How dat happen???
Geez....someone cued me in to this...look at this MSN search for "hot girls from israel".
LOL!

Good night...sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.
No..........really......I mean it.

I don't want to drag out the John Kerry sleaze-gossip anymore than I have to, but if my readers want to see the latest, here's a blog that delves.

I like Wes Clark. I'm watching a tape of him endorsing John Kerry. I consider myself to be a very rational and intuitive person..and something here seems weird to me. Why did General Clark invest so much time and effort telling us that we had to beware the Washington insiders...only to endorse the most longstanding, "special-interest-ed" Washington-insider-candidate? My only conclusion would be that General wants to be rid of Bush..far more than he loved his own message. I'm not in concurrence with this way of thinking. I was enamoured with the message..the vision. We will never move away from Bush-lite-ism if we do not vote with our vision. My enthusiasm has dulled greatly with the developments in this Democratic primary. Perhaps I am out of step with the Democratic party. I know I am not alone in this feeling. I am suspecting Kerry (and perhaps Clark) may have stolen Howard Dean's message to further them in their own respective candidacies...only to lose much of that message once they were coronated by those in the powerful Democratic establishment who have pretty much secured what they knew they'd get all along.
The vast centrist-wing conspiracy. (Yes..I can laugh along with myself-- although I see dismal truth in the joke).

When I think about all this AWOL arguing back and forth between the dizzily-talking media-heads, I realize these few and simple words from Paul Krugman ring true:

"There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong?
....we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged on his record, not his legend. And that, of course, is what the White House fears."

We've seen enough of Bush's wickedly poor character to understand that the AWOL issue just doesn't matter.

Who does this fellow think he's fooling?

"RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie attacked Democrats for planning what he called "the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics." Psssst, Ed... Politics is and always has been a dirty game. Have you looked at your own ads lately? Does the name Max Cleland ring any bells? Do you know you get free mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh to spread your diarreah all around so you don't have to stink? Better yet, check on the history of your party's activities throughout the entire eight years William Clinton was in office. It was the virtual stinking pig-sty of modern politics. Stop looking so forlorn...oh..or is that just your normal face?


This is the dumbest headline title I've found today on a news search: "Electability may play key role in elections" - UW Badger Herald. Luckily, when I got to the article, the revised headline made a bit more sense. Speaking of the Badger Herald, Howard Dean was in their news today. I thought this was worth repeating on this blog:

Although saying the campaigns of Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) and Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) are embedded with special interests, Dean said any Democrat in the Oval Office is better than the current administration and that he would never use his campaign to "undermine the prospects of the Democratic Party."

I couldn't help but laugh when I read the title of this article: "Kerry resurgence shows voters have own minds." As if any of the people who've worked to support the other candidates did not. I especially laughed as I thought of the literal hundreds of thousands of Howard Dean-scream replays since the media sanctioned it as their anti-Dean anthem (after Dean's loss in Iowa, which was facilitated by Kerry supporters like sleazy Bob Toricelli and Kerry push-pollers warning reminding the poor folks in Iowa about Howard's "environmental racism"). Mind of our own indeed. The press and Terry McAuliffe coronated Kerry when this primary race was hardly begun. People followed. Baaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa!


Kerry resurgence shows voters have own minds...


Reuters is reporting that the U.N. recommends a new timetable for elections and that Iraq is not yet ready for such an election to happen. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has been demanding early direct elections, but allegedly appeared to accept that time is too short to organize the proper polls before the U.S. handover. It won't happen before the U.S. hands over power to an Iraqi government in June. Realistically, three months just isn't enough time to arrange and conduct the elections. The initial caucus system proposed by the U.S. is no longer on the table.


Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix certainly doesn't expect anything other than political perversion by President Bush of any of Blix's previous reporting on Iraq to the U.N. On Thursday he said he was sure President Bush's election campaign would "twist his reports on Saddam Hussein's arsenal to justify the war in Iraq." When asked whether members of the Bush campaign may try to alter the meaning of his reports to back the decision to invade Iraq, he said: "I'm sure they will."

It's interesting how we're hearing so much about Bush's AWOL and Kerry's illicit love life from media, but nothing about the alleged fact that Al-Qaeda has possessed tactical nuclear weapons for about six years. Al-Hayat newspaper reported Sunday that sources close to Al-Qaeda said bin Laden's group bought the nuclear weapons from Ukrainian scientists who were visiting Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there's been serious concern over the possibility that nuclear technology and weapons could spread to other groups, in part due to the difficult economic situation in the former communist lands.
Speaking of nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Policy Research Institute hosted a panel this past Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington that focused on three countries refusing to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pervez Hoodbhoy of Pakistan, Gautam Adhikari of India and Avner Cohen of Israel spoke about their countries' nuclear capabilities. Pakistani professor Hoodbhoy claimed it would have been impossible for President Pervez Musharraf to ignore the hard evidence that the International Atomic Energy Agency showed him about Abdul Qadeer Kahn and that there's a "serious credibility gap" at the moment.From the article:

Hoodbhoy explained that there was a general feeling of anger, grief and betrayal in Pakistan directed towards the government for allegedly buckling under U.S. pressure to persecute Khan. If Musharraf had kept silent, Pakistan would have been sanctioned, leading the economy in a downward spiral. Hoodbhoy said that Musharraf is trying to do a balancing act to please his citizens and the international community.
The principle reason for sacrificing Khan and incurring the wrath of the public, Hoodbhoy said, was so that Pakistan could keep its nuclear weapons.

Hoodbhoy also said it was "unfair" of the United States to call for only select countries to produce nuclear fuels. He questioned the logic in monopolizing nuclear production, saying that much of the world thinks the United States acts without consideration of larger issues.
"That creates a sense of outrage," he said. "The history of U.S. policy has been one essentially of expediency."
The United States knew that Pakistan was trying to obtain nuclear weapons in the 1980s, he said, but America was busy countering the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan so it looked the other way.

Gautam Adhikari, the former executive editor of the Times of India, said that there is mounting alarm over the direction in which Pakistan is heading. He said that India kept quiet about recent revelations in Pakistani nuclear proliferation for three reasons: India wants to maintain overall stability and does not want to impede upon Pakistan's peaceful overtures made at a recent South Asia Regional Conference; India does not want to disturb the increasingly close relationship it has had with the United States, particularly in light of the tensions that two nations have had with each other for decades; and India is focusing on economic growth and being a great power.

Avnar Cohen, author and former co-director of the Project on Nuclear Arms Control in the Middle East (who in the past has been threatened with arrest in Israel), said Israelis view the subject of nuclear weapons in Israel as subject "not to be discussed". He said that Israel's official position of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons is ingrained in the national culture and that The U.S. has taken a view of "exceptionalism" with Israel. Cohen believes the "bubble of secrecy" in which Israel handles the nuclear issue is "against the very tenets of democracy."

Did you see American Enterprise Institute's Jim Glassman have his lame excuses handed back to him by Lou Dobbs last night on CNN? It was a sight to behold! The transcript is HERE. I'll show you a sampling...but it won't have the full effect because Lou's face was oh-so-expressive. Picture Lou Dobbs with a "Get outta town, you intellectually dishonest sack of crap!"-look on his face.

GLASSMAN: Lou, over the last 10 years, we have manufactured 40 percent more than we did 10 years ago. Manufacturing is doing well. Jobs change. This is a dynamic society. Now, the thing I'd like to -- the thing I would like to say is, free trade is much better than the alternative, which is no trade or obstructed trade.
DOBBS: Wait, Jim, you are far too smart to do something like that. There is not simply a Hobson's choice between free trade and no trade. I just offered you one, a mutuality of interest, mutual trade.
GLASSMAN: That's the idea of the World Trade Organization.
DOBBS: It may be the idea of some in the World Trade Organization. It is not the practice. We have got 11 years experience with NAFTA. We have 10 years experience under WTO. It isn't working, Jim? What part of that don't you get?
GLASSMAN: It's not working?
DOBBS: It's not working.
GLASSMAN: Then why is the American economy as robust as it is?
DOBBS: Tell people it's robust.
DOBBS: Tell those 15 million people out there who can't..... -CROSSTALK- .....No, look in the camera, tell those 15 people out there who can't find a job right now...
GLASSMAN: I prefer to look at you. And let me say this. This is a huge economy. I have tremendous sympathy for people who lose their job and are in pain. And for those people, we need to concentrate on helping them. How do we do it? We do it through job retraining. We do it through...
DOBBS: What are you going to retrain them for, Jim? You're a smart guy.
GLASSMAN: What do you mean what I am going to retrain them
DOBBS: What are you going to retrain them for? We're exporting many, many jobs. We're exporting radiologists.
GLASSMAN: How did we retrain blacksmiths when the automobile came in? Forty percent of Americans worked on the farm. Today, it's 2 percent. We produce far more agricultural goods than we ever did. We export agriculture.
DOBBS: Do you want to go back to policies of the 1850s in this country?
GLASSMAN: No.
DOBBS: Well, then why are you quoting these metaphors?
GLASSMAN: Because I'm trying to tell you, this is a dynamic economy.
DOBBS: Well, I think we understand that.
GLASSMAN: Every week, Alan Greenspan, in his testimony...
DOBBS: There's no fool here again, OK, no fool watching, no fool here listening. Let me say this to you. David Ricardo, as you well know, never considered a world in which you were exporting American jobs to produce services and goods for reexport to the United States. It was never considered.
GLASSMAN: I really object to this term exporting American jobs.
DOBBS: Well, wait a minute.
GLASSMAN: It's not as though we start with 100 jobs. They have 100 jobs. We send a few. Our jobs have been on the rise for the last 20 years, enormously. We have 130 million people working in the United States.
DOBBS: Well, it's actually ... million, but that's all right.
GLASSMAN: Every week, as Alan Greenspan said in his testimony, a very interesting statistic for your readers.....they're viewers... for your viewers ...."Every week, one million Americans leave their job, but one million Americans take a new job. It is that dynamism....
DOBBS: Jim, Jim...
GLASSMAN: It is that dynamism that drives the American economy.
DOBBS: American corporations are shipping jobs overseas for one reason.
GLASSMAN: They are not shipping jobs. And I really object to this rogue...
DOBBS: They are not shipping jobs?!????
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