Garbled Crap -- Buncha stuff bugging me

Sorry for no new post yesterday (believe it or not, the CNB actually has readers). Sick kid and work doings took over. However, in light of the loyal CNB readers, CNB promises to post new content each and every weekday for you to read and immediately forget -- with the election coming up, likely weekends as well. Anyhoo, back to the usual load of crap . . .

1. For the second time in a week, Pres. Bush gave what his folks told the press would be a "major policy speech" on terrorism, which would merit television coverage, in that he is the President and we all want to know what major policies he has. However, as he did last week, he made his normal stump speech with NO NEW POLICY ANNOUNCEMENTS, although this time he delivered more pointed attacks on Kerry, and, just like last week, it was broadcast live on the cable news networks. Georgieboy: you can't do that. By now, one would think you would understand that misleading people is a lousy way to get them to trust you (then again, the polls seem to refute that statement). Media: -- you can't let him keep doing that without calling him on it (and that means somewhere other that Slate). You'd think Bill O'Reilly and the Jon Stewart-Tucker Carlson donnybrook would keep you guys busy enough.
2. No more stuff about Mary Cheney. None. She's gay - we all know, and we all ALREADY KNEW. Maybe Kerry should not have mentioned her (nice work, dumbass - way to ride that momentum), but this in no way merited this much discussion.
3. Uncle on all the polls. There are all sorts of polls: CNN/USA Today/Gallup, a conglomeration that only seems to be missing Disney as a partner; Zogby; Newsweek; Time, which one would logically presume would be partnered with its corportate sibling CNN; the AP, and, of course, the BCS. The problem is, there is no clear answer among them. Maybe the problem is that there really is a 50/50 split in the country over the candidates, maybe it is that they only poll 500 people at a time and then attempt to extrapolate that to a country with a population inching toward 300 million. Whatever the case, they have to stop, or at least my addiction to them has to be curbed.
4. You don't get to endorse a candidate by copying his talking points. The Chicago Tribune, to which CNB subcribes, endorsed Pres. Bush on Sunday. That is all well and good, although I don't know that I care who a paper likes or doesn't, and the Trib Editorial Board is free to endorse. However, they do not get to parrot the candidate's campaign slogans, which is what the Trib did -- one example: "But for his resoluteness on the defining challenge of our age--a resoluteness John Kerry has not been able to demonstrate--the Chicago Tribune urges the re-election of George W. Bush as president of the United States." Everyone in Chicago knows that the Trib is conservative, but this is not about the paper's ideological leanings. Rather, this is a criticism of intellectual laziness by a usually-respected newspaper -- they even crib the Bush campaign notes on stuff like the $87 billion vote and his alleged plan to pull all US troops out of Iraq. David Corn does a good dissection of it here.

Sorry for the stuff that's been bugging me today. Better content will follow. In the words of Dan Rather: "Courage."