3 polls

LA Times 49-47, Newsweek 47-45, Gallup 49-49.

No link yet on Gallup. Was on CNN.

Wingnuttery

I'm watching the Specter/Hoeffel debate which includes the Constitution and Libertarian party candidates as well. The Libertarian candidate just informed us all that members of Congress "opt out" of Social Security. She must read too many of those chain emails.

Foxy New York Times

From uggabugga.

Let Me Finish

One of the weirdest moments during the debate was when Bush, out of nowhere, barked "let me finish." Lehrer hadn't said anything. Kerry hadn't said anything. He was only 60 seconds in to his answer. None of his warning lights had gone off.

I have no opinion on the "earpiece" theory, but just who was he talking to?

Afternoon Thread

Enjoy.

mmm....terducken....

Jesse's right. The "balance" on Meet the Press is a joke. The roundtable consists of Kate O'Beirne, Roger Simon, and Ron Brownstein. O'Beirne's a total partisan hack. Simon and Brownstein are cast as centrist straight journalists, but Simon leans Republican quite a bit and Brownstein leans Republican a bit, from my viewing. But, whatever you think of Simon and Brownstein, there's no one to balance O'Beirne.

This kind of "balance" has been pervasive for years.

Jersey

I was never worried about Kerry's chances in New Jersey, but hopefully this poll puts to bed all the "Oh My God! Kerry's Even In Trouble In New Jersey!" stories.

Why do we never hear stories about, say, Bush Even Being In Trouble In Virginia?

Weird, that.

Fox Again

Link:

Editor’s Note:

In an version of this article that was published earlier, the Communists for Kerry were portrayed as a group that was supporting John Kerry for president. FOXNews.com’s reporter asked the group’s representative several times whether the group was legitimate and supporting the Democratic candidate, and the spokesman insisted that it was.

Well, there you go. The reporter did everything possible to determine the legitimacy of the guy's claim. Everything. You know, except clicking on the "about" section of their website.



And, a big shout out to my homey johnny dollar, for being an idiot.

Late Night Thread

babble babble.

Big Mo

Kerry Leads!

Hoeffel/Arlen "Einhorn Not a Flight Risk" Specter Debate

Taped earlier, broadcast this evening, tomorrow - check local listings.

Fox News - Snookered Again

Is anyone ever going to hold this network to any standard?

Of course, there were some Kerry supporters in attendance who had no doubts whatever about their candidate.

"We're trying to get Comrade Kerry elected and get that capitalist enabler George Bush out of office," said 17-year-old Komoselutes Rob of Communists for Kerry.

"Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush," Rob said, before assuring FOXNews.com that his organization was not a parody group. When asked his thoughts on Washington's policy toward Communist holdout North Korea, Rob said: "The North Koreans are my comrades to a point, and I'm sure they support Comrade Kerry, too."

It is unclear whether the Kerry campaign has welcomed the Communists' endorsement.

All Fox had to do was click on the "About" link:

"Communists for Kerry" is a campaign of the Hellgate Republican Club, a tax exempt non-partisan public advocacy "527" organization that exists for the purpose of;

"Informing voters with satire and irony, how political candidates make decisions based on the failed social economic principles of socialism that punish the individual by preventing them from becoming their dream through proven ideas of entrepreneurship and freedom."

Our members help elect candidates who support economic growth through Entrepreneurship, limited government and lower taxes. Communists For Kerry is separate and distinct from the Communist party of America and any of its organization. None of it's members are members of any communist organizations.

(thanks to reader g)

Liars

Rice:

The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

But before Ms. Rice made those remarks, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. As early as 2001, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and a senior administration official, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.

"She was aware of the differences of opinion," the senior administration official said in an interview authorized by the White House. "She was also aware that at the highest level of the intelligence community, there was great confidence that these tubes were for centrifuges."

Ms. Rice's alarming description on CNN was in keeping with the Bush administration's overall treatment of the tubes. Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, The Times found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of their own experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.

I think we can put to rest any notion that, as Connolly and Kessler wrote, "there is little evidence the Bush administration purposely tried to deceive Americans and other world leaders about the threat posed by the alleged weapons..."


Powell too:

Intelligence analysts at the State Department waged a quiet battle against much of the proposed language on tubes. A year before, they had sent Mr. Powell a report explaining why they believed the tubes were more likely for rockets. The National Intelligence Estimate included their dissent - that they saw no compelling evidence of a comprehensive effort to revive a nuclear weapons program. Now, in the days before the Security Council speech, they sent the secretary detailed memos warning him away from a long list of assertions in the drafts, the Intelligence Committee found. The language on the tubes, they said, contained "egregious errors'' and "highly misleading'' claims. Changes were made, language softened. The line about "the mere pressure of my hand,'' for instance, was removed.

"My colleagues,'' Mr. Powell assured the Security Council, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions.''

He made his way to the subject of Mr. Hussein's current nuclear capabilities.

"By now,'' he said, "just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts and the Iraqis themselves argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher.''

But Mr. Powell did not acknowledge that those "other experts'' included many of the nation's most authoritative nuclear experts, some of whom said in interviews that they were offended to find themselves now lumped in with a reviled government.

In making the case that the tubes were for centrifuges, Mr. Powell made claims that his own intelligence experts had told him were not accurate. Mr. Powell, for example, asserted to the Security Council that the tubes were manufactured to a tolerance "that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets."

Yet in a memo written two days earlier, Mr. Powell's intelligence experts had specifically cautioned him about those very same words. "In fact,'' they explained, "the most comparable U.S. system is a tactical rocket - the U.S. Mark 66 air-launched 70-millimeter rocket - that uses the same, high-grade (7075-T6) aluminum, and that has specifications with similar tolerances.''

The Times, very gently, at least reminds us in parts of the article about its own culpability in this mess. Let's see. Sources made claims. Times reports them. Claims later turn out to be bullshit. hmmmm....

Made Up

Wow. Bob Somerby managed to get to the bottom of the Dowd's quoting of Kerry saying "Who among us doesn't love Nascar?" which he never said.

Start here with this post for a background.

So, here's the timeline. At a campaign rally on February 17, Kerry says:

There isn't one of us here who doesn't like NASCAR and who isn't a fan...

Dowd reported in her March 18 column:

Even when he puts on that barn jacket over his expensive suit to look less lockjaw -- and says things like, "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" -- he can come across like Collins, Elizabeth Bennet's pretentious cousin in "Pride and Prejudice."

Of course, she didn't hear the quote. So, where did she get it from? Apparently New York Times journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg who was at the rally.

The quote was subsequently used in Boston Globe article on March 20, sourced to Dowd, dissecting the speech patterns of the candidates.

It was then used in a March 23 column in the New York Daily News by Denis Hamill, who wrote:

If you're a John Kerry fan you must have cringed recently when he chased the blue-collar male vote by saying, "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?"

It showed up in a July 7, 2004 Newsday column by Joseph Dolan:

"Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" he supposedly said when confronted with George W. Bush's gaudy performance before the beer-bellied dads of Dixie at the Daytona 500 a few months ago.

It showed up in a July 25, 2004 NYT article by John Tierney(quiz format):

5. When journalists do impressions of John Kerry, their favorite words to quote are:

a) I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

b) I have three words for this president that I know he understands: Bring it on!

c) Folks, I say to you

d) I learned my first cuss words sitting on a tractor.

e) Who among us doesn't like Nascar?

(the "correct" answer being e)

It showed up again in another New York Times report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and John Tierney on July 30, 2004:

To anyone who has listened to Mr. Kerry extemporize at length -- who among us can forget his ''Who among us doesn't like Nascar?

It showed up again in an August 22 NYT article by Timothy Egan:

Still, some red-state Democrats wince when they see Mr. Kerry stiltedly asking, ''Who among us does not love Nascar?'' and connecting to the great outdoors by windsurfing.

One wonders how they wince if they haven't actually seen it.

It showed up again in a September 5 column by Frank Rich:

When the Democrat asks ''Who among us does not love Nascar?'' and lets reporters follow him around on a ''day off'' when his errands include buying a jock strap, he is asking to be ridiculed as an ''International Man of Mystery.'

It is likely, though not necessarily, the inspiration for the jokey September 5 NYT article by Kate Zernike, which was headlined "Who Among Us Does Not Love Windsurfing?":

The stereotypes of the sport are unfair -- there are lots of plumbers and construction workers windsurfing off Cape Cod and in the lakes of Iowa. (Better put: Who among us doesn't like windsurfing?)

Again in the September 18 Toronto Star in a Tim Harper article:

Kerry was never going to win this vote, but tossed it away with his strong push to extend the assault weapons ban this week and his rather patrician nod to the track when he said, "Who among us doesn't love NASCAR?"

And, it shows up most recently in a September 26 Hartford Courant piece by Aaron Zelinsky:

Kerry-Don't 1. Don't speak in elegant sentences. Kerry needs to create good sound-bites. He also needs to connect with rank-and-file Americans. This means saying fewer things like "Who among us does not love NASCAR?" and more things like "America can do better." He ditched the Brahmin lilt a while back; now he just needs to make sure he doesn't speak in sentences that involve semicolons (like this sentence).

When I first heard of the dubious sourcing of this quote, after I bit of research I concluded pretty quickly that the quote was bogus - not because I couldn't imagine Kerry saying it, but because I knew that if he *had* said it, then it would have run on the cable nets and the late night talk shows over and over and over and over. Instead, it seems to have been a little anecdote people passed around and around. But, then Bovino claimed to have verfied it with the journalist, who now admits that maybe she misheard, and so I had to admit that I must have been wrong. Silly me.

Lisa Myers

Wow. Truly hacktackular. NBC should stop embarrassing itself.

Oops

Expired.

What Fox Thinks of The Liberal Media

While everyone's been focusing on the Made Up Story over at Fox News, a reader pointed out another fascinating bit of 'reporting' in the same page:

While it is not uncommon in press filing centers for reporters to laugh, cheer, groan and audibly react during a presidential debate, there was silence in the press room Thursday night.

There is a growing consensus among reporters that Kerry's criticisms got under the president's skin.

Is there any other way to interpret this other than that the Fox reporter (presumably) Cameron thinks the press corps was chilled into silence by the horrible thought of a looming Kerry presidency?

If they were a bunch of libruls, wouldn't they be cheering?

Open Thread

BRUUUUUUUUUUUUCE edition.


...mini concert review. Went to see Bright Eyes, REM, and Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band on their Vote for Change tour. Politics were in the air, with Bruce making a brief "public service announcement" and Stipe wearing a "Kerry" t-shirt, but not overwhelming. Mostly it was just a good show. I'm not a particularly big fan of either REM or Bruce (flame away), so I can't really give a "fan's" perspective, but it was a good show. Bright Eyes opened, then REM, then Bruce. Crossover moments include Springsteen joining in on "Man on the Moon" with REM and Stipe joining in on "Because the Night." The whole crowd joined in for "Peace, Love, and Understanding" and "People Have the Power."

Before and After

The pre- and post- debate spin.

There's a Reason They're Called Faux

I'm sure you've all been following Josh Marshall follow the fake Fox News (is there any other kind?) story. Apparently the author was their star campaign reporter Carl Cameron. That's quite a big deal.

Over to you, Howie... (who, if he addresses it, will marvel at Cameron's wit).