In a DNC fundraiser in Arizona, TKH was doing her usual thing, caterwauling about the evils of Bush, etc. Her blather, when coherent, was both clueless and offensive, which is hardly news. But she dropped this nugget, which I found amusing:

She said she was embarrassed to receive tax cuts advocated by Bush and supports her husband’s efforts to roll them back for higher incomes and use those funds for education, health care and deficit reduction.

Embarrassed? Sheesh, sis, no need to be embarrassed. If you don’t like tax cuts, send them back. What you should be embarrassed about is that a zillionairess like yourself, who earned nothing but gets to spend it all, should be whining about other people getting tax breaks they don’t “deserve”.

(HT to Drudge for the original article link)

LGF, as usual, just nails it in this post about the real importance of the Ra^thergate scandal:

Someone, somewhere, sat down with a copy of Microsoft Word and set out to deliberately influence one of the most important elections in US history with fraudulent documents. The implications of this are huge, even if the DNC is not connected in some way.

William Safire’s article (use BugMeNot.com to login) is linked from there, and says much the same thing, and hopefully to a readership who might not otherwise see it. Safire concludes of liberals and conservatives:

Both should focus on the lesson of the early 70’s: from third-rate burglaries to fourth-rate forgeries, nobody gets away with trying to corrupt American elections.

Unfortunately, that remains to be seen. I certainly think there will be scalps given up over this; Mapes probably loses hers first, and there will probably be more. But if you think you’ve seen desperate attempts to cover her behind on this, it will get worse as the time draws shorter and the circle shrinks tighter around the DNC or its minions as the source of the forgery. Will we catch the original malfeasant? And if we do, will we jail him/her?

The Daily Recycler has done yeoman’s work in putting together this disturbing collage of Kerry’s tongue lashing on Letterman the other night. Did I say disturbing?

Seen at full-speed, these are not as readily noticeable. But your subconscious doesn’t miss much, and I wonder if this is one reason why I find Kerry so distasteful to watch (even with the sound down; his droning, condescending voice simply drives me up the wall with revulsion).

(Hat tip to Ace on this one).

Drudge has the scoop

CBS executives on both coasts have become concerned in recent days that Dan Rather’s EVENING NEWS broadcast has plunged in the ratings since the anchor presented questionable documents about Bush’s National Guard service.

We would need Congress to get involved if there were gov’t skulduggery afoot, or if CBS were engaged in nefarious legal wranglings to shut down the bloggers who’ve taken them down. As it is, this is good, old-fashioned market magic at work.

If you sell apples, and you start selling apples with worms in them, people shop elsewhere. You either (1) sell better apples, or (2) go out of business. And Congress never has to lift a finger.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike. And sometimes, I tag along with them.

I wondered how long it would take the blogsphere to start tightening the noose around the sources of the famous forged memos. The answer is “not long”. Wizbang is bringing the rope and Ace of Spades is practicing slipknots.

UPDATE: Drudge is reporting that the WaPo has determined that the documents show “marks” of having been faxed from a Kinko’s in Abilene, TX. There’s nothing that Google can find yet on the Washington Post’s web site. But I did find what appears to be the only Kinko’s in Abilene:

Kinko’s
4133 S Danville Dr
Abilene, TX 79605
(325) 698-3300

Hmm..and here’s something else interesting. Bill Burkett (who?) lives in Baird, TX. Baird, TX is 20 miles from Abilene, TX.

Last but not least, go to FedEx Kinko’s site and type in 79504, the zip code for Baird, TX. The closest location? Abilene, TX at 27 miles. The next closest is 111 miles away.

UPDATE:Of course, Instapundit noticed this already.

UPDATE:Drudge now has the WaPo article link. It’s a great article, and it’s interesting to me to see that if the MSM wants to chase down a story, it’s still possible for them to get out ahead of the Pajamahadeen occasionally.

I was struck by the last paragraph of the article, btw, which says:

In a related development, White House press secretary Scott McClellan hinted that more documents regarding Bush’s National Guard service may soon be released. Asked whether officials in the White House have seen unreleased documents, McClellan called that “a very real possibility.” Other officials with knowledge of the situation said more documents had indeed been uncovered and would be released in the coming days.

As I’ve observed, the next forgery will be better. I wonder whether this next batch of docs will be legit. If they are, or if they are in the least favorable to Bush, expect to see the left hemisphere of the blogsphere to swing into action, attempting to discredit these memos as fraudulent. Expect further to see the arguments take the form of “See, we can reproduce this old typewriter font on a modern word-processor, therefore it has to have been a modern forgery.” All of which will ignore completely the fact that it’s become almost trivial to manipulate text and place it any where and any way that you want; that’s the point of the ever-more-powerful tools for composition we have. The crux of the proof that the CBS memos were forged is that it was not possible to create them back then. But the left, in its eagerness to pretend moral equivalence and tit-for-tat, will miss this entirely as they desperately attempt to cook up their own “memogate”. Watch for it.

Do you know, it occurred to me why John Kerry likes windsurfing so much. But more than that, why it’s so fitting a pastime for him that it’s become a sort of surrogate for how out of touch he is.

In windsurfing or kitesurfing - or sailing, for that matter - you choose a destination, or a course, that you want to follow. The winds may be blowing in any direction, and can shift at any time. They may even be competing with one another to buffet you about.

The intrepid windsurfer must be adept at flinging his sail about to any direction on the compass, at a moment’s notice and without regret or hesitation, to catch the prevailing wind, and shunt its power toward his goal. The sail at any time may be pointed ahead, behind, left or right, depending on which way the wind blows. But so far as the windsurfer’s concerned, it’s just what you have to do to get where you want to go. The winds don’t mean anything; they and the water are just tools to be deftly manipulated and ridden to achieve your ends.

Now you tell me: is that John Kerry — the politician — or what?

UPDATE: The Bush campaign is now running an ad showing Kerry windsurfing.

“John Kerry,” the ad says, referring to what it calls shifting positions on Iraq, education and health care. “Whichever way the wind blows.”

Heh heh.

Walter Williams has a great piece on what’s wrong with a tax system which allows an increasing number of people (almost 44%) to pay no taxes. He says:

You might ask, “Why?” In general, I’ve always held that a tax cut for anybody, at any time, for any reason is a good thing because it keeps more of our earnings in our pockets and out of Washington. But there’s a problem. Removing so many Americans from federal income tax liability contributes to the political problem we’re witnessing this election: class warfare and the politics of envy.

When 122 million Americans are outside of the federal income tax system, it’s like throwing chum to our political sharks. These Americans become a natural spending constituency for big-government politicians. After all, if you have no income tax liability, how much do you care about how much Congress spends and the level of taxation?

It’s a great piece; go read it.

Dan Ra^ther stands by his claim to be Queen of the Space Unicorns. (Hat tip to protein wisdom).

The past few weeks have been saturated with discussions of evidence, truths, half-truths, un-truths, and “my truth’s“.

Kerry once joked to the WaPo, “I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis.” The funny thing is, it’s not that funny. Kerry’s not “wishing I hadn’t said that,” or “wishing I’d been more circumspect on that occasion,” or especially, “admitting that I was was wrong then and have since come to my senses.” No, the problem that gives him pause is the fact that all the pajama-clad riff-raff can keep bringing stuff up.

On the matter of the memos, Dan Rather said:

“Until someone shows me definitive proof that they [the memos] are not [genuine], I don’t see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill.”

Well, sheesh, Dan, what would it take? What would you consider definitive”? What is the standard of proof required for you to admit what seems, well, rather obvious to most of us?

Bill in DC quotes Talk Left’s equivocation about whether or not the Boston Globe grossly misrepresented its conversation w/ Dr. Bouffard:

Without hearing a tape of the conversation between the reporter and the source, I don’t know that’s true.

I submit that if we did have a tape of the conversation to show up, the next thing they’d start on would be the tape’s validity. It’s first-hand personal, or nothing. And maybe not even that. No, the acid test would only be hearing the conversation for ourselves. Which would mean that ALL news is unreliable, insofar as what reporters do (in theory) is to tell other people, who weren’t there, what went on.

Mark Steyn points out the pitifully shameless double “standard of proof” for news stories:

…the ”60 Minutes” crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ”CYA” that Bush’s commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ”This was too hot not to push,” one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who’ve signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera — that’s way too cold to push; we’d want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry’s second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative — that meets ”basic standards” and we gotta get it out there right away.

The problem is that, for many people, the conclusions are fixed, and the evidence is as malleable as the arguments It’s post-modernism’s excuse for logic. Meaning only exists in the moment, in the speaker’s mind, or in the listener’s - “my truth” - not outside in the real world, or in any objective abstract framework of truth. And “my meaning” is “my truth”, and has just as much right to exist and “be true” as “your truth”, whatever “you mean”.

The total rejection of any objective truth absolutely requires an endless spiral of unendable arguments defending various, equally non-true, replacements for what we used to call “the truth”.

And while there’s certainly a preponderance of this on the left, at least in the MSM and among candidates, my own experience indicates that the problem is far more widespread. It stems from two things:

1. lack of the tools (i.e., ability, training, and discipline) to reason rationally (i.e., according to the rules discovered, not made up, over 2 millenia ago)
2. lack of interest in, or respect for, rational thinking as a “good” in the first place.

Look, properly prepared argumentation is hard, hard work. That’s why you see so little of it. And it’s why, when it shows up, it’s refreshing, bracing, like a splash of cold water that shocks, but then invigorates. But nowadays, it’s as though many people think words and “arguments” are so many little puzzles to be pushed around, trying to make a prettier picture of the available pieces than the opponent. Playing Tetris with the truth, so to speak, hoping to ride it out when the pieces start piling up in one place or another, find a way to drop a piece elsewhere that will undercut and remove the impact of the other pieces, and end up with the high score.

Is truth a game? Is everything just about who wins? Is there a larger meaning, a “right” that will still be “right” a generation, two, a century, many centuries from now? And does it matter to us, right now, whether we find it? Because if it does, then it’s time for us to straighten up, buckle down, and think, not feel our way to truth. Because the truth, as you know, is out there.

UPDATE: BlogsforBush has some related thoughts.

Looks like the NY Times is beginning to cut itself loose from CBS on the forged memos.

A former National Guard commander who CBS News said had helped convince it of the authenticity of documents raising new questions about President Bush’s military service said on Saturday that he did not believe they were genuine.

…After seeing the documents on Friday, Mr. Hodges said, he concluded that they were falsified.

The article also carefully identifies Matley as “a handwriting specialist”, without tacking on the “document and” part. Of course, it then also pretends that all he did was verify that the signatures were consistent with known signatures of Colonel Killian.

The article also points out that Col. Staudt had retired from the guard more than a year before the date of the purported memos.

CBS’s response? Accuse Mr. Hodges of lying:

A CBS News spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, indicated that Mr. Hodges had changed his account.

“We believed General Hodges the first time we spoke to him,” Ms. Genelius said.

Anyway, my take is that the NYT has decided to cut CBS and the whole memo story loose, because they’re as convinced (privately) as everyone else, and they figure it’s better for CBS to swing alone.

Through the reminders and reminisces, articles, and memorials of pride, sadness and anger, the President has declared today Patriot Day. And the League of Extraordinarily Conservative Gentlemen says Happy 9/11? Blogs for Bush is running some remembrances. You can bet these Marines remember. And, of course, the Pundit has pix and thoughts worth having.

It will be entertaining to watch CBS attempt to wrap itself in the tattered remains of its dignity, after suffering a major blog storm over its pitiful handling of a clumsy forgery. An amusing sidenote will be to see whether Dan Rather will keep his job over this.

But perhaps more importantly, there is an in-depth tutorial going on (if you have enough clue to notice) in what not to do if you’re trying to create a believable forgery. And what that means is that the next one will be better: higher quality as a forgery, not as an ethical pursuit.

Of course, after the flame has burned out on this one, one might hope that the major media folks wouldn’t touch another one.

But then, you never know. We are dealing with a level of sky-is-falling panic on the part of the left that is without any precedent that I’m aware of. To a number of people in this country, the re-election of George W. Bush as president is something on the order of the Apocalypse.

Not in a Johnny Depp, move-to-Paris sort of way, but in an all-out we’re-all-gonna-die-so-might-as-well-try-anything wild-eyed frantic and violent desperation sort of way. The wounded, rabid, cornered animal sort of way. And it’s going to get worse - probably much worse - before November rolls around.

As Ed Gillespie said in this Chairman’s memo,

So brace yourselves. Any mention of John Kerry’s votes for higher taxes and against vital weapons programs will be met with the worst kind of personal attacks.

The hatred for George W. Bush is simply astonishing. It makes you wonder what sort of people could work up a frothing hatred so profound against a man that they claim to think is on the mental level of a child. The vitriol against him is agonized, the oozing pus of some kind of psychological wounds that it’s hard for me to fathom. I’m convinced that a lot of Bush-haters don’t enjoy bashing Bush, but are in intense emotional pain and turmoil over his very existence.

This is not a healthy thing. And it doesn’t lead to very healthy actions. It would be nice if we could seriously hope that a bit of forgery is the bottom of the barrel. But I fear that it’s the first layer of slime on the top, and the stench will just get worse before the Desperate Left has plumbed fully the depths of its capacity for dirty tricks.

UPDATE: Some related thoughts from Todd Gitlin.

The NY Times op-ed page today has a piece entitled “Unraveling Kerry’s Iraq Plan“. WizBang amusingly wonders whether it’s even worth it any more, but for you, because we’re buds and all, I’ll unravel the op-ed piece here. Let’s start with the first sentence:

Nobody gets angrier about Senator John Kerry’s complicated position on Iraq than his own supporters.

OK, an inauspicious beginning, that, since they misspell “hopelessly feckless flip-flopping in the political breeze” as “complicated position”. And as for people getting angry about Kerry’s “position” (again, the misspelling - this should be “positions”), it strains the bounds of credulity to suppose that liberals are more angry about Kerry’s pitiful pop-gun attacks on the President vis-a-vis Iraq than those of us who understand what’s at stake (freedom, liberty, peace, etc.) and think that Kerry is, once again, undermining America’s armed forces and putting them at greater risk by projecting weakness and promising to cut-and-run if elected. But let’s continue:

But for all of his current tough talk about Mr. Bush’s “wrong choices,” Mr. Kerry has blurred his message, particularly with his recent statement that he would have voted for the Senate’s war resolution even if he had known that Saddam Hussein had no significant cache of weapons of mass destruction.

“Blurred” - he’s “blurred” his message.

Translation: You see, my friends, Mr. Kerry has a message, a message of truth and goodness and joy and light. It’s just that, well, he’s blurred it, so the poor unwashed aren’t seeing it clearly yet. If they only could - well, then, everything would be going swimmingly, and he wouldn’t be losing in the polls to a simpleton.

Mr. Kerry also basically agrees with the president that it is now necessary to stay the course - something that will require a continued American military presence in Iraq for years.

Well, not so fast. It depends on which day you catch him on whether this is true. I didn’t have access to the actual day this was composed, but I assume it was on an “agrees with the president” day.

It’s no wonder the issue hasn’t provided the Democrats much traction.

And some of you people say the Times never gets anything right any more!

People who are unhappy with the way Iraq is going may be frustrated by Mr. Kerry, but they should direct their real anger at Mr. Bush.

Kerry agrees with Bush. He has blurred his message. Democrats have gotten no “traction” on the “issue” of Iraq (not a war; an “issue”). So people should be mad at Bush! See? If you just follow along carefully, it’s easy to keep up.

Still, voters need a much clearer sense of what Mr. Kerry would do differently.

As does Mr. Kerry.

Much of the Democrats’ counterpolicy for Iraq involves the conviction that as president, Mr. Kerry could still get the broad international support that Mr. Bush failed to rally before the invasion. They also argue that if the administration were willing to offer allies a broader share in reconstruction contracts, the allies would be more willing to help with things like providing financial aid, training security forces and guarding Iraq’s borders.

Translation: The Democrats believe, deep down in their souls, they just believe, that Kerry could get the French and Germans on board, and if you all believe too, and say, “I believe”, then Tinkerbell won’t die! And of course, the way to get the French and Germans on board is to bribe them with reconstruction contracts, so the Democrats will do that, too. It’s OK, of course, for the war to make lots of money for the French and the Germans. But God forbid that Halliburton should get within 10 sovereign states of the rebuilding effort.

None of that would address the need for more international combat troops. That train has left the station, and nations with the capacity to help will be unlikely to sign on for what looks like a very unpromising enterprise, no matter who is in the White House. Still, Mr. Kerry’s proposal is a sensible one.

Translation: Mr. Kerry’s proposal doesn’t even address the issue of more non-US troops, and we shouldn’t pretend that France and Germany are ever going to share the troop load in any meaningful way. It won’t work, it’s too late, and nobody else would get involved now, even for “reconstruction contracts”, and everybody knows it. Still, Mr. Kerry’s proposal is “sensible”.

Many of Mr. Kerry’s other ideas on Iraq are similar to the current administration’s, but he says he’d do a much better job [on lots of stuff].

Translation: Anything Bush can do, Kerry can do better.

Mr. Kerry’s advisers say it is critical to provide security for elections in the Sunni region - without saying that their candidate would go any farther than Mr. Bush in attempting to subdue rebellious towns like Falluja.

Translation: Bush must do more! He must do better! You must elect Kerry! He’ll won’t do any more than Bush!

One thing Mr. Kerry should certainly be stressing is the way Iraq has drained the nation’s attention away from imperative antiterrorism missions.

Ah, an important point here. It is, of course, de rigeur to treat the war in Iraq as having nothing to do with the war on terror. Terrorists are only in Afghanistan, and anyone who says otherwise is lying. Plus, the terrorists are winning in Afghanistan. To wit:

It is outrageous to hear Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney boasting about American successes in Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban is gaining a new foothold in the country, the warlords are in the ascendant and supporters of international terrorism are playing important parts in the American-supported government in Kabul.

Any evidence, please? Even a shred that indicates the “Taliban is gaining a new foothold” in Afghanistan? No, I didn’t think so. But still, it’s outrageous that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would “boast” about American successes there.

Mr. Kerry should also be pressing the Bush administration to get back into the game when it comes to pushing the Israelis and Palestinians to restart the peace process - a move he is unfortunately reluctant to make, given his anxieties about the Jewish vote in states like Florida.

Translation: It’s just critically important that we harass our only reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, into giving away more concessions to the terrorist leaders who’ve been inciting non-stop violence and agitation against them for 50 years, and who remain publicly sworn to the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the occupying Jews. But then you know how Kerry is - always pandering to the Jews in Florida.

If [Mr. Kerry] sincerely believes that other nations can be brought into the effort there, he should be much more forthright in explaining how he could do it.
…
Given the political corner Mr. Kerry has painted himself into, it’s not surprising that his advisers are urging him to start concentrating on the economy.

At least here I agree 143% with the op-ed. No translation needed here.

Interesting article here on a Seattle-based organization called Community Voice Mail that provides free voice mail to homeless and “phoneless” people.

“The intangible that Community Voice Mail provides is hope,” said national spokeswoman Patricia Bonnell. “No one e-mails you to tell you you’ve got the job. They call you. Without a phone number on your resume, you can’t get a job.”

Serving 37 cities in 19 states, CVM officials say they helped more than 47,000 people find jobs and housing last year. Helped by a $2.5 million grant from Cisco, they hope to expand into all 50 states.

Do I need to explain why I think this is so cool? OK, then. (1) Private organization (i.e., not a gov’t agency), (2) helping needy people solve their own problems and get jobs, housing, medical care, etc. That is, if you don’t want a job, aren’t looking for help, aren’t trying to get back on your feet, then who needs to call you? But if you are trying to get out of the hole, how do you do it without a phone? So CVM, a relatively small organization, is making a very large impact in a lot of people’s lives by focusing on solutions rather than the problems.

The NY Times is running an article by Richard Stevenson entitled Sifting for Truth as Bush and Kerry Wage a War of Words Over Iraq Policy. In it, the author does his very best to convince us that Bush is (*gasp*) framing Kerry’s words to make Kerry look bad! Can you imagine? The gall..

Stevenson writes:

Deconstructing Mr. Bush’s statement [that Kerry "woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position, etc."] on Tuesday shows that as has often been the case as the two sides fight over Iraq policy, there is a basis for his assertions about Mr. Kerry, but also that the president ignores statements by Mr. Kerry that flesh out his position in ways that make Mr. Bush’s claims less persuasive.

Note that last part: statements that “flesh out” Kerry’s position and make Bush’s claims “less persuasive”. Not statements that “correctly represent” Kerry’s position and show Bush’s claims to be “wrong”. A small point, perhaps, but it’s interesting that even in an article so painfully contorted as this one to demonstrate equivalence between the candidates on the “flip-flop” issue, Stevenson recognizes that there is an irreducible core of truth to Bush’s charges. But I digress.

Mr. Bush, as Democrats frequently point out, is also vulnerable to assertions of inconsistency on Iraq. They point out that his rationale for the war has shifted over time, from removing the threat posed by chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to breaking up a relationship between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein to freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant to planting the seeds of democracy in a region that is a breeding ground for Islamic radicalism.

So Kerry goes from supporting the war, to not supporting it, to supporting it again, to — which day is it? — oh, yes, Tuesday, so opposing it again. And this is the same as the fact that the Bush administration has actually introduced more than one good reason for us to have invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam.

Riiiiiiight. Well, to quote their guy, if this is the best Democrats have on the flip-flop issue, then Bring. It. On.

Kitty Kelley’s newest attack screed claims that Pres. Bush did coke at Camp David during his father’s term, and that Laura Bush tried marijuana in her youth, according to this Mirror article.

None of this is news, of course; most of the same trash was trotted out in the 2000 election, and it didn’t fly then either. What is of more interest to me is to see how the book is treated, compared to the reception of Unfit for Command.

Will we hear sonorous declarations about the “seriousness of the charges” demanding a “full investigation”? Will it be ignored for weeks by the NYT and her spawn, until they get the official “response” from the Bush campaign?

Will we see Bush’s lawyers frantically threatening bookstores, the publisher, TV stations, and anybody walking nearby in order to squelch its release?

You already know the answer. But I still have to point it out: let the storm of hypocrisy rage anew.

UPDATE: My Pet Jawa has a great intro to Kitty Kelley.

UPDATE:TotH to Protein Wisdom for hooking me up with more details on the Kitty.

Pres. Bush, speaking in Missouri today, said this about Kerry’s latest Iraq “nuance” (”wrong war, wrong place, etc.”):

“After voting for the war, but against funding it, after saying he would have voted for the war even knowing everything we know today, my opponent woke up this morning with new campaign advisers and yet another new position,” Bush said in prepared remarks released by his campaign.

“Suddenly he’s against it again,” Bush said. “No matter how many times Senator Kerry changes his mind, it was right for America and it’s right for America now that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is no longer in power.”

Lately, it’s getting hard to tell whether the Bush campaign is just swinging the bat well, or whether the high, hanging floaters the Kerry campaign is pitching them are just making them look great. But I must confess, it’s fun to watch.

What a potent brew! A new 527 organization MoveOnForAmerica (I love the name, btw; much teeth-gnashing will be going on across the aisle) has two commercials viewable on its site, one linking Kerry to Willie Horton and the other linking Kerry to Al Sharpton. The latter is vastly better than the former, and I fear that the weak Horton attempt will detract attention from the Sharpton one.

But I freely confess that I am confused about this (from the site):

MoveOnForAmerica.org was created due to the Bush campaign’s largely timid ads against Mr. Kerry, and will air this first ad starting Tuesday Sept. 7th in the Washington D.C. market and in key swing states beginning Monday September 13th. Since the organization is a “non-connected� committee, the ads will run non-stop until Election Day, and are not subject to the McCain-Feingold ban during the campaign’s final 60 days.

I was under the impression that even 527’s were prohibited from running ads directly advocating the election or defeat of a particular candidate within the magical 60-day window. Perhaps someone can explain this to me?

UPDATE: MoveOnAmerica.org was founded by Stephen Marks, a “DC-based GOP political consultant” (also from the site). According to this story,

Marks also worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Governors Association, and served as a press secretary to President Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in his unsuccessful 1994 campaign.

The article also explains the 527 ad ban/not-bad issue thus:

Under the new campaign finance law, a ban on political ads by outside groups that mention presidential, House and Senate candidates went into effect on Friday - 60 days before the Nov. 2 election.

But groups are exempt from this ban if they use only donations from individuals and do not receive support from corporations or unions.

So that’s that.

Moxie thinks so. And with good reason, considering Kerry’s political weakness on the War on Terror:

I’m not suggesting that domestic issues aren’t important but if we could ask the 3,000 people who perished in the attacks of 9-11 what they think the most important issue to consider when heading to the voting booth — do you think they’d say education, higher taxes, job creation or social services?

The inimitable Mark Steyn certainly thinks so:

Unnerved by sagging numbers, he decided to start the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign three days before Labor Day. The way things are going, Democrats seem likely to be launching the post-election catastrophic-defeat vicious-recriminations phase of the campaign round about Sept. 12.

And BlogsforBush points out that he’s acting just, well, loopy.

Captain Ed weighs in as well:

Make no mistake — despite the spin coming from the Kerry campaign, the Democrats are in full panic mode, and they don’t trust John Kerry to lead them out of it. That’s why the Clintonistas have taken command of the campaign. And if they don’t trust Kerry to lead them through hard times, why should we?