Said Kerry:

Once again, today America needs a president who believes in science as John Kennedy did. The American people deserve a president who understands that when America invests in science and technology, we can build a stronger economy and create jobs for the 21st Century. But George Bush has turned his back on the spirit of exploration and discovery.

You get the feeling that if George Bush had been president during other periods in American history, he would have sided with the candle lobby against electricity, the buggy-makers against cars and typewriter companies against computers.

Back around 1994 through 1996, during the era that Newt Gingrich was prone to wax eloquent on beach volleyball (and, if you noticed all the ass shots that populated Yahoo’s “Most Emailed” list during the Summer Olympics, you realize he may have had a point), Gingrich said the same thing about Union-backed Democratic politicos likeDick Gephardt, and major figures of the “Liberal Media”:

“If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as “candle making industry threatened.”

I disagree with Kerry. There aren’t any religious implications in candles.

Voting Fraud Fever is SWEEPING THE NATION!!

South Dakota!!!
OHIO!!!
NEVADA!!!
OREGON!!!
PENNSYLVANIA!!!
ARIZONA!!!
MISSOURI!!!
WISCONSIN!!!
FLORIDA!!!
MICHIGAN!!! (no, not “voter fraud”… but in the sense that it’s background noise.)
THE ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD!!!

(originally posted on October 13… updated time.)

Alan Keyes:

The Illinois Republican Party this week sent out hundreds of thousands of campaign mailers to homes across the state that leave off the name of one high-profile Republican contender–U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes.

The glossy promotion, which doubles as an absentee ballot application, is zoned for specific regions in the state and touts “Your 2004 Republican Team.” The team roster includes President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and various congressional and legislative candidates.
[…]
“It’s immature and petty for them to have left Keyes off something like this,” said Keyes supporter Christine Boreland, who received one of the mailers at her Barrington home Tuesday. “He’s definitely a long shot, but it wouldn’t have cost any more money to include his name.”

“People are reading too much into this,” Illinois GOP spokesman Jason Gerwig said. “We did our mailing and congressional candidates helped coordinate it. The Keyes campaign is doing its own thing.”

Supporter for Alan Keyes’s 2000 presidential bid, Tom Coburn:

U.S. Senate candidate Tom Coburn declined to comment Wednesday on the Republican U.S. House speaker’s published statement that Coburn will probably not win the race.

“We have a race in Oklahoma that we are probably not going to win,” Hastert told the (Arlington Heights, Ill.) Daily Herald editorial board. “That’s a Republican seat we are probably going to lose.”

In hindsight, perhaps it was a mistake for the Yankees to raise a “Mission Accomplished” banner above their dugout after Game 3.

Seems to be a common mistake…

I turned in the middle way of Game 4 of the Boston Red Sox — New York Yankees series, the Yankees were leading the best of seven series 3-0, a deficit no major league sports team– save apparently a hockey team or two– has ever recovered from. I watched Mike Timlin go into the game for Relief Pitching. He used to be in the Seattle Mariners bullpen. He gave up the Boston Red Sox’s lead. Just to remind everyone of the Mariners bullpen, apparently.

The Fenway Park crowd became sullen. The tv started showing crowd shots with signs saying “I’m Sorry You Made Us Believe Yet Again”. The atmosphere was akin to a funeral march. I turned away.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, down by one, the Red Sox scored, throwing the game into extra innings. The game went on and on and on, and finally in the bottom of the twelvth, David Ortiz hit a homerun and the series went to the a fifth game.

Where, an eight inning rally pushed the game to a tie, and into fourteen innings. Which was when David Ortiz hit the game-winning hit.

Game six saw new meaning to the name “Red Sox”. Pitcher Curt Schilling’s injury was showing, and the cameraman kept showing close ups of the Red Sox pitcher’s bloody sock. Red… Sock…

My prediction, after Game five, was I predict the Red Sox win tommorrow easily, setting up a game 7 where events in the seventh inning pretty lead the Yankees to victory.

The Red Sox made a bizarre pitching change in the seventh inning, replacing a pitcher that was breezing along with Pedro Martinez. Martinez’s troubles with the Yankees had lead him to say “What can I say? The Yankees are my daddy.” The crowd, of course, started chanting “Who’s my daddy?” What happens? Martinez gives up two runs, seeming to confirm my prediction. He then got his three outs. The Red Sox immediately had a homerun, shutting down their momentum, and my prediction came to be way off base.

In the end, I could care less who wins or loses the World Series. But it brings up some odd political ramnifications.

It’s hard to say who we want to win Game Seven of the National League Championship Series (a series that has been thoroughly overshadowed by Yankees – Red Sox). You have the Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals.

If we see Houston, we’ll inevitably get comparisons with the presidential race — Massachusetts versus Texas. The winner of the Superbowl, in case you’re curious, was the New England Patriots… who are on such a roll that they have broken the record for most consecutive victories (spanning over two seasons). In that case, we want Boston to win… if Massachusetts has two victories, a third one looks to be right on the way, right? On the other hand, should the Astros win that hypoethetical series, we’d want the series to mean squat. Troubling, ain’t it? To innoculate us in case of a loss, it may be best for this match-up to not materialize.

St. Louis offers another challenge. Who do we want to see win? Missouri is a swing-state, and what would happen if the Boston Red Sox defeat the the St. Louis Cardinals, and the baseball fan takes out their frustration on John Kerry? On the other hand, a Boston defeat destroys that Boston mojo.

Or pretend like this doesn’t exist, and perhaps just move along… nothing to see here. For his part, Kerry is mum and liable to make a crack about “keeping the eyes on the prize” and Tora Bora.

From a Michael Bérubé:

Maybe you’re fond of speaking of the “corporate duopoly” of American politics– and I admit that the phrase does roll nicely off the tongue. Or maybe you like to imagine that there’s a groundswell of hundreds of millions of people around the globe who believe that Kerry and Bush are just two different brands of detergent, even though actual polls show wide margins of support for Kerry in other nations. Or maybe you just think it’s smart, cool, and alternative to dismiss both guys as “millionaires” or “Skull and Bones men,” because you know better than to buy into “the system.”

I could never quite pull the “smart, cool, and alternative” charade off. You can see that by my reaction over here. This thus makes moot the very name of this blog. Originally, the phrase at the top of the page was “The 2004 campaign as though it doesn’t matter. That didn’t work. Kerry has some advantages, apart from “Not Bush”. Bush has some disadvantages. (Sometimes I have this tendency to poo-poo the caricature as not correct, but go back and compare the 2000 SNL sketch where a hypoethetical Bush cries out “This is Hard” with the debate performance where he says “This is Hard”.) Bush looks worse than he did four years ago. Kerry looks better than Gore (and, need I remind you, Lieberman) looked four years ago. If some damnable basic structural items of our curious government persist due Kerry’s basic limitations or our flawed society or the ever-mystical “Shadow Government”… just remember that just because you voted for the man, doesn’t mean that you have to be a Kerry Syncoprant, and doesn’t mean that you have to stick yourself in a permanent “Elephant versus Donkey” state of mind. (That’s Limbaugh’s job — to always parlay the current RNC line whole-sale.) And you can still be smarmy about these things.

(Gore still puzzles me, but that’s another digression altogether.)

(If I could find the “comment” from early on in the blog calling herself a “60 or 70-something year old” regular reader, asking “You’re supporting Bush?” I’d place it here.)

When I saw that comment, I knew I had to change the saying at the top.

This looks like a fairly decent account of what’s wrong with the current Republican Party. Not the full picture, but a large chunk of it.

What turned out to be the remedy for the Democratic Party’s malaise: the DLC. Defendable as a force within the Democratic Party and one of several clearinghouses of ideas. As the driving force for the party, and as an enemy of any other faction, it becomes deplorable and obnoxious in its demands of ideological adherance. Note their attacks on Howard Dean during the primary, a man who spent the 1990s as one of their stars. (And, I might add after taking a good look at Dean’s stewardship as governor, a good one. The DLC’s current cast of stars… are pathetic.)

Bill Clinton gets a mixed review in relation with what he did with the DLC. At any rate, the late-night radio host on KGO offers good advice to people who call complaining about Clinton: “Don’t vote for that clown. If you see him on the ballot, skip right over him, and vote for JOHN KERRY..”)

But, I see what the future of the Republican Party would look like with a successful election-outcome. It’s Tom Coburn, bravely fighting the threat of Lesbians in Southeast Oklahoma. It’s Jim DeMint, making sure there are no single-mother parents teaching in our schools. It’s the continued power-consolidation of the corrupt Tom DeLay. And it’s the Orwellian distance away from reality of the Bush Administration. [And, no matter what, Judith Miller will continue in her role for the Party… assuming she doesn’t end in prison for “contempt of court” as her role in the Vallerie Plame incident is investigated. Just consider her a part of the opposition party, and a part of the government, along with large chunks of what we don’t normally think of as “government”.]

The idea is to break that, and help create two better parties.

Michael J Fox has endorsed Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, reasons make a heck of a lot of sense: for the cause of stem-cell research, it’s best to have a bi-partisan coalition. Not that I’ll herald the greatness of Arlen Specter, one of any number of political hacks who’ll adjust themselves to fit the wind, but… the Club for Growth and Conservative Grassroots everywhere wanted to knock him out and replace him with someone fitting their, quote-in-quote, “kleptomaniac Contra-funding retreads, neo-segregationists associated with Confederate outlets like Southern Partisan magazine and the Council of Conservative Citizens, and Christian fundamentalist jihadists who believe themselves to be the instruments of God” persuasion.

“Our” version of the enemy-in-our midst (if you assume we’re all Democrats, and I’m not entirely — I’d be comfortable with a certain couple of types of Republicans in the White House) be Joseph Lieberman, giving us the worst aspects of Scoop Jackson, Bill Clinton, and the 1980s version of Al and Tipper Gore. (The Democratic figure-head for the “Committee on Present Danger”.) I recomment not voting for him. (And Note that his White House bid got nowhere.)

Should he disappear from the Senate, he’d remain there in the policy debates somewhere and somehow. Interesting territory.

Pat Robertson is vying for the title of “The voice of Reason”.

“He was just sitting there, like, ‘I’m on top of the world,’ and I warned him about this war.

“I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr President, you better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ‘Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s the way it’s going to be.’ And so, it was messy. The Lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy.”

Praise the Lord and Pass the Amunition!

(UPDATE: Look at the quote a bit closer… And I think we need to understand that. I told the president that just recently, that we have got to prepare the American people for civilian casualties, for possibly our casualties, for gassing, for various chemical weapons against them. NOW… Bush’s “no casualties” line would make sense… because, there will be no gassing, or chemical weapons, will there?

Or, if you don’t like the God that Bush is speaking to (and Pat Robertson speaks with), perhaps you prefer KISS‘s God:

God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Put it in the soul of everyone
Do you know what you want? You don’t know for sure
You don’t feel right, you can’t find a cure
And you’re gettin’ less than what you’re lookin’ for
You don’t have money or a fancy car
And you’re tired of wishin’ on a falling star
You gotta put your faith in a loud guitar
God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Gave rock and roll to everyone (oh yeah)
God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Put it in the soul of everyone
“Now listen”
If you wanna be a singer, or play guitar
Man, you gotta sweat or you won’t get far
Cause it’s never too late to work nine-to-five
You can take a stand, or you can compromise
You can work real hard or just fantasize
But you don’t start livin’ till you realize – “I gotta tell ya!”
God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Gave rock and roll to everyone
God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Put it in the soul
God gave rock and roll to you
(to everyone he gave the song to be sung)
Gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to everyone
God gave rock and roll to you
(to everyone he gave the song to be sung)
Gave rock and roll to you, saved rock and roll for everyone
Saved rock and roll
“I know life sometimes can get tough!
And I know life sometimes can be a drag!
But people, we have been given a gift, we have been given a road
And that road’s name is… Rock and Roll!”

Now I’m just being ridiculous!

After nearly four years of a Bush Administration, an adminstration that Bush Campaign boils down to a bull-horn moment and the unpopular to educators “No Child Left Behind” (Unfunded Mandate)… with, there in the background

an unpopular to Seniors Medicare Reform Bill,
a War in Iraq, and apparently that $87 Billion didn’t go to body armor,
Some missed chances in Afghanistan,
An incredibly inept economic recovery,
Envrionmental de-regulation and a “Clear Skies” Initiative — (or perhaps we can say the regulation is there, but it’s strictly voluntary…),

And if I missed your pet cause, sorry… (I’m focusing strictly on “kitchen-table issues”)…

After all that, what might this election turn on, and what might turn Kerry past the finish line ahead of Bush?

A flu vaccine shortage.

Strange, ain’t it?

Former Elder of the Ku Klux Klan, Johnny Lee Clary, endorses George W Bush.

Al Qaeda’s Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades has endorsed Geogre W Bush.

(Wait. Maybe that’s a head-fake though, Dennis Hastert claims that al Qaeda endorsed John Kerry. A real head-scratcher…)

The government of Iran has endorsed George W Bush.

(And why not?, considering the greatest hero of the Republican Party is Ronald Reagan: Iranian clerics were crucial in determining the fate of the 1980 U.S. election when Republican Ronald Reagan won in part because Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter was unable to secure the hostages’ release.
The hostages were freed as Reagan was inaugurated. )

(Also, the winner of the Iraq War, the one government that has had its interests advanced because of the Iraq War is… Iran. (certainly the US!))

[Actually, I have a complicated thought-process on the matter of Iran, but let’s run with it anyways… I specified “government”. Read to the end of the story, and you get a half-endorsement for Kerry, so it’s a wash.]

Vladmir Putin, who recently seized control of parliment and who keeps an iron-grip control over the Russian television media, endorsed George W Bush. FREEDOM IS ON THE MARCH!!!

It goes without saying, but Reverend Sun Myung Moon has endorsed George W Bush.

The US Communist Party has endorsed Kerry. (Note their merchandising line: how very bourgeoise.) LaRouche endorsed Kerry.

More endorsements over here.