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I hope the Democrats, now back in power in Congress, will grow up, sober up and start seriously engaging issues from Iraq to Social Security.  I hope they do not squander the next two years with a crippling anal examination of every aspect of the Bush Administration, but instead will want to move forward, keep this country safe, and fix the entitlements mess for which they are largely responsible.

I hope the Republicans ponder the fruits of abandoning the small-L libertarian smaller-government, lower-taxes, individual-empowerment philosophy which was central to their taking over Congress in 1994, and rededicate themselves to being the reformist party that brought them to power in the first place.

Catching up on the weekend's news after a wonderful weekend in Knoxville (and no, I didn't look up Glenn Reynolds).  The weekend would have been complete with a Tennessee football win over LSU, but the food in the skybox was pretty darn good.

Anyway, it seems that everyone's favorite former dictator has almost come to the end of his rope, literally.  Lovers of freedom and liberty throughout the world hailed the imminent final meting of justice to a murderous tyrant:

Former Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia said the death sentence would make no difference and predicted more violence.

OK, perhaps not.

Well, that's not exactly how the New York Times is trying to spin the story, but that's pretty much what they're saying.

See, the Times thinks that they've got Bush again.  Now they're reporting that the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN don't-inspect-for-weapons agency) is concerned that the U.S. has put captured Iraqi documents on the web for, basically, anyone who can to translate from Arabic to English.

Guess what?

Some of those documents, according to the IAEA as reported by the N.Y. Times, reveal in detail how to go about building a nuclear weapon.

Weren't we told again and again and again that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam was years from obtaining one?

If so, how can the captured Iraqi documents be that serious?

Hmm??????

Makes you wonder who, exactly, has been lying to us all these years?

This story focused on ACORN's shady voter registration tactics in St. Louis, but the first Federal indictments for vote fraud in this year's election cycle come against ACORN workers in Kansas City:

The four indicted -- Kwaim A. Stenson, Dale D. Franklin, Stephanie L. Davis and Brian Gardner -- were employed by ACORN as registration recruiters. They were each charged with two counts.

Federal indictments allege the four turned in false voter registration applications. Prosecutors said the indictments are part of a national investigation.

ACORN says they turned the four in, and have fired them.  But how deep does the corruption go, really, and what are the links between ACORN and the Democratic Party?  Will these four Kansas City indictments be the last in Missouri this election cycle?  These indictments are part of a national investigaton. Where will the next rotten ACORN be found?

Hat tip:  Instapundit and Gateway Pundit.

Forced to cancel numerous campaign appearances, Kerry emerged from foot-in-mouth surgery late yesterday as outraged citizens extracted this statement from his tortured soul:

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.

I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.

The operation was obviously not a total success. He would have done well to stop at the second paragraph, because the third is the verbal equivalent of crossing his fingers behind his back.

The blogswarm and firestorm over John Kerry's "joke" continues.  I have little to add, except:

This was the candidate for President for one of the country's major political parties.

Think about it, before you go to vote this year.

Think about a party that would nominate such a raging twit for President.  Then think about that person with the D beside their name that you're about to vote for.

Vote Twit.  Vote Democrat.

Posting is light, primarily because we're in the heart of the college athletics season--but also because I'm utterly burned out on politics and Islamofascism and serious stuff.

So, it is with joy that I present this story from Yahoo News:
Man builds 3,300-pound rubber band ball

EUGENE, Ore. - With all due respect to The Spinners and T.I., prepare yourself for the new rubber-band man. Steve Milton, through concentration and perseverance, has created a 3,300-pound ball comprised of rubber bands. His creation measures almost 5 feet tall and takes up half his two-car garage. Though it's not official, the 26-year-old Eugene man believes he has broken the record for the heaviest such ball, eclipsing John Bain's mark of 3,120 pounds. The Wilmington, Del., man's record has stood for eight years.

Milton has posted updates of his ball's growing girth on his MySpace page. He's also uploaded videos of the ball crushing things, such as using a forklift to drop the ball on an old van.

Right Wing News posts this Internet campaign tactic that we'll go along with . . . the leftists fire off "googlebombs" all the time. Why not, as RightWingNews says, fight fire with fire?

So, what's to be done? Well, in my opinion, we should simply fight fire with fire. That's why I put together a list of key races for Republican blogs to Googlebomb. How do you do that? Simply view source, grab the HTML below, and post it on your blog or in a forum that you frequent. Then, once Google picks it up, the links on these candidates should rocket up charts and help even the playing field for the GOP in the key races.

Senate

Connecticut: Ned Lamont
Maryland: Ben Cardin
Michigan: Debbie Stanbenow
Missouri: Claire McCaskill
Montana: Jon Tester
New Jersey: Bob Menendez
Tennessee: Harold Ford
Virginia: James Webb

Democrat Held Seats

(CO-03): John Salazar
(GA-03): Jim Marshall
(GA-12): John Barrow
(IA-03): Leonard Boswell
(IL-08): Melissa Bean
(IL-17): Phil Hare
(IN-07): Julia Carson
(NC-13): Brad Miller
(PA-12): John Murtha
(WV-01): Alan Mollohan

Republican Held Seats

(AZ-08): Gabrielle Giffords
(CT-04): Diane Farrell
(CT-05): Chris Murphy
(CO-07): Ed Perlmutter
(IA-01): Bruce Braley
(IL-06): Tammy Duckworth
(IN-02): Joe Donnelly
(IN-08): Brad Ellsworth
(IN-09): Baron Hill
(FL-13): Christine Jennings
(FL-16): Tim Mahoney
(FL-22): Ron Klein
(KY-03): John Yarmuth
(NC-01): Heath Shuler
(MN-06): Patty Wetterling
(NM-01): Patricia Madrid
(NY-20): Kirsten Gillibrand
(NY-24): Michael Arcuri
(NY-26): Jack Davis
(OH-15): Mary Jo Kilroy
(OH-18): Zack Space
(PA-06): Lois Murphy
(PA-08): Patrick Murphy
(PA-07): Joe Sestak
(PA-10): Chris Carney
(VA-02): Phil Kellam
(WI-08): Steve Kagen

Update #1: As an aside, while I was researching articles for this Googlebomb, I noticed something interesting: most Republican candidates, for whatever reason, already had at least one negative article up on the front page of Google. On the other hand, again, for whatever reason, it was not unusual for me to go 3 or 4 pages deep into some of these Democratic candidates without finding a single, negative, article about them. So, ironically, we may have a good opportunity to make a much bigger impact than the liberal bloggers with this Googlebomb. We'll see.

Here, Google google google? Nice Google. Eat the googlebomb. Good search engine.

The infamous Michael J. Fox commercial (click here to see the video) shows him spastically jerking around as he battles his Parkinson's Disease to deliver a classic Democratic "Republicans Are Evil" message on behalf of the Claire McCaskill for Senate campaign.

There are, at least, two serious problems which undermine the credibility of the Fox ad:

Mr. Fox's political attack on U.S. Senator Jim Talent is based on Talent's opposition of "stem cell research." This is, simply, a lie. Talent opposes embryonic stem cell research--he does not oppose all stem cell research, as he told the Kansas City Star:

TALENT: I am a strong supporter of stem cell research. I'm strongly opposed to human cloning. In the Senate, I have already supported more than $2.2 billion for adult, umbilical and other types of stem cell research that does not involve the cloning or destruction of human embryos.

It would seem that a party which once celebrated the nuances of its Presidential candidate, in 2004, has lost its appreciation for nuance. The evidence is the Michael J. Fox ad, which is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the side of the head. Now, I don't see human cloning as the boogey-man that many conservatives do. I voted (absentee) for the Stem Cell Amendment in Missouri, but I also voted for Talent, for reasons that have nothing to do with stem cells or cloning.

The second and possibly more damnable problem is in the non-verbal language of Fox's jerking body. You see, he has admitted that he has stopped taking his medication in order to elicit sympathetic reaction from a Senate committee in the past. From his own web site:

Snippets of my testimony were featured on several of the nightly news broadcasts. One line in particular from my prepared statement got a lot of play: "In my forties, I can expect challenges most people wouldn't face until their seventies and eighties, if ever. But with your help, if we all do everything we can to eradicate this disease, when I'm in my fifties I'll be dancing at my children's weddings." I had made a deliberate choice to appear before the subcommittee without medication. It seemed to me that this occasion demanded that my testimony about the effects of the disease, and the urgency we as a community were feeling, be seen as well as heard. For people who had never observed me in this kind of shape, the transformation must have been startling.

Emphasis mine.

There is no denying that Fox has a terrible, debilitating disease. But there is also no denying that he has in the past willfully exaggerated the effects of the disease by suspending a medication therapy, in order to win sympathy.

Dean Barnett, no stranger to debilitating diseases (he has cystic fibrosis) is not impressed by Fox's sympathy play:

If you don’t think that’s manipulative and quite frankly outrageous, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. It also begs the question, why did he make himself suffer? If his goal was to make a disingenuous statement about his condition, he didn’t have to refrain from taking his medication. He could have just taken his medication and pretended to be sicker than he was. After all, isn’t that in effect what he did?

Just remember, she's Claire McCaskill, and she approved that message. Of course, pretty much the same ad is also running in Maryland, so it's not just McCaskill.

Word is that G.W. Bush is dropping the term "stay the course." 

"He's stopped using it," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. "It left the wrong impression about what was going on and it allowed critics to say, 'Well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,' when, in fact, it is the opposite."

Good.

Ralph Peters points the way to a solution.  It won't be pretty. 

We did the right and virtuous thing by deposing Saddam Hussein. There's no reason even now to regret that act. But history will condemn us - justly - for the moral cowardice we revealed after the fall of Baghdad: We would not kill the handful of men who needed killing. Now they've converted tens of thousands to their cult of violence.
. . .

Political compromise is not a tradition of the Middle East - life and power are viewed as zero-sum games.

And the ugly truth is that some men love to kill. Torture and murder are addictive. The lifelong loser empowered to kill for a cause becomes a little god. And when the violence ends, the party's over.

The butchers our timidity unleashed are enjoying themselves. They're having the time of their lives executing unarmed civilians.

How many American - and foreign - lives must we sacrifice to stay within our privileged comfort zone, clinging to the lie that "all men want peace"? A compromise peace is the last thing Iraq's killers want.

Emphasis mine.

Peters thinks it's too late for American power to salvage the situation, and that the Iraqis must now do it themselves.  I don't agree.  But it will require a level of aggression and ruthlessness that will scandalize the tender sensibilities of the world's chattering classes.   I think the majority of Americans actually understand what needs to be done, and would loudly cheer such a crackdown.  But they can't be heard over the shrill complaints of the media elites.  The American public usually has more common sense than its leaders and "opinion-makers."

They all hate us anyhow, let's drop the Big One now -- Randy Newman, "Political Science"

(And no, I don't mean going nuclear . . . )