Housekeeping

Welcome BLOODTHIRSTY WARMONGER blog to the blog roll.

Thanks for all the feedback over the last few days. Nice to know I’m connecting.
If I don’t get back to you right off, be aware I’m going though some rebuilding of my main desktop, here. I generally answer mail during the evening hours, or on weekends.

This theme keeps coming up… this time from lgf:

“We believe al Qaeda and its associates may be planning a maritime ‘spectacular’,” said Dominick Donald, a senior analyst with Aegis Defense Services, a leading London-based risk and security consultancy.

“We think there are enough indications now that al Qaeda would like to do this, is thinking hard about it, and is probably beginning to prepare for it,” said Donald, speaking at an oil and transport security conference in London.

You’d almost thing they’d been reading BITSBLOG, huh?

FOXNews is reporting

So, will Kermit wear the ears?

FOXNewsreports:

“WASHINGTON Democratic White House hopeful Howard Dean (search) abandoned his bid for the presidency Wednesday, a day after he lagged far behind in yet another state primary.”

Dennis Prager has a thought provoking article yesterday… 

Beautiful Horizons has a story up about how France is moving it’s military into Haiti. Without UN sanctons?

Gee… anyone would think France was acting *unilaterally* in the matter.

Horizons, by the way, is a great source for Latin american news.

Me at Drezner’s this afternoon: (Typos and all)

As to Kerry being forced to adopt one position or another, who cares? He already looks and smells like the bottom of my fishing boat; Flipping and flopping and smelling more than faintly fishy the whole while.

As a result of that,there were a lot of peple who simly could noot commit to Kerry, even among staunch Democrats.

Edwards got as close as he did because of last minute deciders… a large number of people who couldn’t decide which they liked less… Kerry, Dean, or Edwards.

This is revealed by means of the exit polling which showed the largest number of last minute commitments going to Edwards.. to the tune of 65% or so, by one poll I noted on the tube last night.

To me this says Edwards has done the right a huge favor, showing Kerry’s vulnerability even among Democrat primary voters, much less the general election.

He’s done this by two means:

First, showing that the real bedrock support for Kerry, while likely sufficiant to win the nomination, is postage-stamp thin, and can be pulled off it’s mark by some last minute ads and good, old fashioned campaigning, which Edwards did in Wisconsin…. the kind of campaigning that the President needs to do over the summer to get back into this thing… somehting he clearly has the money and the org to do. This alone would be enough for a victory in the general election, even discounting Bush’s base… which I think is far stronger than is being projected by the major news outlets.

Secondly, the shift in question, as I’ve discussed previously, is by no means issue driven. All this kind of voter cares about is who will be elected/elecatble in November… not what said person will do once in office. This by it’s nature means that the voters will be shifting loyalties based on minutiae. Support this thin and shifting is as likley as not to sit out the general election as to vote, which makes for a weak base, at best.

I submit that all of this adds up to it being Bush’s race to lose in the general election.

Found on Snopes while looking up something else today:

“This picture of the statue was made by an Iraqi artist named Kalat, who for years was forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad. This artist was so grateful that the Americans liberated his country, he melted 3 of the fallen Saddam heads and made a memorial statue dedicated to the American soldiers and their fallen comrades. Kalat worked on this night and day for several months. To the left of the kneeling soldier is a small Iraqi girl giving the soldier comfort as he mourns the loss of his comrade in arms. It is currently on display outside the palace that is now home to the 4th Infantry division. It will eventually be shipped and shown at the memorial museum in Fort Hood, Texas. “

Check the picture in the above link.

Or, this one, which has different shots

I’ve just noticed that TTLB’s NZ BEAR must ahve gotten the ecosystem running again.
I’m now listed as a ‘flappy bird’ even though it still lists my daily hits as being around 36.
(Shrug) My daily unique counts have been over 100 per day for a month, now.

It’s an improvement, I suppose.

Miller’s Time reports:

“No joke… a Florida TV production company plans to pitch Preparation H and other hemorrhoid-relief products with a commercial that features the country classic Ring of Fire…”

Ummmm Yeah.

OK.

Christopher Hitchens has hita home run. Hitch does it so seldom anymore that it needs to be noted when he does.

“A war fought with weapons of indiscriminate slaughter, and accompanied by racist rhetoric, with a conscript Army deployed against a highly evolved revolutionary movement is as different as could possibly be from a campaign of precision-guided munitions, with an all-volunteer Army, directed at the overthrow of a hideous and dangerous tyranny, and then taking the form of a drive for free elections and a constitution. If people say that it’s “reminiscent” of Vietnam, it means they don’t remember Vietnam. “

…

“There’s something creepy about the Democratic decision to hail the heroes of Vietnam, from Kerry to Clark, and to denigrate the extraordinary effort being made to salvage Iraq and to pursue and kill people who really are, unlike the Viet Cong, the common enemies of humanity. It’s trying too hard, and it’s inauthentic and hypocritical as well as point-missing. It would be as if the Republicans suddenly started talking, as that great veteran Robert Dole once did, about all the conflicts in American history as “Democrat wars.” That didn’t fly, if you recall, though it would have been a fair description of Vietnam. “

MSNBC – John Kerry’s Chinese campaign connections:

” in 1996, few had more money to burn than Johnny Chung, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur from Artesia, California. 
Chung gave $10,000 to Kerry’s campaign — most of it illegally — hosted a fund-raising party in Beverly Hills, and threw in an extra $10,000 to honor Kerry at a Democratic Senate Campaign Committee event.  Kerry eventually returned all the Chung money.
In return, Kerry opened a door for a friend of Chung: Liu Chaoying.
‘Who is Colonel Liu?’ asked William Triplett, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer and author of two books on Chinese influence in US politics.  ‘She began her military intelligence career with Chinese Navy intelligence.  She has been, in succession, assistant to the President of the China National Precision Machinery Import-Export Corporation and the China Great Wall Industries Corporation, both of whom have been sanctioned twice — in 1991 and 1993 — by the United States for ballistic missiles sales to Pakistan.  She later became president of China Aerospace Industrial Holdings Ltd. and she made illegal campaign contributions to the Clinton Gore ticket and John Kerry in 1996.
‘She is a communist, says Triplett; she is a high-tech spy; she is an arms broker and she met Bill Clinton at a fund raiser and John Kerry in his Senate office.'”

Boortz brings up a name from the past, among a string of names now connected with John Kerry:

“Then, there’s Johnny Chung. Sound familiar? Same Johnny Chung that was at the center of the Clinton-Gore fund-raising scandals. In 1996, Kerry met with Chung, faxed a letter on his behalf to the SEC, and thanked him for helping him with his campaign. Within weeks, Chung holds a Kerry fund-raiser. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Unbelievably, at one point Kerry denied he had met Chung. I get it – we’re all supposed to remember George Bush’s National Guard service in Alabama over 30 years ago, but Kerry can’t recall something that happened 8 years ago. Right.”

The SUN over in the UK, is reporting this morning yet another change of heart for the Kerrys… Says this SUN:

“Terry Polier pledged to vote for the super-rich Democrat after daughter Alex, 27, publicly insisted she had not had a fling with him.

Yet just four days ago, Terry branded Kerry, 60, a “sleazeball” and said he and wife Donna would NEVER support him.”

I’ll be interested to see why the change of heart, wouldn’t you?

I suggested a few days ago that Kerry’s support was thin. I must admit I didn’t know HOW thin.
The lesson to take away from last night is rather simple…

Bush will win, because the support for Kerry is so light, a good wind can blow it away. I can’tr imagine the support for Edwards is much better.

Among the voters for Edwards, about 55% of them but a couple estimates I saw last night, were people who hadn’t decided until the last day or so… I can’t imagine that this is a voter swing toward Edwards based on issues. Bottom line, the Democrats can’t decide who they like least.