Feeling down? Need a good laugh? What are you waiting for — go here this instant and enjoy!

Via a wonderful blog I just stumbled onto.

In order for bush to win, he’s got to hit hard and relentlessly, truth be damned. It has to be one assault after another, constantly keeping Kerry on the defensive so the conversation never, ever turns to the mess bush has made of this country and Iraq.

Brace yourslef; a whole new series of 527s are about to come out with ads the likes of which we have never seen before, with charges so outrageous, so awful they will make the Willie Horton ads and even the Smear Boat Liars look like a bed of roses. Racism will be the lightning rod of the new campaign; so much for the big tent of the inclusive Republican Party.

I am hoping the media will expose the smears for what they are instead of running their ads on the news and letting Ann Coulter tell us how wise and enlightening the ads are. After giving the SBVFT free reign, they finally realized they were being used. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far this time, and that they refuse to do Rove’s advertising for him.

It’s going to be scary and ugly from now to November 2nd, and we haven’t seen anything yet. This is all bush has to offer — complete and total destruction of John Kerry to keep eyes off of his litany of miserable failures.

We all knew it was going to be ugly, but this goes so over the top. Time for Kerry to throw away the kid gloves and swing harder than ever before. It’s a pity, but fire has to be met with fire; I don’t want to see Kerry, like Gore before him, finish last just because he’s a nicer guy than bush & co.

I always said it was inevitable that marketers would turn to blogs as they became more mainstream and popular. When you consider the millions of eyeballs they command, how could they not? Any medium that reaches loyal viewers is viewed as red meat by marketers, advertisers and PR flacks.

Sometimes this has nice perqs for bloggers, even miniscule ones like me. I get sent books to review and DVDs, which I really appreciate. And they keep offering me new ones, even if I haven’t reviewed the last one (and most will never get reviewed here; I don’t have the time or inclination). I was also surprised when a media buyer wrote and tried to negotiate putting banner ads on my blog. (No way, ever, unless I can control what banners they put up.)

Now I see they’ve created yet another “marketing tool” called Blogversations in which advertisers pay bloggers to discuss certain topics or questions. Check it out, and maybe you too can become rich by blogging! (Though I highly doubt it.) My friend Jeremy wrote up this bad idea a few days ago and has some interesting thoughts.

On my very first trip to Beijing, I had a foot massage at my hotel, and when I offerd the masseuse 10 yuan she refused to take it. One thing my friends in China always told me was never to give tips to servicepeople. Bellmen, waiters, taxi drivers — they don’t expect a tip, and whenever I would give them some extra change they’d beam with delight. One friends got annoyed at me when I gave extra money to a waiter, and said, “That’s their job — that’s what they’re paid for. We don’t do that here.”

Is that all changing? According to this article, tipping is becoming routine in some parts of China.

In the old China, everyone was taught they were working for the glory of the state. In the new China, the glory has gotten a little more calculating — say, 10% of the bill.

Tipping, long frowned upon in this still officially communist country, may be going mainstream.

This month, one of China’s leading travel agencies will begin offering three VIP tour packages during which customers will be encouraged to tip the guides. The pilot program has touched a nerve in the traditionally gratuity-shy society even as it underscores China’s continuing shift to a market-driven economy.

“The practice for many, many years was not to tip,” Jane Liedtke, a management consultant who does cross-cultural training for foreign firms here, said about the general treatment of food servers, doormen and other service personnel. “But they are picking up on the Western practice of tipping here quite vigorously.”

That attitude represents a cultural sea-change in a place where tipping was unheard of under early communism, which taught that everyone was equal. Even before communism, expecting a tip was considered rude.

I suppose it’s the cost of progress. Just one more aspect of Chinese culture being chipped away by the bulldozer of globalization.

ESWN has amassed an amazing collection of photographs of the storming of the school held by Chechnya rebels in the village of Beslan. (Warning: these pictures are raw and graphic.)

I try to get into the minds of the rebels shooting children in the back, but I can’t. And looking at the photos and at the history of the conflict, centuries old, like the Middle East, I wonder if we should all just give up and acknowledge that terrorism is here forever, a part of the fabric of our world that we can only try to contain as best we can. I don’t pretend to have any answers, but it’s pretty obvious that what we’re doing now isn’t making much difference….

Do check it out. But be forewarned — if you’re using Firefox, it’s all screwed up. It’s the only blog I’ve found so far that is Firefox-hostile. Otherwise, at least two thumbs up.

Funny. The most pressing issues of our time, and they never came up once in the speech that Sullivan astonishingly praises as “superb.” (At least Sully then goes on to say that it’s official — he cannot and will not vote for bush. I have to say, it takes courage; he has made himself a pariah on the left and the right, a very lonely place to be.)

Apparently not:

Cheney, at the time defense secretary, had scolded Congress for keeping alive such programs as the F-14 and F-16 jet fighters that he wanted to eliminate. Miller said in his speech that Kerry had foolishly opposed both the weapons systems and would have left the military armed with “spitballs.” During that same debate, President George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father, proposed shutting down production of the B-2 bomber — another weapons system cited by Miller — and pledged to cut defense spending by 30 percent in eight years.

Though Miller recited a long list of weapons systems, Kerry did not vote against these specific weapons on the floor of the Senate during this period. Instead, he voted against an omnibus defense spending bill that would have funded all these programs; it is this vote that forms the crux of the GOP case that he “opposed” these programs.

On the Senate floor, Kerry cast his vote in terms of fiscal concerns, saying the defense bill did not “represent sound budgetary policy” in a time of “extreme budget austerity.” Much like Bush’s father, he singled out the B-2 bomber for specific attention, saying it is “one of the most costly, waste-ridden programs in a long history of waste, fraud and abuse scandals that have plagued Pentagon spending.”

The more I read about this racist swine, the sicker I feel. That of all the splendid people on this planet they could have chosen to give their keynote the GOP turned to this ogre of hatred and vitriol — well, it tells us all we need to know, doesn’t it?

Unbelievable.

And yet, all too believable.

Assorted chunks from one of the most perceptive articles yet on the extraordinary irrationality and utter wackiness of the current election campaign. For anyone who doesn’t know of Karen Hughes and her doglike devotion to bush (and to her task of fictionalizing his past), this is required reading. And even if you do know, it’s required.

Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy’s connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.
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As we leave the scripted conventions behind us, that is the uber-scenario that has locked into place, brilliantly engineered by the president of the United States, with more than a little unwitting assistance from his opponent. It’s a marvel, really. Even a $10,000 reward offered this year by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau couldn’t smoke out a credible eyewitness to support George W. Bush’s contention that he showed up to defend Alabama against the Viet Cong in 1972. Yet John Kerry, who without doubt shed his own blood and others’ in the vicinity of the Mekong, not the Mississippi, is now the deserter and the wimp.
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Though pundits said that Republicans pushed moderates center stage this week to placate suburban swing voters, the real point was less to soften the president’s Draconian image on abortion than to harden his manly bona fides. Hence Bush was fronted by a testosterone-heavy lineup led by a former mayor who did not dally to read a children’s book on 9/11, a senator who served in the Hanoi Hilton rather than the “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard and a governor who can play the role of a warrior on screen more convincingly than can a former Andover cheerleader gallivanting on an aircraft carrier.
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The early drafts of the script pre-date 9/11. In “A Charge to Keep,” his 1999 campaign biography crafted by Karen Hughes, Bush implies that he just happened to slide on his own into one of the “several openings” for pilots in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 and that he continued to fly with his unit for “several years” after his initial service. This is fantasy that went largely unchallenged until 9/11 subjected it to greater scrutiny. Since then, the mysterious gaps in the president’s military résumé have been finessed by the dialogue and wardrobe departments, from the invocation of “Wanted: Dead or Alive” (whatever did happen to that varmint, Osama, anyway?) to the “Mission Accomplished” rollout. Of late, Bush’s imagineers have publicized his proud possession of Saddam Hussein’s captured pistol.
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But with the high stakes of an election at hand, it’s not enough to stuff socks in the president’s flight suit. Kerry must be turned into a girl. Such castration warfare has long been a Republican staple. We’ve had Bill Clinton vilified as the stooge of a harridan wife and Al Gore as the puppet of the makeover artist Naomi Wolf. But given his actual history on the field of battle, this year’s Democratic standard bearer would, seemingly, be immune to such attacks, especially from the camp of a candidate whose most daring feat of physical courage was tearing down the Princeton goalposts.
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No matter. Once Kerry usurped Howard Dean, whose wartime sojourn in Aspen made the president look like a Green Beret, the Bush campaign’s principals and surrogates went into overdrive. His alleged encounters with Botox and a Christophe hairdresser were dutifully clocked on Drudge. Eventually John Edwards would become “the Breck girl,” and Dick Cheney would yank an adjective out of context to suggest that Kerry wanted to fight a “sensitive” war on terror.
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The flaw in Kerry is not, as Washington wisdom has it, that he asked for trouble from the Swifties by bringing up Vietnam in the first place. Both his Vietnam service and Vietnam itself are entirely relevant to a campaign set against an unpopular and ineptly executed war in Iraq that was spawned by the executive branch in similarly cloudy circumstances. But having brought Vietnam up against the backdrop of our 2004 war, Kerry has nothing to say about it except that his service proves he’s more manly than Bush. Well, nearly anyone is more manly than a president who didn’t have the guts to visit with the 9/11 commission unaccompanied by a chaperone.

Please read it all. Rich is quite talented at pointing out the absurdities right in front of our noses that somehow we manage to ignore or block out.

Written quickly and surreptitiously from my desk at The Corporation….