When claiming credit for kidnapping and murdering an American citizen in Iraq on your propaganda websites, try not to pick a victim who is alive and well and living in Detroit, and who would be very interested to learn how you got her name and an old driver’s license photo.

Wow, the eyes really are the windows of the soul.

This one has been following me around since junior high school Health class, and for some unknown reason it once again popped into my brain. Google seems to have no record of it, so I might be the only one in the world who remembers this little ditty:

I got those V, VD blues,
careless love, what ya got to lose?
I got high, on two-bit booze,
careless love, loser's blues, VD blues.

(note that for full effect, one must picture a bad country-western singer, backed up by a banjo (if I recall correctly), serving as the title song for a Sex-Ed video made in the 1970s. And I can still sing it. These are the brain cells I wouldn’t mind losing as I get older.)

So if the new moveon.org ad bin Laden video is real, and current, and says what is claimed, then I think it is the most persuasive pro-Bush argument that has been made in the last six months. The only way it could possibly be positive for Kerry is if he can prove that it was written, directed, and produced by Karl Rove, with Bush working the camera and Cheney running the teleprompter.

I’m much more concerned with how much candy to buy for Halloween, though. Last year’s depressing turnout left me wondering whether I should go light and risk running out, or stock up and take any leftovers to the office.

And then I remembered The Bush Tax Cut, and stocked up. I’ve got about fifty pounds of assorted goodies in my big Igloo cooler, and I may run out to Costco tomorrow to buy some more.

Remember: Osama bin Laden is dedicated to the destruction of a society so decadent that it not only has four different kinds of Snickers bar (standard, Cruncher, Almond, and Marathon), but allows you to purchase them from an unmarried young woman who bares her face in public and knows how to read and write.

And he’s for Kerry.

Update: Walter Cronkite announced in a Larry King interview that he sincerely believes that Karl Rove “probably set up bin Laden to this thing”. I guess now we know what kind of smoke that whole “smoking gun” thing refers to.

After watching discs 1-3, I described this as one of the best anime series currently running. Disc 4 cemented that opinion, and was so good that I didn’t want to say anything for fear of spoiling it.

On disc 5 it gets better.

Much of what happens is expected, and some of it is even predictable, but in the final scene of the fourth episode on the disc, they casually drop a bombshell that has the potential to change everything. And it makes perfect sense.

The only thing that kept me from spraying my drink across the room in surprise was the fact that I’d just finished it.

What appears to be an op-ed in Germany’s largest newspaper is getting a lot of attention for endorsing Bush, and laying out the reasons he’s a better choice than Kerry.

My German is far too shaky for me to tell if this is the paper’s official endorsement or “the opinion of one of our columnists,” but either way I can see heads exploding on both sides of the Atlantic. This site appears to have an accurate translation of the reasons given in the article. It’s, um, refreshing reading, and far more sane than the hallway conversation I had today at work.

This one isn’t bad. It correctly divines that while no one truly represents me (“ideal theoretical candidate”, 100%), I’d generally be inclined to vote Libertarian (Badnarik, 69%), if it weren’t for my compelling interest in the survival of western civilization (Bush, 63%).

It puts Kerry at 44% for me, but it’s not clear how recently they’ve checked his positions on the issues. I’ll have to try again tomorrow and see if the same answers produce different results…

Pretty much every new portable music device that comes out is evaluated for its potential as an “iPod-killer”. I’m sorry, but as long as they keep building things that look like this, they’re not the killers, they’re just a flat patch of fur on the side of the road.