BeldarBlog

Beldar's ballot

Another thing cheered me up tonight.  Before going to see my daughter's play, I stopped by an early voting location and cast my ballot for the November 2nd election.

I'm glad I allowed plenty of time, because even around 6:00 pm on a Saturday night after a brief rainstorm, there was a fifteen minute line.  The early voting location was fully staffed — same computerized voting system we've been using for a while now in Harris County, and there were no glitches with either the equipment or the staff, there were just lots of people out voting!

I saw nothing remotely resembling any intimidation from either major party or supporters of any candidate.  I saw voters of all ages, races, and apparent social classes — Houston's an incredibly diverse city, and you could see it at this polling place. 

Texas isn't on anyone's list of swing states, of course, and there weren't even that many contested down-ballot races, nor any real blockbuster ballot propositions or amendments.  I think the folks who were there were mostly there to send a message — whether that message be pro- or anti-Dubya, pro- or anti-Kerry — about the top of the ticket, even from a state whose electoral votes are as close to "in the bag" as either candidate can count upon.  This is a good thing — and I'll continue to believe it's a good thing even if my preferred candidate loses.

Dubya has my vote, and I feel good about that.

Sarah's play

As predicted, I'm in a much better mood after watching my oldest daughter, Sarah (age 13), in her middle school drama class play tonight.

The play was "The Great Ghost Chase" — book by Tim Kelly, music & lyrics by Bill Francoer.  It's a "Ghostbusters Visit the Funny Farm"-type spoof — perfect for a school production because there are lots of speaking parts.  Anyway, here's Sarah (in the yellow tee and black leotard, if you can't guess from the proud-pappa photo composition):

I'm a lucky and very, very proud father.

Technical blegs

For some reason that I can't figure out, I can never access James Lileks' excellent weblog, The Bleat, from my home PCs. 

I always get "The page cannot be displayed.  The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings." I don't seem to have that problem with any other URLs.  I don't have any website blocking software on my PCs, and although the DSL router that I use to network my two PCs has the ability to block designated URLs, I haven't designated any.  A half-hour spent on the phone with my ISP's technical assistance folks was completely unproductive (ending up, predictably, with "perhaps you need to reinstall your operating system").  I can access Lileks' URL if I go through anonymizer.com, but that's a pain.  I'm using Internet Explorer 6.0 and Windows ME (yucky, I know). Any hints from my more technically gifted readers on how I might fix this?

One of my readers also emailed me some time ago to say my RSS feed isn't working.  I have that option turned on via TypePad, but don't use an aggregator myself, and I'm not even sure how to see whether this is working or not.  Can anyone confirm whether this is a problem or not, and if so, suggest how to fix it?

Update (Sun Oct 24 @ 1:30am):   I figured some of y'all would be able to shed light on the subject!  Much thanks to those who've confirmed that my RSS feed is working, and to all those who've made suggestions in emails or comments below about the Lileks problem.  I've tried several of the proposed solutions with no success; and (I shoulda thought of this myself ) I've tried pinging and trace-routing to his server from a DOS window, but timed out.  So I think it's an ISP issue, rather than something unique to my home PCs or DSL router or browser, and I've emailed Lileks' ISP with an inquiry.  I'll update here when and if I get a reply.  (I don't intend to trouble Lileks himself about it — it'd probably generate another one of those service calls he's always writing about, and I'd rather he focus his attention on his upcoming Senate campaign.)

Update (Sun Oct 24 @ 1:35pm):  Impressive response time from EV1.net's tech support guy — two emails in twelve hours on a weekend.  From the first:

The IP range 70.241.70.x/xx is not blocked in our network. Please provide the following so that we may investigate this issue further.

1. A trace route from your IP to the server you cannot reach
2. A trace route from your IP to a neighboring IP on the same subnet as the server you cannot reach
3. A trace route from your IP to mail.ev1.net

From the second, after I'd complied:

The last hop in your trace is the switch that this server is operating on. This would indicate that you are probably being blocked by the server. Please contact the webmaster of the site you are trying to reach for more information.

Since I've never bombarded Lileks with emails, nor written anti-Hummel screeds, I'm reluctant to believe that he's blocked my IP address on purpose.  Alas, though, it seems I've no choice but to trouble the candidate himself.

Frustrations of blogging

Yesterday and this morning have been frustrating.

• For pointing out that Sen. Kerry was trivializing the ethical and moral issues inherent in human embryo stem cell research (by comparing Dubya's opposition to federal funding of such research that would destroy additional embryos to him opposing research on cars or electricity), I was pulled into a debate with a 21-year-old hard-left blogger over whether I'm a likely fertility clinic bomber.
• For republishing a Reuters photograph of a little girl appearing at a campaign rally with Sen. Kerry, I've been accused of "encouraging others to take jabs at an innocent little girl."  (I've encouraged no such thing, nor have my commenters done so.  And I certainly agree that she's an adorable little girl, and I neither fault her nor her mom for permitting her picture to be taken at the rally.  Michaela rools, even if I don't think her candidate of choice does.)
• Folks over at the Democratic Underground are speculating that my September 28th post entitled "John Kerry: Lapsed lawyer of little legal luster" is somehow the basis for a rumored breaking story in Monday's WaTimes on Sen. Kerry.  (I'd be very surprised if this were true.  Kerry's career as a lawyer is awfully unimpressive, and in particular he's consistently exaggerated his extremely thin credentials as a former prosecutor, but I don't think this is an "October Surprise" by anyone's account.)
• And my dog Weiss' latest online photo album, after being linked by Jonah Goldberg's dog Cosmo on The Corner, got about 20k more page views yesterday than my blog.  Weiss insists that this is because she has better manners and is smarter; perhaps she's right.  But congrats, Weiss, on your Corner-launch!  (Current projected bandwidth usage for my blog and photo albums for October is 1231.72% over my quota — but bless their hearts, TypePad still isn't charging for bandwidth overages.)

Eventually every blogger has days like that.  One learns to shrug it off.  Tonight I'm off to watch my oldest daughter in her middle school drama class musical, which I'm pretty sure will restore my good humor and perspective.

The real dirt on John Kerry and his family

People just don't understand the moral danger we're in from this election.  You need to know the real dirt about John Kerry and his family, before you vote.  I've got the links to back up each of these allegations, or at least to point you in the right direction.

Did you know, for instance, that while aboard his Swift Boat, with the American flag streaming from its stern, Kerry regularly engaged in piscatory activities with several of his crewmen — at the same time?  In fact, Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty (at page 200) reveals that Kerry regularly permitted such activities to be conducted with exploding grenades!  And they followed these activities with repeated gustatory rituals involving hot coals burned in a small grill.  They actually bragged about this to crews from other boats.

This from a self-described former alter boy — who, it's rumored, enthusiatically engaged in proselytism of homo sapiens, both while on and off of church grounds. And there are credible rumors that as a boy he took advantage of his family's foreign travels to become a practicing philatelist, too.  I suppose that made his parents proud, do you think?

Why, did you know at Boston College Law School, John Kerry openly matriculated with each and every one of the young women students who began classes there at the same time he did?  He did so publicly, apparently without any shame, and without getting their permission first or apologizing afterwards — even though he was already married himself, and some of them were too!

Unfortunately, this runs through the whole Kerry family.  Remember that "integrity, integrity, integrity" line from the debate?  What would you think if you knew that John Kerry's mother was hospitalized at the time from complications related to her diagnosed status as a sexagenarian?

What's more, his daughter Alex is a self-admitted practicing thespian, and has even accepted money for public performances of such acts!  Indeed, you can purchase videos of her public exhibitions of thespianism on certain internet websites, which modesty forbids me to link.

Shockingly, Kerry and his wife regularly permit, even encourage, their male and female children to masticate in each other's presence at the dinner table!  Some of the mastication is rumored to involve Heinz Ketchup, believe it or not.  Apparently, Sen. Kerry and Ms. Heinz-Kerry think these practices are "safe" and "normal" so long as the children use condiments. 

Finally, the entire family have been shamelessly taking part together in hortatory activities, all over the campaign trail!  In fact, if you look closely at film clips from the campaign, you can see that Sen. Kerry engaged in what has presumably been consensual osculation with not only his wife, but also his adult daughters, repeatedly and on a public stage. He makes this a regular part of his campaign appearances, and the audiences all cheer!  Whether Sen. Kerry's cheeky display of osculation with First Lady Laura Bush's most accessible integumentary organ after each of the debates was consensual or not, I suppose we'd have to ask her.  At least, unlike Al Gore's activities with his own wife in the 2000 campaign, Sen. Kerry hasn't been observed in lingual osculation involving his own wife's, or any other woman's, sulcus terminalis or oropharynx.  But who's to say that won't happen the next time they're on stage?

Sen. Kerry's campaign has yet to deny any of these shocking allegations.  This is, as we say in the blogosphere, developing ....

(Hat-tip to my reader Steve T. and to Bill Garvin, with apologies to George Smathers.)

Kurtz on the THK kurfluffles

WaPo's Howard Kurtz has a funny, link-filled article on Theresa Heinz-Kerry's (or does she prefer the unhyphenated version?) comments about First Lady Laura Bush, in which he reports that NPR has video footage of the gaffe, and then muses:

We don't really vote for first lady. She kind of comes with the package. But if the candidates are going to have their wives out there campaigning for them, I guess they have to take their lumps when the spouse goes off message.

Well, yes.  So it has been back to FDR's days and well beyond.  Mr. Kurtz wonders whether "this more important than, oh, I don't know, American soldiers dying in Iraq?"  Well, no; of course not.  But there's bandwidth and column space and airtime enough to discuss all of these things, and more; Mr. Kurtz found space in his WaPo article to mention Sen. Kerry's geese, for instance, just as there was time at the DNC for Licorice the Unlucky Hamster and at the RNC for the Bush twins' riff on growing up with Dubya.

And certainly we all need some comic relief, some distraction from more weighty issues.  In fact, I'd one-up TRN's Noam Scheiber, as linked from Mr. Kurtz's article, and suggest that the most attractive Kerry counterspin (to be made by suitably distanced proxies, and leaked only to Judith Miller-types who'd go to jail before breaching their promises of confidentiality) would be to argue that Ms. Heinz-Kerry would be a formidable asset in a Kerry presidency precisely because of the comic relief she'd offer for the next four years.  Alas, from the look on Ms. Heinz-Kerry's face after her husband's debate joke at her expense about marrying up, I suspect Judith Miller would end up preferring a jail cell to facing THK's prolonged wrath, and Sen. Kerry's probably too tall to fit comfortably on any of the couches in the White House anyway.

NYT review of "Stolen Honor"

Like many others (e.g., InstaPundit, Just One Minute, Smash, and PrestoPundit), I was surprised to see this generally sympathetic review of "Stolen Honor" in the NYT — especially this beginning statement:

"Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the highly contested anti-Kerry documentary, should not be shown by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. It should be shown in its entirety on all the networks, cable stations and on public television.

I'm less surprised after pondering it a bit, however.  The rebound risks from attacking ex-POWs are frankly higher than from attacking the Swiftees who've joined the SwiftVets' campaign, and the folks who've tried — with comments to the effect of, "Well, those POWs weren't really tortured all that much" or "there really were atrocities committed by the American military in Vietnam" — have done Sen. Kerry's campaign no favors.  This NYT review is consistent with the smarter pro-Kerry strategy of saying, in effect, "Well sure the ex-POWs are miffed, and they have understandable hard feelings about the way the American public treated them upon their return,  but that's an old grudge that really doesn't have much to do with Kerry's current fitness to be President."

I'm still miffed, however, that after finally admitting its repeated errors in describing Kerry as having met with "both sides" in Paris, the NYT continues to repeat its separate mistake about whether his trip was secret:

The imagery is crude, but powerful: each mention of Mr. Kerry's early 1970's meeting with North Vietnamese government officials in Paris is illustrated with an old black-and-white still shot of the Arc de Triomphe, an image that to many viewers evokes the Nazi occupation of Paris. The Eiffel Tower would have been more neutral, but the film is not: it insists that Mr. Kerry "met secretly in an undisclosed location with a top enemy diplomat." Actually, Mr. Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

The clear inference here is that Kerry was forthright about revealing the details of his Paris trip.  Yet   he's been anything but.  As I've previously written, Kerry's first trip to Paris to meet with the enemy was in May 1970, immediately after his marriage.  His Fulbright Committee testimony didn't come until almost a year later, in April 1971.  If there's any record of Kerry revealing that trip to Paris to the public prior to his Fulbright Committee testimony, I haven't seen it. 

Rather, as far as I can tell — and I'd welcome any further or contrary information, with links, from any of my readers — the May 1970 trip was a secret at the time it was made and for almost a year afterwards; and later, it was pointedly left out of both Brinkley's biography and the Kranish et al. biography, as well as Kerry's campaign website.  By April 1971, Kerry and the VVAW certainly knew they were under investigation by the FBI, according to rabidly pro-Kerry and pro-protest movement historian Gerald Nicosia.  My strong hunch is that Kerry mentioned it in his Fulbright Committee testimony because he expected details to be leaked by the Nixon administration to try to discredit him, and decided — to use a trial lawyer metaphor — to pull the teeth on this monster himself, before it bit him.

And of course, the NYT still ignores Nicosia's claim (based on FBI records released on the basis of Nicosia's Freedom of Information Act request) that Kerry made at least one other trip to Paris to meet with the enemy.  The dates and details of that trip, if Nicosia's right, continue to be secret — which I continue to find outrageous.

Love ya 'Stros!

First things first:  Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals — a classy, gutsy team with first-rate fans and management that certainly deserves to represent the NL in the Series, based both on its season-long and playoff series performances.  They've proved themselves a better team, if by a razor-thin margin, than the very fine team the Astros had turned into by season's end.  And as a devoted National League guy, I'll be rootin' for St. Louis over the BoSox.

But now my main point:  Damn, I'm proud of my hometown team!  Proud fit ta bust, yessir. 

You've provided entertainment.  You've provided thrills.  You've been great role models as sportsmen for hundreds of thousands of kids — four of whom are mine.  No fan has the right to expect a world championship, ever, but everything which any fan could legitimately expect short of that, you've given the City of Houston, and your fans elsewhere in Texas and beyond, this year.

Rocket:  I've been watching you since you were at UT.  You're a genuine sports hero for the ages, and such a Texan.  Whether you hang it up or come back, we Houstonians, we Longhorns, we fellow Texans are and will always be grateful that you came out of retirement for this season.  Hook 'em!

To Phil Garner and every other man jack on the team and in the organization, from the batboys up to Drayton:  There's no shame in this loss.  Nobody doubts that you guys were entitled to be there in Game 7.  And nobody doubts that the Astros will in due course play in the Series, but we'll be with you through thick and thin until then.

No word whether the goose was in a loincloth

John Kerry went hunting.  "Now here's where the story gets strange, as only a John Kerry story can get," explains Radio Blogger, and he's right.

Embryos and buggy whips

Here's Sen. Kerry today (hat-tip to K-Lo from The Corner):

Kerry, appearing with Dana Reeve, widow of the "Superman" actor, portrayed the Republican president as out of touch. He suggested Bush would have sided "with the candle lobby against electricity, the buggy makers against the cars and the typewriter companies against computers."

But let's pick a more apt analogy.  Dubya would have sided with the Gypsies, the mentally retarded, and the Jews against Hitler's sterilization and genocide.  Whatever one thinks of abortion, whenever one thinks meaningful human life begins, it's ugly — outrageous — to compare human embryos to typewriters and buggy whips.

----------------

Update (Fri Oct 22 @ 2:00am):  Since he didn't bother to send a trackback ping, I'll note here that Jesse Taylor of Pandagon (BA in Religion from Swarthmore, per his bio) saw fit to link this post with one entitled "The Hollow Echo of Jackboots."  I think I'm supposed to be the one in jackboots; or maybe it's Alan Keyes, it's kind of hard to tell.  We're apparently both part of "these people" who are ready to start bombing fertility clinics.

In addition to Charles Krauthammer's recent WaPo op-ed (discussed and linked below in a fine comment from Va Jim), folks interested in the science and politics of this would be well served to read James Kelly's article on NRO.

Update (Fri Oct 22 @ 3:20am): Prompted by a civil email from one of the commenters on the Pandagon post, I should make clear that I'm not arguing that Sen. Kerry, or anyone else who supports human embryonic stem cell research, is a Nazi or comparable to that hated regime.  That's a label that I apply rarely if ever.  Rather, people of good faith and decency can and do have differing moral and ethical perspectives on these issues.  Some of those with strongly held, sincere positions believe that large-scale destruction of human embryos for purposes of this research would be tantamount to genocide.  I frankly don't intend to get into a lengthy debate about my own views on that subject, and I'm not trying to persuade anyone else to take one side or the other.  Rather, my objection is to Sen. Kerry mocking President Bush's position for partisan gain, and trivializing the issue by ignoring the moral and ethical dimensions of this topic. 

Update (Fri Oct 22 @ 8:50am):  Commenter Sid the Fish on Pandagon (whose own blog post on the subject is linked in a trackback below) provides this link to the prepared text of Sen. Kerry's speech from his website, which I will concede, as he argues, discusses much more than human embryonic stem cell research.  As printed there, I will also concede that the buggy/electricity analogy is far less offensive (if of equally questionable factual validity, since it there appears to claim that Pres. Bush is against any and all scientific progress in practically any field). 

Moreover, one might legitimately wonder if the text of the speech as printed on the Kerry campaign's website actually corresponded to the speech as given.  Perhaps Reuters, or the similar NPR report on Sen. Kerry's speech that I heard this morning, which also discussed only stem cell research, are spinning Sen. Kerry's spoken words to make him look bad.  But Sen. Kerry's been known to expand and wander from his printed text on occasion, and in fact seems to do so more often than not.

Finally, Mr. Taylor has edited his original post to say that he only fears fertility clinic bombings by those with a "slightly more extreme version of [the] view" he attributes to me and Mr. Keyes.  (I actually have no clue what Mr. Keyes' views are.)  In an update to the post, however, he continues to argue that my original post here and comments on Pandagon represent the "utter height of irresponsibility and demagoguery," which makes me wonder what the "slightly more extreme version" might be.  Ah, well — the moral I take from the exchange is, once again, not to bother arguing with such folks on their own turf.