"Fair Game"
Regardless of what John Kerry has said in defense of his reference to Mary Cheney in the third debate, the bottom line is that Mary Beth Cahill said that raising the issue of Ms. Cheney's sexuality was "fair game." In other words, the reference was a deliberate choice of a target.

No, it is inaccurate to say that Kerry "outed" her, but his and the Edwardses' decision to raise such an irrelevant issue ---as well as breaking one of the few taboos left in electoral politics by singling out an opponent's child for any reason other than unmistakable praise--- was a foolish thing to have done.

Just watch a replay of Kerry's remarks. You can tell by the hesitancy in his delivery that he knew, even as it was coming out of his mouth, that he was making a mistake. And what he has said about it since then is complete bullshit. If he was merely trying to give an example of a gay person whose family is loving and supportive, Kerry could have come up with a generic example or made reference to Dick Gephardt's daughter or Rosie O' Donnell or Ellen DeGeneres or any number of people. But he specifically raised the issue of Mary Cheney for a reason: to introduce the element of division into the ranks of the Presidents' Christian Right supporters. Their bigotry is a problem, indeed, but what is worse is Kerry's cynicism in playing to it. That's the bottom line.

I Voted
Around noon today, all three of my brothers and I met up at the Travis County Courthouse at 10th and Guadalupe here in Austin, Texas and voted in the election of the President of the United States. It was very easy and enjoyable. I even ran into our state's Attorney General, Greg Abbott, who had apparently just wrapped up a photo op when I came in. We chatted for a minute while he waited for his wife to come from powdering her nose. Nice guy.

So it's a done deal, friends. I have now made amends for my vote in 2000 and have cast my latest for our President.

I am nervous about this election as I have never been before. But it's looking good for George W. Bush. Just gotta maintain until it's all done.

And, then, I have some letters to write.

No Answer
One of the very few positions that John Kerry hasn't waffled on is his conviction that we should have brought our "allies" to the table when we invaded Iraq. He uses this generic term for two reasons: one, he is a liar who can't bring himself to acknowledge the fact that we do have allies in Iraq and, two, he doesn't want to explicitly define who those "allies" are because he is hypersensitive to being labeled a Francophile appeaser. "Allies" is just code for France and their lickspittles in Germany. Kerry believes that our Coalition is illegitimate because it wasn't blessed by Jacques Chiraq.

What I want to hear is just one sorry-assed reporter asking Jean le Kerrie what he thinks of the Duelfer Report's indictment of the French for taking bribes from Saddam in exchange for their influence against us on the UN Security Council. Why doesn't this happen? When is someone going to ask this guy why he thinks France is the moral and political exemplar in this situation when they obviously didn't oppose us on principle, but on greed?

A vote for John Kerry is a vote for those who are a bunch of goddamned ingrates.

Dying with a Silver Foot in Its Ass
Andrew Ferguson has written a very entertaining article in the latest Weekly Standard on Bush-hatred and the liberal political culture of Austin. He gets everything just about right, including this:

[...]the feeling that runs through Texas liberalism--the feeling of being besieged, outgunned, impotent if not hopeless--is well-founded. Even paranoids are sometimes on to something. For nearly a century, Texas liberals shared the majority party in Texas, the Democratic party, with conservatives. It was an uneasy alliance but it satisfied both factions with separate spheres of influence. No more. The good news for Texas progressives is that they've finally purged the Democratic party of right-wingers and now have it all to themselves. The bad news is that the party is roughly the size of a well-attended kegger. And it promises to stay that way for the next generation.

The change is notable not only for its comprehensiveness but for the rapidity with which it took place. In Texas, the first Republican since Reconstruction took statewide office in 1978. Within 20 years, all 22 statewide offices were held by Republicans. Unbudgeable, decades-old majorities in both houses of the Texas legislature vaporized just as quickly. You can't blame Texas liberals for being disoriented. "There's something about being so concentrated ideologically that makes them more strident than they'd be under other circumstances," Will Lutz, managing editor of a political newsletter called The Lone Star Report, told [Ferguson] earlier this month.

Be sure to read the whole thing, especially if, like me, you're stuck in this self-important, over-crowded, slacker-proud madhouse on the Colorado.

Too Rich for My Blood
Ter-AY-zuh has released a couple pages of her 2003 Federal income tax return. Turns out, she's very rich:

Teresa Heinz Kerry reported income of just over $5 million last year, slightly more than half of it from investments in tax-exempt municipal and state bonds, her 2003 income tax return shows, confirming her status as the wealthiest spouse of any major party nominee in United States history.

Ms. Heinz Kerry on Friday released a small part of her 2003 income tax return, unlike her husband, Senator John Kerry, and President Bush and his wife, Laura, who have made their full tax returns available for public inspection. The Kerrys file separate tax returns, a common arrangement when one spouse is wealthy.

Well, I say Caesar's wife must be seen to be above reproach. She needs to give us more than just two pages. And if you read allll the way to the bottom of this New York Times article, you'll see why (emphasis mine):

No information was provided about how much income was earned by trusts of which she is the beneficiary. If the trusts are as large as reported - and the Kerry campaign has not challenged the billion dollar estimate - then even a modest 5 percent return would have generated $50 million of income, 10 times what was on the two pages released by Ms. Heinz Kerry. A statement released by the Kerry campaign noted that income taxes are paid directly by the Heinz family trust, in addition to taxes that Ms. Heinz Kerry pays.

Yeah.

This woman is extremely rich and is a great backer of all sorts of Leftist bullshit and charities. We don't need her kind in a position of even greater power. Because the super-wealthy obey no law but their own conscience. Because she is a weird and narcissistic moonbat. And because her consort pronounces her name in a way that absolutely pisses me off.

And while I'm at it, let me say this, too, to all of the other creepy broads from hers and my mother's generation who were in some position of influence over me in my formative years: you like her, don't you? You like that degenerate, cosmopolitan view of the world, don't you, where it's all Gloria Steinem balls and Diane Keaton hats? A world of Bela Abzugs and Helen Thomases, Jane Fondas and Valerie Harpers. Strident pro-choice nutjobs, duking it out with Mr. Grant in the newsroom and then looking for Mr. Goodbar later on that night. What a filthy fucking time in our nation's cultural evolution. Whatever there may be to my own feminist sympathies, they remain despite the nauseating memory of those days.

Tough
Enjoy this report at NewsMax.com which features the text of the letter sent today by John Kerry's shyster to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Evidently, the Kerrion are mad because Sinclair is going to broadcast a documentary called Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, which is said to be an attack on Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s. Kerry wants equal time.

But Sinclair has already offered Kerry a chance to participate in the airing of this documentary. He has refused. And the Federal Communications Commission has also refused to keep Sinclair from exercising its First Amendment rights in showing it.

If Stolen Honor were a piece of libelous agitprop without any redeeming value, why would Sinclair consent to its broadcast? That would be bad for business. As it is, they are reaping a huge publicity windfall for an excellent purpose besides their own bottom line: they are helping to defeat a man who should not be the next President.

Not incidentally, you can visit the website for Stolen Honor here.

"A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country..."
Be sure to read Paul Kengor's essay at National Review Online on the importance of what George W. Bush has begun in bringing the hope of democracy to the tyrannical Islamic regimes of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If such countries become 21st-century democracies, historians will struggle to explain how impossible democracy's prospects once seemed in these nations, and thus how boundless and rare was Bush's optimism. His assessment may have been more farfetched than Ronald Reagan's predictions on the end of Communism in the early 1980s, which Bush referred to in this speech. Speaking specifically of Reagan's June 1982 Westminister Address, as well as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Bush concluded: "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country.... We [Americans] believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history.... [T]his is, above all, the age of liberty."

Kengor also writes (after John Lewis Gaddis) ---as I, too, often remind my so-called liberal friends (who are nothing but isolationists now) that

by seeking to spread democracy everywhere, Bush aimed to finish the job Woodrow Wilson started a century earlier. "The world," writes Gaddis, "quite literally, must be made safe for democracy, even those parts of it, like the Middle East, that have so far resisted that tendency." (This was the kind of thing that liberals once championed, before blind rage at Bush precluded their better angels.)

Please remember what is at stake, folks. Remember that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for those who hate America.

What a Kerry State Department Would Look Like
Via NRO, here's part of a response to blogger Daniel Drezner's offer to change his mind from voting for Kerry. It's from "a former US diplomat who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations."

You also have to ask yourself, who is going to carry out Kerry's multilateral approach? And on that score, things simply get worse. A Kerry White House would mean the Madeleine Albright B Team moving into senior foreign policy positions. And, with the notable exception of Richard Holbrooke (his hair may be on fire, but he gets things done), this would be disastrous. These are the same folks who fiddled for 8 years on counter terror, negotiated a terrifyingly naive nuke deal with North Korea, and generally treat foreign policy as a rhetorical exercise. This is a team who has demonstrated, in past position of influence, an alarming propensity to get rolled by their foreign counterparts. Let's pick just two: Susan Rice? Jamie Rubin?! Are you serious?? During her sojourn as assistant secretary for Africa in Albright's State Department, Rice had to be consistently bailed out of trouble by career diplomats. As for Rubin, he is anti-gravitas. He's Edwards-lite.

Heh, heh.

Righteous Indignation
Check out this post at Patterico's Pontifications about why Kerry and the Edwardses think it's okay to have gratuitously used Mary Cheney as an example in their recent debates of their [greater sensitivity] to gay rights. Here's Patterico's conclusion:

So what was the purpose? You know damn well what it was. John Kerry and John Edwards have calculated that there are Christian conservatives out there who are not aware that Dick Cheney has a gay daughter. They know that Karl Rove considers the mobilization of the Christian conservative vote to be the single most important factor in this election. So they have cynically decided to exploit what they believe to be the homophobia of some of those Christian conservatives. There is no other possible explanation.

President Bush may owe a lot to the Christian Right ---and some of that debt is undoubtedly a low-grade hostility to the full recognition of gay rights (viz., gay marriage). I think that sucks. I also think that Kerry's belief that homosexuality is not a choice is correct. But he gets no points from me for that. He is, instead, a chickenshit for making Mary Cheney a part of his argument. That crosses a line.

Mary Cheney loves her parents and they love her. They aren't ashamed of her. Rather, they have respect for her dignity and privacy as all good parents do. The Democrats think it's fun to make something of out of the gay rights agenda when it touches on a Republican. But guess what, jackasses: that doesn't affect Dick Cheney as a father or as a man; you only hope it has some effect on him politically.

Let's see who gets affected next.

Keeping an Eye on Voter Fraud
Please be sure to have a look at Bill Hobbs' post/archive on voter fraud. Turns out, contrary to what CNN and Comrade Jennings and the rest would have you believe, most of the fraud is attributable to Democrats, as is the almost brownshirt-like pre-election violence and vandalism that's going on all across the country against Bush-Cheney campaign offices.

Pejmanesque on "The Wisdom of Paul Begala"
This is to laugh.

Paul Begala: yet another person to add to my List of People Whose Faces Must Be Rubbed In It When Bush Wins Re-Election.

Thus far, the List includes:

Terry McAuliffe
Hanoi John
Michael Moore, who is a traitor
Jimmy Carter
James Carville
Ted Rall
Jamie Rubin
Dan Rather
Mary Mapes
Joe Wilson
Richard Clarke
Wesley Clark
Ter-AY-zuh Heinz
Jacques Chiraq
Gerhard Schroeder
Chris Matthews
John Roberts
Keith Olbermann
The Gorebot

Feel free to add some of your own.

He Shoots Prisoners in the Head, Doesn't He?
Iraq's Prime Minister Allawi is just about done with Fallujah. According to a story in the Washington Times,

Iraq's prime minister yesterday threatened military action against the rebel stronghold of Fallujah if residents don't hand over Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi.

"If they do not turn in al-Zarqawi and his group, we will carry out operations in Fallujah," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told a meeting of the 100-member National Council. "We will not be lenient."

Time to find a new hero to worship, Fallujah. These ain't the 1930s and that sorry fuck sure ain't John Dillinger.

Aaron's Rock n' Roll Sucks
I've been in the market for a while now for a particular Jimi Hendrix poster that a friend of mine used to have up in his room. It's an enlarged version of a playbill for a show Hendrix did in Germany. It's got German writing on it and is mostly just a giant portrait of Hendrix with wires and cables emanating from his fro. It's a real favorite.

No one seems to have it, but a guy at a Planet K off Riverside said that Aaron's Rock n' Roll has a good selection of posters, so I made my way down there this morning. Great parking there on Neches at Sixth Street at eleven in the morning, so it was looking smooth.

But when I get to the door, the clerk-slacker-thing is desperately trying to get the door shut and locked so that he can go do something. What the fuck? It's eleven, man. Says the store opens at eleven right there on the sign.

"Dude, I'm sorry. I've got to go take care of this. I'll be back in five minutes."

There's a well-used "Back in Five Minutes" sign taped up.

"Can you wait?"

Yeah, I'll wait. It's a really pretty morning and there's nothing going on.

But after waiting around for at least ten minutes, I pack it in and take off.

See what happens when you hire irresponsible, 20-something pot-head slackers to run your store? You lose business. So, nice going, Aaron's Rock n' Roll of Austin, Texas. I'm gonna find that poster online and have it delivered to my door. And no sales tax, either, assholes.

Enjoy keepin' it real.

What a Relief
I'm sure glad that David Gergen is reminding people on CNN's Slagging President Bush Hour (also known as Inside Politics) that "the public perceives" that Kerry won both of the debates so far. Really? I didn't know that. In fact, I was thinking that President Bush demonstrated in the second debate that he is a likeable human being who connects with the public and who inspires our confidence. He very obviously won that debate, just as certainly as he lost the first one on style.

Fuck these biased clowns in Big Media. If they weren't so taken with Kerry's owl-shit demeanor and banalities, they'd have to admit that he has nothing to say that isn't going to lead us to disaster.

Michelle Malkin: "Was Kerry Dishonorably Discharged?"
Mood:  special
Be sure to read Michelle Malkin's blog this morning for a very interesting post on whether John Kerry was dishonorably discharged from the Navy. As Thomas Lipscomb reports in this morning's New York Sun, there may be a reason why Kerry won't sign his Standard Form 180.

An official Navy document on Senator Kerry's campaign Web site listed as Mr. Kerry's "Honorable Discharge from the Reserves" opens a door on a well kept secret about his military service.

The document is a form cover letter in the name of the Carter administration's secretary of the Navy, W. Graham Claytor. It describes Mr. Kerry's discharge as being subsequent to the review of "a board of officers." This in it self is unusual. There is nothing about an ordinary honorable discharge action in the Navy that requires a review by a board of officers.

According to the secretary of the Navy's document, the "authority of reference" this board was using in considering Mr. Kerry's record was "Title 10, U.S. Code Section 1162 and 1163. "This section refers to the grounds for involuntary separation from the service. What was being reviewed, then, was Mr. Kerry's involuntary separation from the service. And it couldn't have been an honorable discharge, or there would have been no point in any review at all. The review was likely held to improve Mr. Kerry's status of discharge from a less than honorable discharge to an honorable discharge.

Be sure to read the whole thing. Maybe the President can ask Kerry about it at tonight's debate.

UPDATE: Be sure to read this post at the BeldarBlog for much more information.

"I Am August"
Mood:  lyrical
A couple months ago now, my little brother calls me up and asks me what I think the word august means. I give him my best Latin-educated answer and ask why he wants to know. He tells me that his new band is taking the name I Am August. Apparently, it's a phrase from a Walt Whitman poem.

So, I google that up tonight and I see it's from "Song of Myself," part of Leaves of Grass:

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize
I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all.

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content.
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

This seems to match what I know of my brother and his chief collaborator, although they are manifestly more ambitious than what comes through Whitman's affected indifference to public opinion. But I wonder if they have yet read what the Saturday Review had to say about Whitman's poetry on 15 March 1856:

After poetry like this, and criticism like this, it seems strange that we cannot recommend the book to our readers' perusal. But the truth is, that after every five or six pages of matter such as we have quoted, Mr. Whitman suddenly becomes exceedingly intelligible, but exceedingly obscene. If the Leaves of Grass should come into anybody's possession, our advice is to throw them instantly behind the fire.

Heh, heh. I hope I Am August gets better reviews than that. But, having heard a few tracks from their upcoming release, I daresay they will.

I don't know much Whitman at all, but I think it's interesting that the one stanza of his that I do know comes from the same poem. I have been able to quote it by heart since high school:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then: I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.

I'll keep you posted on their album release party. I think it's going to be later this month at one of the big clubs downtown.

Taking Care of Bidness
As reported in the Tehran Times, the Marines are backing up the Iraqi Army as they secure Ramadi:

Iraqi security forces, backed by U.S. Marines and troops, launched a series of raids Tuesday on seven mosques in the central city of Ramadi, the U.S. military said.

"Our participation in these raids has been limited to supporting Iraqi security forces," U.S. Brig. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford said.

Ramadi is in the restive "Sunni Triangle" area about 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Baghdad.

Insurgents have used mosques at times to stage attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

"Restive." I like restive. Sounds as gentle as a peace bond or euthanasia.

Earlier this week, we also hit a mosque in the town of Hit which was being used for "non-religious" purposes, taking on a hundred or so of these [patriots] and murderers and undoubtedly sending a few of them to their final reward. We also hit a safehouse in Fallujah from the air, killing at least four of these rats.

It's a damned good thing we have Iraqis leading the way on these operations. When they secured the mosques and other sensitive sites in Samarra last week, that's something we almost certainly couldn't have done without causing a big stink.

Keep at it, gentlemen. I am proud and in awe of you.

You Don't Shit Where You Eat
Via Winds of Change, here's an interesting story in today's Washington Post that explains what's going on in Fallujah. Apparently, Mo's getting The Idea through his thick skull.

Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

Even the run-of-the-mill vermin who inhabit Fallujah know that they cannot actually defeat us and realize, instead, that their homes and their lives are not going to be worth anything if they can't figure out a way to be done with the "insurgents" in their midst.

Because, one way or the other, you filthy rats, your city will come around.

Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

Bad PR, eh? If you're not willing to help the authorities drive these animals out, Uncle Sam will come and put a 500-pounder through the roof of your shack.

Oh, yes. The picture's getting much clearer now.

"You Gotta Believe Enema!"
My brothers and I used to laugh at the clowns on Sunday mornings disguised as televangelist preachers ---with their bizarre oratorical affectations and flights of fantasy. Some spoke in tongues, even, while others simply ripped off their speaking styles from black guys who never had a show on the TV. And the thing about Jesus, they'd hysterically tell you, is that "you gotta believe in him-uh!" ---which we understood to be "You gotta believe enema!"

I prefer that understanding.

No wonder I've been turned off of religion for more than 20 years.

But now we're in danger of having another blow-dried Baptist-type charlatan too close to power. In remarks made yesterday upon hearing the news of Christopher Reeve's unfortunate death, John Edwards told a crowd in Illinois that

"When John Kerry is the president people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk again!"

Got that? The Democratic Vice Presidential nominee/con artist is not only using Nancy Reagan's example to "shame" this Republican President into going beyond his own personal ethical limits with respect to stem cell research, but now he claims that Bush is somehow responsible for keeping quadripelegics in their chairs. What garbage!

Or am I mistaking Edwards' chickenshit for some even stranger belief in John Kerry's supernatural healing powers?

This stem cell thing has been one of the Democrats' most successful lies this election season and I wouldn't really expect them to abandon it now. But it might help to know that not only has George W. Bush been the first President to actually make Federal funds available for this sort of research, but he has neither the power nor the inclination to ban private researchers from pursuing any number of stem cell lines they wish.

Moreover, stem cell research is not a panacea for nervous or other organic diseases; it is simply one approach out of many. A lot of it is speculative and theoretical. I personally support its full development, but I'm not stupid enough to believe that the religious Right in this country has been standing in the way of a full range of immediately implementable drugs, therapies, and transplants that could have solved all human disease at some time in the last four horrible, GOP-oppressed years.

So let's review: 1) The Kerrion are chickenshits for trying to use stem cell research and Nancy Reagan's support of it to politically damage the President; 2) John Edwards is a chickenshit for using a man's death to score points with a celebrity-obsessed electorate; 3) Edwards may also either be an ignorant tool who still thinks he's addressing a jury in a tort case and/or he believes that John Kerry is Jesus H. Christ; 4) Stem cell research is not the Fountain of Youth or a cup of ambrosia or a silver bullet or anything else; it is a general line of inquiry into arriving at a cure for many different diseases; 5) The President has actually funded some of this research with our tax money; 6) The President, regardless of his own ethical questions, has no ability or interest in keeping private researchers from exploring as many lines of stem cells as they wish. They'll just have to do it without public money ---which is fine since they're going to be making an investment in their own future profitability by doing this research, anyway.

Thank you for your time.

CORRECTION: Edwards was in Newton, Iowa (not Illinois)when he gave witness to Kerry's healing powers.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is a surgeon, said:

"I find it opportunistic to use the death of someone like Christopher Reeve -- I think it is shameful -- in order to mislead the American people," Frist said. "We should be offering people hope, but neither physicians, scientists, public servants or trial lawyers like John Edwards should be offering hype.

"It is cruel to people who have disabilities and chronic diseases, and, on top of that, it's dishonest. It's giving false hope to people, and I can tell you as a physician who's treated scores of thousands of patients that you don't give them false hope."

Bitch-slapped.

Gratuitous Picture of Salma Hayek
I'm not burned out yet, but every time I look down, there's little piles of kindling at my feet.

Another three weeks of listening to Big Media trying to put that lying liberal from Dukakichusetts into the White House? It's wearing me down.

In the meantime, enjoy this amazing picture of Salma Hayek.