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September 20, 2004

A Dukakian Fall III: A Dukakian Fall With a Vengeance

Bipartisan "Battleground" Poll Puts John Kerry Below 40%

STUDY #9936 THE TARRANCE GROUP, INC. and LAKE SNELL PERRY N = 250 per day of registered “likely” voters Field Dates: September 12 –16, 2004
1. If the election for President were held today, and you had to make a choice, for which candidate would you probably vote?
(DO NOT READ NAMES, JUST RECORD)

George W. Bush 46%
John Kerry 39%
Ralph Nader 1%
NAMED OTHER 1%
UNSURE 14%

Here. You have to download an MSWord file (hopefully not forged) to read the data.

Of course, all hope is not lost. As The Unabrewer tips me, John Kerry is still ahead in New York... by five whole points.

And in Maryland -- one of the staunchest Democratic bastions there is -- he's comfortably in a 48-48 tie with Bush.

I don't want to say that John Kerry is unelectable, but he couldn't get elected warden in monkey-prison with a wheelbarrow full of bananas and a lenient policy on excrement-flingin'.

Update! And now Bush four points ahead in... Oregon?

The only problem with a real blow-out is that it doesn't hurt to be blown out. When you get trounced, you know that no particular error you made, or flaw in your strategy, could have possibly helped you. You just throw your hands up and say, "Eh. Nothing I could have done."

On the other hand, there's Al Gore.

Thanks to Terry Notus for the Oregon tip.

posted by Ace at 06:26 PM

Comments

Dukakian. There's a word I don't use often enough.

Dukakian.

Posted by: Ross on September 20, 2004 06:56 PM

Monkey-prison. That's also a grossly under-utilized term.

Posted by: George on September 20, 2004 07:00 PM

Don't count Kerry out until he's made a concession speech...and then you better wait about a month, just in case. It better not be close...at all...anywhere. If it is, it's going to be 2000 all over again in spades. Here's some cold comfort...

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby.html

Posted by: Blacknimbus on September 20, 2004 07:11 PM

I've got video of a Japanese monkey jail.

Posted by: Ripper on September 20, 2004 07:18 PM

Ace, Brit Hume just quoted Mary Mapes' father that she is a radical feminist and went into journalism to push a leftist agenda.

Posted by: Mark on September 20, 2004 07:34 PM

Ace--

But wait! Kerry is coming back, baby!

"AP: Kerry Says He Wouldn't Have Ousted Saddam."

Ya gotta read the story, if only for the howler opening para.

http://garfieldridge.blogspot.com/2004/09/kerry-says-he-wouldnt-have-ousted.html

Cheers,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

Posted by: Dave on September 20, 2004 07:41 PM

I just hope Bush is far enough ahead to compensate for Democrat vote fraud.

Posted by: Golden Boy on September 20, 2004 07:46 PM

I am excited about Maryland being a 48% tie. I was commenting to family over the weekend that I've been seeing more visual support for Bush/Cheney than Kerry/Edwards. Matter of fact, I am starting to see more Bush bumper stickers on the Washington Beltway every day. And at the Anne Arundel county fair last week, there was a line at the Republican tent for yard signs and I didn't see anyone accept a Kerry yard sign.

Posted by: Fersboo on September 20, 2004 08:18 PM

ACE: Check out Lucianne!!! Joe Lockhart has been outed as a liason between Mapes and Burkett!

This appears to be, at the very least, a shadowy connection between the Kerry Campaign and CBS!

Posted by: senator philabuster on September 20, 2004 08:21 PM

Ace:
I love this. I vote in Maryland, so maybe I can be the tiebreaker. However, the Pew (+1) and the Harris (-1) national polls are still bugging me. In the NE, Bush is beating the spread like Pete Rose is placing his bets, but the national polls aren't reflecting it. Something is whacky.

Mark:
That's very interesting, in an utterly unsurprising way. We would all love to see a link when one is available.

Posted by: Terry Notus on September 20, 2004 08:34 PM

Ace:
Now Bush is +4 in Oregon too.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9713728.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

Posted by: Terry Notus on September 20, 2004 09:01 PM

A blowout would be sour and sweet. On one hand, I wouldn't miss the court battle and never-ending "selected, not elected" chants. OTOH I'd hate to not see Kerry's inevitable Gore-like descent into madness. At least there might be a nice Terrezza melt-down, assuming it's possible for her to become even nuttier.

Posted by: Trevor on September 20, 2004 10:11 PM

Ace,
The problem with this poll is that it is a fill in the blank problem as opposed to a multiple choice. The real story here is that Democrats are far less likely to even know who is running on their ticket than Republicans.

Posted by: Ace on September 20, 2004 10:40 PM

I distrust the cited poll for Oregon. If Kerry loses here, Bush will be the next president (i.e., it will be a landslide). It seems to me that the poll has too many people listed as rural. I live in barking moonbat territory. I have never seen a Bush sign near me. No conservative wants to set off the crazies by putting up a sign. That is not meant as a joke or hyperbole. It is just the sort of tension that exists here.

We have vote by mail here. It is too easy to cheat here. When Phil Keisling was in charge of such things, I wrote him. My vote depends on some moonbat crazy government type looking at my signature of record (the one when I registered 30 years ago!!!!). This is totally asinine! Keisling, to his credit, did reply, but basically said that I was a lunatic to question the government.

I did not get a ballot once. I had to go down to the local election office. It was a damn zoo with ballots lying everywhere. It took a great effort wading through morons, before I finally found someone competent to figure out what was going on. My address had changed for absolutely no reason. I got a ballot which I added to the tumult there, but did it count? Was it negated by the ballot sent to the incorrect address? Phil Keisling said that I do not have the right to even know. Ballots once cast into the mess which is the system in Oregon, are secret, even to the person casting them. I have zero confidence in our system of voting. On the plus side, we have few electoral votes.

Mike

Posted by: Mike on September 21, 2004 10:21 AM

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What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
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A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
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Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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