I love the NFL because you get the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat– every weekend.
Archives for 2003
Drum Nails It
Kevin Drum puts to bed the stupidity coming from the telemarketing industry regarding the ‘death of the industry’ because of the new national Do Not Call list.
Go read Kevin’s post, then think to yourself why you wouldn’t want a free filter to get rid of all the people who are going to be hostile, irritable, and unlikely to ever buy anything from you? Most companies with half a brain would love a free marketing tool which would provide you with a list of names of people WHO ARE GOING TO BE UNRECEPTIVE to your phone calls.
More Crushing of Dissent
If I had a dollar for every screetch from the far left about the crushing oof dissent, Forbes would have to re-write their richest man list. At any rate, here is a piece by Democrat Jim Marshall which is bound to cause some problems for the loony left:
So it is worth doing only if we have a reasonable chance of success. And we do, but I’m afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded, the Blumbergs. Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with “the rest of the story,” the progress made daily, the good news. The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy.
During the conventional part of this conflict, embedded journalists reported the good, the bad and the ugly. Where are the embeds now that we are in the difficult part of the war, now that fair and balanced reporting is critically important to our chances of success? At the height of the conventional conflict, Fox News alone had 27 journalists embedded with U.S. troops (out of a total of 774 from all Western media). Today there are only 27 embedded journalists from all media combined.
…We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media. I’m afraid it is killing our troops.
Let the screaming begin…
Better Late Than Never
The NY Times is finally bashing Robert Mugabe because he is… attacking the press in Zimbabwe:
In The Daily News of Zimbabwe readers could follow the long, cheerless saga of President Robert Mugabe’s slide into dictatorship. But the most telling illustration of Zimbabwe’s decline is the case of the newspaper itself. The four-year-old daily, the only one not controlled by the government, has been bombed twice, its staff and distributors beaten and harassed, its founding editor driven into exile. Now the government has closed the paper, using undemocratic laws to extinguish one of the last embers of free speech in Zimbabwe.
Imagine that! A dictator using undemocratic laws to shut down the opposition. Presumably it was too difficult for the Times to report what happened to any and all the white landowners (they dryly report that their farms were ‘confiscated’) or the opposition leaders- but shutting down the NEWSPAPER!!!! How dare he- time for him to go.
Note to Castro- keep the damned papers running on you are in a heap of big trouble.
Our ‘Ally,’ The French
Insert your own punchline to this joke:
President Jacques Chirac called today for the immediate transfer of sovereignty in Iraq to the Iraqi people, and indicated that France would only approve a new United Nations resolution that recognized this need.
They really have no shame, do they?
Slow Learners
Talk about just not getting it:
Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, the only black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, formally declared her candidacy for president Monday, forging ahead with a long-shot bid in an otherwise all-male contest for the White House.
“I am uniquely qualified to do the job of president, and I offer the clearest alternative to this current administration, whose only new idea has been pre-emptive war and a huge new bureaucracy,” Braun said in a low-key appearance at Howard University. Her only introduction came from her 26-year-old son, Matthew Braun.
Take the hint, Carol. Start looking for a real job.
Dean on the Mind
I am no Dean supporter, and I agree that Dean has a problem with gaffe’s, but this criticism from John Kerry is laughable:
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts today sharply criticized one of the other leading Democrats running for president, Howard Dean, asserting that some of his recent pronouncements show that his “bubble’s bursting a bit.”
Referring to statements by Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, on the Middle East, the Hamas guerrillas and other issues, Mr. Kerry said, “You can’t make 15 gaffes a week and be president.”
Tell that to the rest of your field.
In the WCBS interview, Mr. Kerry implied that many of Dr. Dean’s views would cost him his standing in the polls. “Dean’s been imploding,” he said.
Asked what he meant, Mr. Kerry said Dr. Dean had asserted that the United States should not take sides in the Middle East conflict and that suicide bombers from Hamas were “soldiers.”
Mr. Kerry called those positions “dead wrong.”
“It just catches up,” Mr. Kerry said. “Someone’s going to write it. People will see it. And you know, the poll numbers are going to show it.”
And poll numbers are why Sen. Kerry has vowed to have either no discernable position or every possible position on every issue imagineable. I never thought the day would come that I would pseudo-respect Dick Gephardt, but this field of candidates is doing an admirable job of persuading me he is not a bad man.