Politics
stcynic | April 15, 2005Thursday night is the night we host a weekly poker game, and the first one to arrive is usually our buddy Scott. Known Scott for years. He's your basic small businessman, owns a convenience store that does pretty well. He has two homes a couple miles from us, and a couple miles apart, one on the lake and one on an 80 acre parcel outside of town. So last night he's here first and we're just shooting the breeze, he and my brother and myself, and he mentions that he had been planting some stuff on his land (I forget exactly what, and it doesn't matter). And this is the conversation that ensued:…
stcynic | April 12, 2005Carpundit, in a comment on another post, wrote this and I just wanted to move it up here. It captures perfectly the American political system:
We have grown so tired of political rhetoric that only the loudest of it gets through anymore. We have grown so tolerant of loud debate that any opinion short of violence is a reasoned one. We have grown so used to there being two sides to every issue that any opinion is valid as long as someone says something on the other side.
That is an excellent description of the state of American politics today, especially the last sentence.
stcynic | April 4, 2005Tom Delay was right up front in the battle over Terri Schiavo, and having lost that battle he is now out to punish those impudent judges who dared not to agree with his position. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," he said. Delay has long been at the forefront of the right's war on the judiciary, as the Dallas Morning News points out:
In 1996, Mr. DeLay argued for using impeachment to police and steer the federal bench. The next year, he said "judges need to be intimidated" to ensure that they uphold the Constitution. In mid-2003, he created…
stcynic | March 30, 2005This is very interesting. John Danforth, the conservative former Senator from Missouri, outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations, and Episcopal minister, has written an op-ed piece in the New York Times decrying the growing influence of the religious right in the Republican party:
BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells…
stcynic | March 28, 2005Just how zealous is the religious right to make sure they have total control over the Republican party? Well this should answer that question. Remember their fevered efforts to have Arlen Specter drummed out of the party leadership after the election? The Christian Coalition's 2004 scorecard for the Senate gave Specter an 83% score. If someone agreeing with you 83% of the time isn't good enough for you in politics, you're the very definition of fanatical.
stcynic | March 23, 2005It's looking like the memo that I mentioned the other day in this post is, like the Dan Rather memos, fake. Josh Claybourn has a roundup of links on the subject here. I don't think it changes the truth of the claim that Republicans are exploiting the situation for political gain. Delay's comments before the Family Research Council on Friday, which were recorded, leave no doubt of that. Not only is he trying to use it for political purposes, but he thinks God struck the woman down just so he could do so. But the memo wherein they allegedly admitted this motivation appears to be fake.
stcynic | March 21, 2005Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom foundation has an excellent article in the Chicago Sun-Times about the distinction between democracy and liberty, a point I make regularly and loudly on this blog. Richman writes:
But it would be a mistake to equate democratic procedures with freedom, which the Bush administration and many others are eager to do. There is a big difference between democracy and freedom. In fact, democracy can be, and has been, the engine of freedom's destruction.
Definitions matter. What is democracy? Literally, it means that the people rule. But what does that mean?…
stcynic | March 4, 2005I've always wondered how on earth Dennis Hastert became Speaker of the House of Representatives. He isn't very bright and he has all the charisma of a pine tree. Along comes Charles Oliver, writing in Reason magazine, to explain it all as basically dumb luck. He was only elected to the Illinois state house because the opponent that beat him out in the primary had a stroke and he got the seat by default. 6 years later, he was picked to fill a US House seat when the sitting Republican congressman went into a coma. And 12 years later, he was elected Speaker of the House in the aftermath of sex…
tlambert | March 1, 2005Lott and James Glassman have a piece in the New York Post arguing that felons should not be allowed to vote. Well, I can't claim to know anything about the issue (for that, see Kevin Drum and Julie Saltman), but this is John "98%" Lott and James "36,000" Glassman, so you just know their numbers are going to be dodgy. And sure enough, in the first paragraph we find:
A bill to guarantee that millions of convicted murderers, rapists and armed robbers can vote.
That sounded like a lot to me, so I thought I'd check. I found a table giving a breakdown of felony convictions by crime…
stcynic | March 1, 2005A fascinating exchange has gone on between two of my favorite bloggers, Caleb McDaniel and Paul Musgrave, about how the two sides tend to look at American foreign policy in a far too simplistic manner. Caleb began by responding to a recent column by David Brooks crowing that the recent movement to get the Syrians out of Lebanon was a direct result of Bush's policy in Iraq. Paul then wrote this reply to Caleb, which is not so much a rebuttal as an extension of the same sort of reasoning. He agrees with Caleb that Brooks' American triumphalism is far too simplistic, but he points out that there…
stcynic | February 24, 2005Media Matters has a side by side comparison of various "news reports" written by Jeff Gannon/James Guckert for Talon News that were simply taken word for word from either the President's speeches or from RNC or White House "fact sheets". It's a pretty funny comparison.
stcynic | February 24, 2005One of the things that is endlessly amusing to me is watching the two parties do their dance of feigned outrage at the tactics of the other party when they have engaged in the same tactics when the tables were previously turned. The latest example is the frantic hand-wringing of the Republicans about Democrats in the Senate blocking 10 Bush judicial nominations in his first term. They're shocked, I tell you, absolutely shocked that the Democrats would dare to impede the nominations of so many judges and they are considering changing the Senate rules to rule out the use of the filibuster so…
stcynic | February 22, 2005In a Washington Post column the other day, George Will said the same thing I've been saying the last couple weeks - the notion that Bush's proposed budget is fiscally responsible is ridiculous:
Not that his "lean" (his adjective) and "austere" (John McCain's) $2.57 trillion budget is anything of the sort. It proposes spending 38 percent more than the government was spending when Bush became president. It would slice off only thin slivers here and there: Remember, entitlements and interest are two-thirds of the budget and discretionary domestic spending is just 17 percent. It calls for a 3.6…
stcynic | February 22, 2005In thinking about the exchange below with Sandefur, it occured to me that there is a great example going on right now of how the press interacts with the two major parties - the new budget. In this case, both parties are trying to sell the same line, that the President's proposed budget contains "deep spending cuts", and the press is blissfully passing that lie along. The President's proposed budget is 10% larger than last year, yet they announced it with a flurry of press releases talking up the strong focus on fiscal discipline and the deep cuts in many programs found in it. The White House…
stcynic | February 22, 2005Am I the only one who finds this whole Gannon/Guckert situation hilarious? I can't imagine I am. I mean, on how many levels could one person and one situation be simultaneously ridiculous? Let's count them.
Gannon/Guckert himself. How pathetic is this guy? First of all, the gay escort personal ads are about the funniest thing I've ever read. I mean, who wouldn't respond to an ad for an "aggressive, verbal, dominant top" who says he "won't leave marks - only impressions"? For that matter, who wouldn't pay him $1200 a weekend for it? But hey, I'm a libertarian and as far as I'm concerned, all…
tlambert | February 18, 2005 Roy Eccleston has an article on blogs in The Australian. He is startled to find that thanks to blogs, some Americans believe an entirely false story about how Diana Kerry interfered in the Australian election, based on a contrived reading of an story that Eccleston himself wrote. He writes (my emphasis):
"You're Australian aren't you," said a bystander, listening to our conversation."So what do you think about John Kerry's sister interfering in your election campaign?"
I was stunned. Here was a particularly well-informed American - he not only knew Australia had held…
stcynic | February 16, 2005I haven't written anything about the Ward Churchill situation, but I'd like to point to a post that I think nails it pretty well. Brian Leiter has summed up my thoughts pretty well in this post where he defends the man's academic freedom. From what I've seen, Churchill is an arrogant and mediocre man and his opinions are certainly quite offensive on the subject of controversy. It may well be true that the university made a mistake in hiring him. But that would make him no different than 10,000 other mediocrities in academia in many other fields. The bottom line for me is that I'm not willing…
stcynic | February 7, 2005Am I the only one who finds press reports like this amusingly ridiculous?
President Bush sent Congress a $2.57 trillion budget plan Monday that seeks deep spending cuts across a wide swath of government from reducing subsidies paid to the nation's farmers, cutting health care payments for poor people and veterans and trimming spending on the environment and education.
The budget - the most austere of Bush's presidency - would eliminate or vastly scale back 150 government programs. It will spark months of contentious debate in Congress, where lawmakers will fight to protect their favored…
stcynic | February 4, 2005Okay, this made me laugh. Eugene Volokh posted what was obviously a very sarcastic response to the Iraqi election noting that the 72% turnout was a 28% drop from the 100% turnout in the last election in which Saddam Hussein was reelected and asked, "Why isn't the media pointing this out?" The next day he received the following email from an obviously not-too-bright correspondent:
Let me guess? Your (sic) a bleedy (sic) hear (sic) Democrap. I am sure the last election in Iraq had a higher turn out because if thet (sic) did not vote they were tortured, murdered or put in jail maybe we should…
tlambert | January 29, 2005 What Max Sawicky says.
Update: Reynold's response? He doesn't link or rebut or even give his readers a clue that he is responding to a particular post, no he just likens Sawicky to a monkey. Real mature.
Update 2: John Holbo has a longer response.