In a letter published in this morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former President Jimmy Carter excoriates Senator (and fellow Democrat) Zell Miller for his participation in the Republican National Convention last week. Miller was the keynote speaker.

In Miller's speech, he took the Democratic party to task for becoming too rabidly and radically leftist, and alienating many around the nation. Carter's letter accuses Miller of being motivated by greed.

It was a loyal Democrat, Roy Barnes, who appointed you as U.S. senator when you were out of office. By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.

Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican National Convention because of your being a "Democrat," and it's quite possible that your rabid speech damaged our party and paid the GOP some transient dividends.

Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations.

Zell, I have known you for 42 years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral pre-emptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause.

I don't think Carter regrets a damn thing. I think he's more pissed off that he -- and the remainder of the Democratic Party -- got caught with their collective pants down.

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Republican carpetbagger Senate candidate Alan Keyes has shoved his foot in his mouth yet again.

In a radio interview last week, Keyes used religion to bash his Democratic opponent Barack Obama.

Keyes, who has focused his campaign on abortion, said that his statement about whom Jesus would vote for was based on Obama's pro-choice votes in the Illinois Senate.

"Christ would not stand idly by while an infant child in that situation died," Keyes said. "And I'm not the only person, obviously, who thinks if you are a representative of me, I cannot vote for you if you would ignore the dignity and claims of that child's life. So, yes, I did respond quite logically -- you'll see it's quite logical, right -- with the conclusion that Christ would not vote for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved."

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The Chechen terrorists who perpetrated the Beslan school massacre made a video tape of their siege. They seem to think that they will get the public to support their ongoing "efforts."

All we can do is pray they suffer far more than they made those children suffer.

On closer examination, portions of the video become even more disturbing.

...a shot where you hear a voice in the background. The voice is talking to someone on a cell-phone. He is not speaking Russian. He is either speaking Turkic or Arabic, but he distinctly can be heard speaking the Arabic phrase "Allahu-Akhbar". The next scene is disturbing if brief. The camera looks down at blood on the ground and pans past what look to be the legs and arms of dead children. You cannot see their full bodies, just a brief glimpse as the camera pans past to focus on the blood. Horrible.

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Author Ronald Kessler's A Matter Of Character: Inside The White House Of George W. Bush looks at Bush, the man, not Bush the "cartoon character" that everyone from commentators to comedians have turned him into.

NRO's Q&A with Kessler points out the continued contradictions behind the "comic book picture" that the left continues to paint regarding Bush.

National Review Online: So President Bush isn't dumb, you say?

Ronald Kessler: Most of what the public knows of Bush is filtered through the liberal bias of the media. He wears cowboy boots, so he's a hick. He has unconventional ways of dealing with the twin threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, so he must not know what he's doing. He says exactly what he thinks, so he must be unsophisticated.

The caricatures are conflicting: Bush has a short attention span, yet from the day he took office he was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He is a puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove, but he does not listen to anyone's advice. His decisions are made for him by warring factions within his administration, but he stubbornly clings to his own views. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, but is a dimwit.

What I found was that, contrary to the caricatures, Bush solicits differing views, then makes up his own mind.

NRO: And he doesn't have dyslexia, contrary to some disingenuous reporting?

Kessler: The claim that Bush has dyslexia was in a Vanity Fair article by Gail Sheehy, and she has since repeated that claim on TV. In fact, Nancy LaFevers, one of the two experts Sheehy quoted to support her conclusion, told me she told Sheehy that Bush was not dyslexic.

NRO: What's the most persistent and damaging myth about President Bush?

Kessler: That he is a Nazi because he deposed someone who killed 300,000 people. A large number of people actually believe that.

Kessler has changed that opinion as a result of his research for this book. He plans to vote for Bush in November.

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Russian special forces nabbed one of the "alleged" hostage takers in the school massacre, and was shown on television in Russia pleading for his life today.

Channel One state television showed the man being dragged into a room by two masked commandoes.

His hands cuffed and locked behind his back, he makes a plea to the camera.

In the footage, shown on Sunday evening, the man, whose accent strongly suggests he is from the region and not a foreigner, makes a plea to the camera.

"I really didn't go there to die and I still don't want to die. I swear, I swear to Allah the almighty, that I want to live," he says.

Religion of peace? Yeah. Right.

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While Florida and the Southeast is dealing with Hurricane Frances, that sigh of relief when the skies clear shouldn't come yet.

Out in the Atlantic, Hurricane Ivan is intensifying, and on the move.

Ivan is already up to a Category Four storm, and headed westward. Hurricane Watches for the Windward Islands have been raised as of this evening.

Hurricane Ivan grew to hurricane strength during the morning with top sustained wind of nearly 85 mph, and by early afternoon it already was a Category 3 hurricane with top sustained wind of 111 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm was about 995 miles east of the Windward Islands, or more than 2,000 miles east-southeast of Miami, too far away to tell with any certainty whether it would hit the continental United States, the Hurricane center said.

However, the center's map projections suggested a path across the Antilles and Hispaniola, possibly reaching Cuba about Friday.

And after being struck by the back-to-back hurricanes Charley and Frances, Floridians should monitor the storm, forecasters said.

Ivan was moving west at about 21 mph and was expected to turn gradually toward the west-northwest.

Those of you in South Florida might want to think twice about taking down their storm shutters as Frances moves on.

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After several e-mails (and a phone call or three) from folks telling me how stupid and gullible I am, I've gotta come clean.

The London News Review (originator of the "Zell Miller's gonna burn in Hell" piece Thursday) is a satirical newspaper not unlike The Onion.

The LNR is a collective of writers, artists, hacks, satirists, critics, comedians and commentators. We have all sorts of complimentary skills, a bit like the X-Men, but only one of us is a mutant. We are a generally happy bunch, except when paralysed by anxiety and depression, and often socialize together, occasionally out of choice.

So what do we actually do? Well, as the name London News Review suggests, we do quite a lot of news reviewing, and we like talking about music and books and basketball and the other day we sent a letter to Ofcom, complaining about the Gillette advertisements where the men shave at super-speed, pointing out that if people shaved at that velocity they would cause themselves serious injury, and possibly death.

So yes, we are politically active; but to be honest, we have such a radical spread of political beliefs that we pretty much cancel each out.

So, yes. I was wrong about the article being serious. It was clearly a satire from a batch of clearly talented satirists.

That being said, what's scary is that there are many on the left (see Democratic Underground, Indymedia and other sites) who do have beliefs that fall in that line. Not only that, but I've been told by more than one Briton in more than one forum, about President Bush's brand of "evil," and by extension, the "evil" of the United States.

So you can see how easy it was for me to take this article as "truth."

Ultimately, if I ticked anyone off, I'm sorry.

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Bill Clinton was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City today, after a blockage was found in his heart.

According to CBS and ABC, Clinton will be having quadruple heart bypass surgery.

He's undergoing tests, which have come behind chest pains that have plagued the former president in the past few days.

Hospital officials are not commenting, but, as you can imagine, the press have swarmed over Columbia Presbyterian thus far.

Most sources do not consider it to be a major issue presently, since his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, is on a campaign trip in upstate New York, as opposed to being at his side.

Today, he's undergoing part of a series of tests.

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton will be joining Clinton at the hospital shortly.

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Backcountry Conservative is live-blogging the violent end to that siege of a Russian school in the southern town of , where more than 400 children along with parents were being held by a handful of Chechen terrorists, courtesy of the "Religion of Peace."

Current reports have an unknown number of people dead, all of the children out of the school, and at least 13 of the animals getting away -- possibly using some of the children as human shields.

At least 100 bodies have been found inside the gymnasium, according to ITV. There are also reports that at least 250 people have been taken to local hospitals.

Russian officials are insisting that they did not try to mount any sort of rescue operation. They indicate that Special Forces went in after the terrorists tried to escape. The situation obviously deterioriated dramatically from there.

Details will become more clear as the day progresses.

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In a departure from any notion of impartiality, the London News Review says that after his RNC keynote speech last night, they hope that Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) "burns in Hell."

If there is a hell, and most likely Zell Miller believes in such a thing, then Democratic Senator Zell Miller is going to burn in it. Spin hotly on a giant griddle. For something close to eternity.

Oh yes, siree. He is going to burn in hell.

And the chances of hell existing have just skyrocketed, because if God exists then he's no kind of God unless he quickly fashions a hell for Democrat Senator Zell Miller to burn in. And even if the universe exists without a God, as many would contend, it is far from beyond the inarticulate power of this vast mass of galaxies, nebulae and planets to create - within itself - a dark and steaming corner where Mr. Zell Miller can dwell, for eternity, in unspeakable pain. We can call it hell or we can call it Georgia. Just so long as Senator Zell Miller suffers in it.

So - yes - Senator Zell Miller is a very bad person.

Of course, it's because Zell supports George W. Bush, and in their minds, anyone associated with Bush is "eeeeeevil," right?

God is not indifferent to America? A sentiment dripping with unintentional irony. Miller had better hope, he'd better pray, that God starts feeling indifferent towards America, and pretty damned soon.

They're wrong.

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1 Easy for those poofs to talk like that from across the pond.

Posted by: Deb at September 02, 2004 04:45 AM (6aoDM)

2 I like that "we can call it hell or we can call it Georgia" bit. Me, I'll take Georgia every time. Go dawgs! (speaking as a UGA alumna)

Posted by: Fausta at September 02, 2004 05:43 AM (WhoVr)

3 A world without America would be hell for the Brits, but I'm sure that crumpet-cruncher isn't old enough to remember 1940 -- and I'll bet they don't teach about the Battle of Britain in their schools anymore.

Posted by: McGehee at September 02, 2004 05:59 AM (WcMFl)

4 Just watched Don King on CNN and it was just outstanding in what Mr. King said about Bush.

Posted by: Dex at September 02, 2004 08:05 AM (nLVch)

5 Sigh. I think you'll find that the so called London News Review is a spoof similar although not in any way as good as The Onion. It is certainly not a mainstream paper or website and is probably only read by the same kind of twit that writes for Daily Kos etc! Log onto the LNR and click on the 'history' page which shows that the latest editor is a dog called Samson....following on from one called Sausage. Deb: This "poof" from across the pond has 13 operational tours, 23 years British Army service and a Combat Infantry Badge awarded for helping the 101st Airborne during Gulf War 1 amongst others! Oh and I'm not actually a poof as my wife will hopefully confirm.... McGehee: They DO teach World War 1 and 2 in history at O and A level over here. After 23 years soldiering I am now a trainee History teacher ! (But they don't say things like "the British were fighting since breakfast and the Yanks rolled up in time for tea......"we are far too classy for that - honest!) Keep smiling but don't bother getting excited about this....or I shall start believing everything I read in the National Enquirer, especially that story about Princess Di and the alien baby.....

Posted by: dave t at September 02, 2004 09:13 AM (k+YZE)

6 McGehee: They DO teach World War 1 and 2 in history at O and A level over here. After 23 years soldiering I am now a trainee History teacher! Sometimes I'm glad to lose a bet. Thanks. ;-)

Posted by: McGehee at September 02, 2004 10:41 AM (WcMFl)

7 Oh and I'll be teaching the PROPER history of our once and glorious Empire etc.....! ruhbarb to all that Politically Correct stuff! We won Waterloo not the French! We won in Burma not Errol Flynn! Churchill was half British before he was half American! Colin Powell is really a Londoner! That sort of stuff always goes down well! Actually a recent survey (yeah right) claims that some Brit kids think Grandalf was involved in World War 2.....much as I love Lord of the Rings I think I'll have to make sure they know that in fact it was Merlin the Wizard and King Urther Pendragon....

Posted by: dave t at September 02, 2004 11:40 AM (k+YZE)

8 The article appears to be a parody of certain right wing GOP attitudes towards certain people in the Democratic Party. Such a viewpoint however is completely erroneous in the message it sends out. Any Bible believing Christian knows that every man and woman born into this World has sinned against God, because all have a sinful nature. Thus every single person alive is deserving of eternal punishment in Hell. But there is the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, who was executed on a Roman cross, and who died, so that those who believe in Him, will be saved.

Posted by: Corin at September 03, 2004 01:56 AM (HKrv0)

9 Deb: Still waiting for an apology towards the United Kingdom..... Mr King: Any chance of an update to state this LNR crap is simply that - rubbish? Many thanks.

Posted by: dave t at September 03, 2004 04:01 PM (S6lOn)

10 LOL Dave: I am direly sorry I did not correctly phrase my thought. I meant "those poofs what wrote that article". I try not to throw overly large blankets, just little lap warmers. Mike, he's right about LNR being a parody. http://www.lnreview.co.uk/corporate.html I fell for the Landover Baptist one way back...

Posted by: Deb at September 03, 2004 08:42 PM (6aoDM)

11 OOh if I send you the wool will you make me a lap warmer too? I have two friends from Lapland who would love to share one!

Posted by: dave t at September 04, 2004 02:29 AM (UZHyc)

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Zell Miller wouldn't sit still for Chris Matthews and his bullying last night.

After his speech to the Republican National Convention last night in New York City, Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) was interviewed by MSNBC's resident bully, Chris Matthews.

Matthews tried his usual antics with Miller, when Zell "gave him hell" and opened up with both barrels.

MATTHEWS: That kind of rhetoric is not educational, is it?

MILLER: Wait a minute. Now, this is your program. And I am a guest on your program.

MATTHEWS: Yes, sir.

MILLER: And so I want to try to be as nice as I possibly can to you. I wish I was over there, where I could get a little closer up into your face.

(LAUGHTER)

MILLER: But I don‘t have to stand here and listen to that kind of stuff. I didn‘t say anything about not feeding poor kids. What are you doing?

MATTHEWS: No, I‘m saying that when you said tonight—I just want you to...

MILLER: Well, you are saying a bunch of baloney that didn‘t have anything to do with what I said up there on the...

[SNIP]

MATTHEWS: OK. Do you believe now—do you believe, Senator, truthfully, that John Kerry wants to defend the country with spitballs? Do you believe that?

MILLER: That was a metaphor, wasn‘t it? Do you know what a metaphor is?

MATTHEWS: Well, what do you mean by a metaphor?

[SNIP]

MILLER: Well, use John Kerry‘s talking points from the—from what he has had to say on the floor of the Senate, where he talked about them being occupiers, where he put out this whenever he was running for the U.S. Senate about what he wanted to cancel. Cancel to me means to do away with.

MATTHEWS: Well, what did you mean by the following.

MILLER: I think we ought to cancel this interview.

MATTHEWS: Well, I don‘t mean...

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

[SNIP]

MATTHEWS: Well, you could argue it was not nurses who defended the freedom of nursing. Why did you single out freedom of the press to say it was the soldiers that defended it and not the reporters? We all know that. Why did you say it?

MILLER: Well, because I thought it needed to be said at this particular time, because I wanted to come on...

MATTHEWS: Because you could get an applause line against the media at a conservative convention.

MILLER: No, I said it because it was—you‘re hopeless. I wish I was over there. I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.

(LAUGHTER)

MILLER: Now, that would be pretty good. Don‘t ask me—don‘t pull that...

MATTHEWS: Can you can come over? I need you, Senator. Please come over.

MILLER: Wait a minute. Don‘t pull that kind of stuff on me, like you did that young lady when you had her there, browbeating her to death. I am not her. I am not her.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

MATTHEWS: Let me tell you, she was suggesting that John Kerry purposely shot himself to win a medal. And I was trying to correct the record.

MILLER: You get in my face, I am going to get back in your face.

(CROSSTALK)

MILLER: The only reason you are doing it is because you are standing way over there in Herald Square.

MATTHEWS: Senator, Senator, can I speak softly to you? I would really like you to...

MILLER: What? No, no, no, because you won‘t give me a chance to answer. You ask these questions and then you just talk over what I am trying to answer, just like you did that woman the other day.

MATTHEWS: Well, Senator...

MILLER: I don‘t know why I even came on this program.

MATTHEWS: Well, I am glad you did.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you this about John Kerry‘s war record.

MILLER: Well, are you going to shut up after you ask me?

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Hurricane Warnings have been issued for much of the southern half of Florida as Hurricane Frances continues to approach the east coast of Florida.

The most recent tracks are showing that Frances will strike somewhere between Vero Beach and West Palm Beach sometime late on Friday or early on Saturday.

Hurricane City is streaming coverage from the Hurricane Watch Shortwave net, local radio from the Bahamas and local television from South Florida.

Keep safe everyone!

Prayers for safe passage for everyone in Florida, and those of us along Frances' projected path.

WSVN-TV/DT Miami is streaming live video at http://216.242.118.140/windowsmedia/asx/wsvn_broadband.asx (WMP). Other television and radio stations in South and Central Florida will be streaming later today.

The current path of Frances has a target solution that is continually being revised southward. The other, less spoken, portion of that message is that there is a realistic possibility that Frances may hit the Port Charlotte area with hurricane force winds in the midst of their clean-up from last month's Hurricane Charley.

Also not noted is that this could emerge in the Gulf of Mexico, where waters are as warm or warmer than they are on the Atlantic side of Florida. This brings an even more complex set of calculations and preparations. Everyone needs to keep an eye out on this one and be prepared to move quickly.

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That's it.

If Putin were to finally take the velvet gloves off and nuke Chechnya, I don't think many people would be saddened -- OK, maybe Tom Daschle, but that's about it.

The Chechen terrorists crossed the line of rational thought today by taking over an elementary school on the first day of school. More than 400 hostages, most children, plus some parents are under the "watchful eye" of a band of masked and armed terrorists, some with suicide belts strapped to them.

Heavily armed militants wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya (news - web sites) on Wednesday, taking hostage about 400 people — half of them children — and threatening to blow up the building if police storm it. At least eight people have been killed, one of them a school parent.

In a tense standoff, Russian forces wearing camouflage and carrying machine guns took up positions on the perimeter of the school in the town of Belsan. Television footage showed other men in civilian dress with light automatic rifles pacing nervously.

The terrorists have threatened "for every destroyed fighter, they will kill 50 children and for every injured fighter — 20 (children)," according to the ITAR-TASS news service.

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