The Dish

NRO is beginning to realize Bush is losing. The second debate didn’t help much. Women were particularly unimpressed with Bush’s “Furious George” testosterone-flush. And now we hear he’s talking about putting his “foot on John Kerry’s throat.” Ugh.

TINY BONES: New evidence of Saddam’s monstrous regime: mass graves of Kurdish children. And then this kicker:

Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein’s regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part. The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death.

There you have European elite morality. Ignore mass graves of children in order to spare Saddam the death penalty. You couldn’t make this up, could you?

Cheney gets serious.

“I spent the last 8 months in London, working near Moorgate/Old Street. While I did wander into some virulent pockets of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism (Hello Whitechapel, Hello Finsbury Park), I saw nothing as universal as what was described in the article. True, they loathe Bush, but my experience with the mid-20’s set was nothing but a great time.
I don’t know much about the chattering classes, but the girls I met loved the American accent. Maybe I just got the ‘I’m from NYC’ exception.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

Larry Sabato explains why. Money quote:

We continue to believe that President Bush absolutely, positively MUST have at least a 51 percent approval rating in the nation as a whole to be reelected. Second, given our surmise that the undecideds/leaners will break somewhat more heavily for Kerry, we think Bush needs to have built a lead of at least several points overall to win narrowly. In other words, a polling tie probably results in Kerry’s election.

Then add in the massive new registration numbers in Democratic constituencies. Tonight’s debate is obviously critical for momentum in the home-stretch. Check in for post-debate reactions tonight.

Some of you scoffed at the notion that WMD equipment and materials might have been lost in Iraq under allied occupation. What WMDs? But the point is not that nuclear bombs have been looted – but that equipment that could be used in such efforts has been purloined. Money quote from the Guardian:

The inspectors have been virtually barred from Iraq by the US since before the war and Dr ElBaradei’s information on the missing equipment has come from satellite photography and other sources. Some of the contaminated equipment and material from Iraq is believed to have been located in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and the Netherlands. Iran is widely suspected of conducting a clandestine bomb project and might be keen to obtain some of the sophisticated engineering equipment on the loose in Iraq.

Iran? Yes, there are caveats in this story. But given the haphazard way we have occupied Iraq, and our apparent unconcern about WMD equipment being stolen or looted (“hey, stuff happens”), this surely needs a follow-up, no?

The corporate ransacking of the tax code – aided and betted by this president – continues apace. Both parties are responsible. But Republicans control the Congress and Bush has been more than an enabler.

Hard to interpret this news any other way, is it?

CANADIAN FREE SPEECH: Let me add my two cents of outrage to the way in which homophobes in Canada are denied freedom of speech. It’s horrifying. I’ve long believed and argued that the central aim of the gay rights movement should be to expand freedom – for everyone. Speech codes and “hate crime” laws restrict freedom – and gays should have nothing to do with them. We should be defending the right of the Boy Scouts to discriminate if they so wish, while making the argument that they shouldn’t. We should be defending the right of bigots to exclude gays from their St Patrick’s Day parade if they so wish – because their freedoms are our freedoms also. This is particularly true in First Amendment matters. For centuries, free speech was the only real freedom gays ever had. The idea that we should now be curtailing it for others – whatever their views – is a betrayal of our past, our integrity and our freedom.

EUROPE AND THE JEWS: A horrifying first-person account of anti-American and anti-Semitic vitriol in London.

BUSH AS A LIBERAL: Sky-high spending at home, utopian interventionism abroad. Paul Campos makes the case.

DIVORCE IS NEXT: Kudos for one evangelical for conceding that the battle to keep civil marriage an exclusively heterosexual privilege in the name of traditional values is hard to sustain given the high rate of straight divorce. So … tighten up divorce! Why not combine state constitutional amendments “defending” marriage with bans on no-fault divorce? Well, you know the answer.

Here’s a blogger who says he’s voting for Bush but rooting for Kerry. I understand his “riptide of conflicts.” I share them.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “This is in response to your recent ’email of the day.’ (‘Your posts on Kerry make me feel like I’m watching a bad Woody Allen movie, where some neurotic, forty-something Manhattanite is trying to convince herself that she really is in love with the off-putting proctologist who just proposed to her. For the love of God, please come to your senses.’) I would say that the writer only got it half right. As a twice-married woman who may be slightly neurotic (but no more than most people), I must admit that I would choose a stable, cautious, steady “proctologist” any day if I had just gone through a marriage with a husband who was verbally abusive, intolerant of criticism, had a hair-trigger temper, and spent like a drunken sailor. And I don’t think I’m alone on this one.”

THE ADVALANCHE: As you can see, the response to our blogads has been phenomenal. Over two dozen ads in a couple weeks, a revenue stream like never before, and we’ve only just begun! Yes, Mickey, I’m excitable at times. I have Irish blood in my veins. But I’ve waited over four years to break into a real business model, and now we have. I’m also proud to have ads from both George Soros and Ann Coulter on the same page. Says it all, doesn’t it? If you want to advertize to one of the smartest and most influential readerships on the web, contact Henry Copeland: henry@blogads.com.

Glenn Reynolds thinks that the attempt to prevent the Sinclair TV network from airing an anti-Kerry propaganda movie is a worrying encroachment on free speech. Fritz Schrank compares it to the anti-Bush propaganda movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” I’m not so sure. There is surely a distinction between a movie shown in theaters and a movie shown over the publicly regulated broadcast airwaves. Owners of TV stations do have some public obligations in the way that movie theater owners and distributors do not – especially in an election campaign. Here’s FCC commissioner, Michael Copps:

“This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology — whether liberal or conservative.-Some will undoubtedly question if this is appropriate stewardship of the public airwaves. This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline’s reading of our war dead in Iraq.-It is the same corporation that short-shrifts local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from hundreds of miles away.- It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the Federal Communications Commission while it allows media conglomerates to get even bigger.-Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous road.”

As I’ve said, it’s a free country, and my instincts are against any attempt to regulate this kind of thing. But the blatantly partisan nature of this move – and its dissemination of rank smears into millions of homes – is still troubling. If CBS announced they were pulling regular programming to air “Fahrenheit 9/11” a week before the election, do you think no conservatives would protest?