I’m “Dark, Mysterious, and Introspective”

Yeah, well, it’s going around, so I thought I’d take the Hugh Hewitt challenge and find out which Bob Dylan song I am. Now I have the results, and I still don’t know what this means:

Which Bob Dylan song are you?

Ballad of a Thin Man

Personality Test Results

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I think I need to consult with Big Trunk at Power Line to find out why …

WMD Not Missing At All

Ever since the David Kay interim report was released in December stating Kay’s pessimism about ever finding actual weapons and chemical/biological agents, conventional wisdom has held that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction — and in fact that our intelligence and that of most of the world was so faulty that we all missed Saddam’s disarmament after the first Gulf War. Little attention has been given to the rest of Kay’s report, which clearly laid out that Saddam had been in material violation of UNSC Resolution 1441 and the other sixteen which preceded it by hiding and maintaining the activities and systems which could quickly reconstitute WMD programs as soon as the heat was off.
Now Kenneth Timmerman has provided a second look at the WMD question, informing us that WMD has indeed been found in Iraq — even though our national media apparently prefers to stick with the established story line instead of actually reporting the news (via Power Line):

In virtually every case – chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles – the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors. … In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed that the ISG had found evidence of a “crash program” to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a “high-speed rail gun,” a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq’s main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for “a clandestine nuclear-weapons program.”
In taking apart Iraq’s clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that “the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program” [see “Documents Prove U.N. Oil Corruption,” April 27-May 10].

So not only has the ISG discovered the banned materials as well as the programs, Congress has heard this in testimony just four weeks ago — and yet have you read anything about this in the media? With the UN Oil-for-Food scam in the headlines, you would think that journalists would start drawing lines between the OFF funding and Saddam’s established and nascent weapons programs. And there’s more:

When coalition forces entered Iraq, “huge warehouses and caches of ‘commercial and agricultural’ chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists,” Hanson writes. “What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches.”
Caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals don’t match the expectation of “stockpiles” of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. “At a very minimum,” Hanson tells Insight, “they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly.” Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment’s notice.
At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a “camouflaged bunker complex” that was shown to reporters – with unpleasant results. “More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent,” Hanson says. “But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The ‘agricultural site’ was also colocated with a military ammunition dump – evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.”
That wasn’t the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai’ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin – a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. “Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up,” Hanson says. “It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'”

However, as Timmerman himself notes, the new information doesn’t fit within the established story line; to acknowedge this new reality, they will have to explain why they got it wrong before, and so far they don’t seem inclined to do that. Read the entire article and judge for yourself.

FactCheck.Org Missing Expertise on Defense Matters (plus “Captain Ed” Defined)

FactCheck.Org, run by the Annenberg Foundation, normally does a pretty good job of providing a balanced look at the controversies of the day and applies logic and facts instead of volume and hyperbole. However, in the case of FactCheck’s defense of Kerry’s own defense record, they made a monumental goof that deserves a solid response:

It is true that when Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984 he did call specifically for canceling the AH-64 Apache helicopter. What the ad lacks is the historic context: the Cold War was ending and the Apache was designed principally as a weapon to be used against Soviet tanks. And in fact, even Richard Cheney himself, who is now Vice President but who then was Secretary of Defense, also proposed canceling the Apache helicopter program five years after Kerry did.

The short answer to this is that there was a huge difference between 1985 and 1990, but fortunately I received an e-mail from a reader who spent a lot of time both in the military and in the defense industry who can give the more detailed response. Duane from MnKurmudge & DCKid is a long-time CQ reader whose 19 years in the latter outstrips my 3+, but I can vouch for his accuracy in his vehement response below:

The comparison with Cheney is almost worse, and reveals these people as having rotten egg on their collective face.
It is because of two things: first, in 1990 the Cold War was effectively ended and Cheney was presiding over the drawdown and decommissioning of significant pieces of the force structure. Back in 1985 there was no such prospect on the horizon; we were still preparing militarily for an apparently viable USSR, and Kerry proposed shutting down the most important Army combat aviation asset right in the middle of the Cold War- if that doesn’t reveal his flawed and anti-military view, I don’t know what else would show it better, other than marching through Lafayette Park with his old V-VAW “Band of Brothers” (the real B-O-B shouldbe insulted by the terminology when associated with the Senator) and urging that all weapons be beaten into love jewelry (we don’t do plowshares any more).
Second, this example shows that the writers have no idea how the DoD appropriates funds and runs their programs, and has no interest in finding out before waxing eloquent and self-righteous on the subject.
There is a huge difference between cancelling a program in FY90 (which would be Aug 89) and FY85 when Kerry wanted to kill the Apache. By FY90, the Army had built at least 50 to 100 more Apaches (at an assumed, for lack of budget history specifics, production rate of 1 or 2 per month) than they had in 1985, so the likely revised procurement objective would be about complete at that point. Generally, the argument would be over whether to keep a warm line at a minimum sustaining rate or let the line go down and just provide spare parts.

Make sure you read his entire, detailed rebuttal to FactCheck’s sloppy analysis.
One last item: Duane made a reference to me being “a military guy,” and my nickname certainly could give that impression. My original Typepad blog had an explanation of the origins of “Captain Ed”, but here it is again so I don’t mislead people by mistake … It’s a nickname bestowed on me by a former girlfriend during a time in my life when I was a huge Star Trek fan, and had named my first car the Carship Enterprise, and had bought a license-plate frame with that on it. For a birthday gift, she got me a set of personalized license plates that read CPTN ED to fit within it.
Well, I thought that was pretty cool. In fact, I liked it so much that I transferred those plates to every new car I bought until I moved to Minnesota, when I finally decided enough was enough. The old plates, which outlasted my Star Trek passion by several years and the girlfriend by even more, are in my office at home. By that time, I had used the nickname on the Internet for years on e-mail, newsgroups, listservs, and blog comments. When I set up my own blog, it seemed natural to call it “Captain’s Quarters”.
So keep in mind — the Captain has more in common with Daryl Dragon, the Captain from Captain & Tenille, than he does with the brave men and women serving now or in the past in our nation’s military; it’s just a nickname. However, that analogy doesn’t sound too terrific in a week where we’re all debating the worst hit songs ever …

Making Market Sense of Wages and Prices As A System

When I want to read sensible explanations of a market economy, I turn to many sources, but one blogger in particular: Jon Henke at QandO. Jon posted a long essay today explaining why free-market mechanics work, using Wal-Mart as an example. One money graf — quite literally — is the most concise argument I’ve yet read regarding the pointlessness of artificial minimum-wage increases:

We’re a wage-earning society, but not we are not exclusively a wage-earning society. We are also a price-paying society, and if we pay attention to the income end of that fiscal balancing act, at the expense of our spending power, then we are simply engaging in a modern sort of mercantilism, wherein we think the consumer is wealthier if he has more money….even if that means he can’t buy as much.

Jon explains in detail why Wal-Mart is not the devil and why its continued success isn’t guaranteed:

But that’s the beauty of a free market. We simply don’t know how to allocate our resources – for one thing, because the proper allocation of resources changes from day to day – but a properly functioning price mechanism allows us to distribute those resources based on what value we place on them. Will Wal-Mart be around and on top forever? Of course not.
I’d remind you of who Wal-Mart replaced on the Dow Jones Industrial Average: Woolworth. A company that achieved market dominance by “undercutting the prices of local merchants”. Of course, they were criticized for driving local merchants out of business at the time. And then, in 1997, they closed the remainder of their stores. Why? “Analysts at the time cited the lower prices of the big discount stores and the expansion of grocery stores to carry most of the items five-and-ten-cent stores carried as factors in the stores’ lack of success in the late 20th century.”
Short version: Wal-Mart, Target, grocery stores and others had found a better business model. Woolworth was a dinosaur.

Read the whole post, and if you haven’t already added QandO to your blogroll or bookmarks, be sure to do so.
UPDATE: I don’t normally update a post with a comment, but this one made me laugh out loud and also emphasizes the point. From Farmer Joe of the fine new blog Urban Farmhouse: Whenever somebody says to me “I don’t believe in the market”, I always say that’s like not believing in gravity. You’re free not to believe in it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to affect you.

AP: Massive Reductions In US Positions on SK DMZ?

The AP reports that the US will reduce its military presence in South Korea, including dramatic cuts in forces along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea, in a policy shift from the decades-long “tripwire” strategy that kept the million-man northern PRK army from invading the south:

The United States will pull nearly all its troops from their last front-line positions along the tense frontier with communist North Korea by October as part of a force reshuffle on the divided Korean peninsula, the United Nations Command said Tuesday. Duties along the heavily fortified buffer, called the Demilitarized Zone, will be handed over to South Korea, which has 600,000 troops staring off against North Korea’s 1.1-million member military, the world’s fifth largest.

While the US’s popularity in South Korea has waned over the past couple of decades, they never really wanted to see us leave their defenses. The AP does not include any reaction from Seoul, either official or unofficial. The US plans on handing back half of its bases in the Republic, some of them on land considered to have prime real-estate potential, which may offset the economic damage done by the base closings.
North Korea reacted counter-intuitively:

On Sunday, North Korea condemned a reduction of U.S. forces along the DMZ as preparation for a pre-emptive attack against the communist country. The North sometimes argues that a pullout signals an attack, because it would reduce the risk of immediate U.S. casualties along the border fighting zone.

It may be the only country to consider a stand-down of forces as a prelude to attack, but then again, in the paranoia of Kim Jong-Il, any change could be a prelude to attack. The AP explains it as part of Donald Rumsfeld’s campaign to create a lighter, nimbler armed forces that leverages its technological advantages to deter attack rather than large numbers of standing troops. In that regard, it certainly means less casualties at least on defense, and for that we can do nothing but applaud Rumsfeld as long as the mission isn’t compromised.
However, it looks more like the reduction also reflects changing priorities at the Pentagon and changing politics on the ground. The South Koreans have not been terribly helpful during the nuclear non-proliferation effort aimed at disarming North Korea of its nuclear weapons. Force reduction may possibly reflect some disenchantment between the US and its South Korean ally, or more likely it is simply a way in which to allow the South Koreans to take more control over their own security situation, which should be the ultimate goal in our Korean policy anyway. In the meantime, we could use the troops pinned down in the DMZ in other theaters, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, since our erstwhile NATO allies haven’t been particularly eager to assist in either effort, despite official UN blessing on the latter.
Expect to see more realignments in the near future to meet new global realities, especially in Europe, where we’re still defending against a non-existent Soviet menace.

Power Line Debunks D-Bunker – Again

My colleague Scott “Big Trunk” Johnson at Power Line provided a terrific look at the Orwellian nature of the Kerry campaign by posting two screenshots of Kerry’s “D-Bunker” section of his website. The first screenshot showed the D-Bunker entry on the medal-tossing exploits of the presidential candidate before his ABC appearance, while the second showed an unannounced modification by Kerry’s campaign. The difference? The updated D-Bunker entry had this phrase removed:

John Kerry is proud of the work he did to end the Vietnam War, and he has been consistent about the facts and the symbolism of the medal-returning ceremony.

This morning, Big Trunk notes that the changes go even further back than that, and directs readers to two blogs that captured what we think are the originals. Don’t miss it!

NY Times Spreads Gossip, Tweaks Bush

Normally, newspapers print gossip — unsubstantiated rumors that tend towards the salacious or damaging — in specialty columns, such as the New York Post’s Page 6 or the syndicated Liz Smith column. However, if the unsubstantiated and unsourced rumor involves high-ranking members of the Bush administration and can be used to tweak the president, the New York Times feels free to run gossip as a “news” story, as it does today regarding the latest (ho hum) Colin Powell rumor:

Forget the official pronouncements that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is staying put at the State Department.
The buzz in the capital is at least a couple of steps beyond that, as people in business and finance circles here are speculating that he could become the next president of the World Bank, the largest and most influential development agency in the world.
The whispers only grew louder the other night after Mr. Powell dined with James D. Wolfensohn, the current bank head, at his home in the Kalorama section of Washington.

Ooh — Powell attended a private dinner! Wow, that never happens. Elizabeth Becker notes that Wolfensohn said that Powell came as a friend and not in any official or business capacity. Wolfensohn also dismissed out of hand the idea that Powell would want to take over his job in a subsequent Bush administration, even if the president wanted to replace him. Wolfensohn hasn’t even given any indication he wants out.
At least she quotes Wolfensohn by name. He’s only one of two sources to be identified in the rest of the article; the other, a spokesperson for the Treasury Department, refused to comment. In the middle of the article, Becker gets to the point:

The speculation about Mr. Powell increased after the publication of Bob Woodward’s book, “Plan of Attack.” Mr. Woodward’s portrait of the secretary of state as dissenting from the hawks in the Bush war cabinet seemed to confirm what many believed inevitable, that Mr. Powell will not remain as secretary in a second Bush administration.

Ah, yes, the oft-reported, oft-denied “Powell was betrayed” scenario that Powell pichimself has repeatedly and forcefully denied. Not only does Becker manage to maneuver that into her gossip column (titled “Psst! Is Powell Bound for the World Bank?” in a rare example of truth in headlining) but she even includes this picture of a poor African family with the caption, “The agenda of the World Bank is to help the world’s poor, like this family in Soweto, South Africa.” Why this picture?

To those pressing for Mr. Powell to make the move, what better position than as spokesman for the world’s poor? He served as chairman of America’s Promise, a charity aimed at helping children at risk.
While his policy speeches are replete with praise for the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s more muscular initiatives, Mr. Powell never fails to list as major accomplishments the administration’s contributions to the fight against AIDS and world poverty – all items on the bank’s agenda.

Well, sure, but they’re also items on the Bush Administration’s foreign-policy objectives, too, and Powell is the head of the State Department that is tasked with implementing them. Remember the $15 billion earmarked for AIDS?
Powell may well be a great candidate for the World Bank top spot. Heck, I’d pick him to run almost any organization; he has been tremendously successful no matter where he’s gone. But this isn’t a story, it’s wishful thinking. The position isn’t open, Powell has never said he’d leave his current position, and Bush hasn’t been re-elected yet. No one has gone on record — or even off-record — saying he wants to take the job or that Bush wants to offer it to him. Becker relies on Powell’s attendance at a private dinner and some unnamed functionary telling her, “Wouldn’t that be great?”
Becker must have felt left out of the Bush-bashing lately and decided to get in a mild shot by proxy. If this is what passes for journalism at the Gray Lady these days, then Howell Raines clearly was not the only problem on the editorial board.

Adventures in Headlining

The Sacramento Bee analyzed a Los Angeles Times poll (always a dangerous task) on gay marriage in a state with the nation’s strongest gay movement. The results of the poll showed that less than a third of Californians supported legalizing same-sex marriage. However, the Sacramento Bee headlined the story thusly:

Poll: Nearly one of three Californians favor gay marriage

Wow — nearly a third support gay marriage! That’s about the same percentage that supported Cruz Bustamante in the recall election. I’m talking about the actual vote, not the LA Times’ polling, which had both of them ahead until the final weekend before the vote — labeling the race as “too close to call” just before Californians rejected Gray Davis by 10 points and Bustamante 48%-30%. “Nearly a third of all Californians” didn’t help them much in the end.
Talk about viewing the glass half-full! Who knew that the Sacramento Bee hired such optimists as headline writers? (via The Corner)

A Whiff of Desperation at the Gray Lady

John Kerry’s fumble on his medal-tossing incident has produced an aroma of desperation from the New York Times this morning, where an article titled “1971 Tape Adds to Debate Over Kerry’s Medal Protest” broadens out inexplicably to cover a range of what reporters Jim Rutenberg and James Dao must feel are Kerry-friendly topics. First, Rutenberg and Dao hedge on calling Kerry a liar, even though their own reporting makes it clear that Kerry lied about the medals:

The Kerry campaign Web site says it is “right-wing fiction” that he “threw away his medals during a Vietnam War protest.” Rather, the Web site says, “John Kerry threw away his ribbons and the medals of two veterans who could not attend the event.”
But the issue is not so cut and dried. A television interview Mr. Kerry gave in November 1971 shows that Mr. Kerry himself fed the confusion from early on. … When the interviewer asked, “How many did you give back, John?” he answered, “I gave back, I can’t remember, six, seven, eight, nine.”
When the interviewer pointed out that Mr. Kerry had won the Bronze and Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts, Mr. Kerry added, “Well, and above that, I gave back my others.”

Actually, the issue is cut and dried; Kerry flat-out lied about this incident being the product of a right-wing smear campaign, as he puts it on his website, and he may or may not have lied in 1971 about the medals being his. After Rutenberg and Dao nicely confirm Kerry’s attempt to falsely generate paranoia about Vast Right-Wing Conspiracies, a la Hillary Clinton, they note that Kerry lied about it as late as last Friday (as did the original ABC News report that Drudge broke) in an interview with the Los Angeles Times:

In The Los Angeles Times article, Mr. Kerry was quoted as saying that he never meant to imply that the two medals he had discarded belonged to him. He said they belonged to two men who could not attend the ceremony.
“I never ever implied that I did it,” Mr. Kerry is quoted as saying[.]

You can’t even argue that Kerry either lied then or lied now, because it’s patently obvious he’s lying now about the issue being generated by a right-wing cabal. Kerry tossed someone’s medals over the White House fence, and in 1971 explicitly stated that they were his own. To blame the “confusion” over their ownership on the Republicans is like, oh, I don’t know … calling your Secret Service protector an SOB and blaming him for knocking you down while snowboarding?
Rutenberg and Dao then inexplicably shift the article to Kerry’s attacks on the Bush administration’s policies on photographing returning caskets of American servicemen, as if this were just a political diary. Instead, it reads as an attempt to polish Kerry’s image a bit by tarnishing Bush. Rutenberg and Dao reviewed the 1971 interview by Kerry that has been stored in the National Archives ever since Nixon demanded a copy of it. What else was said during the interview? Apparently Rutenberg and Dao don’t want us to know, which is why they finish their article with a completely unrelated issue.
Do you get the feeling that the folks at the New York Times see this election slipping away from them?
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! I listened to a small bit of Kerry’s interview on ABC this morning, and I detected more than a whiff of desperation in his attitude too. Even Charlie Gibson wasn’t buying Kerry’s explanation, and if Kerry loses ABC, things are definitely going downhill. More on that in this CNS News piece. Here’s the description, with a startling observation by Gibson:

In a somewhat heated interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday, Kerry insisted, “I stood up in front of my nation and took the ribbons off my chest” — in front of TV cameras, he noted — and then threw those ribbons over a fence.
“I never asserted otherwise,” Kerry said on Monday — moments after ABC played part of the 1971 intervew in which Kerry indicated he threw his medals over a fence. …
“Good Morning America” anchor Charlie Gibson said he was there 33 years ago when Kerry threw medals over the fence. “I saw you throw medals over the fence, and we didn’t find out until later (interrupted) that those were someone else’s medals,” Gibson said.
Kerry, not listening to the end of Gibson’s statement, said, “Charlie, Charlie, you’re wrong. That is not what happened. I threw my ribbons across. And all you have to do…” [Gibson tried to clarify that Kerry threw someone else’s medals over the fence, but Kerry would not give him an opportunity.]
Kerry eventually clarified that he did throw two medals (not his) over the fence at the request of two veterans.

But he claimed in 1971 to have thrown his own medals over the fence. How many times will this story change? Look, the issue isn’t whether he protested the war; we know he did, and you can decide whether that’s germane 33 years later. But what this issue is about is Kerry’s honesty — he’s lying about the medals now, and he likely lied about them in 1971 in order to make himself more credible to the radical-left crowd he represented back then. And instead of simply saying something along the lines of, “I must have been mistaken,” he blames Republicans for catching him in a lie. It’s the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy all over again.
I crossposted this at Oh, That Liberal Media.
UPDATE II: Here’s the full transcript, courtesy Instapundit.
UPDATE III: Here’s what you missed at the end of the interview, but which ABC apparently ran on later broadcasts:

God, they’re doing the work of the Republican National Committee!
— Sen John Kerry, ripping off the microphone after his interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America, after being grilled about his shifting ‘Medal Throwing’ stories

As I commented on Silent Running’s blog, Kerry seems to have switch his campaign motto from “Bring It On!” to “Make It Stop!”

Drudge: Kerry Lied, Again

John Kerry told the Los Angeles Times on Friday that he had never even implied that he threw his own medals over the fence at the White House to protest the Vietnam War. However, Matt Drudge reports that ABC has video from 1971 that will prove Kerry lied:

In an interview published Friday in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry claimed he “never ever implied” that he threw his own medals during a Hill protest in 1971 to appear as an antiwar hero.
But a new shock video shows John Kerry — in his own voice — saying he did!
ABC’s GOOD MORNING AMERICA is set to rock the political world Monday morning with an airing of Kerry’s specific 1971 boast, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.
The video was made by a local news station in 1971.

Can this man ever tell a straight story, for Pete’s sake? On his website, he even refers to the story as “right-wing fiction.” If ABC delivers as promised, what lame explanation follows next? He used the wrong word again?
UPDATE: Via Instapundit, ABC News confirms:

But Kerry told a much different story on Viewpoints. Asked about the anti-war veterans who threw their medals away, Kerry said “they decided to give them back to their country.”
Kerry was asked if he gave back the Bronze Star, Silver Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for combat duty as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam. “Well, and above that, [I] gave back the others,” he said.
The statement directly contradicts Kerry’s most recent claims on the disputed subject to the Los Angeles Times last Friday. “I never ever implied that I did it, ” Kerry told the newspaper, responding to the question of whether he threw away his medals in protest.

Honestly — and I use that word specifically — how can anyone believe a word this man says? This goes way beyond “nuance”; this approaches pathological lying. Hugh Hewitt has referred to the Torricelli option recently in regards to the Democratic nomination, implying that Kerry wouldn’t survive to the July convention and that Hillary may be drafted to run instead. Even up until this weekend, I scoffed at the idea. However, Mitch and I debated it on the Northern Alliance radio show yesterday, and with this new revelation, it looks like more than just a possibility.