It was tentatively predicted that Bush could experience a "Reagan bounce" in the ratings. Whether this is what has happened is difficult to know:
President George W. Bush seems to have stopped his ratings slide across the board. A Pew Research poll indicates that the president’s job approval ratings are up, the support for the war in Iraq is up, and now a respectable 57% of those polled believe the situation in Iraq is going very to fairly well.
The numbers and responses indicate the electorate is becoming Iraq fatigued, and when that happens, attention will return to the rebounding economy.
And there is more bad news for Kerry, “Favorable views of Kerry have slipped since his successful run through the Democratic primaries, as opinions of the presumptive Democratic nominee have grown more partisan. Currently, 50% have a positive impression of the Massachusetts Democrat – down from 58% in February – while negative opinions have increased sharply, from 28% to 41%.”
This is partly as expected. The voters are deeply polarised and this effect is strengthened as the election gets closer. Then there is what many observers have argued for a long time: people don't tend to like Kerry once they get to know him. If that is true, it is hard to imagine how he can win when the campaign starts for real.
Maybe being the anti-Bush candidate is not good enough after all.
PS: RasmussenReport's Presidential Tracking Poll continues to show hardly any move at all, over several months. The latest three days have had Bush at 46 and Kerry at 45 per cent, well within the margin of error.
The Intifada is over. The Palestinians lost. Israel won, but at a bitter price. Charles Krauthammer is not the first to pronounce the second intifada over, but he does it convincingly.
The weapons that succeeded: First, the targeted killings. Second, the security fence. Obviously the two tactics that the Palestinian terrorists feared the most, so their spineless political and media allies all over Europe mindlessly attacked these tactics.
"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received such information and passed it on to their American colleagues," he told reporters.
The Kremlin leader, who was speaking in the Kazakh capital, said Russian intelligence services had many times received information that Saddam's special forces were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States "and beyond its borders on American military and civilian targets."
"This information was conveyed to our American colleagues," he said. He added that Russian intelligence had no proof that Saddam agents had been involved in any particular attack.
Very interesting. Tony Blair says Saddam let terrorists operate. Now Vladimir Putin says Saddam not only allowed, but actively planned, terrorism against the west. It is beginning to add up.
It appears the 9/11 commission is the only ones who do not believe that Saddam Hussein was deeply involved in terrorism.
PS: For what it is worth, DebkaFile is extremely critical to the interim report for a number of reasons, in particular for attempting to link Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian intifada to the 9/11 attacks. And the reason, it argues, is disinformation:
Many senior counter-terror officials, some of whom have had access to Shaikh Mohammed and other top captured al Qaeda operatives, have long come to the conclusion that he and others let themselves be seized for the sake of advancing a wider al Qaeda disinformation plot. Their mission is to plant red herrings in the path of US intelligence and lead its investigators away from the organization’s real operations, especially during reorganizations of the group’s command structure and terror networks.
If that is true, they are more clever than anyone could have suspected.
Should a woman slightly wrong her husband, she will do everything possible to assuage her man's anger.
In the Joola- and Manding-speaking groups, the woman will slaughter a goat and prepare a delicious meal to appease her husband.
There is a long-standing traditional belief here that if a man is angry at his wife, it could prevent her from entering paradise in the next world.
So, husbands can beat and abuse their wives at will, knowing the religion will dictate her to be obedient and subservient and never report domestic abuse. That is a neat arrangement, provided you're a pathetic little 2" dick loser and beating women is your thing.
The tragic truth is that women are consistently more religious than men.
Probably the most misrepresented report in history: the 9/11 hearings. The media, instead of trying to report what can be learned from the disaster, is trying to find ammunition against Bush (forget al-Qaeda). Since the report doesn't say what the media wants to hear, they distort it. The report says there is no evidence Iraq was involved in 9/11 (true) and the media says there is no evidence there was any evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime (false).
I am still not convinced that Mohammed Atta did not meet with Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed al-Ani in Prague in April 2001. As far as I have seen, Czech intelligence is still sticking to that story. This is a well-renowed intelligence service that did a brillaint job through the cold war (on the wrong side, of course). The FBI and the CIA, who have been disastrously wrong about everyone and everything up to and including the war on terror, disagrees with the Czech. Now, who to believe?
Obviously, to mainstream media, it is more important to defeat Bush than it is to get the truth about the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3000 Americans.
What scares me, is that the same objective has been the main priority of around half the 9/11 commission.
Another reason why this hearing should never have happened in an election year.
