Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

For Sunday, October 1, 2006

Meet the Press (NBC): Host Tim Russert goes Ohio, with his joint appearance/debate featuring Senator Mike Dewine and his Democrat opponent, Sherrod Brown. Pervez appears after, part of his book tour.

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace will talk to the latest Dem firebrand, Jane Harman, and Newt about “how last week’s interview with former President Clinton changed the landscape for November.” It sounds a little narcissistic, no?

Harman’s a sharp lady, ranking Dem on House Intelligence, just the kind of spokesperson the Dems would truck out in search of credibility.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer has Joe Biden then Presidential advisor Dan Bartlett.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos chat with Dan Bartlett then… Jack Murtha, for gawdsakes.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer interviews Bartlett, Lugar and Dodd, and his usual cast of thousands.
—–

If you know of any repsonsible blog which is liveblogging the Dewine-Brown debate, please let me know so I can link. Joe Biden continues his Presidential run, and Newt vs. Jane should be interesting, as far as that go.

We expect there to be some Mark Foley stuff in there somewhere, although the last thing we need is Jack Murtha’s take on the matter.

Representative Mark Foley (R-Florida) has resigned his seat after trading some pretty disgusting Instant Messages (IMs) with several underage House pages. Here is the pdf of one of the IM conversations, and here is pdf of several others. Don’t read them, as they should be very offensive to you.

Here’s a brief sample, by no means the most disgusting, wherein Congressman Mark Foley is Maf54 and the child’s name is blocked with x’s:

Maf54 (7:55:42 PM): shows your package then

Xxxxxxxxxx (8:33:29 PM): ya slow things down a little im still young…like under 18
dont want to do anything illegal…im not 18 till feb 23

Maf54 (8:33:43 PM): i know..
Maf54 (8:33:50 PM): nothing will happen
Maf54 (8:34:04 PM): just dreaming

The man is predator, and this should not have happened to the young man. Or to a young woman.

But TIME magazine doesn’t see it that way:

Opinion may be divided over whether the e-mails Florida Representative Mark Foley sent a teen-age male congressional page last year were inappropriate or even constituted outright sexual harassment.

The magazine wants to protect Foley, but why?

Foley’s aides insist that the e-mails in question do nothing to belie his commitment to child protection issues, saying the exchanges between the congressman and the page - in which Foley asks what the boy would like for his birthday and requests a picture of him - were innocuous and “nonchalant” chat.

WRONG. Foley’s chatter with the teens was disgusting. It went far beyond the limits for an adult.

Again, why is the TIME protecting Foley? Would the magazine protect him if he had tried to solicit sex from a young woman?

My wife is an avid view of the FOX News Channel, and she tells me that Representative Mark Foley (R-Florida), who resigned Congress after a bout of major perversion, was a frequent guest on the network: “He seemed like such a nice guy. It’s creepy. It’s like find out an uncle or someone is a sex pervert.”

This has cast a pall. Period.

Here’s this:

“It’s a tragedy for him and his family. I don’t want to get into the pain of the closet. It’s irrelevant if he’s gay or not.'’

- Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Matt, it is a tragedy for the kid. If it had been a young girl, it would have been a tragedy for her. Foley is a pervert. Period. We just don’t have room for that kind of sickness in a civilized society, and thus we punish it.

Congressman Mark Foley (R-Florida) has quit Congress of a sudden after hitting on a 16-year-old boy through e-mail.

By all accounts, the child was a nice kid.

And there is a Dem pickup: Florida’s 16th CD.

George Soros tried and failed:

“In the future, I’d very much like to get disengaged from politics,” Soros said at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting on the Upper East Side. “I’m interested in policy and not in politics.”

Does he want a spot in a President Murtha’s cabinet?

He opened his bit yesterday like this:

The current policy on correcting errors on the editorial and Op-Ed pages seemed clear when Gail Collins, the editorial page editor, announced it almost a year ago. Her declaration published on Oct. 2, 2005, stated: “We correct all errors, from heart-stoppingly egregious to sublimely insignificant, because we believe that The Times should take its reputation for accuracy seriously.”

While there have been corrections published during the past year, resistance remains. Two clear-cut errors in editorials and a mistake in an Op-Ed article have remained uncorrected for months. Each of the two errors in editorials has been brought to the attention of the deputy editorial page editor in at least three e-mails from me over the past four months.

He lists a few minor things, blatant errors, but nothing on the deliberate misrepresentation of obvious, black-and-white facts. The editorial linked says, for example, that the recently declassified NIE states that “the war in Iraq has greatly increased the threat from terrorism by ’shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.’” WRONG.

QUOTE:

The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

It lists Iraq as just one of four factors contributing to the global jihadist movement and nowhere says that the threat is increasing, let alone is “greatly increased.”

Get with it, Byron.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 29.21 points today, at 11,718.45. That’s only 53.59 points shy of its Clinton record, set on Jan. 14, 2000. The American media seems silent.

This is great news. Our economy is strong.

It’s an election year.

The Democrats can run against only Iraq. They lose.

Ed Rendell said that he would lower our property taxes by 40%, standing on his head. With a cardboard cutout out Ed in tow, a fellow walks around and asks Pennsylvanians if anything like that had happened to their property taxes. Dogs chase him down the street, a woman watering her lawn turns the hose on him, the Ed cutout is placed on its head…

It’s an hilarious commercial, illustrative of the fact that Ed made a promise which subsequenly disappeared.

It has an image — the governor on his head — onto which people can latch. Guided by mirth, it lets us know that this governor/cutout can be taken neither seriously nor at his word.

Watch the ad: HERE.

Cleveland rocks.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has chosen Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota’s “Twin Cities,” as the site of their 2008 Presidential nominating convention. Balloons and all. This will give them local TV facetime in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota — three close States in 2004.

Ohio was closer.

Is this supposed to help Mark Kennedy in his Senate race up there? What of Mike DeWine, and what if he does not hold that Republican seat?

I give Karl Rove a D on this call. Ohio would have put them at the gates of the Midwest with a toe in the northeast. It could also have been seen as a trip into the Belly of the Beast, so to speak, and it would have nicely countered the Dem choice of (almost certainly) New York City. The GOP will have the national security issue down, which is what New York symbolizes politically these days, and should move toward rebirth. Cleveland is reborn. Minneapolis is kind of just there. A great city, with St. Paul, to be sure, but it’s not a message.

But this isn’t a deal breaker by any means. Things will be great in Minnesota.

Some folks think Clinton’s little tirade with Mike Wallace which aired alst Sunday was a scripted political move designed to motivate the moonbats to ATTACK. It might well have been that, but, as Ian at Hot air notes, this wasn’t his first such outburst:

The former President sparred with the late Peter Jennings during a 2004 interview at the Clinton library.

Jennings, who passed away last year, received rage after noting Clinton was ranked 41 (out of 41) for moral authority by a C-SPAN organized panel occupied by 58 historians. He responded “they were wrong about that” because “they were wrong about that”. Clinton then went on to wagging his finger at Jennings saying “you don’t have any example where I ever lied to the American people about my job”, to only conclude that he doesn’t “really care what they [the American people” think”. Jennings stopped him right in his tracks and confidently voiced “oh yes you do”, Clinton responds “you don’t want to go there, Peter”.

The most important part of the interview is encapsulated in what followed Clinton’s “you don’t want to get there” remark. Clinton, like his FNC interview, blamed the network for repeating “every little sleazy thing” Kenneth Starr “leaked”. Another similarity is where he admitted he failed. This failure wasn’t about his adulterous relationship(s), but that he let getting caught get to him.

The man is still a piece of work after all these years.

Dallas Cowboys wideout Terrell Owens tried to off himself last night. So the story goes, but it was more likely what is known in the non-psychiatric field as a “cry for help.”

“Help me!”

He’s not as good as the hype, never was. He’s not good enough to be a brand name.

Neither is Ben Roethlisberger, who has had multiple times more adversity, but Ben has something Terrell needs. The Way.

The two should talk.

(only slightly altered from SwannBlog)

Looking at this objectively… well, Governor Ed has $14-million in the bank and Lynn Swann has $3.7-million. One can argue that Ivan Itkin had only $26,000 to Governor Tom Ridge’s $4.6-million in ‘98, but that’s the first I’ve seen Itkin’s name since then. If you get my drift.

There were lot of big checks for Ed, of course, and we shan’t question the sources. (Well, Rob “Meathead” Reiner gave him $10,000.)

Swann’s fundraising was hurt a lot by the Pennsylvania’s MSM grabbing memes like moonbats and trying to play political scientist, but that is the nature of the mainstream media everywhere. And, yes, I have one paper in particular in mind: Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has contributed to Rendell something more valuable than money: their voice.

The real question is what can the Swann campaign do with $3.7-million? The candidate certainly has the energy, the smarts, the charisma to do great things with a little.

Swann spokesman Len Alcivar said:

“But we believe that with the money we have, we’ll be able to fight our air war and stay competitive until the last day in this race,” Alcivar said. “… A lot can change in 24 hours, and we have six weeks to go. We think these polls will tighten up and when they do, we expect the money will be there.”

We’ve two debates on the horizon.

This election is far too important not to fight until the end.

The President has released the NIE report, as much as could be declassified.

The key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate state that the number of “jihadists” is growing in size and geographic dispersion, and if the trend continues it could lead to more terror attacks worldwide and more threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad.

Rather than point the finger solely at U.S. involvement in Iraq, the NIE instead concludes that counterterrorism efforts in general have caused a rise in global terror, and “greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.”

[Declassified NIE Key Judgments Report (pdf), from FOX News.]

I’ve read it, and I can see portions which could be taken out of the context of the rest of the report then twisted and defined in a ridiculous manner to be used in the manner of the New York Times report, but it would be such an ugly twist that such reporting cannot be considered journalism, let alone objective reporting.

The message I got was that if we cut and run, the jihadists could gain the upper hand.

The Iraq conflict has become the ìcause celebreî for jihadists, breeding a deep
resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for
the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves,
and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry
on the fight.

Rremember, folks, this was written last April and selected parts were leaked now, in time to influence the election.

Should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against
Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global
threat.

The New York Times is a dangerous organization.

Disgraced sportscaster Keith Olbermann, a symptom of a 3rd place news network, recently referred to FOX News’ Chris Wallace as a “monkey posing as a newscaster.” (Keith’s macaca minute?)

From Wallace’s FOX bio:

Before joining FOX News, Wallace worked at ABC News for 15 years where he served as the senior correspondent for “Primetime Thursday” and as a substitute host for “Nightline.” During his tenure with ABC News, Wallace hosted multiple groundbreaking investigations and received numerous awards for his work, including the Dupont-Columbia Award-winning probe of the Associates, Ford Motor Company’s finance department that allegedly practiced predatory lending.

Prior to joining ABC News, Wallace was with NBC News where he served as the chief White House correspondent from 1982-1989. While at NBC, Wallace covered the 1980, 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns as well as the Democratic and Republican conventions in those years. Wallace also anchored “Meet The Press” from 1987-1988 and anchored the Sunday edition of “NBC Nightly News” from 1982-1984 and 1986-1987. Wallace joined NBC as a reporter with WNBC-TV in New York City in 1975.

Wallace has won every major broadcast news award for his reporting, including three Emmy Awards, the Dupont-Columbia Silver Baton and the Peabody Award.

Hello, Keith?

Over at RedState.com, diarist Rick Moran slaps sportscaster Olbermann silly.

Clinton’s FBI guy Louis Freeh:

t soon became clear that Mr. Clinton and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the [Khobar] towers. This is astounding, considering that the Saudi Security Service had arrested six of the bombers after the attack. As FBI agents sifted through the remains of Building 131 in 115-degree heat, the bombers admitted they had been trained by the Iranian external security service (IRGC) in Lebanon’s Beka Valley and received their passports at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Syria, along with $250,000 cash for the operation from IRGC Gen. Ahmad Sharifi.

We later learned that senior members of the Iranian government, including Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Spiritual Leader’s office had selected Khobar as their target and commissioned the Saudi Hezbollah to carry out the operation. The Saudi police told us that FBI agents had to interview the bombers in custody in order to make our case. To make this happen, however, the U.S. president would need to make a personal request to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

So for 30 months, I wrote and rewrote the same set of simple talking points for the president, Mr. Berger, and others to press the FBI’s request to go inside a Saudi prison and interview the Khobar bombers. And for 30 months nothing happened. The Saudis reported back to us that the president and Mr. Berger would either fail to raise the matter with the crown prince or raise it without making any request. On one such occasion, our commander in chief instead hit up Prince Abdullah for a contribution to his library. Mr. Berger never once, in the course of the five-year investigation which coincided with his tenure, even asked how the investigation was going.

This attitude brought us 9-11, and this can hardly be denied. Bill Clinton was President, to be sure; he was also a miserable failure.

Well, in the candidate forum in Hershey, Lynn Swann evidently cleaned Ed Rendell’s clock.

There are a lot of vacuous intellects about the State who grumbled that Ed would eat Swann alive, that Swann was not ready to be governor, that he was a “sacrificial lamb.” Damn, I’m not going to go into what I think is ulitimately behind such prattle — as it is madness — but I will point out there’s still time for those who wish to be conservative Republicans to act like conservative Republicans. You cut out Reagan, you cut out the party’s heart, and don’t forget it.