Politics
stcynic | August 1, 2005Patterico has a post up about Howard Dean's latest stupid comment, this one about the Kelo decision. I agree with him that Dean's comments are absurd, but not with his "oh my god, the media is so liberal for not reporting this" stance. First, the substance. Here is what Dean said:
"The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is."
Well, no. You can certainly criticize Bush himself on the subject of eminent domain. After all, he has personally benefited to the tune of several million…
stcynic | July 24, 2005The Senate Armed Services committee is working on a bill that would place firm limits on the treatment of detainess and the types of interrogation they can use. And the Vice President apparently wants the bill stopped:
The legislation, which is still being drafted, includes provisions to bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual...
In an unusual, 30-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday night, Mr. Cheney warned three senior…
stcynic | July 21, 2005Since politics today is conducted primarily through the use of catchphrases and codewords, political memes are particularly fun to watch and never more than when they're first beginning to enter the public discourse. The right has long been the master of this art, building on the direct mail campaigns of Richard Viguerie and, later, Newt Gingrich's famous list of words to use when making political speeches. Particularly interesting are those codewords and phrases that really just mean "Them - everything we despise". For instance, the favorite buzzword of the religious right, beginning in the…
stcynic | July 7, 2005The media has been reporting that President Bush fell off his bike in Scotland, sustaining only a minor scrape or two. But just to show you how the liberal media protects Democrats, they aren't reporting that Dick Durbin was the one who took the training wheels off the President's bike. And now you know...the rest of the story.
tlambert | July 3, 2005The Jargon Dictionary says:
spelling flame: n.
[Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article's spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare dictionary flame). Of course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think any correction is a spelling flame. It's an amusing comment on human nature that spelling flames themselves often contain spelling errors.
I wonder if people realize just how lame they look when they try to score points off a spelling mistake? Which…
stcynic | June 28, 2005The Washington Nationals are the talk of baseball this year, having returned baseball to the nation's capital and put aside the losing ways they had as the Montreal Expos prior to this year. They're such a hot commodity that several groups are bidding to buy the team, including one group that includes billionaire Democratic Party booster George Soros. And as Roll Call magazine reports, some Republican leaders are actually threatening retaliation on Major League Baseball if they allow Soros' group to buy the team:
"I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes," said Government Reform…
stcynic | June 22, 2005My views on this issue are still in flux, so I'm just going to present a link to this article by Andrew Sullivan without much comment. He documents that the concerns about abuse and torture by our government in the war on terrorism go much deeper than a few complaints by anti-war journalists. Thousands of pages of documents have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act, including memos and reports from internal military commissions, FBI interrogators and much more. And those documents paint a fairly disturbing picture, one that fills me with ambivalence.
I frankly don't think…
stcynic | June 7, 2005I know that pointing out hypocrisy in politics is a bit like pointing out inconsistencies in movie plots. It's probably not sound sport, and it's entirely too easy most of the time. But sometimes you just have to laugh at how brazen someone can be at the pot and kettle game, and the recent revelation of the identity of Deep Throat was a great example. Watching Nixon's henchmen come out of the woodwork to declare their moral indignation at the ethical lapses of Mark Felt was tantamount to watching Liza Minelli criticize someone else for being an an unstable boozehound. Gentlemen, do you not…
stcynic | June 1, 2005The Massachusetts legislature overrode Mitt Romney's veto of a bill that cleared up state roadblocks on stem cell research yesterday. Before this bill, state law actually required stem cell researchers to get permission first from the local district attorney. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. The new bill ends that and the legislature voted overwhelmingly to override Romney's veto, 112-42 in the House and 35-2 in the Senate.
stcynic | May 29, 2005Patterico has an interesting post up about last week's filibuster compromise that says that President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist sent conservative senators Lindsay Graham and Mike DeWine to join the 5 moderate Republicans in negotiating a compromise with the 7 Democratic senators. This contrasts completely with Frist's public statements that he doesn't want the compromise, and with much of the vitriol from the right aimed at the compromisers, but I have no doubt it's correct. The day the deal was struck, I told several people not to listen to Frist's complaints about the deal…
tlambert | May 25, 2005 Congratulations to blogger Arthur Chrenkoff for getting an article in the New York Times based on his "Good news from Iraq" posts. I thought it would be interesting to look at all the good news from Iraq on one topic so we can see how things have progressed over the year that Chrenkoff has been doing his series. I picked electricity generation because that is one of the most important parts of infrastructure, indeed many other things like water and sewage treatment depend on an adequate electricity supply.
For each month from May 2004, the table below gives an extract from Chrenkoff's…
stcynic | May 24, 2005My fellow In the Agora contributor Paul Musgrave has a brilliant post on the nature of political parties as opposed to philosophies. Paul isn't a good writer, he's a great writer and the clear and lucid arguments in this essay demonstrate that.
stcynic | May 19, 2005This is just perfect, Bill Frist babbling on the floor of the Senate yesterday trying to explain why 5 years ago he was voting to sustain a filibuster against Richard Paez, a Clinton judicial nominee, when today he keeps claiming that it's unprecedented, unconstitutional and obstructionist to do the very same thing:
SEN. SCHUMER: Isn't it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?
SEN. FRIST: The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we'll come back and discuss this further. ... Actually I'd like to, and…
stcynic | May 8, 2005I've done my fair share of bashing Tom Delay and Bill Frist, but I have to ask: how the hell did Harry Reid get his job and how does he keep it? How on earth does someone get to be the most powerful man in the Senate's Democratic caucus and not learn when to shut his mouth? Following on the heels of his absurd accusation that Clarence Thomas is an "embarrassment" to the Supreme Court - compounded by the fact that he clearly hadn't bothered to read any of Thomas' opinions, since when challenged to back it up he mentioned a case in which Thomas had only written a three line technical…
stcynic | May 3, 2005The Cato Institute's budget studies department has released a study that really nails Bush and the Republicans for their big spending ways. Here's the summary:
President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn't cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush's first term. The federal budget as a share of…
stcynic | April 28, 2005Ten points to the first person who can guess who said the following thing in 1995:
"The time has come that the American people know exactly what their Representatives are doing here in Washington. Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know...I say the best disinfectant is full disclosure, not isolation."
Leave your guesses in the comments. And using google isn't fair.
stcynic | April 27, 2005The great charm of democracy, HL Mencken famously wrote, is that it's the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. That amusement grows exponentially when one isn't a political partisan. Folks like me who think that the two major parties are, for all practical purposes, equally corrupt and incompetent can find endless amusement in watching the party faithful routinely flip positions on issues and become outraged at behavior they themselves exhibited not long ago. It's a show of the first caliber.
When Hillary Clinton's fundraiser is indicted, the Democrats respond with admirable…
stcynic | April 27, 2005A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows that most Americans oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier to confirm judicial nominees, and it's not even close. 66% are opposed to it, while 26% are for it. According to The Hill's Alexander Bolton, the Republicans' internal polling is showing the same thing and that is why many are backing away from the so-called "nuclear option":
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a leading advocate of the "nuclear option" to end the Democrats' filibuster of judicial nominees, is privately arguing for a delay in the face of adverse internal party polls.
Details of…
stcynic | April 19, 2005I've written a lot about the hypocrisy coming from the right on a number of issues, particularly federalism and "judicial activism." There are signs that these issues are beginning to split conservatives as well, roughly along the line dividing those who actually believe the things they've been saying and those who have just used such issues to gain political power only to ignore them once they get that power. The St. Petersburg Times has a fascinating article about it pointing to lots of other examples as well:
The trend is becoming a source of squeamishness among many conservative…
tlambert | April 16, 2005I got some spam from David Horowitz asking for donations to fund his lifestyle or something. Brad R. at Sadly, No, got the same spam. (Except that where his had "Brad" mine had "Tim".)
So who is this Horowitz fellow? Via Ralph Luker I found a discussion he had with Tim Burke. Burke began with:
On DiscoverTheNetwork, some of my objections have already been ably described by my colleagues. Let me mention a few of my greatest concerns.
First, I think the entire project has an almost non-existent sense of what represents a "linkage" between two separate individuals. This is the bread and…