Just another nerd.
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.