Monthly Archives: September 2004

Ending the Evening On A Happy Note

Our readers tell us that President Bush’s appearances in Ohio today were greeted by unexpectedly huge and rapturous crowds. Even Reuters was impressed, as they published this photo of a lovely young Republican: Babes for Bush is actually a movement, with a web site and a store, and lots of fine representatives, like Garrette and Brooke. Feel free to join in! This ties in, I think, with our post earlier »

The way we weren’t

I finally got around to reading the The New York Times Magazine piece on left-wing bloggers. I must say that, unlike Rocket Man, I rather enjoyed the story. It didn’t bother me that the focus was on lefty bloggers. First, any half-way decent story on blogging in a major publication is good for all bloggers. Second, there likely will be similar stories about conservative bloggers soon enough. Third, as Evagelical »

Another Reason Why We Care

Of the many reasons why we care who is President, the fact that he will appoint federal judges is somewhere in the middle: below national security, and above the remote possibility that he might veto the latest Medicare boondoggle. Today Anne Gearan of the Associated Press attempted a short summary of the issue. There is nothing worth reading in her piece except this: In an AP-Ipsos poll taken last week, »

Kerry Sees Wisconsin Slipping Away…

…so what does he do? Pathetically, he announces another Bush “secret plan” to somehow damage dairy farmers: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry told voters in America’s Dairyland on Monday that President Bush had a secret plan that would hurt milk producers after the election. Kerry tried to convince voters in this rural community, where he is practicing for Thursday’s debate, that he would look out for dairy farms here even »

Our Helpul French Allies

Steven Den Beste, one of the best bloggers ever, wrote to point out this article in the International Herald Tribune, on a proposed international conference on Iraq: France said Monday that it would take part in a proposed international conference on Iraq only if the agenda included a possible U.S. troop withdrawal, thus complicating the planning for a meeting that has drawn mixed reactions. Paris also wants representatives of Iraq’s »

Bush’s Lead Holds Going Into Debates

New Gallup and Washington Post/ABC polls released today show President Bush continuing to lead John Kerry. Bush is up by 8 points among likely voters in the Gallup poll and by 6 in the Post survey. The answers to some of the down-survey questions are brutal for Kerry. In the Gallup poll, Bush leads Kerry by 51-45 on the economy, 55-41 on Iraq, and 61-34 on terrorism. In the Post »

The two Iraqs

Chrenkoff has Part 11 of the good news from Iraq. As Chrenkoff notes, “There are two Iraqs at the moment; both equally real and consequential. The Iraq of never ending strife – the insurgency, terrorism, crime, and all too slow pace of reconstruction makes for interesting news stories and exciting footage. The Iraq of steady recovery, returning normalcy and a dash of hope rarely does.” Before scrolling down to the »

Sister Kerry

Katherine Mangu-Ward has strong piece in the Weekly Standard (with a great title which I have stolen) about John Kerry’s sister in Australia. As Mangu-Ward notes, “As the head of Americans Overseas for Kerry, Diana Kerry is a campaign official. And she was speaking in that capacity when, in reference to the invasion of Iraq, she said, ‘Australia has kept faith with the U.S., and we are endangering the Australians »

The CIA’s War Against President Bush

We have talked repeatedly about the guerrilla war that the CIA, long a Democratic stronghold, has conducted for years against the Bush administration. Increasingly, that war is breaking out into the open, and we are sorry to see that our old friend (and Deacon’s former roommate) Paul Pillar appears to be playing a key role. Robert Novak reports: A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report »

Essence of Kerry

Mark Steyn has posted his hilearious, heartening National Review article on his Web site: “The Kerryness of Kerry.” Here’s Steyn’s take on Kerry as a campaigner: I underestimated Kerry [as a primary candidate] because I made the mistake of seeing too much of him in 2003 »

Getting Things Done at the AP

Power Line reader Kevin Bailey thinks he was responsible for changing the headline on the Associated Press story we attacked over the weekend from “Bush Twists Kerry’s Words on Iraq” to “Bush, Kerry, Twisting Each Other’s Words”: I called the main office in NY immediately upon seeing the headline. After politely hearing me out, the girl there put me in touch with the D.C. office. A man named Tom Strong »

Catch the Northern Alliance, Live or Not

New readers may not have figured out that in addition to this site, we also have a radio show called the Northern Alliance Radio Network, which we do in combination with several other Minnesota-based bloggers–Mitch Berg, the Fraters gang, Captain Ed and King Banaian of SCSU Scholars. The show streams live over the internet from 12 to 3 every Saturday afternoon, and it’s pretty darned good. We’ve been astonished at »

Democrats’ Top Scholar Charged With Plagiarism

I got to know Larry Tribe in the days when Deacon and I were stalwarts of the Dartmouth debate team, and Tribe coached the Harvard team. Shortly thereafter, he was one of my professors at Harvard Law School. Larry was never exactly a friend, since he was a teacher and I was a student, but I knew him and considered him a nice guy and one of the most lucid »

Is “tangible progress” cause for real optimism?

David Petraeus, head of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq, reports that “tangible progress” is occurring as “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up.” Petraeus predicts that “with strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition — and now NATO — support, this trend will continue.” Petraeus provides something that is missing from nearly all MSM coverage of Iraq — data. For example, there now »

Clueless in D.C.

This piece by David Broder of the Washington Post, “The Media, Losing Their Way,” couldn’t be more clueless if Richard Cohen had written it. Broder starts off on solid ground. He observes that “the American news media have been clobbered” in this election cycle, and he admits his “shame and embarrassment at our performance.” It is when he tries to analyze why the media has became such an embarrassment that »

Jacko 101

Via an academically attuned Fox News headline writer, the AP reports from New Haven: “Scholars gather to deconstruct Jacko.” The AP reports on the proceedings at Yale devoted to consideration of the gloved one: Eighteen scholars from U.S. universities discussed sexual, racial and artistic aspects of Jackson’s life and music Thursday and Friday in the first academic meeting to study him. Jackson “in many ways is the black male crossover »

How the Associated Press Operates

We noted yesterday that Associated Press reporter Jennifer Loven, who authored a ridiculous hit piece originally titled “Bush Twists Kerry’s Words on Iraq,” is married to Roger Ballentine, who was Bill Clinton’s deputy assistant for environmental initiatives and chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force, and is listed on John Kerry’s website as one of Kerry’s most important supporters on environmental issues. Reader Thomas Blumer has documented how »