Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko claims victory, and his supporters are getting out-of-line. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana arrived in Kiev vowing to fix everything.

Maybe Jacques Chirac needs to pull the poet Dominique DeVillepin from the Interior Ministry and put him back at Foreign Affairs. He could write them a nice sonnet and perhaps surrender.

Evidently, a lot of people stream the signal from Beethoven Radio whilst at work. This is a fine thing, I suppose, as they play good if standards stuff and go by: “Classical music without the attitude.”

The attitude is part of what makes it happen.

But Beethoven Radio is getting ready to discard its Windows Media streams and move to a 96kbps Real Audio stream. To hear them, you have to purchase Real’s Radio Pass, which is $5.95 a month.

They’re not worth it. There are plenty of 1st rate free streams out there, such as KFDC out of San Francisco, WBAA out of Purdue University, KBYU out of Brigham Young, KUSC out of Southern Cal., WETA out of Arlington, and Classical 103.5 out of DC. Google, and they’re yours. The one drawback is that all of them but the one out of DC use NPR news, but you’ll get used to it. It is not a complete a front to your rationale for being.

That’ is not an excuse for not removing the anachronistic and ugly references, though.

My sister tells me that she has been listening to Country & Western music of late, which surprised me. She can name these people, like Toby Keith and Kurt Busch, or whomever. Which would be the equivalent of her remarking that I can name people like Sergei Prokofiev and Edouard Manet. There’s one big difference, though: performer Keith and NASCAR driver Bush are alive, while composer Prokofiev and impressionist painter Manet are not.

The second, Lightning Bugs is from a tale I wrote in 2001. I liked the shell of the thing and the concept, but I had to gut the middle. They want 1,500 words or less, and it was 3,400 in the original.

Maybe I’ll start a revolution.

President George W. Bush made Thanksgiving Day calls to soldiers in Iraq and bases in the global war on terror as the Iraq conflict cast a growing shadow over the traditional turkey feast for tens of millions of Americans.

That is a tacit admission from one representative of the French media that he conflict in Iraq is a part of the global war on terror.

It doesn’t mean much, but it is good to see.

I wonder what Mo Dowd bought for them?

Governor Bill Richardson said in a statement that he’d try to make it fast next time.

As I see it, the President is not spending his political capital to push the 9-11 Commission proposals, but he is serious about reforming intelligence. (Porter Goss springs first to mind.)

Reuters wants it done their way.

Diedrich is a former president of the National Soybean Association. Fun guy.

“We are hopeful that GAO’s non-partisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election.”

This stubborn refusal to accept defeat is unbecoming and is a threat to the efficient function of our Democracy. These lawmakers, and their fellows (sportscaster Keith Olbermann, etc.) lack the dignity and class of Dick Nixon circa 1960.

My pro team is the Steelers. ‘Nuff said.

His depictions do have that wild look, in his eyes and his unkempt beard. Can a drunk man find grace?

WTG, JF! He’s not resting on his laurels; rather, he seeks to take his mandate for action and become a Senate leader with MSM bona fides. (I think it would be kewl if he became the Dems’ John McCain, but JF lacks the spine. And the notions.)

Specter can remain chairman for six years, provided he behaves. (He is either not running for or will not be elected to another term from Pennsylvania.)

Whatever. It’s nifty chill music.

These folks are in another aspect of reality if they believe that anyone is more frightened of a crowd of scraggly, doped-up protestors is more to-the-bones frightening than a single fanatical Moslem extremist with a death wish packing a rocket launcher and a canister of botulinum. Gads!

It was an asinine move, to try to push through the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission merely because they were what the committee recommended. No one voted for the committee, and their work should be a starting point, a launching pad toward a final reform.

This implies that there should be a dramatic change. The President did not promise one, and it is not for what we voted.

Anyone want a recount?

[Radio talker Laura] Ingraham has no existential dread of being a conservative talk host in an age of conservative dominance.

At least they admit it, now would that it were true.

“Nobody in the meeting was against Arlen,” Hatch told reporters, with Specter at his side. “Senator Specter handled himself very well and frankly, I’m for him, as I should be.”

It would require an inter-caucus revolt to oust Specter, and that would be more devastating for the party than a Chairman Specter living in a box would be for the unborn.

Specter’s on notice; if he tries anything cute, he’s in trouble. And he won’t bolt the party over this, because he’d then be chairman of nothing for the rest of his term, stuck in a cranky minority which might suit his general demeanor, but wouldn’t give him an adequate power trip.

This AP story now has a paragraph which reads:

Reid takes over a party with 44 seats in the new Congress, fewer than at any time since the Great Depression.

Steven Taylor found it, though, before they had changed it:

Reid, 64, takes command of a party that will have only 44 seats when the new Congress convenes in January, fewer than at any time since Herbert Hoover sat in the White House, according to records on the Senate’s Web site.

Methinks the AP caught the Herbert Hoover reference and were embarrassed at turning a Dem barb on the Democrats themselves.

[Addition HT, Erick Erickson, who had also read the story before it was amended.]

And one of my birthday gifts came a few days early: an Olympus Camedia C-765 UZ digital camera. I’ll figure it out eventually, then I’ll read the manual. (That’s how I do things, for some reason.)

The House is being cleaned. They aging intelligence corps, the hotheads who are resistant to following instructions, can go somewhere and write scathing books. Tim Russert will talk to them, Dan Rather will talk about them, and they’ll get their fifteen minutes.

The President will get his intelligence.

Remember, it was a Clinton guy who told our President that Iraq was a “slam dunk.”

Sweep it clean of eight years of stain.

Thanks for the link, for whatever your reason. If I can track you down in Technorati, I’ll recip.

JF Kerry is reported to have begun to make a caustic, over-the-top comment before bursting into tears upon the realization that it was too late.

[W]hile the defeat was all my own, the failure was of the party to which I swear allegiance, which uncritically embraces a modernity that so many others reject.

The “modernity” of which he writes is “the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones.” And the Democrats don’t even do that right, else they would be capitalists of the Godless variety.

This afternoon at Sam’s Club, I purchased The Essential Charlie Chaplin, 45 of his earliest short subjects. Tonight, we’ll watch Making a Living, Chaplin’s film debut. I haven’t seen it since school, but I recall that Chaplin wasn’t the tramp that we know today. In fact, he was a bit of a [curseword]. But I’m a silent film buff who appreciates Chaplin even when he’s “out of character.”

My wife picked out an Atomic clock for the bedroom. The time is exact, and it sets itself from a signal out of Fort Collins, Colorado. I dig it.

I’M BLOGGING FROM BORDERS at the moment, and I couldn’t help but notice all the Michael Moore films in the discount bin.

Yeah, I know. Probably this has absolutely nothing to do with the election, but . . .

And note all the Jerry Lewis films behind them. Well, they’re both big in France!

He posts a jpeg: The Nutty Professor and Bowling for Columbine, both only $9.99.

WASHINGTON — President Bush is holding fast to his rejection of mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming, despite a fresh report from 300 scientists in the United States and seven other nations that shows Arctic temperatures are rising.

The President has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, not some separate mandatory curb on gases. If the arctic temperatures are rising, scientists do not know what is causing it.

That statement was a puerile example of non-sequitur, and methinks someone should turn in his pencil, sit in the corner, and not write for a week.

Tomorrow morning, the Sunday shows. This should be interesting, and perhaps we’ll see some gloating. Karl Rove is guest around on Meet the Press and FOX News Sunday, but I’d sooner hear Ken Mehlman, although Rove sets off the wounded opposition in amusing ways.

“Contrary to press accounts, I did not warn the President about anything and was very respectful of his Constitutional authority on the appointment of federal judges.

[ . . . ]
“In light of the repeated filibusters by the Democrats in the last Senate session, I am concerned about a potential repetition of such filibusters. I expect to work well with President Bush in the judicial confirmation process in the years ahead.”

He claims to be warning the President to surrender to the Democrats’ filibusters without a principled use of the his nominating prerogative.

Arlen Specter is not a good man.

They note that FOX News is often called “a broadcast annex of the White House,” attributing that sentiment to “liberal bloggers.” But the lefty bloggers, they ought to add, take their cues from the New York Times’ lefty columnists.

Attorney General John Ashcroft ‘plans to submit his resignation to Bush in the next several days’…

No surprises there. We might be entering the “kinder, gentler” phase.

“It was on Air Force One on election day that strategist Karl Rove started calling around to get the results of early exit polls. But the line kept breaking down. The only information that came through as the plane descended was a BlackBerry message from an aide that simply read: “Not good.” Not long afterward, Rove got a more detailed picture and told the President and senior aides the bad news. Florida Governor Jeb Bush had been saying the state was looking good, and the Bush team had expected to be ahead in Ohio. But Kerry was leading everywhere. “I wanted to throw up,” said an aide onboard. Bush was more philosophical: “Well, it is what it is,” he told adviser Karen Hughes.”

Karl Rove fell for those exit polls, as well.

I’m with Bill Kristolon this one: the only thing for which such exit polls have been good is a look at voter preferences, vis-à-vis issues and such. These people ought to know better than to be mainlining the tripe.

President Bush has now been clearly authorized to govern. The asterisk is gone. If he wants to govern for everyone, fine, but he’d better not forget those like me. Govern us least.

I have no desire to gloat. It’s not my style, and Michael Moore is as irrelevant to me in defeat as he was when he was touring the nation touting his Fahrenheit flick. Daschle’s gone, probably to work for in his wife’s line once the year’s moratorium is up. Kerry’s done. Edwards has proven that I overestimated him.

If I had to gloat, it would probably be in the face of Ed Rendell, but he deserves it.

Have a good night, all y’all. When you wake, consider that it just might be morning in America.