Newspaper Endorsements
Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher is keeping meticulous count of newspaper editorial-board presidential endorsements. He reports, as of yesterday, that "Kerry now leads in endorsements 142 to 123 and in the circulation of those papers (roughly 17.5 million to 11.5 million)."
A total of 37 newspapers that endorsed Bush in 2000 have switched to Kerry, compared to six papers that endorsed Gore and switched to Bush.
And Howard Kurtz writes in The Washington Post today: "Nine more papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, abandoned Bush after four years but did not support the Massachusetts senator. Instead, these papers -- the Detroit News, the Tampa Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune among them -- threw up their collective hands and made no endorsement."
Kurtz writes that "the Bush defections may reflect a degree of disillusionment with the president, at least among opinion leaders, principally on Iraq but on domestic issues, as well."
The switching -- and, as Kurtz writes, disillusionment -- in those papers is something you don't hear much of in the modern media world, saturated with bickering partisans who display no ambivalence or hesitation about their positions.
Tehran endorses Bush for president
I laughed out loud at this.
Historically, Democrats have harmed Iran more than Republicans, said Hasan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security decision-making body.
There will be civil war. If not here;
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
then here;
With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, an unprecedented number of lawsuits challenging basic election rules are pending in many of the battleground states. Both sides are in the final stages of training thousands of lawyers who will descend on the polls on Nov. 2 to watch for voter fraud or intimidation.
or possibly here;
The head of the Israel Defense Forces' manpower division, Major General Elazar Stern, will meet Wednesday with leaders of hesder yeshivas - which combine Torah studies with IDF service - to discuss recent calls by rabbis urging religious soldiers to refuse to evacuate settlements under the disengagement plan.
the debates and a well timed offensive
Timing is everything.
Cameras were rolling when Jessica Lynch was 'rescued' from an Iraq hospital. The operation was carefully planned and executed and it was a total sham.
Initially a hero was created, not just as personified by the rescued soldier, but also in the form of the American GI being all that he can be. The spin worked for a while, until reality sideswiped the fiction of the event. There was no enemy left to rescue Lynch from, aside from the doctors that were treating her, and the military knew it.
ah, well.
Yesterday, as the Pres. and his rival were debating each other, US and Iraqi troops were hammering Samarra, a rebel stronghold to the north of Baghdad. Me thinks this was a calculated move akin to the rescue of Lynch. That the assault has taken place now is no surprise to me.
The cable networks have focused today as much on events in Samarra as on the debates from last evening. A high bodycount works well for the administration (even though the Pentagon doesn't do body counts, or atleast they didn't for most of the war) and further distracts Americans from reality.
If the assault was motivated politically, then a calculation would have been made for success. I would imagine that in that calculation it was understood that the margin for error was small and the chances of success large. In other words, the assault was pretty much guaranteed to be successful in order to show progress, in the form of dead insurgents, and that the administration had a plan to win the war.
I expect another major assault the day of the next debate.
