Associated Press and others now reporting that Kerry called Bush privately to concede and congratualte the president on his win. Kerry will give a concession speech at around 1 p.m. Eastern Time.
That’s going to seriously piss off all the left-liberals who took Edwards’ promise to count every vote as a sign that Kerry was prepared to turn Ohio into the next Florida.
But it is clearly the right thing to do, and it is to Kerry’s credit that he is gracious in losing.
All signs now point to Kerry delivering a concession speech later this afternoon.
A lot of liberal-left blogs and web sites are deluding themselves that the provisional ballots in Ohio could put Kerry over the top. The problem is this — yes, in 2000 something like 85 to 90 percent of provisional ballots counted as votes. But Ohio’s operating under a federal law now, and shortly before the election a federal judge ruled that provisional ballots cast by legitimate voters at the wrong precinct could not be counted. A huge number of those provisional ballots are going to be people who weren’t on voter rolls because they showed up at the wrong precinct. In 2000 Ohio’s state law allowed those to be counted; in 2004, federal law is going to prohibit them.
It’s over, folks.
The only remaining question is whether or not Kerry will be able to get through is concession speech without mentioning Vietnam, and whether Bush will be able to give a victory speech without mentioning that winning an election is really hard work.
Odd story from the Cedar Valley Times (Iowa) showing that there not all the relgious nutcases are in the Republican Party,
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin says John Kerry has been gaining in the polls every day since Oct. 21, and George Bush has been going down every day.
“That’s how God wants it to be,” Harkin told a group of about 25 people at the Benton County Headquarters in Vinton on Thursday afternoon.
Harkin was touring the state to stump for Kerry and Democratic legislative candidates. He appeared in Benton County on behalf of Mt. Auburn Mayor Dawn Pettengill, who is running against incumbent Republican Dell Hanson for the Iowa House District 39 seat.
Thank goodness God isn’t one of those cellphone-only families whom pollsters can’t reach.
Source:
Harkin campaigns for Kerry, Pettengill, says Kerry’s rise in polls is what God wants. Cedar Valley Daily Times, October 29, 2004.
Just when it looked like Kerry had finally settled on a position on the war in Iraq — that Saddam Hussein hadn’t attacked us on 9/11 and wasn’t a threat — all of a sudden, Kerry’s back to saying that Iraq was a threat and he might have gone to war against Iraq. From an interview with Tom Brokaw (courtsey of Henry Hanks),
Kerry is back to saying that Iraq was a threat:
Brokaw: “You said you wouldn’t go to war against him.”
Kerry: “That’s not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons.”
Brokaw: “But he wasn’t destroying them.”
Kerry: “That’s what you have inspectors for. That’s why I voted for the threat of force, because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. It’s irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, he wouldn’t be gone. He might be gone, because if he hadn’t complied, we might have had to go to war, but if we did, we would have gone with allies, so the American people weren’t carrying the entire burden. And the entire world would understand why we did it.”
Trying to figure out where Kerry stands on the war is almost as frustrating as getting my daughter to decide which outfit she wants to wear.
Robert Harris is apparently lowering himself to agree with an analysis that John Kerry plagiarized portions of his 1997 book, The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America’s National Security. The basic charge is that some sentences in Kerry’s book bear a marked resemblance to sentences that appeared in news reports about the topic of the book, money laundering.
Yawn. Kerry wasn’t writing as a scholar, but rather wrote a popular book designed for a general audience on money laundering. Harris hits him Kerry for slightly rewriting a couple sentences that he picked up from a news report in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Big deal — major newspapers do this all the time. The major syndicated news companies regularly runs articles which are little more than rewrites of their competitors stories.
If it is good enough for the Associated Press or the BBC, why not for John Kerry? At best Kerry simply engaged in poor attribution, which is hardly unheard of for non-scholarly authors and hardly worth the space the Sun devotes to it.
Source:
Researcher Alleges Potential Plagiarism in 11 Passages of Kerry’s Writings. Josh Gerstein, New York Sun, October 26, 2004.
Watched the debate tonight. It’s like Diet Coke vs. Diet Pepsi — both of them leave me with a nasty aftertaste. My political views are much closer to Bush than Kerry, but it was interesting to see Kerry go after Bush on relatively conservative issues, such as the fact that Bush never met a spending bill he didn’t sign.
One of the odd things is seeing the nutcases on the right and left out in force. I admired the folks at Powerlineblog.Com for their work publicizing the CBS fake memos, but here’s John Hinderaker had to say tonight about Kerry,
My main impressions: One, I had underestimated Kerry. I’ve always thought of him as a rather dull-witted stiff. But that’s wrong. He is a demagogue of some genius, like Father Coughlin or Huey Long, with, I think, the psychopathology that that implies.
That just takes Powerlineblog.Com over the line into right wing nutcase land. The comparision with the anti-Semitic Father Coughlin is especially outrageous. The psychopathology implied seems to say more about Powerlineblog.com than Kerry.
Yet another example of Boing! Boing! letting its anti-Bush knee jerk reaction get the better of it. Bush is scheduled on Wednesday to give what his campaign calls a major speech. The Bush campaign is making much of the fact that Bush was going to talk about medical liability but is now going to talk about terrorism and the economy.
Boing! Boing!’s Mark Frauenfelder goes nuts with this extremely bizarre post,
Will Kerry get equal time to respond to President Bush’s last-minute speech
In an effort to halt his deteriorating ratings, President Bush has announced that’ll he’ll be giving a major speech on Wednesday. “The president is said to be eager to rebut Kerry’s attacks on [the] issues.” I’m imagine he is, since Kerry won’t be able to respond. Will Kerry be given equal time on the networks?
What the hell does that mean? Kerry won’t be able to respond? What, is Bush going to have Dick Cheney sit on Kerry to prevent him from responding? Of course Kerry will be able to respond, and you’ll likely see dueling soundbites on the 6:30 p.m. news on Wednesday or Thursday.
Fraunfelder seems under the false impression that broadcast networks will carry Bush’s speech live just because he calls it a “major speech.” Give me a f—ing break — the broadcast media never runs campaign speeches live.
Kids, this is your brain. And, this is your brain on reflexive Bush bashing.
Update
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one watching television instead of blogging. A lot has been made of the fact that two cable news channels — CNN and MSNBC — chose to run Bush’s speech live (I’m sure all 12 people watching MSNBC in the middle of the day were thrilled by that decision).
Big deal — cable news channels regularly run live feeds of campaign speeches by Kerry or Bush, and if you bill the appearance as a “major speech” that is not just a standard recapitulation of the stump speech, one or more of the cable news channels will probably run the whole damn thing live as long as it’s a slow news day. On September 20, for example, CNN ran a major Kerry speech on foreign policy live beginning at 10 a.m. Similarly, a number of the cable channels ran Kerry’s midnight speech on the last day of the Republican National Convention.
What would have been inappropriate, would have been if CBS, ABC or NBC had interrupted their daytime broadcasts to air Bush’s campaign speech live, since they don’t usually run campaign speeches from either candidate live. And, of course, they didn’t because they can’t build an audience based on the half dozen cats whose owners accidentally leave the television on and tuned to MSNBC during the day.
And, of course, the Kerry campaign did have a chance to respond to Bush’s speech. The broadcast networks featured reports with excerpts from Bush’s speech and from a speech that John Edwards gave the same day. In fact, the coverage on most of the networks was overwhelmingly negative (as it should be) toward Bush due to testimony about the CIA report finding that Saddam Hussein’s WMD program had ended several years after the end of the first Persian Gulf War.
A new Newsweek poll has George W. Bush and John Kerry essentially tied after Bush’s poor debate performance.
I bet the Bush folks really regret agreeing to three debates now.
But, of course, the important polls are those in the a handful of states that are actually going to be competitive. It’ll be interesting to see how polls in Florida and Ohio look at the end of the week.
Hugh Hewitt writes of tonight’s debate,
Overall: Bush gets a big win, by hiting all his messages over and over again. He wins on substance. Biggest mistake by Kerry: “The Global Test.” Sorry, the American voters aren’t interested in passing any global tests. Bush stresses steadfastness and resolve. Kerry firmed up the hard-left vote, but you can’t win on this.
Was Hewitt watching the same debate I was? Kerry came across as very strong — he’s obviously very comfortable in a debate format. Bush, on the other hand, continues to prove that he is a horrible, horrible public speaker.
Remember the Democratic strategy before Kerry’s implosion in August — highlight the things that Bush has done wrong (in their view) and present Kerry as presidential and, therefore, a credible alternative. Kerry accomplished all of that and more tonight, in my opinion (and I can’t stand the guy even after the debate).
Bush is still very beatable, and if Kerry performs as well in the next two debates Bush is going to be in serious trouble.
The New Republic has an article about the Dan Rather dustup in which Telis Demos claims the following,
If this last offense sounds familiar, it’s because the right-wing media does it all the time. In February 2004, for instance, Fox News broadcasters Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, and John Gibson all showed a photo of John Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda on a podium at an anti-Vietnam War rally in the 1970s. It turns out the photo was fake. Did hordes of media critics demand retractions from Hume, Hannity, and Gibson? Of course not. As a result, it seems likely that plenty of voters continue to believe the picture was real.
Did this really happen, though? I searched through all of the transcripts of Fox News programs on Lexis and I couldn’t find any time when this faked picture was shown as if it were real. The photo was definitely shown on Fox News by Brit Hume, but not in the context that Demos claims. On February 15, 2004, Chris Wallace discussed the photo on Fox News Sunday,
WALLACE: Juan mentions that there was dirt being loaded on John Kerry. It was also being loaded on him about his opposition to the war in Vietnam after he came back as a war hero.
And I want to show you some fascinating pictures. Let’s put up the first one, if we can. There is a picture of Jane Fonda, a famous anti-war activist, in the foreground. And way back in the back, fuzzy, no sign that they were anywhere close together — and I must say, two years before Jane Fonda actually went to Hanoi and became Hanoi Jane — at a rally.
WALLACE: And this was put out as some indication that they were in lock step.
And then, when that sort of fell flat, another picture was seen on the Internet showing, well, they’re not now far apart, they’re actually right together on the podium, John Kerry and Jane Fonda. There is only one problem with that picture, it was a fake. Jane Fonda was digitally added. The photo agency that owns the picture says this is the original, John Kerry by himself.
Ceci, I guess the question is, with the length of this campaign — it looks now we could be talking about eight months between Kerry and George W. Bush — and all the things, either rumors or bogus pictures that could be circulated on the Internet, are we headed for something we’ve never seen before?
I found one example where Hannity mentioned a photo on his show (not with Brit Hume, though) where it was unclear which photo Hannity was referring too, though I suspect it was the photo of Kerry sitting several rows back at an event where Fonda spoke. But the only time the fake photo is mentioned on Brit Hume’s show that I could find is to dismiss it as a fake.
Demos isn’t very helpful since he just says “February 2004.” Does anyone else know if Fox ran the photo as real (if they did, it would be interesting to track how long it took them to acknowledge the fact that it was fake).
Source:
Forge Ahead. Telis Demos, New Republic, September 15, 2004.
