"I am particularly outraged that the commission failed to choose anyone from NBC News personnel for a moderator's role."
Brokaw's parting shot: "For a commission that has assumed primary power in the exercise of the democratic process, you have a peculiarly autocratic style."
I’m so thoroughly disgusted by Michael Moore’s new book of supposed letters from soldiers that I’ve decided to put my money...or more precisely, my time, where my mouth is.
I will assemble a counter to Moore’s book. Unedited, untouched except for the assemblage, a book of letters from soldiers that support the President and do not trust Mr. Moore.
If you are military and you are interested, or you have military family members who would like to participate, please send your letters to letters at moorewatch dot com. All hate mail will be deleted upon receipt, so save your energy, Moore-ons.
If you prefer to write old-fashioned snail mail letters, I will get a P.O. Box and make the address available. Email would be the best route though, since time is of the essence.
I will touch not a word of these letters. Not one. If you send a letter, you must be willing to allow me to publish it AND publish your name and branch of service, so independent people can verify that you are who you say you are and that you wrote what I say you wrote. EVERYTHING will be public and verifiable. I refuse to hide any aspect of this.
If we can’t get anyone interested in publishing it, we’ll publish it our damn selves. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn't interested in the truth -- and they're not telling the truth,'' Kerry said. ``Here's what you really need to know about them -- they're funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They're a front for the Bush campaign.
As Stephens points out, European countries now have attitudes in inverse proportion to the likelihood of their acting upon them. They're like my hippy-dippy Vermont neighbours who drive around with "Free Tibet" bumper stickers. Every couple of years, they trade in the Volvo for a Subaru, and painstakingly paste a new "Free Tibet" sticker on the back.
What are they doing to free Tibet? Nothing. Tibet is as unfree now as it was when they started advertising their commitment to a free Tibet. And it will be just as unfree when they buy their next car and slap on the old sticker one mo' time. If Don Rumsfeld were to say, 'Free Tibet'? That's a great idea! The Third Infantry Division go in on Thursday', all the 'Free Tibet' crowd would be driving around with 'War is not the answer' stickers. When entire nations embrace self-congratulatory holier-than-thou moral poseurdom as a way of life, it's even less attractive. The Belgians weren't half as insufferable when they were the German army's preferred shortcut to France.
"George Bush used his father to get into the National Guard, was grounded and then went missing. Now he's allowing false advertising that attacks John Kerry, a man who asked to go to Vietnam and who served with dignity and heroism.
"I agree with Senator McCain that the ad is inappropriate," Kerry said in a statement released by his campaign. "This should be a campaign of issues, not insults."
Saying he would defend Bush's decision to enlist in the Guard, Kerry rattled off a long list of Vietnam-era options that lumped Guard service in with draft-dodging.
"I've never made any judgments about any choice somebody made about avoiding the draft, about going to Canada, going to jail, being a conscientious objector [or] going into the National Guard," he told Sean Hannity. "Those are choices people make."
Kerry today:
Finally, I want to say something about the plan that the President announced on Monday to withdraw 70,000 troops from Asia and Europe. Nobody wants to bring troops home more than those of us who have fought in foreign wars. But it needs to be done at the right time and in a sensible way. This is not that time or that way.
Kerry on August 1, seventeen days ago:
I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just there but elsewhere in the world. In the Korean Peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps. There are great possibilities open to us.
Vice President Dick Cheney's questioning of John Kerry's war record and his ability to protect America is "cowardly," Sen. Tom Harkin said Monday.
"It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that," said the Iowa Democrat, a former Navy fighter pilot.
Harkin said he had seen clips of the vice president saying in Iowa last week that Kerry lacks a basic understanding of the war on terrorism.
He accused President Bush and his vice president of "resorting to dirty attacks on John Kerry's war record."
"They're running scared because John Kerry has a war record and they don't," said Harkin. "What he (Cheney) is doing and what he is saying is cowardly. The actions are cowardly."
That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record -- "I put my ass on the line day after day" -- he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam. . . .
Mr. Harkin's Navy record shows his only decoration is the National Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone on active service during those years. He did not receive either the Vietnam Service medal or the Vietnam Campaign medal, the decorations given to everyone who served in the Southeast Asia theater. "We didn't get them for what we did," Mr. Harkin says. "It's never bothered me."
Alston recalled: "I know when John Kerry told Del to beach that damn boat, this was a brand-new ball game. We wasn't running. We took it to Charlie."
"In addition to Kerry's Silver Star PCF-94's performance on February 28 also earned Bronze Stars for Tommy Belodeau and Mike Medeiros and Navy Commendation Medals with Combat V Devices for Del Sandusky, Fred Short, and Gene Thorson." - Douglas Brinkley
All of the crew, it seems, were decorated for their actions that day, noticeably absent was David Alston.
The United States reportedly plans to pull 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia in the largest restructuring of its global military presence since World War II.
Two-thirds of the reductions will be made in Europe, most of them military personnel stationed in Germany who will be sent back to U.S. bases, the Financial Times reported Saturday.
Five hundred tons of yellowcake uranium ore stored at Saddam Hussein's al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons research laboratory near Baghdad could have been enriched to produce 142 nuclear weapons, a prominent British physicist has determined.
The biggest falsehood that critics have promulgated against NCLB is that the bill represents an “unfunded mandate,” in that it doesn’t provide enough money to bring kids up to the standards it imposes. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is typically dismissive. “It’s hard to believe the president ever intended to adequately fund the No Child Left Behind Act,” he writes, right after checking in with that objective source, Ted Kennedy. “Mr. Bush fights ferociously for the things he really cares about: enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, or launching a war against Iraq. He has never showed a similar passion for the public schools.” In fact, the Bush administration will spend a whopping 49 percent more on public education this year than the Clinton administration did in its last year in office. In just four years, the Bush team will quadruple what the Clinton administration spent on reading programs over eight years.
In retrospect one must in reality question why Kerry filmed his supposed escapades in Vietnam, a tactic that obviously smacks of exploitation and calculation. I spent one year in Vietnam as a combat veteran and I never saw any soldier carry an 8-mm camera. If John really wanted to do something important why didn't he document with his camera all the atrocities he said that he witnessed and were committed by the hoards of Ghengis Khan he so blatantly accused in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971? The murdering, rapists ....Your fathers, sons, friends, and relatives, our young fighting men who fought with so much bravery because they loved America! Where was his bravery then? He was so against the war what better chance to prove his accusations but on film? No his real reasons for carrying that camera have become very obvious to most veterans and to many Americans. John Kerry is into only one thing and that's John Kerry's political aspirations. THINK AMERICA!
Back in September 2002, Kerry told then-New York Times columnist (now executive editor) Bill Keller "I have no intention of using" his Vietnam home movies, which Kerry shot with an 8-mm camera, for campaign purposes. But contrary to that promise, those films have been used in Kerry’s TV ads and were heavily featured during the Democratic convention. Can you say Flip Flop? No I'm tired of that idiotic name for what John Kerry does, the real word is called LYING.
Iraq War critics have argued that Saddam's uranium stockpile was safe because it was subject to once-a-year inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But the IAEA was also in charge of monitoring North Korea's nuclear program right up until 2002, when Pyongyang announced it would begin producing nuclear weapons.
Iran's defense ministry said on Wednesday it had carried out a field test of the latest version of its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile which defense experts say can reach Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.How will you know when Iran is really close to having missiles that can carry nukes?
Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said last week Iran was working on improvements to the range and accuracy of the Shahab-3 in response to Israel's moves to boost its anti-missile capability.
If Kerry’s story is a lie, it’s significant, but not because we have a gotcha moment – gee, a politician reworked the truth to his advantage, big surprise. This is much larger than that. This is like Bush insisting that he flew an intercept mission with the Texas Air National Guard to repel Soviet bombers based in Cuba, and later stating that this event was “seared in his memory – seared” because it taught him the necessity of standing up against evil governments, such as the ones we face today. In other words, it would not only be a lie, but one that eroded the political persona he was relying upon in the election. Kerry has made Vietnam central to his campaign. If he’s making crap up, it matters. But the story of the CIA agent he ferried into the Heart of Darkness gives the gotcha a curious twist; as lawyers say on TV courtroom dramas, it goes to state of mind. What sort of man bedecked with genuine decorations feels compelled to manufacture a story like this one?I agree with Lileks when he says, in effect:
The Commission's report failed to note that elections in Florida are the responsibility of 67 county supervisors of election. And, in all but one of the 25 counties with the highest ballot spoilage rates, the election was supervised by a Democrat-the one exception being an official with no party affiliation. In fact, most of the authority over elections in Florida resides with officials in the state's 67 counties, and all of those with the highest rates of voter error were under Democratic control.
Of the 25 Florida counties with the highest rate of vote spoilage, in how many was the election supervised by a Republican? The answer is zero. All but one of the 25 had Democratic chief election officers, and the one exception was in the hands of an official with no party affiliation.
The majority report argues that much of the spoiled ballot problem was due to voting technology. But elected Democratic Party officials decided on the type of machinery used, including the optical scanning system in Gadsden County, the state's only majority-black county and the one with the highest spoilage rate.
Both the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post "hardly bastions of Republicanism" as Harris has pointed out found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they let vote, and this largely was to the benefit of Al Gore.
In November 2001, a ballot-by-ballot analysis by a consortium of newspapers (the media consortium included The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to examine the ballots) shows that Bush would have won the election clean if he'd let Florida go ahead with the partial recount that Gore wanted.
"Nonetheless, last month's release of the Sept. 11 commission report vindicated the Saudi government of any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon the United States.
My ClashPoint is this: John Kerry’s political track record is what you should be eyeballing. You see, it’s not just his grinning would-be Veep; not his Hollywood hepatitis C crowd; not his Jurassic rock stars. It’s not even his ‘Nam war films [which we now know Kerry himself shot during staged re-enactments of the action]. It’s what he has stood for, the last two decades, the ultra-left record of his time in the U.S. Senate.
You know, the facts that he has so ardently tried to hide, and not his current “look the other way” fabrications. Facts like: over the last 20 years Senator Kerry has voted again and again to cut spending on the military and on the intelligence services, in stark contrast to his “I will be strong militarily” bluster.
No you won’t, Senator. You never have been and never will be.
If there is a consistent[ly] repeated story by John Kerry about his Vietnam experience, it is his story about how he and his boat spent Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 illegally present in Cambodia and, listening to President Nixon's contrary assurances, developed "a deep mistrust of U.S. government pronouncements." See Exhibit 24, Kranish book, p. 84. The point of his story was that his government and his commanders were lying about Kerry's presence in Cambodia on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. During a critical debate on the floor of the United States Senate on March 27, 1986, Senator John Kerry said:
Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.
I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me . . . .
Exhibit 25, Congressional Record - Senate of March 27, 1986, page 3594.
By way of further example, Kerry wrote an article for the Boston Herald on October 14, 1979:
"I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."
See Exhibit 26.
The Christmas in Cambodia story of John Kerry was repeated as recently as July 7, 2004 by Michael Kranish, a principal biographer of Kerry from The Boston Globe. On the Hannity & Colmes television show, Kranish indicated that Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia was a critical turning point in Kerry's life.
The story is a total preposterous fabrication by Kerry. Exhibit 8 is an affidavit by the Commander of the Swift boats in Vietnam, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, stating that Kerry's claim to be in Cambodia for Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 is a total lie. If necessary, similar affidavits are available from the entire chain of command. In reality, Kerry was at Sa Dec -- easily locatable on any map more than fifty miles from Cambodia.
Prior to the Democratic national convention in Boston, journalists in both mainstream and ethnic press queried Vietnamese in the United States and in Vietnam on their views of the two presidential candidates. The contrast is startling.
Back in the United States, however, residents like Pauline Tran in Fairfax, Va. said that she would vote for Bush. Kerry, she said, was an anti-war activist and was part of the reason why South Vietnam was defeated. Others said they will vote for Bush to punish Kerry.
In a Cali Today poll, 90 percent of Vietnamese Americans said they would vote for Bush, and only 10 percent said they would vote for Kerry.
This advice only applies to conservative bloggers. Any of you liberals who don't grow as fast as Wonkette? Just go ahead and cut your losses, quit blogging, and make giant puppet heads for the big "No War With Iran" protests that'll be going on right after W bombs the ayatollahs in his 2nd term. The Commies who run those protests need dupes like you to grow and thrive! So don't let them down!Oy!
Today I walked around the motor pool and tried to figure out how many Strykers got hit by RPG's, from what I gathered from the motor pool and from talking to everybody I knew that was there, it looks like over 50% of all the vehicles that drove down that main street, took at least 1 RPG. Most took more than one. And almost all of them are totally serviceable.We have 4 vehicles in my PLT, 4 Squads per Plt. Each Sqd rides on each vehicle. 2 out of the 4 vehicles in my Plt got hit by RPG's. Both vehicles in my Plt took 3 RPG's each. One of the vehicles in my Plt that took an RPG, had its engine catch on fire from the Impact, the SAW gunner from 3rd Squad, grabbed a fire extinguisher, stuck his body out of the hatch and extinguished the fire, under fire. My driver counted 4 RPG's flying past our vehicle. A Stryker in another Plt took 7 RPG's that day, which blew out all 8 rubber tires, and it was still able to Continue Mission with no tires and drive on, out of the kill zone. Do you think a Gavin 113 could do that? Speed the hell out of a Kill zone with no tracks?
What angered me the most the other day was how inaccurate and very little press coverage the attack recieved. They all got it completely wrong. CNN, Al Jazzera, BBC, all of them. Cnn only reported 12 dead??? I told my friend from another Plt that and he said, "Shit! We killed 12 people in the first three minutes." I still wonder why, what happened the other day, over 100 crazed out Al Qaeda jihadist wearing all black and high off the Koran, attacking US Forces with everything they had received very little to no press in all the major news outlets???? It seems to me something like that should be major news. And you also have to wonder how many times something like this happens here in Iraq, where all hell will break loose, and there will be very little to no talk of it whatsoever. They only devoted two fucking paragraphs to that story that happened the other day, I had to fuckin search all over Cnn's site site to find that little bit about what happened, and it totally made it sound like nothing major happened here??? That is complete bullshit. Makes you kinda wonder.
"'Less than a week after the Cleveland Plain Dealer published Bill Singleton's name among a list of people who have chosen to obtain a license to bear arms for self-defense, Mr. Singleton is dead. When three robbers came to Singleton's business Tuesday morning - they allegedly shot before Singleton had time to react to their demands.' "FlashBunny.org
“You show endless repeats of that panty-on-the-head video because it’s awful and Americans have a right to know the whole truth, but atrocities committed by our enemies are carefully hidden away. Hell, you won’t even show footage of 9/11 anymore because Americans might actually remember it and wonder who the hell’s side you’re on in the first place. Shit, you people don’t even have the stones to show videos of Islamist whackjob imams calling for our destruction at wholesale rates in mosques all over the world. But if Falwell offered Muslims the choice between conversion or violent death you’d be all over it with both feet—and you’d blame Bush for the fact that Falwell was nuts.
“You complain about divisiveness and uncivil discourse, but Bush is a Nazi and all Republicans are extremist right-wing religious maniacs. You call Dick Cheney Bush’s “hitman” but Howard Dean is just a reasonable Democrat floating interesting ideas about terror alerts. Israelis are genocidal monsters for building a security fence to keep murderers from their midst, but the Palestinian killers they’re trying to thwart are ‘militants.’ Terrorists in Iraq trying to kill not only our servicemen and women but any civilians they can get within machete’s reach of are ‘gunmen’ or ‘extremists’—when a handful of you aren’t gushing outright about how they’re no different from George Washington. Who owned slaves, let’s never forget, the dirty terrorist.
Texas cops thought they'd made a major drug bust when they raided a home northwest of Houston last Tuesday. After all, it looked like there were huge marijuana plants growing in the front yard.
"All of a sudden, they burst in with their guns loaded, pointing at me, screaming, 'Get on the floor! Get on the floor!'" northwest Harris County resident Blair Davis told KHOU-TV.
It turns out the tall plants with the narrow leaves arranged in a fan pattern weren't pot plants at all, but specimens of Texas Star hibiscus, which Davis grows for his landscaping business.
The supporters of gay marriage had to push., and now they are getting pushed back. There was no reason for the Mayor of San Francisco to suddenly decide that the State law banning gay marriage was illegal and being issuing licenses. There was no reason for the County Commissioners in Multnomah and Benton Counties in Oregon to do the same. It was a push. It was the embodiment of that silly protest chant. "What do we want? (fill in the blanks) When do we want it? Now! Evidently the chanting broke something in the reasoning department of the gay marriage supporters thinking.(emphasis mine)
Rather than seeking to persuade, they sought to impose. Rather than having it now, they have delayed the day when they achieve it.
In the new Atlantic Monthly, Eric Alterman notes that Laurie David, wife of Larry David--among Hollywood's wealth elite owing to "Seinfeld" royalties--has become an influential environmental crusader, but herself travels in chartered Gulfstream jets. Laurie David has organized numerous celebrity save-the-environment events and "reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable," a private jet, Alterman writes. I did a few quick calculations. The mid-sized Gulfstream G200 model can carry about 2,100 gallons of jet fuel, which is made from petroleum, and would burn around 1,200 to 1,500 gallons flying from New York to Los Angeles, depending on wind speed and how many passengers were aboard. A Hummer driven 15,000 miles, the average put on a car per year, would burn around 1,250 gallons of gasoline. So for Laurie David to take one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year. But then, conservation is what other people should do.
Subway™ has now committed commercial seppuku with their latest ad campaign in their German franchises, consisting of a tray liner promoting the "movie" Super-Size Me! along with a crude drawing of an obscenely obese Statue of Liberty holding an order of fries and a hamburger.Follow the link.
Oh, and the headline (in German) is to DIE for (in a corporate sense):
"Why are the Amis so fat?"
When first running for his Senate seat in 1984, Kerry explained carefully that he was firmly against such mainstays of the defense establishment as the B-1 bomber, B-2 stealth bomber, AH-64 Apache helicopter, Patriot missile, the F-15, F-14A and F-14D jets, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, and the Trident missile system.
He also ran on a platform of cutting back on the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the F-16
In 1991 Kerry voted to cut defense spending by 2 percent. Only 21 other senators voted with Kerry, and the defense cut was defeated.
In 1991, Kerry voted to cut over $3 billion from defense and shift the funds to social programs. Only 27 senators joined Kerry in voting for the defense cut.
In 1992, Kerry voted to cut $6 billion from defense. Republicans and Democrats alike successfully blocked this attempt to cut defense spending.
In 1993, Kerry voted against increased defense spending for a military pay raise.
In 1993, Kerry introduced a plan to cut the number Of Navy submarines and their crews; reduce tactical fighter wings in the Air Force; terminate the Navy’s coastal mine-hunting ship program; force the retirement of 60,000 members of the armed forces in one year; and reduce the number of light infantry units in the Army down to one. The plan was DOA.
In 1995, Kerry voted to freeze defense spending for seven years, cutting over $34 billion from defense. Only 27 other senators voted with Kerry.
In 1996, Kerry introduced a bill to cut Defense Department funding by $6.5 billion. Kerry’s bill had no co-sponsors and never came to a floor vote.
In 1996, Kerry voted yes on a fiscal 1996 budget resolution – a defense freeze that would have frozen defense spending for the next seven years and transferred the $34.8 billion in savings to education and job training. The resolution was rejected 28-71.
A member of the Kerry advance team called Nikola’s Restaurant at the Newburgh Yacht Club the night before and ordered 19 five-star lunches to go that would be picked up at noon Friday. Management at the restaurant, which is operated by CIA graduate chef Michael Dederick, was told the meals would be for the Kerry and Edwards families and actor Ben Affleck who was with them on the tour.
The gourmet meals to go included shrimp vindallo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, and steak salad. The meals came to about $200.
The entourage had also expected to stop at the Alexis Diner at Route 9W and North Plank Road in the Town of Newburgh. In fact, the Kerry advance team had ordered 125 lunches for the team and supporters. Their buses drove right by the diner on I-84 and proceeded straight to Wendy’s.
(July 30th)John Kerry said Friday he would put Osama bin Laden on trial in U.S. courts rather than an international tribunal to ensure the "fastest, surest route" to a murder conviction if the terrorist mastermind is captured while he is president.
Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response.
