Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is a bigger threat to the election of a Democratic president in 2004 than Ralph Nader was in 2000. The Dean machine rolls on toward snagging the Democratic presidential nomination, but in national polls in which he is matched up against "President" Bush, Dean is lucky to get 40 percent. In the most recent such poll by CBS News, Dean got 35 percent to Bush's 55 percent and independents preferred Bush to Dean by two to one. Lemmings for Dean I have this recurring waking nightmare where millions of zombies try to drag me, kicking and screaming, off a cliff with them, taking all of us to our deaths. No, wait; it isn't a nightmare -- it's Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Where to begin with the problems with Howard? The fact that his intention to keep 145 boxes of official records from his governorship of Vermont sealed for 10 years rivals the Bush regime's suppression of information? The fact that he criticized the Bush regime for refusing to release details of its energy policy task force's secret deliberations, but as governor of Vermont he had a similar energy policy task force that met in secret and he refused to release details of its deliberations? (You'd want your records sealed for 10 years, too.) How about this one? Dean calls himself a liberal yet he supports the death penalty, and in one of the biggest flip-flops so far in the Democratic primary season, a New Hampshire newspaper on Friday quoted Dean as saying of Osama bin Laden: "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials." (I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. Everyone, even people like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, has the right to a fair trial.) But after Dean took heat for the quote in the New Hampshire newspaper story, falsely accused of being an Osama lover, on Friday he told The Associated Press of Osama, "As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law. But as an American, I want to make sure he gets the death penalty he deserves." So, apparently within a 24-hour period, Dean went from the position that Osama bin Laden deserves a fair trial to the position of off with Osama's head. (I oppose the death penalty because I never understood the "logic" of killing someone to demonstrate that killing people is wrong. But that's another blog piece.) Perhaps the worst aspect of Dean and his millions of lemmings is their apparent belief that, although presidential primary battles are almost always bloody, Dean's eight Democratic rivals should just concede to Dean already. The Associated Press recently reported: Infighting between Howard Dean and some of his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination has gotten so nasty of late that Dean called on party chairman Terry McAuliffe to step in and tone things down. In the process, Dean managed to insult McAuliffe. ...In complaining over the weekend about the attacks, Dean wound up criticizing McAuliffe when he said a strong party leader would intervene to keep him from getting beat up. Criticism of Dean has intensified as he has risen in the polls and as he continues to make statements he later has to clarify. "If we had strong leadership in the Democratic Party, it would be calling the other candidates and saying somebody has to win here," Dean said Sunday. "If (former Democratic National Committee head) Ron Brown were chairman, this wouldn't be happening." Yeah, I can see a President Dean in very touchy diplomatic situations. How do you think a President Dean might have handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance? Democrat George McGovern's disastrous candidacy in 1972 aside, Dean and his lemmings seem to have little to no sense of even fairly recent history. (The comparison of Dean to McGovern seems pretty appropriate to me, but of course Dean's lemmings deride it.) The AP reminds us that "George H.W. Bush, father of the president, gave Democrats one of their best attack lines against Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he derided Reagan's monetary policies as 'voodoo economics'" -- and that Dean, who now is crying foul, earlier in his campaign publicly called Democrats with whom he disagrees "cockroaches" and "prostitutes." (I'm not saying that they're not; I'm saying that crybaby Dean can dish it out but can't take it.) This is what primary seasons are supposed to be: political brawls. Dean and his zombies don't seem to believe that Dean should have to earn the crown, to fight for it, but should be handed the crown on a plump velvet pillow in The Name of Democratic Unity. Things get rough and Dean whines that the party chairman isn't protecting him from his opponents. (This man wants to be president?) Dean, in what we are quickly learning is typical Dean fashion, also warned -- threatened? -- on Sunday that if he doesn't get the Democratic presidential nomination, the majority of his spurned supporters will pick up their marbles and go home. "If I don't win the nomination, where do you think those million and a half people, half a million on the Internet, where do you think they're going to go?" The Associated Press quoted him as having said. "I don't know where they're going to go. They're certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician." I confess that I don't understand the Dean juggernaut. Even otherwise intelligent people such as Al Gore, Molly Ivins, Ted Rall and Tom Tomorrow have explicitly or implicitly endorsed Dean in the face of the readily available evidence that he has a snowball's chance in hell of beating Bush. The only reason I can see anyone supporting Dean is that everyone loves a winner and that no one wants to be on a losing team. Team Dean sure looks like the winning team: That Dean has raised more money than his eight rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination is indisputable, as is the fact that among his eight rivals he polls best among Democratic voters. That Team Dean can beat Team Bush in November 2004, however, is very disputable. The latest Bush-vs.-Dean national poll numbers aren't pretty, as these graphs from pollingreport.com, an independent compendium of polls, graphically illustrate:           CBS News Poll. Dec. 21-22, 2003. N=685 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 4 (total sample). . "If the 2004 presidential election were being held today, do you think you would probably vote for George W. Bush or probably vote for the Democratic candidate?" Bush Democrat Can't Say Until Chosen (vol.) None/ Won't Vote (vol.) Don't Know % % % % % 12/21-22/03 49 40 6 1 4 . "If the 2004 presidential election were being held today, and the candidates were George W. Bush, the Republican, and Howard Dean, the Democrat, do you think you would vote for George W. Bush or Howard Dean?" George W. Bush Howard Dean Depends (vol.) None/ Won't Vote (vol.) Don't Know % % % % % ALL 55 35 3 1 6 Republicans 91 3 2 0 4 Democrats 20 70 2 1 7 Independents 57 28 3 1 11   In the latest Bush-vs.-Dean national poll by CBS News, Bush trounces Dean by 20 percentage points, and independents, an important voting bloc, prefer Bush over Dean by two to one. In other recent Bush-vs.-Dean national polls, Dean fares no better than 40 percent against Bush, who in most of these polls garners 50-something percent. John Kerry and Wesley Clark fare better against Bush in the polls than does Dean, but Bush's generic Democratic opponent, whoever it turns out to be, is about 10 percent behind Bush in most of the recent national polls that pit Bush against his generic Democratic opponent. So the Democrats need to field the strongest candidate they can against George W. Bush, and the polls indicate that it ain't Howard Dean. The Deanies would say that the national Bush-vs.-Dean polls don't matter (because Dean fares so poorly in them), but these polls, which show a clear pattern of Bush beating Dean's ass by a wide margin, do matter. They measure American public opinion, which does not favor Howard Dean. True, things could change significantly in the first 10 months of 2004, but, barring freakish events, of course, I don't see things changing all that much. The Bush regime will continue to play the 9/11 card over and over and over again. Dean's facade will continue to crack under the weight of the spate of unflattering news stories about him, which are just emerging and are the result of the intensifying scrutiny of him as the Democratic frontrunner. I don't see what Team Dean could do to reverse the American voters' clear choice of Bush over Dean even in the 10 months that it has between now and Nov. 2, 2004. I hope that as the primaries and caucuses approach, voters will keep their eye on the prize, which isn't winning the Democratic presidential nomination, but is ending the Bush regime's hostile occupation of the White House. That is a mission that Howard Dean, even with his legions of lemmings, cannot accomplish.        9:03:59 PM    Comments []

Wherein I rant and rave that the Salon weblog rankings system is unfair. Nothing to see here. Really. Move along. I don't write much about blogging because that's an insider thing, but I can't help but note how unfair the Salon weblog rankings system is. (I'm not especially picking on the Salon weblogs; other weblog ranking systems might work identically, but I am familiar only with Salon weblogs, so that's what I'm bitching about.) Take my e-friend and fellow Salon blogger Shane, for instance, whose weblog is "Fear This Factor" (like he needs the link so that he can get even more hits!). I'm not especially picking on Shane; I'm just using him as an example, although it will probably piss him off. A while back Shane expanded the title of his blog to "Fear This Factor - On the South Beach Diet" (Shane is on the diet and is sharing his progress with us). Recently Shane remarked in an e-mail to me that he was surprised how fast he is shooting up in the Salon weblog rankings. I had figured well, he has a pretty good weblog. I don't agree with everything he says in his blog and I notice any typo or misspelling because I'm anal retentive about that, but he's doing something right because he keeps me coming back. I was happy to see him climb in the rankings, as long as he kept a comfortable distance below my ranking. (Hey, it's honest.) But today I discovered that Shane, who was several notches below me in the rankings just a week or two or three ago, now sits at No. 61 after he displaced me, apparently, from No. 64, where I had sat for a little while, to No. 65. So, on a hunch, I looked at Shane's hits and discovered that today alone he has gotten more than 300 hits from various search engines for "South Beach Diet." (I stopped adding up the number of Shane's "South Beach Diet" hits on my computer's calculator after about 300 of them.) Now, I like Shane's weblog, but those 300-plus hits didn't come from people who also like Shane's blog; they came from people wanting information on the South Beach Diet. I can't be a hypocrite; recently I posted a piece on how a picture of Eminem has gotten me hundreds of hits through search engines over the past year. (But that pales in comparison to the number of hits that Shane is mining from "South Beach Diet.") It strikes me that there is something wrong with a system in which a person can regularly post well-researched, well-crafted pieces for his or her weblog (I'm not [necessarily] implying that that person is me; I'm thinking of several well-written Salon weblogs that are lower in the rankings) and get only poor or mediocre rankings while someone can simply insert a popular search-engine phrase into the title of his or her weblog and watch his or her ranking skyrocket. I don't (necessarily) think that this has been a deliberate attempt on Shane's part to artificially inflate his rankings -- any more than it was my intent to mine hits from search engines with the photo of Eminem that I posted more than a year ago with my review of his movie "8 Mile" -- but the unfair results that manifest in the Salon weblog rankings are the same. And some Salon webloggers apparently do try to artificially inflate the number of hits they get, such as a Salon weblogger (who will remain nameless and who is almost in the top 10 now) who created several categories for his weblog, each of which looks like a different weblog when it appears on Salon's "recently changed weblogs" list. Even after he was aware that his fellow Salon bloggers had been complaining that he was filling up the "recently changed weblogs" list with his innumerable categories, thus preventing other bloggers, perhaps especially newbie bloggers, from getting noticed by readers, this unnamed blogger refused to reduce the number of his categories. (Could it come as any surprise that this blogger has endorsed Howard Dean? Anyway, to give you an idea of his fetish for categories, he has more than 40 of them [I have just two categories and I rarely update them], including separate categories for both "TV" and "reality TV" -- because there's a world o' difference between the two, ya know. Oops. I think I just divulged his identity...) "The rankings don't matter," I hear some readers whining. No. They do matter, because people -- especially people who are new to the Salon weblogs -- assume, when they see the rankings, that the higher-ranking weblogs must be quality weblogs; after all, they're getting the lion's share of the readership, right? Thus, even long-dead Salon weblogs (I will define a "dead" weblog as one on which nothing new has been posted for at least 120 days) -- such as "The Raven" (the last new post was in May but it's at No. 15 in the rankings, with more than 110,000 hits), "Notes from Atlanta" (the last new post was in March but it's at No. 35) and "No Code" (the last new post was in July but it's at No. 54) -- continue to get hits because people don't know that they're dead blogs; they only see that they're higher up in the rankings. It gets worse: The No. 2 Salon weblog, which has logged more than 1.4 million hits, and the No. 5 Salon blog, which has logged almost 800,000 hits, aren't even functional links, so I can't even say when they were last updated. Then, of course, the more titillatingly titled weblogs get a lot of hits, such as "Pornographer's Picks" (it's at No. 17, with more than 100,000 hits, but has only one post for this month, none from last month, none from October and only one from September), "Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex with You" (it's No. 13 but is on hiatus until Jan. 9, with only one post for this month), and "The Devil's Excrement" (it's at No. 9, but at least it is frequently updated). It seems to me that Salon won't keep the best and brightest bloggers if they're working hard but are competing for readership against not only dead (inactive) Salon blogs but Salon blogs whose links don't even work and also against active Salon bloggers who intentionally or unintentionally artificially inflate the number of hits that they receive. (No, that's not a thinly veiled threat to abandon my Salon weblog; I plan to be a gadfly, even if [at only No. 65] just a minor one, for some time to come.) If you share my concerns about the fairness of the Salon weblog rankings system, why not e-mail Salon's managing editor, Scott Rosenberg, who is in charge of the Salon weblogs (and whose own Salon weblog, which has a standing link on salon.com's home page -- yeah, that's fair to the rest of us Salon bloggers -- is at No. 4)? (Don't get your hopes up, though; whenever anyone complains about Salon weblogs, Rosenberg most often blames it on Radio UserLand, the blogging software that the Salon blogs use, and thus nothing gets resolved.) P.S. I just temporarily added "South Beach Diet" to the title of my weblog. I'll be damned if I'm outdone by Shane. 4:10:52 PM    Comments []

The latest thing we good Amuricans are to fear is Middle Easterners with -- gasp! -- almanacs in hand. Be afraid. Be very afraid. The stupid white men who are "protecting" us from terrorists (in this case, the FBI) now advise that terrorists might be seen running around with almanacs, because almanacs contain useful information with which terrorists might plot their attacks. (This is way too stupid for me to make up; see The Associated Press story here.) This reminds me of the scene in "Men in Black" in which Will Smith's character, while in training, blows away a facade of a little girl in pigtails carrying a quantum physics book because, he explains, no little girl would be learning quantum physics; it must be an extraterrestrial terrorist disguised as a little girl. I'd imagine that terrorists are more likely to use the Internet than almanacs to get their information, but even if they were almanac aficionados, I'd think that they'd have their terrorist attacks planned out to the last detail before executing them. I just can't see a terrorist consulting his almanac right before he detonates his bomb. Maybe this is the Bush regime's first step in cracking down on us intellectuals; anyone with a book is an "enemy combatant." Or maybe the Bush regime's "re"-election strategy is to force those relatively few Americans left who are capable of independent thought to flee to Canada out of embarrassment, thus ensuring Bush the dumbfuck vote, which grows by the day. (Since Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 by about a half-million votes, the Bush regime has to drive off only about a half-million of us, right?) You will be horrified to know that as I write this, The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004 sits at No. 51 at amazon.com! I'm thinking that the Department of Homeland Security should shut down amazon.com -- America- and freedom-hating, terrorist-loving books by the likes of enemy combatants Al Franken, Michael Moore and Molly Ivins fill amazon's bestseller list -- and raise the terror alert level to red. Update (Wednesday, Dec. 31): The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004 now sits at No. 37 on amazon.com! Armageddon! Buy your duct tape while supplies last! Update (Sunday, Jan. 11): The terror alert level recently was downgraded from orange ("high") to yellow ("elevated") -- probably because The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004 has dropped to No. 85 on amazon.com's bestselling books list. Whew!   7:15:43 AM    Comments []