perfidy

At this time three years ago, flight 93 crashed into a field in southeastern Pennsylvania. Since that time, we have not suffered another terrorist attack in this country. But many have died in those three years. They sacrificed their lives to protect ours, and our freedom. Think of them, and of those that died three years ago today. For their sake we need to remember that there is evil in the world, and that it is worth fighting.

For ten bucks and the resources of the greatest technologists on the planet, you too can have a robot that walks on water. It's almost becoming pointless to post these discoveries as sometime next week, probably on Tuesday, they'll invent armor plated flying robots armed with particle beams that have the intelligence of five Einsteins and can raise the dead. Only they won't, they'll just kill. Or maybe they'll kill us, then bring us back just so they can kill us more.

This may not be that unlikely:

On a lighter note, the AP also reports that Kerry has resorted to making fun of the president's middle initial: "The 'W' stands for wrong," Kerry said of Bush's middle initial. "Wrong choices, wrong judgment, wrong priorities, wrong direction for our country." Wow, there's a compelling argument. Of course, turnabout is fair play. Maybe Dick Cheney could adopt a similar slogan: "The 'F' stands for . . ." Ah, never mind.

Ken Hall has posted a revealing candidate quiz.

Loyal reader #00017, EDog, notes that among the many new flavors of Kit Kat bars being tested in the UK is cumin-masala.

I mean, I'm a big a fan as anyone of the whole chapati/korma/keema paratha/lamb rogan josh thing-- in fact Indian food is #1 tops in my book, but jeezus. Remember, this is the country that deep-fries frozen pizzas, so I'm inclined to <spite>let them have their spicy chocolate if they want it</spite>.

Lileks, true to form, has some excellent perspective on the fallout from the forgery scandal.

But I think the number of people who regard the evening news as straight truth delivered by disinterested observers, can be numbered in the high dozens. Blogs haven't toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you've see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke - then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We've been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.

In retrospect, TV looks like a big smothering quilt: it killed the afternoon papers, forced the survivors to consolidate; it reshaped the news cycle to fit its needs, shifted the emphasis to the visual. It fed off the Times and the Post and other surviving papers, which had institutionalized the Watergate and Vietnam templates as the means by which we understand events. The old-line media, like its Boomer components, got old, and like the Boomers, it preferred self-congratulation to self-reflection. And so the Internet had it for lunch, because the Internet does not have to schedule 17 meetings to develop a strategy for impactfully maximizing brand leverage in emerging markets; the Internet does not have to worry about how a decision will affect one’s management trajectory; the Internet smells blood and leaps, and that has turned the game around, for better or worse. So we’re back to where we were in 1904 – except that the guys on the corner shouting WUXTRY, WUXTRY aren’t grimy urchins selling the paper – they’re the people who wrote the damn thing, too.

In some respects we are seeing a return to 1904. But it's a jazzed up, 21st century 1904. Back in the golden age of yellow journalism and muckraking, competing papers created wars and didn't worry too much about the truth. The competition is returning - Fox amidst the major media, and the thousands of blogs and webzines in the increasingly powerful new media. But it's different now. Like open source software and open source intelligence, we are seeing open source journalism. This is the 21st century stamp on the metaphor.

I think a closer historical analog to what we're seeing now is the pamphleteers of the revolutionary era. In many respects, the golden age of newspapers was the late eighteenth century. Small papers, they carried little of what we would think of as news. The occasional dispatch from europe, advertisements, and essays on politics, morals and religion. This is much of what blogs are today. However, instead of a small number of papers with circulation numbering in the thousands, today's Tom Paines and Alexander Hamiltons can reach millions with their essays and commentary. And again, they don't have to go through semi-monopolistic corporate media giants to get access to the public. Anyone with a computer and a phone has access the writers of the federalist papers would likely have killed for.

Personally, I can't wait for the building to come down.

Brendan Miniter of the Opinion Journal is predicting a big win for Bush in November. He doubts that Kerry will even get as many votes as Dukakis. Like a similar forecast I linked to a while back (21 Reasons Bush will win, by the same entity that does the election projection site) this article lays out some thinking point by point. Here are some of them:

Central to Mr. Kerry's campaign is his promise to raise taxes. Walter Mondale had a similar idea, and he went down in a landslide defeat at the hands of the last Republican president to be re-elected. Similarly, the last Republican president to lose his re-election bid, George H.W. Bush, lost partly because he raised taxes. When skeptical voters--otherwise known as independents--are worried about taxes, they are looking for an unequivocal position. They know that promises to only tax the "rich" almost always morph into taxes on the middle class. Mr. Bush is already capitalizing on this. In his speech Thursday night, he noted that Mr. Kerry is "running on a platform to increase taxes--and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps."

And the electorate does know where Bush is on taxes.

Americans may be the most highly scrutinized and studied electorate in the world, but there's still plenty of activity going on under the radar. Voter turnout is going to be crucial to this election. Indeed, presidential adviser Karl Rove is banking on it. As many as four million evangelical Christians--a group that overwhelmingly supports Mr. Bush--sat out the 2000 election. Getting them to the polls will likely make the difference in several key states. Meanwhile perhaps another 80 million eligible voters didn't cast ballots in the last presidential election. After a close election in 2000 and a sense that this year will be a "historic election" because it will decide whether the nation aggressively pursues terrorists, many are predicting a record turnout in November. Mr. Kerry may be hoping for an anti-Bush surge, but concern for national security is a better motivator for new voters.

The Bush campaign back in '02 used special teams that went into action in the last 72 hours before teh election. By all accounts, they were very effective. They will certainly be in use in November.

Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are swing states with strong unions, but many of the union members there are actually Republicans or are the kind of Democrats who will find it hard to pull the lever for Mr. Kerry. These are the union Democrats who drink beer, watch Nascar and own guns. They have no cultural affinity for a Northeastern liberal who spends his time on the Idaho ski slopes outside one of his billionaire wife's many mansions or windsurfing off Nantucket. Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, picked up on this and told a reporter: "I might have gone windsurfing--you certainly have a right to clear your head. But I'm not sure I would have taken the press with me." Look for all three states to show up red on election night.

Ohio and West Virginia are already in the Bush side of the ledger, as are Wisconsin and Missouri. Pennsylvania is a statistical dead heat.

Which brings us to the final reason Mr. Bush is probably going to walk away with the election: Mr. Kerry is not a very good politician. He's cultivated a reputation as a fighter, a good "closer," because of his last-minute surge past William Weld to win re-election in 1996. But that was in Massachusetts. Why was a two-term Democratic senator having trouble beating a Republican challenger in the only state George McGovern carried? One reason is that unlike Ted Kennedy, Mr. Kerry is not seen as a man who can get things done. No significant legislation bears his name.

Interesting stuff, as is the list of 21 - still relevant after all these months.

Watch and laugh.

Courtesy of Spoons

I was just informed by Teresa Heinz-Kerry that I am an idiot. I was surprised by this, seeing as I've never met the woman, but here it is:

Teresa Heinz Kerry says "only an idiot" would fail to support her husband's health care plan. But Heinz Kerry, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, told the (Lancaster) Intelligencer Journal that "of course, there are idiots." Kerry's proposal includes health care subsidies for children, the unemployed, small companies and more; and government assistance to insurers and employers that keep premiums for workers down. If Kerry is elected, Heinz Kerry predicts that opponents of his health care plan will be voted out of office. She says, "Only an idiot wouldn't like this."

In an ABC report on the CBS document pooch screwery, the officer's wife and son also doubt that the memos in question could have come from Killian. At the end of the piece is a very droll understatement:

Many Democrats are worried that if they are found to be forgeries, it will be a setback for Sen. John Kerry's campaign to defeat Bush in November.

I guess worrying about the professional integrity of a major news outlet, concurrant slander on a sitting president, and the fact that some of your allies are incompetant scumbags rate pretty far down the list.