“One of Osama bin Laden’s chief confidants turned himself in to Saudi Arabian officials yesterday … He’s confined to a wheelchair due to injuries he sustained 10 years ago while fighting in Bosnia and Chechnya. How is it we know more about this guy’s military background than we do our own president’s? How come his records are still on file and Bush’s are not?”
Jay Leno
“The Senate is debating whether to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage. They want to define marriage as a sacred union between a man and J-Lo.”
Craig Kilborn
“The Bush administration may postpone the November election if there’s a terrorist attack. If there’s a terrorist attack, they may postpone the election. Or, they’ll postpone it if there’s scattered showers.”
“Republicans say they don’t want the terrorists to determine the election. No they want the governor of Florida to determine the election”
David Letterman
Google www.bushcheney04.com and see what happens.
Link via TBogg.
Update: As of Wednesday evening no longer working.
“I love that the Department of Homeland Security always tells Americans if you don’t fly commercial airlines, ‘the terrorists have won.’ If you don’t hold the Super Bowl or the World Series, ‘the terrorists have won.’ If you don’t get out to the mall and do your Christmas shopping, ‘the terrorists have won.’ Comes time for the election, ‘Oh, let the terrorists have that one.’ ”
Jay Leno
Via Ralph, Joe Monahan says New Mexico is beginning to appear like it is no longer a “battleground state.” Kerry is up 7 in polls by both Zogby and ARG.
Gore won New Mexico by only 366 votes in 2000.
Frank Rich gets real about Fahrenheit 911 and writes a swell review of Spider-Man 2 as well.
The extraordinary popularity of this hero on the Fourth of July weekend might give partisans on both sides of this year’s political race pause. As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of “Top Gun.” There’s nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man; he would never declare “Mission Accomplished” after a passing victory, and his very creed is antithetical to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But neither is he a stand-in for John Kerry. Whatever inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero, he stops playing Hamlet when he has a decision to make. Nor does he follow Mr. Kerry’s vainglorious example of turning his own past battles into slick promotional hagiography.
Spider-Man 2 took in $152 million its first five days, a record. It added 18 of NewMexiKen’s dollars Friday night. It’s good. For its genre it’s very, very good.
From The Albuquerque Tribune:
“The Dos Juans” made their debut as a team in Albuquerque. It sounds like the name of a salsa band or a Vegas magic show, but the title is a nickname coined by a few enthusiastic audience members for Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards in honor of their first joint New Mexico appearance.
Dos Juans sounds better than Jorge and Ricardo to me.
From The New York Times:
Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.
Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American.
About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black.
*****But the database of felons has only five variables for race: white, black, Asian, Indian and unknown. And a voter registered as Hispanic whose name and birth date matched a felon’s would be left off the purge list unless his race was listed as unknown.
*****The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.
Update:
Florida elections officials said Saturday they will not use a disputed list that was designed to keep felons from voting, acknowledging a flaw that could have allowed convicted Hispanic felons to cast ballots in November.
From AP via The Albuquerque Journal:
But at one point, a group of young men in the crowd took off their flip-flops, waved them over their heads and chanted “Viva Bush!” The young men contend that Kerry’s support of the war has flip-flopped.
Kerry urged the crowd to tolerate the young men and said he and Edwards would teach them a “lesson in values” during the campaign.
“We have 115 days to change the world, not just America,” Kerry said.
Good thing the young men didn’t accuse Kerry of jockeying for position.
Politics and the people devoted to causes never cease to amaze me. Take a look.
An excellent October 2001 article by Joshua Green about trial lawyers and John Edwards in particular from The Washington Monthly. Some excerpts, though the whole article is well-worth reading:
As it happens, Edwards’ professional biography bears a much closer resemblance to the crusading protagonist of a John Grisham novel than to the ambulance-chasers who solicit on late-night cable.
*****The defining case in Edwards’ legal career wrapped up that same year. In 1993, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey had been playing in a Wake County, N.C., wading pool when she became caught in an uncovered drain so forcefully that the suction pulled out most of her intestines. She survived but for the rest of her life will need to be hooked up to feeding tubes for 12 hours each night. Edwards filed suit on the Lakeys’ behalf against Sta-Rite Industries, the Wisconsin corporation that manufactured the drain. Attorneys describe his handling of the case as a virtuoso example of a trial layer bringing a negligent corporation to heel. Sta-Rite offered the Lakeys $100,000 to settle the case. Edwards passed. Before trial, he discovered that 12 other children had suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains. The company raised its offer to $1.25 million. Two weeks into the trial, they upped the figure to $8.5 million. Edwards declined the offer and asked for their insurance policy limit of $22.5 million. The day before the trial resumed from Christmas break, Sta-Rite countered with $17.5 million. Again, Edwards said no. On January 10, 1997, lawyers from across the state packed the courtroom to hear Edwards’ closing argument, “the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen,” recalls Dayton. Three days later, the jury found Sta-Rite guilty and liable for $25 million in economic damages (by state law, punitive damages could have tripled that amount). The company immediately settled for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. For their part, Edwards and Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America’s national award for public service.
*****If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result, then clearly lawyers like John Edwards drive GOP operatives crazy.
*****For all the noise Republicans make about trial lawyers interfering with the free market, most people prefer driving on tires that don’t explode, living in homes with insulation that won’t kill them, and raising babies in cribs that won’t strangle them. They aren’t particularly bothered if it takes fear of litigation to bring these things about.
Link via Slactivist via Eschaton.
Bush — Governor of Texas 1995-2001 — 6 years
Edwards — U.S. Senator 1999-2005 — 6 years
Yup, Edwards is inexperienced.
is 58 today.
Already with the media comments about how the GOP will attack Edwards for being a trial lawyer. Even the Chamber of Commerce plans to speak out against Edwards for that reason.
Aren’t about two million Americans lawyers? Almost every family must have a lawyer in it or know someone who is a lawyer. Is it a good strategy to run against lawyers?
And then there’s Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln. Wasn’t Lincoln a trial lawyer?
Four bagger Saturday from Brad DeLong:
Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom tells the tale.
Link via Body and Soul.
Blogger Tom McMahon has created a fun quiz for you political/history junkies. (Who me?) Guess The Presidential Election Year by looking at the electoral college map. He has 16 maps so far.
Link via OxBlog.
Comedian Lewis Black reminds us that the people in charge of Homeland Security in Washington today are the same assholes who told him when he was a child that he could survive a nuclear holocaust by getting under his school desk.
Juanita has a solution:
By the way, the so-called Defense of Decency Act calls for a $275,000 fine for anyone in the media who uses Cheney verbs. I say let’s fix this national debt thing by applying that law to politicians, telling Cheney that Congress cut his Halliburton profits, and just standing back while …… well, cha-ching, cha-ching.
From Late Night with David Letterman:
Top Ten George W. Bush Complaints About “Fahrenheit 9/11”
10. That actor who played the President was totally unconvincing
9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election
8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words
7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported
6. Didn’t have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger
5. Of all Michael Moore’s accusations, only 97% are true
4. Not sure – – I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe
3. Where the hell was Spider-man?
2. Couldn’t hear most of the movie over Cheney’s foul mouth
1. I thought this was supposed to be about Dodgeball
“Nader is a sixty-something year-old man raised in a household that trained him to revile the decadent pleasures that most of us enjoy.
The most famous story is that Ralph’s mother refused to serve him a frosted cake for his birthday, believing it unhealthy. After years of begging, Mrs. Nader agreed to bake the children such a delight. She constructed a beautiful cake, let the children see it, then removed all the frosting before allowing them to eat it. Parents take note: this is how to raise a bitter, twisted child.
Correspondent and Public Citizen alum Andrew Cohen writing at Altercation
As Dick Cheney becomes more and more unraveled, maybe it’s time to start speculating about who Bush’s running mate might be. NewMexiKen has come up with a few possibilities: