Bush takes a shot at Kerry's comments on Allawi:

"You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility."

Now, to be fair, I'm not sure that's entirely true. France, for instance, is still technically our ally, and Bush questions their credibility on a fairly regular basis, even though some would argue that Bush is leading this country.

That's beside the point, though, because Iraq clearly comes with a special clause in its alliance papers: "If we don't think you're agreeing with us loudly enough, we'll bomb the hell out of you." So Kerry's got nothing to worry about.

Theresa Heinz Kerry*, in an apparent attempt to piss Adam off, gives voice to that which liberals have been whispering for months:

In regard to the hunt for terror leader Osama Bin Laden, Heinz Kerry said she could see the al-Qaida chief being caught before the November election. "I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month," said Heinz Kerry, alluding to a possible capture by United States and allied forces before election day.

(* - The 400th-richest person in the country.)

Letterman's Top Ten from Wednesday night:

Top Ten Ways CBS Can Improve Its Reputation

10. Stick to stories everyone can agree on, like cookies are delicious.
9. Move nightly 'happy hour' to after the broadcast.
8. Stop hiring guys with crazy names like "Morley."
7. Can't figure out if a news story is true? Let Judge Joe Brown decide.
6. Every time Mike Wallace tells a lie he gets a life-threatening electrical shock.
5. Newsroom patrolled by some kind of lovable but strict "truth monkey."
4. If it turns out the story is wrong, give away 276 brand new cars.
3. After delivering a report, correspondent must add, "or maybe not - who knows?"
2. Newscast consists of Dan Rather sitting down to watch Tom Brokaw.
1. Oh, I dunno, stop making up crap?

PA Supreme Court rules that driving a horse while intoxicated is not a crime. Dissenting, world-renowned Rhyming Justice Michael Eakin takes his colleagues to task:

"A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
but the Vehicle Code does not divorce
its application from, perforce,
a steed as my colleagues said.
'It's not vague,' I'll say until I'm hoarse,
and whether a car, a truck or horse
this law applies with equal force,
and I'd reverse instead."

Money, it would appear, does buy happiness (the first sentence of this article notwithstanding).

56% of respondents earning $75,000 or more a year say they're "very satisfied" with their lives. Compare that to 24% of those earning $25,000 or less who say the same thing.

Man changes name to "They." Idiots the world over wish they'd (ho!) thought of it first.

Adnan Abu Odeh is a freaking dumbass.

"It's savage revenge rather than execution," said Jordanian political analyst Adnan Abu Odeh. "While there are those who are disgusted, a certain percentage no doubt feel vindicated because of the killings they see by the Americans in Iraq."

Zerrouk Slimani, a Tunisian school teacher, said nobody should regret the killing of Westerners. "When dozens of Palestinians are dead or 50 killed in Iraq, few in the West condemn these assassinations," he explained.

I vote mass bombings to straighten this situation out. Bush stalling in Fallujah has done nothing to stop the terrorists. Kill them before they hack another head off because they feel "vindicated."

Turns out that grief-stricken mother arrested last week at the Laura Bush rally is a bit of a loon after all:

"I wanted to rip the president's head off... I think if I had him in front of me I would shoot him in the groined area. Let him suffer. And just continue shooting him there. Put him through misery, like he's doing to everyone else. He doesn't deserve any better."

Whoa there, crazy lady. No one's shooting anyone in the groined area. Not on my watch.

John Edwards drops a killer education metaphor:

"The American people deserve better than a President who doesn't do his homework for four years and then does a bad job of copying someone else's when he is running for re-election."

Eerily reminscent of Gore 2000 (or Clinton 1992, or Clinton 1996, for that matter), don't you think?

A South Korean embassy official who met with fund-raisers for John F. Kerry to talk about creating a political group for Korean-Americans was a spy for his country, South Korean and US officials said.

Seriously, does this have to come up in every single election? Maybe the DNC ought to start screening the people it meets with...

An amusing State Department omission, via In the Loop:

To be helpful, State put up a map showing in red where al Qaeda had been operating around the world.

Those places include this country, Europe and Russia, North Africa and most of the Middle East. But wait! There are a couple of countries in the Middle East where al Qaeda had not been operating as of the fall of 2001: Syria and Iraq.

But we now are told al Qaeda had been all over Iraq then, right next to the WMD. In any event, it's operating there now, so best to update soon.

Finally, Kerry let's us know where he stands on Saddam:

"Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," Kerry said.

So there. His own special place in hell. Flip-flop that.

South Dakotans are fed up with Daschle.

He portrays himself as a champion for the little guy, but that's just another liberal trick he learned in Washington. The reality is that Tom Daschle is against tax relief, against small businesses, against gun owners' rights, against a ban on partial birth abortion and against America's families.

Against America's families? That's a little harsh. But certainly true.

If this is a battle of machismo, we're in serious trouble.

The images from the 2004 campaign certainly bear that out. There's the Everyman series: Bush cutting brush, Kerry tossing a football, the pair aiming rifles and falling off their bikes. And the aristocracy series: Bush fishing in his own lake in Texas and off his father's dock in Maine, Kerry windsurfing and snowboarding near his wife's vacation retreats. And the military series: Bush with troops all over the world, Kerry with veterans all over the country, both of them with generals galore.

Pat LaMarche, VP hopeful, embarks on a laudable tour. It's too bad she's Green, or it might actually attract some attention.

Funny Jeopardy story, via Daily Kos: The category was "Botswana," and the answer was "A term you could use to describe cabinet members Cheney and Ashcroft." The first contestant to buzz in gave the response "What are dicks?" Commendable.

A politically-themed corn maze, apparently pre-designed to allow for a race between John Kerry and either George Bush, Dennis Kucinich, Bob Graham, or Graham Spanier.

(For you Republicans, a piece of Reagan-themed corn art can be found here.)

Really terrific Daily Show bit tonight, wherein Stephen Colbert calls for Dan Rather's resignation:

Colbert: Well, John, there's gotta be some accountability. Dan Rather is the head - the "commander in chief," if you will - of his organization. He's someone in the ultimate position of power who made a harmful decision based upon questionable evidence. Then, to make things worse, he stubbornly refused to admit his mistake, choosing instead to "stay the course" and essentially "occupy" this story for too long. The man has got to go. ... CBS is in chaos; unsafe; riven by internal rivalries. If you ask me, respected, reputable outsiders need to be brought in to help the rebuilding effort. ... I can tell you, Jon... Jon, I can tell you... Somewhere, Walter Cronkite is rolling over in his grave.
Stewart: Walt- Walter Kronkite is still alive.
Colbert: Not according to my sources... at CBS News.

Brilliant.

A scathing exposé of undecided voters, penned by Larry David last Thursday. I would have posted it earlier, but... well, frankly, I didn't read it until about four minutes ago.

Oh, the wit... A great quote from Tom Harkin:

Voters learned all they need to know about the election when they were in drivers' education class, Harkin said. "If you want to go backwards, you put it in 'R,' and if you want to go forward, you put it in 'D.'"

Roll Call writes about an awfully-short-lived intern:

An intern in Rep. Phil English’s (R-Pa.) office may have broken the world’s record for shortest time on the job, her budding career ruined by a marijuana arrest. ... The intern lasted all of two-and-a-half hours on her first day at work in English’s office last Thursday. ... [When the intern and the staffer who was escorting her] reached the security checkpoint connecting the Cannon House Office Building to the Capitol, they put their purses on the X-ray belts and stepped through the metal detectors. Inside the intern’s purse, police officers spotted a small wooden box containing a little pipe - and a little something to smoke. As the police report put it, it was a "green leafy substance" and "paraphernalia."

I'm almost guaranteed to have a more illustrious career on the Hill than she did!

(That same story also contains a reference to a Congressional debate between Pete Sessions and Martin Frost, wherein Sessions said: "I believe the opportunity to be before the World Affairs Council, who have a very serious outlook on the world, that what we should discuss tonight are the issues and those opportunities that lay ahead of America, and certainly us here in Dallas on a moving forward basis as we approach the world with world affairs." Well put, Pete. Well put.)

So that's Kerry's big secret...

"Kerry is failing to explain himself, and many think that it's because he's just too busy eating babies to formulate policy," an analyst for REPUBPOLL, a Republican poll analysing organisation, told BIGfib.

Lincoln Chafee won't be voting for Bush this year. So that's one down, fifty million or so to go.

Tom Daschle waxes poetic on Meet the Press:

To do it the right way, to do the right thing, those values are as important to me as my arm. And I think that John ought to reflect on that before he makes a charge like that again.

I love artists...

"Saint Clinton's image on these keepsake items will remind you of better times (about 4 years ago) when you had enough money to eat at a nice restaurant, get your car washed, or take a day off work."

Odds this story was fueled by alcohol: 1:2.

A Democrat was charged with punching a local Republican leader and a life-sized cardboard cutout of President Bush, police said.

David McCally, an instructor at Sante Fe Community College, was headed to a restaurant when he stopped inside the nearby GOP headquarters and punched the presidential cutout.

Teresa Heinz Kerry gives me yet another reason to vote for Bush.

Heinz Kerry has made a feminist issue of her entitlement to express herself, and if she were a man, she says, no one would denigrate her as “opinionated.” She lectures knowledgeably on the inequities that confront women in the workplace and champions the excluded and discounted women of the Third World.

She pronounces folksy locutions with upper-class British vowels, sultry Portuguese s’s, and pizzicato t’s. Her repartee is quick, with a Gallic tartness. Backstage at a fund-raiser in New York, she bantered with her son Andre, who recently moved to Pittsburgh from Stockholm, in perfect French and the convincing Swedish of a Bergman spoof. The Hispanic press in South Florida was disappointed, last spring, that she declined to be interviewed in Spanish, which she speaks fluently, though with the occasional Italian verb. She explained that it would take three weeks to get her vocabulary up to speed for a serious policy discussion, but that she would be happy to oblige the reporters with a little “chitchat.”

She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband’s health-care proposals as “idiots,” and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word “scumbags” to describe some of her detractors.

In the early months of Kerry’s campaign, Heinz Kerry rarely gave a speech or an interview that wasn’t redolent with nostalgia for the sensations of her childhood (the steamy vibrance of New Orleans reminded her of home, she said, as did the palm trees and tile roofs of Florida and the earthiness of Pittsburgh), and she continues to invoke what she sees as Africa’s lessons about nature, race, freedom, dependence, and survival.

Heinz Kerry was in Fort Lauderdale to address a group of women supporters at a luxurious faux hacienda on the intercoastal waterway. It was a hot morning, and on the opposite bank workmen building a new mansion had taken their shirts off, and were gawking and gesturing, none too politely, at the ladies milling on the terrace and in the garden. Some members of the construction crew had evidently gone to the trouble of lowering a scaffold from which to spray a graffito, about ten feet high, in red paint, on the side of the bulkhead: “Liberals Ruin U.S.A.”

The guest of honor arrived late, as she tends to. Her staff tries to keep her to a tight schedule, but she says that she’s “too old to be bossed around.”

She says that she would like to be a model for older women who feel sexually disenfranchised, and to “liberate them from the feeling that they die as women” when their youth is gone.

At a rally one evening in Chicago’s Union Station, wearing a low-cut white blouse and a black suit, she projected—while Kerry spoke—the languor of a maja. On other occasions, she took slugs from a water bottle, frowned, slumped, scribbled a note, fiddled with her rings and hair, or whispered to someone on the dais.

A great article from Saturday's NYT about the flip-floppitude of recent polling:

Despite the differences in the final numbers, the pollsters all say some basic conclusions can be drawn from the varied results.

"One of the things that is pretty clear from all of the polls, that seems to be very consistent, is that Bush had a very good convention, that his support has increased and that he is probably leading Kerry," said Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor and author on the subject of polls.

But the voter sentiment shifts reflected in the surveys also indicate that the contest is far from over.

Edwards finally manages to stake out his place in the Kerry campaign; is named "Official Guy Who Calls the Republicans Sleazy When They Make Sleazy Comments."

Edwards said Hastert had joined the "fear mongering choir."

"One clear sign of weakness and failed leadership is when a politician stoops to the politics of fear," he said, campaigning near Philadelphia.

Arrr.