Politics
stcynic | November 9, 2004Here is an interesting statement from Thomas Oliphant. The op-ed piece is about the Specter controversy going on, but within it he makes this statement that really jumped out at me:
It's important to see all this through the right's lens. Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980; since then, conservatives have been president 16 of 24 years; the party has held the Senate for 16 different years and directly controlled the House for 10 and had effective control of the floor for two more (1981-82).
From one Christian conservative perspective, during this period there have been more than 25 million…
stcynic | November 7, 2004It seems the liars at the National Review and their ideological brethren are having quite an effect on the rank and file, who have dutifully lined up to whoop and cry without bothering to actually put any thought into the matter. There's a surprise. The AP reports that Senate phone banks are being hammered by people insisting that Arlen Specter should not be named chairman of the Judiciary Committee for committing the outrageous sin of pointing out political reality:
Angry conservatives flooded Senate phone and fax lines on Friday demanding that Republicans prevent Sen. Arlen Specter from…
stcynic | November 6, 2004There has been a little brouhaha started between a couple of the Volokh contributors and Stephen Bainbridge, a battle between the social conservative Bainbridge and the more libertarian-minded David Bernstein and Randy Barnett. It began with Bernstein posting a quote from an article for which he was interviewed. The quote:
That idea [that the Federal Government should embrace "traditional values"] is anathema to those who take the Constitution seriously. It's not simply a question of separation of church and state, said Bernstein, but "a separation of everything and state." The conservative…
stcynic | November 4, 2004As I read the reaction around the blogosphere, I can't help but think that people on both sides are overreacting to a point of hysteria. For many on the left, they think we're on the verge of a Fourth Reich, while many on the right seem to think that political nirvana is within reach as the hero Bush slayed the terrorist and communist sympathizer Kerry. May I suggest that everyone take a deep breath. You aren't going to run off to Canada and seek political asylum (and if you do, I think you will justifiably be laughed at by Canadian officials), and we're not going to start throwing pagans and…
stcynic | November 1, 2004David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy sums up perfectly what this election is like for the libertarian-minded:
This year, the Libertarian candidate is embarassing. And Ralph Nader has become a parody of the man who once supported some forms of deregulation because it benefitted consumers. I find virtually nothing to admire about John Kerry. W. deserves credit for a certain steadfastness in the War on Terror, but his administration is suffused with the sort of hubris, sense of entitlement to power, and belief in the ameliorative powers of government action (in both the foreign and domestic…
stcynic | October 27, 2004Quote:
The commander of the first unit into the area told CBS he did not search it for explosives or secure it from looters. "We were still in a fight," he said. "our focus was killing bad guys." He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came across.
Sounds a lot like what I've been saying for months, doesn't it? Sounds a lot like what a whole bunch of generals, former generals and military analysts were saying before the war, doesn't it? And just think, Rumsfeld only wanted to go in with 20% of the troops we DID go in with, which was…
stcynic | October 25, 2004Several months ago there was a story on NBC that claimed that the Bush administration knew about Al Zarqawi's terrorist training camp in the Northern no-fly zone in Iraq long before the war started and that they and that they had decided not to take the camp out because it was more convenient to have a terrorist training camp in Iraq as a way of selling the war. Administration supporters, naturally, thought the story was absurd and just another example of that darn liberal media. Alas, it looks like it may be true. In this morning's Wall Street Journal (about the furthest thing from liberal…
stcynic | October 25, 2004From the "could this administration possibly be any more incompetent" file comes this report:
The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons…
stcynic | October 23, 2004This is just disturbing. Three teachers go to a campaign speech by President Bush. They have tickets for the event that they got from the Republican party headquarters; they give the tickets at the front gate and are let in; then they are approached by event security and told that they have to leave because of what their matching shirts say. And what did they say?
Protect Our Civil Liberties
And Orwell wept. This is par for the course for the administration, which has made "free speech zones" a regular part of events attended by the President and required loyalty oaths to let folks into…
tlambert | October 22, 2004 Via Pandagon I find an appallingly innumerate article on polls by Michael Barone:
Blogger Steven Den Beste has prepared an interesting chart. Den Beste charges that pollsters "deliberately gimmicked" the results, "in hopes of helping Kerry." I don't agree with that at all. But he has made another interesting observation. Eliminating some of the peaks and valleys of the Bush and Kerry percentages in realclearpolitics.com's average of recent polls, Den Beste shows that Bush's percentages have tended to rise over time while Kerry's have risen much less if at all.
He draws the Bush long-…
tlambert | October 17, 2004 Steven den Beste has looked at a graph of polls of voting intentions and decided:
In September, I think there was a deliberate attempt to depress Kerry's numbers, so as to set up an "October comeback". Of course, the goal was to engineer a bandwagon.
This seems rather implausible to me. There are very many organizations do the polling. If all the polls are rigged, a huge number of people would have to know about it, and surely one of them would have leaked the information by now. It also seems unlikely that every single poller (including, for example,…
stcynic | October 15, 2004Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for catching this article in the National Review Online, containing this quote:
Fox News contributor Mort Kondracke put it best when he said last night, "I think it was totally underhanded -- the outing of Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter.... And it struck me as a low blow designed to weaken the Bush-Cheney team with right-wingers who might not know that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter."
While the Democrats have been hurling specious and unsubstantiated charges about Republicans suppressing the African-American vote, Kerry and Edwards are leading their party's…
tlambert | October 14, 2004 Earlier, Glenn Reynolds accused me of spinning because I wrote that "the [Australian] election was not about Iraq---it was hardly an issue.". Now he approvingly links to a piece by Greg Sheridan
Labor did not buy a single ad on Iraq. Nor did Latham mention his troops-home-by-Christmas pledge in his policy speech. Indeed Iraq only figured in the last line on page 13 of a 16-page speech by Latham. ... It was rather strange that we have troops at war and they were hardly mentioned in the campaign.
Why, that's what I was saying! Do you think Reynolds…
stcynic | October 14, 2004From his second post on the subject of Mary Cheney's name being brought up:
In many speeches on marriage rights, I cite Mary Cheney. Why? Because it exposes the rank hypocrisy of people like president Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney who don't believe gays are anti-family demons but want to win the votes of people who do. I'm not outing any gay person. I'm outing the double standards of straight ones. They've had it every which way for decades, when gay people were invisible. Now they have to choose.
Let me give you an example of the double standards here. I remember once being driven around…
stcynic | October 14, 2004For some reason, a lot of people are all upset that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney by name when discussing the subject of gay marriage and whether people choose to be gay or not. This boggles my mind, and Andrew Sullivan hits it just right, I think:
I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry's mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a "low blow". Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president's family. That's a public fact. No one's privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no…
tlambert | October 13, 2004 Glenn Reynolds, in a heroic leap, has apparently concluded that the election in Australia really was a referendum on Iraq and folks who don't think so must just be spinning.
One of those spinning must be Prime Minister John Howard, who told CNN that Iraq "wasn't the dominant factor" in the election victory.
Also spinning must be The Bulletin, which has eighteen pages on the election this week (including a whole page by Tim Blair). In what can only be part of a massive conspiracy by the Main Stream Media, Iraq is mentioned by name a grand total of zero…
tlambert | October 12, 2004 Tim Blair continues to insist that the election was about Iraq. I'll look at his arguments in a moment, but first let's look at what everybody else says about this.
Tom Allard and Mark Metherell in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Iraq flared briefly after the Jakarta bombings---most notably in the leaders' debate---but was mostly left alone by the Opposition, even though Mr Howard refused to talk about the issue, betraying his fears the missing weapons of mass destruction and increased terrorist threat could hurt this chances.
A "Labor Insider" in…
stcynic | October 12, 2004Sandefur has updated his post on my alleged bias, but has continued to oversimplify my position. In fact, I think he is engaging in precisely the kind of false dichotomy that he would recognize immediately were it foisted upon him. In fact, in his follow up he has gone even further than in his initial statement, not only claiming that I give Kerry "every benefit of every doubt", but that I am actually a Kerry supporter! One would think that in order to qualify as a Kerry supporter, one would, at bare minimum, have to be voting for Kerry, which I have made clear I will not be doing. In fact, I…
tlambert | October 11, 2004 The relentless spinning of the result of the election in Australia continues. In the New York Post John O'Sullivan's headline is "Bush wins again". I didn't even know Bush was running in the election here. O'Sullivan also writes:
Al Qaeda has received a serious setback, Kofi Annan a rebuke, France and Germany a disappointment---and the media elites a slap in the face so stinging that outside Australia Howard's victory has been a non-story.
This is just bizarre. Labor is very keen on wiping out Al Qaeda---the only difference with the government seems to be…
stcynic | October 11, 2004Timothy Sandefur has once again taken me to task, this time about my post concerning the Bush campaign's consistent distortions of things said by John Kerry. It hardly needs to be said that I have enormous respect for Sandefur. Not only do I think he's one of the best bloggers around, I also think that he is on his way to becoming an important and influential constitutional scholar. But here I think he is either misunderstanding, or unintentionally oversimplifying, my views on the matter in at least two respects. First, in his understanding of the point of my earlier entry. He states:
Ed…