Duck Season

Made some predictions for Michele's contest, so might as well post them here as well:

Politics:
John Kerry will change his position on the Iraq war 3 more times. Dean will try to get votes from the South by saying he wants to appeal to people who eat roadkill. Dick Gephardt drops out after Barbara Streisand endorses "Dick Gebhardt". Wesley Clark will claim that he is a fan of all 30 NFL teams, as well as every team in the CFL, NFL Europe, the Arena League, and the USFL, until he is told they don't exist anymore. Everyone ignores Joe Lieberman, again. Al Sharpton credibly argues that he is the most qualify Democrat in the race.

Republicans stop trying to put Reagan on the dime after drug dealers start selling "Reagan bags".

Osama bin Laden is captured; Democrats complain that Bush hasn't found Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson's killer yet.

In a shocking move, Canada announces that it is closing its southern border after thousands of Dean voters follow their vow to move to Canada if Bush wins.

Sports:
The Red Sox will finally trade for A-Rod--after the 2004 season ends.

The NHL locks out its players; nobody notices, except for Canadians, who'll blame Bush.

Every team that wins the championship will complain about "getting no respect".

The person appearing on the cover of the next Madden game will be ... John Madden, after every football player in the league decline, citing the "Madden jinx".

Millions of men will go into a simultaneous daze when they watch the first week of Monday Night Football and are shocked the new female sideline reporter, Suzy Kolber, knows what she is talking about.

The Knicks, Bruins, Cardinals (football), and Brewers still suck.

Celebrity:
In a backlash against tidy, well-groomed men on Queer Eye, Saddam Hussein appears on People's list of the 50 most beautiful people of 2004.

Jessica Simpson joins Mensa after they lowered their standards, but they will still reject Ashton Kutcher.

Michael Jackson will join forces with Pat Buchanan, and they'll claim that Jacko was a victim of "reverse discrimination".

Matt Drudge will make thousands of people the first winners in their dead pool when Bill O'Reilly actually kills him.

Entertainment:
Following a Simpsons prediction, Fox will finally become a full-fledged hardcore pornography channel.

Economy goes into downward spiral--only one company makes its projected Christmas sales after every person in America buys the first season Seinfeld DVD in December and stays home watching it for the next 30 days.

Teens accuse MTV of "selling out" after they start playing actual music videos again.

A politician will be forced to resign when it is discovered that he owns a copy of the Dead or Alive beach volleyball video game.

Blogging:
Glenn Reynolds will say "Indeed" 847 times.

Andrew Sullivan will ask for money 847 times.

A left-wing blog will past Instapundit in the Ecosystem for a week when it promises to show a live ritual sacrifice to prevent Bush from winning.

After a post by Michele Catalano, there will be a topic in the Democratic Underground debating whether she is worse than Satan. Many people stick up for Satan.

There are no atheists on the campaign trail, apparently:

Presidential contender Howard B. Dean, who has said little about religion while campaigning except to emphasize the separation of church and state, described himself in an interview with the Globe as a committed believer in Jesus Christ and said he expects to increasingly include references to Jesus and God in his speeches as he stumps in the South.

Dean, 55, who practices Congregationalism but does not often attend church and whose wife and children are Jewish, explained the move as a desire to share his beliefs with audiences willing to listen. His comments came as a rival, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chastised other Democrats for forgetting ''that faith was central to our founding and remains central to our national purpose.''

The move is striking for a man who has steadfastly kept his personal life out of the campaign, rarely offering biographical information, much less his religious beliefs. But in the Globe interview, Dean said that Jesus was an important influence in his life and that he would probably share with some voters the model Jesus has served for him.

''Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised, people who were left behind,'' Dean said. ''He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything . . . He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.''

What's more laughable, Dean as a devout Christian or his argument that Jesus was a modern day liberal? Much like his comment about wanting the votes of people with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks, this ploy by Dean shows again that he's clueless in trying to appeal to Southern voters.

I wonder what Jesus thinks about bike paths ...

After reading Michael Silver's piece in Sports Illustrated (subscription req.) this week i'm on board the Manning for MVP band wagon. My favorite part from the piece:

Likewise, Manning says outsiders can be fooled by his own affable exterior. "If people think I'm a laid-back guy," he says, "that's their mistake." Yes, he makes an effort to be friendly, chatting up rookie free agents at minicamps and talking with well-wishers at airports and restaurants. But on the field Manning can be caustic and exacting. Tight end Marcus Pollard remembers questioning Manning on a play call during practice early in the quarterback's career. "Hey," Manning snapped, "if I tell you it's Easter, you'd better hunt for eggs."

John Derbyshire has some Chirstmas songs updated with politically correct lyrics.

Good thing that I don't have any of the least essential albums of 2003. And why the hell would anyone buy The Acoustic Coffee House Presents: A Female Tribute To Creed? Is it one of those experiments music execs roll out to test how crappy music have to be before we'd stop buying it? (Via Viking Pundit)

David Brooks has a good column in the Times yesterday on how the other Demcrats refuse to take on Howard Dean. Key graph:

While most Washington Democrats expect that Dean will get trounced in the fall, they are not trying to head off the catastrophe. Some fear a party feud more than a defeat. Some don't want to get on the bad side of the likely Democratic nominee. Some privately love what Dean says even as they fear he will lead to disaster. Most important, the Democratic establishment lacks the will to stand up for its beliefs.

There is now a Tony Blair for President website. They even got the citizenship thing taken care of: "In the world of political parody and symbolism, citizenship is not an issue." (Via Roger L. Simon)

John Kerry will borrow $6.4 million to spend on the primary so that he will go down in flames even more spectacularly. Why doesn't he just use his wife's money? The answer is that it would violate campaign finance laws, since the money is only in his wife's name, and it would be illegal for her to put the money in his name after he declared his candidacy. Of course, Kerry is actually spending his wife's money anyway, since after the election he will most likely use his wife's money to pay off the loan. (Unless he, um, wins the nomination, at which point the donations will be rolling in ... [Hey, stop laughing!--Ed.]) That would be illegal, but all he has to do is pay a fine for that, which he'll pay with, you guessed it, his wife's money. So a law that tries to prevent a candidate from spending the spouse's money will do nothing of the sort.

Check out OxBlog for ways you can contribute to Iraq and Afghanistan this holiday season.

Roger L. Simon has returned from France and has filed an entry on his thoughts on the current state of that nation.

Campus Press Notes links to a story which exemplifies my lack of sympathy for the "Woe be us" College Republican movement:

Brian Glotzbach, a Metro student, said he has seen the required books other students buy for classes. He said most of the books are by liberal authors.

"What Michael Moore has to do with an American history class is anyone's guess," he said. "My question is, where are the books by Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly?"

The evidence the students offered was anecdotal - with many admitting they had not taken their grievances up with their respective institutions.

There are real ideological problems on college campuses, this CPN entry proves just that, but the College Republicans inevitably wish to refute Michael Moore with Ann Coulter. (Also see this and this CPN entry for the University of Tennessee Issues Committee controversy.)

If the College Repub. crowd were to understand that neither Michael Moore nor Ann Coulter belong on a syllabus then they might earn my respect, but as things stand, they're more interested in complaining that they're annoyed by shrill liberal rhetoric, and that they instead would prefer to have their own shrill rhetoric repeated to themselves and their fellow students.

I'll 'just say no' to that.

A Gregg book review:

The Beast in the Garden by David Baron. In 1991, a mountain lion attacked and ate a 14-year-old boy jogging in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado. Five more people have since been killed in the United States and Canada by mountain lions, and dozens mauled. Baron explores what it means that lions are repopulating developed areas--with pollution declining, wilderness acreage expanding, and lion hunting forbidden, there will be ever-more bobcats, cougars, and panthers in American and Canadian exurban areas. Meanwhile, preservationists continue insisting that wolves and grizzlies be reintroduced into North America; the deep-green love of the grizzly seems to stem from the fact that it kills human beings, whom deep-greens detest. Lawsuits demanding the grizzly be reintroduced into the wild are at the moment a big political issue in the Rocky Mountain states and provinces.

Nature would be baffled by the notion that Homo sapiens preservationists want animals that attack people not only exempt from hunting but assisted in expanding their ranges and, inevitably, attacking more people. Nature operates on kill-or-be-killed; to nature, it would seem perfectly natural to gun down mountain lions and grizzlies on sight. The Beast in the Garden makes the case for reasonable preservation of predators, but also goes into detail on the sickening number of greener-than-thou types who, in the wake of the Colorado death, showed more sympathy for the lion than the boy. There was green fury that the lion was found and shot. And Baron reports that one of the boy's high-school teachers actually complained that the boy's body should not have been taken for burial, but left in the woods for the lion to finish. After all, it was only feeding.

Be sure to also check out this Gregg post on global warming theory and its supporters.

Guess who sold weapons to Iraq?

Link via Viking Pundit.

"I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid." -
Muammar Gaddafi, dictator of Libya, as reported by the Daily Telegraph.

via Michael Totten.


MORE BBC NONSENSE:

According to the Telegraph, the BBC has banned the use of the word “dictator” to describe Saddam Hussein. He was “endorsed” in a “referendum” where he received 100 percent of the “vote.” Therefore, the BBC says Saddam Hussein was “elected” and was not a dictator.

Unbelievable.

Listening to an Al Sharpton parody on Imus this morning, I realized that his candidacy now has more relevance than John Kerry's.

Howard Dean gets caught lying about his brother's military service. In response to a question on a survey sent to all the candidates from the Quad City Times, "My closest living relative in the armed services is...?", Dean answered "... my brother is a POW/MIA in Laos, but is almost certainly dead." His brother, however, was not in the military, but was a tourist when he was captured in Southeast China.

In what seems to be an emerging pattern, Dean blames the media, calling it "one of the greatest cheap shots I've ever seen in journalism" because the paper pointed out the discrepancy. This would usually hurt a candidate, but at this point I don't think anything could get his fans to reconsider their support.

This, of course, is the kind of thing that will hurt him in the general elections against Bush, and it further underscores his unelectability. His supporters however remain undeterred in their view that the American people would vote for Dean if only they could make us see how dumb and crooked Bush is. Jonathan Chait points us to the latest example, an article in the Village Voice arguing that Dean is electable. Their first argument that Dean is electable is, believe it not, that the foreign policy advisors he unveiled last week are centrists. That'll get out the vote! I follow politics more closely than 95% of the population, and I can't you who any of those people are. And I can't recall any of the names that were on Al Gore's or Bush's prospective foreign policy advisors list either. Chait says that the Dean advisors are more liberal than centrist, but I think he misses the point. Even if they were centrists, no one would know who they are, and it won't change the vote of anyone who perceive Dean to have dovish instincts because he has centrist advisors on his team.

Also, on a related note, I'd have to say that Chait's Dean-O-Phobe blog has been excellent so far.

Her family must be so proud:

... Nicole Richie — Paris Hilton's co-star in the Fox reality show "The Simple Life" — told Fox Sports Net's Bill Macdonald during a courtside interview that her favorite player was "Kobe — because I want him to have sex with me."

1) TMQ on psychics:

"[Sylvia] Browne foresees floating cars with atomic batteries; Atlantis reappearing in the year 2023 (good news for Aquaman, see below); the West Coast and Japan disappearing beneath the oceans beginning in 2026; "people will be able to simply 'walk out' of their bodies upon death;" the presidency will be abolished; world peace will arrive in the year 2050; criminals will be executed by "complete vaporization of the body;" friendly space aliens will arrive on Earth in the year 2010 to present us as a gift the anti-gravity devices used to construct the Pyramids. The friendly aliens do not, apparently, warn about the coming problems on the California coast and Japan. Also, according to Browne, the temporal universe will end in the year 2100. If time fails to end in the year 2100, don't call up Browne and demand your money back. She will have simply walked out of her body by then.

TMQ has always wondered about licensing exams for psychics. If you're really a psychic, wouldn't you just know the answers? In fact, you wouldn't need to see the questions. TMQ proposes that a psychic's licensing exam should simply be a blank sheet of paper, upon which the aspirant would answer the questions he or she knows would have been asked."

2) Michael Moore has posted letters from soldiers in Iraq on his website. They're exactly what you would expect from something on Moore's site, but since I have no reason to doubt their authenticity they merit a looksie.

3) Good things you can do for the troops - Donate through the WWE, and the Howard Dean campaign suggests that you send care packages through Any Soldier or help our heroes get home to their families by dontaing to HeroMiles.org.

Ben Domench has a lot of quotes from the last twelve months. These are my favorites:

"If Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people, Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded."
-Sen. John McCain on the latest round of celebrity anti-war protests

"I thought I was a nice guy, but I've come to realize I'm just a big douche bag."
-MTV's Carson Daly, in a Moment of Clarity

"Imagine the blackouts, there's no money, no leadership. It's pretty much like California."
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, on his upcoming trip to Iraq

"I made a bet with George Pataki on the outcome, and the winner gets Connecticut."
-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on the ALCS series

Old, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through an interview, especially if you're a football Hall-of-Famer:

Joe Namath's interview on ESPN was cut short when the Hall of Fame quarterback gave curious answers to Suzy Kolber's questions.

Namath was at the Patriots-Jets game Saturday night as the Jets celebrated their 40th anniversary team. Asked by Kolber, ESPN's sideline reporter, about what the team's struggles meant to him, Namath replied:

"I want to kiss you," as he leaned toward her.

He added that he believed the team would come back next season with Chad Pennington available to play quarterback all year. But those at ESPN had heard enough.

"Based on Joe's response to the second question, we concluded the interview expeditiously," the network said in a statement Sunday. "While Joe made some relevant football points, had we known what was to come, of course, we would not have conducted the interview."

Kolber responded to Namath's comments by saying "Thanks, Joe. A huge compliment."

Namath capped off the interview by repeating: "I want to kiss you." before Kolber turned things back over to the announcers in the booth.

The Jets said they would have no comment.

Eleanor Clift repeats the following dubious statistic:

The loss of 3 million jobs is a potent political issue. Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to register a NEGATIVE job growth.

This is true only if Bush is not re-elected. Since Hoover, every president has had positive job growth from the beginning to the end of his tenure. However, some of them had negative growth in their first term as president, but was re-elected anyway. So if Bush is re-elected and experiences positive job growth such that at the end of 2008 the numbers are higher than 2000, the statistic about his having negative growth will be false.

(Via the Corner)

If the critics are right that the capture of Saddam has not made the U.S. any safer, and has made the situation in Iraq worse, then wouldn't it follow that we shouldn't have bothered in the previous months trying to find him? And wouldn't this have been true before he was captured? So why didn't any of the nattering nabobs of negativism say that we shouldn't have been wasting our time looking for Saddam before we found him? Did this unconventional wisdom become obvious to them only after? Also, wouldn't it logically follow that we should just let Saddam go back into hiding, since that would presumably make Iraq safer?