly challenge his nonsense.

The NY Times is the only paper that could take alleged criminal wrondoing by Sandy Berger and turn it into a ’scandal’ by the Bush administration and a campaign commercial for John Kerry.

Gregory Djerejian and Tom Maguire have details.

Like Tom says, it’s almost as if the Times used a Kerry campaign fax to write this rubbish.

It’s the headline above that will cause Democratic teeth gnashing and squawking along the corridors of Congress and in John Kerry’s campaign headquarters.

Much to their dismay, most of the blame will be put upon institutional failures going back to the 1970’s.

Regarding the Bush administration, the report will squash several Democratic charges that they have attempted to use against the President for political purposes:

A. The Saudi government did not fund the 19 hijackers.
B. Relatives of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden were not allowed to fly out of the country until after air traffic was allowed to move freely after it was grounded following the attacks. Moreover, those family members had no connection to the terrorist plot. (Tell it to that moron Frank Lautenberg)
C. Bush did not know about the specific threat beforehand, and there was little more that he could to prevent it.

Bad news for the Kerry camp, who wanted to use the report for political gain:

Advisers to the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have said they hope to use the report to show that the Bush administration was inattentive in the summer of 2001 to threats of a possible attack.

Believe that? They’re hoping they can get political mileage out of this. That’s comforting.

For those who used to be part of the old Yahoo Club, ‘Politically Incorrect Cafe’, they’re having a ‘reunion’ during the Democratic National Convention.

Also, Bill over at DebateGate was nice enough to host a short commentary I did about Bush hatred. If people like, I’ll do more.

I have to wonder after reading this NY Times editorial, if the people putting this crap together, do so on purpose to break balls, or if they’re just that dense.

It involves Linda Ronstadt and something she said at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The piece starts out ok:

Something went awry at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas last Saturday night. Linda Ronstadt did what she has done at several concerts across the country this summer. She dedicated the song “Desperado"- an encore - to Michael Moore and urged members of the audience to go see his new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

She said a little more than that, but it’s irrelevant.

Then:

Elsewhere, audiences have reacted to the mention of Mr. Moore by cheering, booing, walking out and sometimes glaring at one another in parking lots. At the Aladdin, a few audience members tore down posters, threw drinks and demanded their money back. According to one person who was present - William Timmins, the Aladdin’s president - it was “a very ugly scene.” Mr. Timmins promptly made it even uglier. He had Ms. Ronstadt ejected from the premises.

According to a paper in Vegas, the whole Desperado/Michael Moore thing was the final straw. She had some other things to say prior to this, which had nothing to do with politics.

Right here is where it veers off into fruitcake land:

This behavior assumes that Ms. Ronstadt had no right to express a political opinion from the stage. It implies - for some members of the audience at least - that there is a philosophical contract that says an artist must entertain an audience only in the ways that audience sees fit. It argues, in fact, that an artist like Ms. Ronstadt does not have the same rights as everyone else.

As the title says, “Here we go again.” Somebody reacts to somebody else’s political speech with something other than hurrahs, cheers and hugs it equates to them accusing that person of not “having the right to express a political opinion.”

I’m sorry, but how exactly does a boo, a spilled drink or a torn poster infringe upon LR’s rights to free speech? It doesn’t. As for the entertainment, one would think that the singer in question would respect that people paid good money to see them sing.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: People are free to say what they want. But they have to expect a reaction and when the reaction is negative, they shouldn’t go around whining that their ‘rights’ being trampled on.

Finally, the song ‘Desperado’ fits Michael Moore about as well as a pair of his underwear would fit an Olsen twin.

So now all the Democrats and various other factions of the Anti-Bush Brigade are bellowing that the information about Sandy Berger was leaked to coincide with the release of the 9/11 Commision’s report.

They’re saying it was done to divert attention away from the report.

Yeah right. Only the most foolish would believe such drivel. You’d be lucky to get 1-100 odds in Vegas that the Berger story is going to keep the release of the commission report off the front page.

UPDATE: Jeff says in the comments that it’s possible that this was a leak by the Democrats. Jonah Goldberg even has a person in mind based on the AP reporter that broke it.

I don’t find this theory to be implausible. First of all, as I said above, once the 9/11 report is issued, this story goes away. Any updates will be buried. So why would the GOP do it? They stand to gain, what? A couple of days of fingerpointing?

Second, it’s a play right out of the Clinton handbook. The Clinton people were constantly leaking grandy jury information from Starr’s investigation and would blame Starr’s office. It accomplished two things: It allowed them to make it look like they were being vicitimized. It also allowed them to get bad news out of the way so if it surfaced later, it would be dismissed with, “Oh that’s old news. We knew that already.”

If you look at the news stories, blogger entries and listen to the talk shows, the Democrats have their talking points already going. “The timing of this is very suspicious.”

Who knows? What I do know is that it doesn’t make sense for the Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler Rove to time something like this.

UPDATE II: Kevin believes a Democrat did it, saying the time is all wrong for a Republican to have done it.

Whenever I am at a meeting, I always remember to gather any important papers and put them in my socks.

Kevin Drum has a post up where he attempts to engage in some sort of apologia for Joe Wilson. This part made me chuckle:

There’s so much frothing in the pro-war blogosphere that it’s hard to separate the genuine complaints from the merely generic loathing of the man.

What is that again about frothing?

Anyway, he addresses the three points that have become crucial in exposing Wilson as nothing but a liar and publicity hound.

On issue one:

Back in the days before he wrote his op-ed, Wilson was an anonymous source for a couple of Nick Kristof columns. In those columns, Wilson (via Kristof) claimed that he had seen the Niger memorandum and had reported to the CIA that it was forged. In fact, Wilson had not seen the memorandum back in February 2002 (he had only heard about it) and had no idea if it was a forgery.

Wilson’s response: None, really. Wilson does some hemming and hawing about other press acounts, but for some reason nobody has asked him about the Kristof columns.

Possible mitigation: In his NYT op-ed, Wilson wrote, “as for the actual memorandum, I never saw it.” So while Wilson pretty clearly misspoke to Kristof, he corrected himself on this point over a year ago.

This doesn’t explain Wilson also being the source for a Washington Post story where he said the same thing. This story appeared in the WaPo just weeks before Wilson’s own NY Times op-ed appeared. Why didn’t he tell Walter Pincus he hadn’t seen the memo and that he was relying on news reports?

On point two:

Wilson claimed he had “debunked” the uranium story and that Dick Cheney knew this. In fact, his report was only one piece of evidence, not a conclusive debunking, and it was never shown to Cheney.

Wilson’s response: He claims that he never said he had singlehandedly debunked the story. What’s more, although he believes that the 16 words were “a deliberate attempt to deceive,” he bases this conclusion on more than just his own trip to Niger.

Possible mitigation: The best defense of Wilson’s claims is that ten days after his op-ed was published CIA Director George Tenet publicly admitted that the evidence for the uranium claims was weak and should not have been included in the State of the Union Address. That’s pretty strong confirmation that whether or not it was Wilson who did the debunking, the intelligence community pretty much agreed with him.

Beyond that, this is obviously a matter of opinion. There’s not much question that Wilson has been outspoken in his opposition to the Bush administration, but trying to gauge exactly how categorical his claims have been is a mug’s game. As for Cheney, Wilson says that he really did think Cheney had seen his report and is surprised to learn that he didn’t.

Earlier in this entry, Kevin says he has been reading Tom Maguire’s accounts of all of this. If he had truly been doing so, he would have seen that this is not as clear cut as he thinks.

As for the ‘debunking’, while Wilson himself may never have said it, he clearly hasn’t objected to people saying it about him. As for Cheney and his report, it doesn’t matter now that he’s ’surprised’ that he didn’t see it. He shouldn’t have been telling people Cheney did see it, if he didn’t know.

On the issue of Wilson lying about his wife’s involvement, he agrees.

He then makes two final points, one of which I will address.

As I’ve mentioned before, Wilson doesn’t really matter much anymore except as political sport. The only real issue on the table right now is whether anyone in the Bush administration outed his wife as a CIA agent, and that’s a matter under investigation by the FBI. Whether or not Wilson lied to the press about other matters doesn’t really affect the legal case.

Oh now it’s just ‘political sport’? Please. Kevin Drum and the rest of the anti-Bush brigades in the media, blogosphere and government took up Joe Wilson like he was a modern day hero. The guy who lit a match instead of cursing the darkness. A brave man willing to withstand the assault he would face by the Bush administration. He was made the poster boy of the “Bush Lied, Soldiers Died” slogans. Now he “doesn’t really matter much anymore.”

It also matters in that Joe Wilson has campaigned for John Kerry, and has a website that is being funded by the Kerry campaign. it does matter.

As for the Plame issue, that will sort itself out. However, it seems to me that the burden is going to be on Plame and the CIA to show that she was working undercover and that the CIA was taking measures to protect her. If they were not, no laws were broken.

Via Michele comes this link. Here is a relevant story in the NY Post:

The father of a young man gunned down in front of his college buddy’s Lower East Side apartment nearly two years ago has launched a Web site and upped the reward for finding his son’s killer.

Burke O’Brien, 25, was shot through the heart in January 2003 after he and his friend Forrest Bloede returned to Bloede’s Orchard Street apartment from a night on the town.

The killer or killers are still at large.

Frustrated by the lack of leads in the case, the O’Brien family has upped the reward to $50,000 and launched a Web site, www.burkeobrien.org.

The slain man’s story will also be the subject of an episode of the controversial all-access show “NYPD 24/7.” It will air tomorrow night on ABC.

O’Brien’s father, Mark, says it will be tough to watch, but he hopes the show will be seen by someone who knows what happened.

“I want them captured,” O’Brien said. “The key is more public exposure.”

This should surprise me, but doesn’t really:

President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, is the focus of a criminal investigation after admitting he removed highly classified terrorism documents from a secure reading room during preparations for the Sept. 11 commission hearings, The Associated Press has learned.

Berger’s home and office were searched earlier this year by FBI agents armed with warrants. Some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration’s handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing.

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had taken from classified anti-terror documents he reviewed at the National Archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants. He also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio, they said.

“I deeply regret the sloppiness involved, but I had no intention of withholding documents from the commission, and to the contrary, to my knowledge, every document requested by the commission from the Clinton administration was produced,” Berger said in a statement to the AP.

Reading almost all the way through the article, one would think this wasn’t much of big deal. Until you get to the last sentence:

The officials said the missing documents were highly classified, and included critical assessments about the Clinton administration’s handling of the millennium terror threats as well as identification of America’s terror vulnerabilities at airports to sea ports.

And now they’re missing and destroyed. How convenient.

Plenty of others are commenting as well:

Outside The Beltway
Michelle Malkin
Big Trunk
Captain Ed
Hugh Hewitt
Glenn Reynolds
John Little

Like Michelle Malkin, I’ve grown tired of the security issues with Internet Explorer. I kind of liked Mozilla and used it from time to time, but it had too much of that Netscape feel to it and I never liked Netscape. Now Mozilla has released Firefox and it is great. I have been using it more and more and in fact, have made it my default browser.

IE is still required for viewing content on some sites (Like MSNBC…duh), but Firefox can handle pretty much everything else. Take a look. I also like their new mail application, Thunderbird.