Definition of a "straw man" argument:

A made-up version of an opponent’s argument that can easily be defeated. To accuse people of attacking a straw man is to suggest that they are avoiding worthier opponents and more valid criticisms of their own position.

This flyer is currently making the rounds on lefty blogs (via Protein Wisdom).

So Osama bin Laden released a new video. In this post I likened it to a John Kerry campaign commercial, but I think I was wrong. It seems more like a Michael Moore production.

Let me illuminate. Here's Osama bin Laden speaking in the video.

We agreed with Mohamed Atta, god bless him, to execute the whole operation in 20 minutes. Before Bush and his administration would pay attention and we never thought that the high commander of the US armies would leave 50 thousand of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because it seemed to distract his attention from listening to the girl telling him about her goat butting was more important than paying attention to airplanes butting the towers which gave us three times the time to execute the operation thank god.

Huh. Whatta ya know. That particular gripe against Bush is right out of Fahrenheit 9/11.

And look at the gross exaggerations. Fifty thousand citizens in the twin towers? I don't think so. And the president sat in that class room for five, maybe seven minutes tops. When the President found out about the attacks they were already over. What in the world was he supposed to do?

Personally, I think its telling that the most horrific terrorist in the entire world is using Michael Moore's talking points against the President.

Here's Osama's closing line:

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al Qaeda. Your security is in your hands. Each state that doenst mess with our security has automatically secured their security.

Screw you Osama. We're not going to back off so you and your cronies can move back in to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not going to let you set up your terror camps again. We're not going to let dictators in rogue nations fund you and support you with supplies and medical aid.

We are going to come to where you are. We are going to take power from those that would help you or harbor you and we are going to give power to the people who you oppress.

You aren't going to throw us off with your phony call for peace.

We know better. You don't want peace, you want us to back off so you can get started on plans to hit us again. We've disrupted your ability to do what you do best and you're angry about it. But you might as well get used to it because it ain't going to stop.

As long as Bush is elected, that is.

Less

Do you know what my beautiful girlfriend got me for a present? The Unsolved Mysteries: Ghosts and Unsolved Mysteries: UFO's series. And you know what? I had never even told her I wanted them. She just saw them and picked them up for me.

What an awesome girlfriend.

Needless to say, blogging is going to be limited tonight.

Well, this is it folks. Kerry wins. The election is over. The professional forehead reader has spoken.

NEW DELHI (AFP) - Indian astrologers say that the planets favour Democratic candidate John Kerry to win the White House race over US President George W. Bush in next Tuesday's polls.

"For months opinion polls have shown the race between Bush and Kerry, his challenger, to be neck and neck," said author and astrologer Lachhman Das Madan, who also heads the Astrology Study and Research Institute in Delhi.

"But the cosmic writ reveals Bush cannot become the president of the US again. On the other hand, Kerry's horoscope shows that Saturn is in the third house from the moon which is highly favourable," he said.

"The planets Mercury and Mars in the fifth and third house have exchanged positions. Success in competition is certain...Kerry will be the new president."

Seriously now, are there any stories too kooky for the media to run in order to give Kerry the edge or are we going to be subjected to the opinion of every nutjob out there willing to give Kerry the nod in this election?

Hey AFP, my next door neighbor's dog told him that Kerry was going to win. You might want to get a camera crew over there.

Could be...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Arab satellite television Al Jazeera said on Friday it would broadcast a video tape from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden addressing the American people.

It said the tape, to be aired at 4 p.m. EDT, would discuss the reasons behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and their repercussions. It gave no further details.

It will be interesting to see if this is contemporary footage of Osama or just old footage edited to make it seem as though it is new.

Update:

Its been aired.

Fox News has the story:

Bin Laden directly admitted for the first time that he carried out the Sept. 11th attacks and promised to outline "the best way to avoid another Manhattan."

It was the first footage of the Al Qaeda leader to surface in more than a year. The video showed him in traditional white robes, a turban and a cloak reading from papers and standing in front of a plain, brown cloth background.

"We decided to destroy towers in America," bin Laden said, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center.

Bin Laden also accused President Bush of deceiving the American people.

In an address just days ahead of the U.S. presidential election, bin Laden also said the U.S. administration resembled "corrupt" Arab governments.

A video released just days before the election calling the Bush administration corrupt and claiming that it deceived the American people?

Sounds like a Kerry campaign commercial to me.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Yes, it is a strange war. Jihadists are amused that a few American soldiers, worried over their safety, can refuse orders, call 7,000 miles home in anguish, and expect that their complaints, handed over by Mom to the local TV station, will turn up on national cable news before their own commanders in the field even know what is up. A teenaged terrorist with a RPG, being filmed as he is killed, is every bit as an effective soldier through his globally broadcast death than had he lived on to hit his target Humvee with his rocket in the first place. We don’t ask, “Which school-builder or power-restorer was he trying to obliterate?” but rather “Why did we have to kill him?”

When the Islamists behead a tearful Englishman or American, it is more likely that his surviving dad or sibling back home will be on television all over the Middle East within minutes damning Tony Blair or George Bush, without a word of censure for the Dark-Age head-loppers. After all, we are not Nepalese who storm the local mosque and put the fear of God into Islamists when they butcher our own. We are more likely to be frightened, turn on ourselves, and condemn some American somewhere who cannot stop “this.”

Read the whole thing.

Is it any wonder that America hasn't won a decisive victory in a war since the proliferation of television and television news?

I've long said that Democrats have no idea how terrible their candidate for president is because, in reality, most of them are voting against Bush rather than for Kerry.

As proof this, Beautiful Atrocities has rounded up quotes from the endorsements for Kerry by notable public figures.

Here's my personal favorite.

Paul Berman: I'm voting for Kerry, with no great belief that he will be a first-rate president.

Close second:

Kathleen Kincaid, Slate: Is he a strong candidate? No. Do I agree with all his positions? No. I've decided he's good enough.

Read them all here.

Schilling won't be able to campaign with the President.

MANCHESTER, N.H. - World Series star Curt Schilling canceled a scheduled campaign appearance with President Bush on Friday. An e-mailer identifying himself as Schilling posted a message on a fan Web site saying an ankle injury would prevent the Boston Red Sox pitcher from attending.

"I am now not medically cleared to do anything until I see Doc on Sunday, so I cannot travel with President Bush," the message read.

The injury would have prevented Schilling from pitching again in the series, he told the Boston Globe.

"I couldn't have pitched," Schilling told the newspaper. "But the guys would have done it for me."

Schilling, who contributes frequently to online fan forums, did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press.

The pitcher endorsed Bush in a TV interview Thursday, a day after the Red Sox won the franchise's first World Series championship in 86 years.

The e-mail said Schilling should have kept his opinion to himself.

"While I am a Bush supporter, and I did vote for him with an absentee ballot, speaking as I did the other day was wrong. While I hope to see him re-elected, it's not my place, nor the time for me to offer up my political opinions unsolicited," the e-mail read.

That's too bad. I wonder if he got pressure from the Red Sox organization that caused this reversal/apology?

Or maybe he's just that classy.

I think this guy plays for the wrong team in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I still kind of like him. Is he a free agent next year? Maybe the Yankees should pick him up.

Sigh...

Slate - Comparing voter databases county by county and state by state is a needle-in-haystack undertaking, even with the aid of computers. Why not vote twice then? Michael Moore probably shouldn't do it. But you probably could.

Just don't tell any reporters.

Sure. Why not committ a crime and illegally skew the election? You won't get caught. Go ahead. More than likely you'll just be adding more smoke to the screen already blanketing this election making it that much more difficult to tell who actually won.

In case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic there. Please don't vote twice in this election. You'll only be doing harm to our electoral system.

I'm sure you've all seen Eminem's new anti-Bush video by now. If you haven't click here.

Michele has some thoughts on it:

And now, in a complete reversal of fortune, Eminem has become the poster boy for the left. The man who was once hailed as a racist, homophobic supporter of spousal abuse is now the king of the leftie world because he made an anti-Bush video. All is forgiven, Eminem! Bash those gays, make more videos about beating up women because you are golden, baby. As long as you come out against Bush, you could come out in favor of eating babies and no one would blink an eye.

Eminem, a rich white entertainer, is suddenly the hottest commodity in the Kerry campaign. No matter that when Schilling speaks, the left says that the opinions of media whore opportunists don't matter. When Eminem speaks, the left listens. See, it's not whether you speak out that matters, it's who you speak out for. I just wish they would be honest about that.

Yup. The hypocrisy is stunning.

I posted some of my own thoughts about Eminem's video here.

Click hear to read about Curt Schilling's support of Bush.

I ran across a cool comparison list of the candidates today. It asks you questions about your stance on pertinent issues, then shows you the candidate for you. It claims to provide 3rd party candidates as well as our normal 2 party candidates, but I didn't get any of them. It's done by AOL, so I was a little surprised when it told me I should vote for Bush.

I table-ized the issues and the candidate stances for you here. Click more.

NBC Nightly News (10/28/2004):

Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President’s military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.

Kerry: That’s great. More power. I don’t know how they’ve done it, because my record is not public. So I don’t know where you’re getting that from.

MSNBC Hardball (04/27/2004):

MATTHEWS: What went out, it basically tracks what you did the other day on “Good Morning America.” And the question your staff put out, under your name, is, is Bush telling the truth, President Bush, when he said he had no special privileges or favoritism in jumping 150 places to get in the Air Guard in Texas?

What do you think about that? Is that something you care about? You want to know the truth?

KERRY: He ought to answer that question.

MATTHEWS: Why?

KERRY: Because I‘ve answered the questions. I released all my military records. Mr. Gillespie thought it was important enough to go travel to another state, make a big speech, demand that I release my records. I did. Everything. All of it. Including my officer fitness reports.

Via In The Bullpen, who has more.

I'd also point out that it was very nice of Tom Brokaw to offer Kerry the chance to answer some softball questions during prime time right before the election. I wonder if the thought of offering Bush the same chance even crossed his mind?

Maybe they did offer Bush an interivew, but my guess is they didn't.

Yesterday I complained about the survey which is getting major play in the press right now claiming 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. I pointed out that, to me, the way they arrived at their numbers didn't seem very scientific.

Now somebody much smarter than myself has agreed with my conclusions. Here's an excerpt.

In effect, what has been found in this paper is nothing. Nada. Zip.

Except of course that one of the two leading medical journals in the world has published a piece of shoddy research four days before the US elections with the obvious motive of influencing them. Sad, that, and my apologies as an Englishman that it should be one of my countrymen who did such a thing.

Go read the whole thing.

This is yet another shoddy attempt to derail the Bush campaign shortly before the election.

Update:

More here:

This "peer reviewed study" is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, "Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children," without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.

Yup.

This is appalling.

New York Post - ...CBS, which had planned to break the explosives story on "60 Minutes" on Sunday — 36 hours before the election — said it now plans to run a story on the show charging that U.S. troops were sent to Iraq without proper body armor because of Bush's tax cuts, a charge often leveled by Kerry.

Does it bother anybody else to know that CBS has been casting around for weeks now trying to find an "explosive" story that will harm Bush so they can run it right before the election? News organizations are supposed to report the news. That's it. They aren't supposed to rig their reporting so that it influences national elections.

Look, they're taking one of John Kerry's talking points and using it as the basis for an "exclusive" story set to air right before the election. Do you see how convenient that is? How beneficial that is for Kerry? Bush certainly doesn't get treatment like that from the press. No news organization is going to make a story out a Bush talking point and put it out right before the election.

CBS News and some of its competitors may as well be a branch of the DNC.

Yet another twist to this story.

WASHINGTON — A U.S. soldier is coming forward Friday to say a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 200 tons of explosives from an Iraqi military facility soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year.

The soldier will appear before reporters at noon, EDT. The briefing will be shown on the FOX News Channel.

The announcement is the latest twist in the mystery over what happened to 377 tons of explosives that the International Atomic Energy Agency said had disappeared.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. It would also be nice to put this story to bed. There is so much wild speculation going on about when these explosives went missing, how big the cache was and who took them that I honestly don't know what to believe any more.

One thing is clear, however. John Kerry, by jumping to a conclusion and blaming the Bush administration for the disappearance of the explosives, has proven that he will say whatever it takes to get elected. That is no reason to vote for him.

Update:

The Washington Post:

Whatever the case, the military significance of the loss, in a country awash with far larger amounts of munitions, is open to question.

The most powerful of the three explosives—HMX—can be used in a trigger for nuclear devices, which is why it was placed under IAEA seal. But HMX is obtainable elsewhere, and the chief U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, has acknowledged that the Iraqi stockpile posed no particular concern in this regard.

Jeff Goldstein responds:

In other words, militarily, this is a non-story. Politically, however, arch opportunist John Kerry is hoping once again to play on America’s fear of military failure—its lingering cultural memories of the protracted and confusing US entanglement in Vietnam (which by now are more the product of Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola than of Walter Cronkite and Robert McNamara, I’d wager )—to advance his own candidacy at the expense of those in the field who he is necessarily maligning.

That pretty much sums it up.

Here's my little girl all dressed up in her Halloween costume.

Ignore the date on the picture. My girlfriend's camera bit the dust and we had to borrow an older one from somebody else. We didn't know the date wasn't set when we took the pictures.

If you want to see more of my girl in her Halloween costume (along with some dumb ones of me and the cats) click here.

A woman bought a new Lexus LS400, and returned the next day, complaining that she couldn't figure out how the radio worked.

The salesman explained that the radio was voice activated. "Watch this!" he said..."Nelson!" The radio replied, "Ricky or Willie?" "Willie!" he continued....and "On The Road Again" came from the speakers.

The woman drove away happy, and for the next few days, every time she'd say, "Beethoven," she'd get beautiful classical music, and if she said, "Beatles!" she'd get one of their awesome songs.

One day, a couple ran a red light and nearly creamed her new car, but she swerved in time to avoid them. "ASSHOLES!" she yelled.

[click more for the punchline]

The Welfare State

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ... an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand ... the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education ... We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents ... The government must undertake the improvement of public health - by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor ... by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the ... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good.

I think its way too early for anyone to be saying that these photos and video are conclusive proof that the explosives in question were at the Al Qaqaa facility when our soldiers arrived.

From Paula Zahn's interview with the reporter who was there when the video and photos were taken.

Zahn: First of all, Dean, are you convinced of the fact that you actually were at the al Qa Qaa weapons site? DEAN STALEY, REPORTER, KSTP-TV: Almost certainly.

I think in terms [of whatever] I've been able to learn about where it is, just how big it is and where it is in relation to the place that we were camped with the 101st Airborne, I don't think there's any question that we were in some part of the al Qa Qaa compound. . . .

What do you make of these highly conflicting stories? You hear Dean's account. We know the date is on that tape. It's encrypted on the tape. So, on one hand, that would seem to indicate that some of those weapons were there after the war began, and yet, the Pentagon today releases a satellite photo that they claim was taken two days before the war got under way showing activity which appear to be trucks perhaps maybe moving some of these materials away from the site.

MICHAEL LYSOBEY, FORMER WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Well, the materials at that site or the materials that I saw in the video are not necessarily the HMX, which is the high explosive used in a nuclear implosion device.

What we saw in the tape were a bunch of barrels and a bunch of explosive caps. Al Qa Qaa is an explosives facility. So that's what we'd expect to see. The explosives that we're worried about, we don't know. This isn't definitive proof that those explosives were there.

Via Wizbang where there is a lot more information on this story. Background on the story here.

Can we all just admit that no one really knows what happened to the explosives at Al Qaqaa yet and we won't know until after an investigation has been launched? We can also admit that it was way, way too early to be placing blame for this since we don't really know the whole story yet?

It seems irresponsible to be jumping to conclusions every time there's a new break in this story.

Chad at In The Bullpen continues his stellar work on this story with an interview with the Swiftboat Veteran responsible for digging up the damning documents suggesting that Kerry coordinated his anti-war efforts with the enemy we were fighting in Vietnam.

Here's an excerpt from the interview.

The fact that this material was from the VC and had been captured “in country” was the most important to me. The details to which the Communists were directing U.S. protests and anti-war movements was absolutely astonishing. This wasn’t something I was reading in a history book – this was their own words.

Go read the whole thing.

Background for this story here, here and here.