Nocturnal Pundit

Blog drought

2004-12-07T09:35:00.000-05:00

As many of you have noticed (and some have commented on through email), my blogging has slowed down considerably lately. And, while some of that had to do with a computer problem that was beyond my control at the time, much of it is a product of my increased level of work from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As long as they're keeping me writing at the pace they're beginning to, I have to level my focus toward them instead of my blogging hobby. In addition to that, I'm about to begin putting a decent bit of my efforts into work with another startup newspaper that I'm trying to help get off the ground in my home state of Tennessee. Therefore, I'm going to be taking some time off from blogging but have every intention of coming back to this when/if the real journalism work dries up before I get a job back with a paper somewhere. The whole point of this blog has been for me to keep writing and thinking, but that opportunity is coming from elsewhere at the moment. Thanks for reading, and I'll be sure to let you know when I return from hiatus.

Amazing

2004-12-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

The New York Times continues to not actually cover the U.N. Oil for Food scandal that is going to become one of the biggest corruptions of authority in our lifetimes if it ever gets the MSM coverage it deserves. Oh, but the Times isn't slacking off of writing unfathomable editorials somehow defending U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan after all this mess. This is fascinating, if inept, reading.

Mr. Annan, who drew the wrath of Republican Washington for opposing President Bush's war in Iraq, will have to face the judgment of United Nations members on how much responsibility he bears. But before the call for his scalp gains more political momentum, it is important to disentangle the mélange of charges swirling around. The United Nations bureaucracy does not bear the primary responsibility for letting Saddam Hussein amass a secret treasury estimated by official investigators at $10 billion to $21 billion.

That IS NOT the issue, and it's hard to believe the Times editors don't know this. The scandal here is that Saddam was buying the contrition of countries such as France, Russia and Germany through oil-for-food vouchers that had the ability to make officials from those countries rich. He lined their pockets for influence over their votes, in the hopes of having the U.N. sanctions lifted and keeping the U.S. out of his country. It was close to working, but that's the most persuasive argument I can think of for Bush taking us into Iraq when he did. Saddam making money off the system is irrelevant, troubling as it may be.

As far as I can tell, many members of the MSM, such as the Times, are afraid to attack the U.N. too harshly because they've defended the organization so staunchly in the past. It would undercut their own credibility to now say the U.N. is corrupt because they so strongly implored Bush and the Republicans to go through the U.N. and let its inspections work in Iraq before going to war. Now it's entirely possible the inspections themselves were influenced by these bribes and would never have found evidence of weapons. They would have let Saddam continue to stall and get off the hook. But the Times would have you ignore that.

UPDATE: A great fisking of the Times editorial by TigerHawk.

What if ...

2004-12-04T17:19:00.000-05:00

... you replaced all water in your life with beer? One brave, brave soul set out to find that answer.

Bubblewrapping

2004-12-04T17:14:00.000-05:00

I know at least one person who I'm sure will get a kick out of this. Try Manic Mode.

Spacey Spaces

2004-12-04T17:05:00.000-05:00

I mentioned the new MSN blogging program, MSN spaces, a couple of days ago. Reports now are, oddly, that word-filtering software has been used in the process to prevent potential bloggers from using certain words, at least in the titles of their blogs. BoingBoing details the issue.

Uh-oh. My attempt to create an MSN Spaces blog called "Pornography and The Law" is met with rude red text advising me to can the profanity. So, if I were a law student who wanted to start a blog about the history of obscenity law in the United States, I'd be s*** out of luck.

I've always found most forms of censorship to be silly at best, as the free market tends to filter out language and behavior it doesn't like. But why would MSN be censoring people's blogs, which are supposed to be unfiltered by nature? I can't think of a reason why they'd care, though I also can't figure out why anyone would want a Constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage either. If I want to title my blog "Bullshit Theatre," what stake does MSN have in this, even if I'm using their program to do it? Surely no religious zealots would start boycotting MSN for allowing me to title my blog with dirty words. And, of course, in the end, there are plenty of potentially offensive words that don't get filtered out for no particular reason and words that do get filtered out for no particular reason. That's what pretty much all censorship programs run into. You'd think they'd learn.

An open Cabinet

2004-12-04T16:59:00.000-05:00

Well, I can't be right all the time.

News snooze

2004-12-03T11:22:00.000-05:00

So I'm reading my usual sites this morning, and nothing's really striking me as particularly interesting. As far as I can tell, we have a new director of homeland security, the BBC has been duped, Annan really has to leave the U.N., college campuses are extraordinarily liberal and baseball players are druggies. So, all in all, pretty much same old, same old.

Richie Rich

2004-12-02T14:54:00.000-05:00

Anybody remember Marc Rich? Yes, the tax cheat for whom Clinton did a hit-and-run pardon on his last day in office. The guy's a low-life scoundrel, and I don't think you'll get much argument against that statement from those who know him. And so is Rich.

Clinton's Rich pardon should have gotten more attention for the sheer filthiness of the whole affair but, lo and behold, here it comes toward the front pages now, perhaps. It seems that Rich allegedly joined the veritable throngs of people who had their dirty little hands in this money-saturated Oil-For-Food scandal, according to ABC News.

Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.

And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.

Forget Monica Lewinsky, TravelGate, WhiteWater, Paula Jones, etc., etc., etc. ... I'd like to see the Rich pardon turn out to be the biggest scandal of the Clinton presidency rather than the barely-a-footnote it's become. If this story is the impetus toward that being the case, it might be worth the whole thing.

Listing your life away

2004-12-02T13:32:00.000-05:00

This should be a fun page to watch, as it tracks all the myriad Top Whatever Lists for 2004 as they begin to pour in during the course of this month and next. Take all the lists with a fat grain of salt, but they're interesting to read, nonetheless.

For those Yuletide music freaks

2004-12-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

This has got to be the ultimate collection.

Bloggy options

2004-12-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

MSN is now introducing its own blog format with MSN Spaces. For those of you interested in joining your humble correspondent in the blogosphere, check it out.

The question of torture

2004-12-01T11:42:00.000-05:00

We've all seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were humiliated and made to suffer by the guards at that prison. But TownHall's Linda Chavez brings up a good point in her column today, asking where the line is drawn that separates torture from forced discomfort and how much of each we as a society might be willing to tolerate.

The ICRC report itself hasn't been made public, but a memorandum summarizing its contents describes far less egregious behavior. Among the tactics the ICRC portrayed as "tantamount to torture" were solitary confinement, temperature extremes, and using "forced positions" to obtain information from some of the approximately 500 men held at Guantanamo.

"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the Times quotes the ICRC report as alleging. But is it? And if such methods are "torture," is the United States justified in using them anyway? Where do we draw the line between what are admittedly unpleasant, coercive methods used to elicit information that might save lives -- thousands, even millions of them -- and actions that are so repugnant they may never be used?

I think there's an issue here that should be addressed. Should these prisoners who may have information that could save lives around the world be coddled and treated with kid gloves? Shouldn't we do what we can, short of purposefully causing the prisoner pain? I think another point has to be derived from this also, which is that terrorists, despite what many liberals will tell you, should not be protected by Geneva Convention rules. They do not belong to a nation's army, they don't wear uniforms and they fight with the intention of inflicting civilian casualties. These facts should disqualify them from Geneva Convention protections, so that's another factor to take into consideration when judging the messes at Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo.

If you can't beat 'em ...

2004-12-01T11:38:00.000-05:00

... and you can't join 'em, you better find another way to beat 'em. Hopefully, for the Democrats, this is it.

De-evolution

2004-11-30T18:20:00.000-05:00

As the Supreme Court wrestles with somewhat morality-based rulings on medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, some U.S. schools are starting to make their own morality plays against evolution, beginning to teach curriculums that include the ideas of Creationism and Intelligent Design. It seems the Morality Police are out in full force right now, and I don't think anybody benefits from this type of thinking. To say evolution is anything other than a scientific theory is wrong; it's not a fact, and we cannot say much of anything in science with 100 percent certainty. However, a scientific theory is not the same thing as a drunken theory. There is no such thing as scientific fact. That's one of the things scientists pride themselves on, that they are always willing to test their theories and have them questioned, debated and tested.

Evolution is a theory that has been heavily questioned, debated and tested, and it has largely held up to said scrutiny. Creationism is merely a belief that cannot be questioned, debated or tested, because the people who believe it refuse to accept any evidence that counters that belief. Intelligent design is actually even less viable, from what I can tell, because it's not even a belief so much as it is a sort of inference that something as complicated as a human being couldn't come about through mere natural order; it must have been handcrafted. Schools that teach these ideas at all should have children pulled from their science classes. Oh, and their books need these.

But how many are still checked out?

2004-11-29T22:51:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting list of the top 1,000 books in terms of U.S. library holdings. In the top 20 you'll find some of the usual suspects like The Bible, Huckleberry Finn and Beowulf, but you'll also see Garfield at Large. In fact, more libraries have Garfield in stock than Macbeth or Gulliver's Travels. People just love a chubby, lazy cat.

Blogger as editor

2004-11-29T22:29:00.000-05:00

Donald Sensing shows one more time today why the blogosphere is a valuable resource and why members of the MSM would be wise to pay attention to what bloggers have to say. Many of the bloggers have particular expertise, as Sensing and many others do with the military, that most members of the press didn't develop during their years in J-School. Sensing does a thorough fisking of the Washington Post's Brian Gifford, who is trying to make the point that the casualties the U.S. is suffering in Iraq are having more impact on the military than the larger numbers of casualties that occurred in previous wars. Read Sensing's post. It's great.

When Republicans lead, Dems secede

2004-11-29T15:07:00.000-05:00

It appears talk of secession hasn't gone the way of the Dodo yet, if this article from Patrick Basham and Niels Veldhuis of the Cato Institute, sent in by an alert reader, is any indication. The Blue Staters are still talking up this B.S. about the Red States sucking up all the government resources, while the Blue Staters foot the bill. Needless to say, this is all based on some extraordinarily faulty math. But don't take my word for it.

But O'Donnell's claim that the red states are bleeding blue states such as New York and California is a bad reading of the fiscal evidence. He includes both transfers to governments and transfers to individuals in his calculations. In this type of analysis, demographics play the major role in determining which states are net recipients.

States with more senior citizens, and hence more residents receiving Social Security, Medicare, and other federal entitlements, are bound to receive more than they give. Keep in mind that such entitlement spending makes up a large part of the federal budget.

A retirement state such as Florida receives a disproportionate amount in individual transfers. But many retirees receiving individual transfers are transitory residents who spent most of their working lives in New York and other blue states. Therefore, transfers to individuals should not be included in an analysis of which states are net contributors and net recipients.

So let's do just what the Cato Institute is telling us to: look at the federal spending per state and see how that stacks up. Let's even take it down to a further level and compare spending per capita, state by state, to make it that much more fair to the Blue Staters.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, of the 20 states that received the most per capita federal funds in 2003, 13 were Red States and 7 were Blue. If you stretch that out to the top 28, it's 16 Red and 12 Blue. For even a little more perspective on that, let's look at the population figures for some of those states near the top to get an idea of exactly how much funds they're sucking up. Of the 8 Red States in the top 12 per capital federal fund-receiving states, 5 of them are in the bottom 7 in terms of state-by-state population, including Wyoming (50th), North Dakota (48th), Alaska (47th) and South Dakota (46th).

I put together these numbers just to drive home the point that it's not nearly as clear cut as too many liberals would have to believe that the Red States are sucking up all the government's money. At best, it's pretty fuzzy who's really getting more, which is the way it should be.

Those lousy homophobes

2004-11-29T10:49:00.000-05:00

... or maybe it's just a crappy movie.

Drugs Not Working (obscure song reference)

2004-11-29T10:16:00.000-05:00

Interesting that, on the same day medicinal marijuna is getting attention from the courts and many major media outlets, this story comes out in the L.A. Times talking about the heroin problem in Oslo, Norway, where the decriminalization of the drug has created a haven for dealers and a nightmare for consumers in the bustling city.

Clean and tidy Oslo, the capital of a nation with one of the highest standards of living and some of the best social programs in the world, is one of Europe's heroin havens. Three years ago, it recorded more overdoses than any other major European city. Now, after a two-year decline in drug deaths — in part because of the war in Afghanistan, which interrupted the production and distribution of heroin — the number of overdoses is rising.

The trafficking routes leading to this city of stiff winds and North Sea oil money have reopened, and Norway is again a prime destination in the international drug network. Opium smuggled out of Afghanistan and turned into heroin is ferried by Albanian and Serbian gangs through Bulgaria and Romania before being distributed across Central and Northern Europe. In one raid this year, Oslo police confiscated nearly 150 pounds of heroin — double the previous largest seizure, in 2001.

The entire story is worth reading. I say the timing is interesting because many detractors of all kinds of marijuana consumption claim it's the mythical "gateway drug" from which all other drug habits will come. That conclusion stems from the misleading premise that marijuana leads people to use other drugs instead of being rooted in a more realistic thought that marijuana is usually just a relatively easy, safe drug for people to start with. The detractors will point to stories like this to say, "Look what will happen if we let people smoke marijuana; it's a(proverbial) slippery slope." I've been a proponent for a long time of, at the very least, legalizing medicinal marijuana and de-criminalizing it across the board. Heroin, on the other hand, is another story entirely.

Moral dismay

2004-11-29T09:51:00.000-05:00

Most have heard by now the widely publicized poll results from the election that Bush voters were big on moral values, with the implication that it was these morals that drove the election toward Bush. The most recent Gallup poll suggests it might not be so much that morals were the most important but government's role in enforcing those morals that was the major swing in relation to this issue.

There is no difference between Bush voters and Kerry voters in their expressed ratings of the state of moral values in the country today. Both groups (based on self-reported voting in the Nov. 19-21 poll) are equally, and overwhelmingly, likely to rate the state of moral values as only fair or poor.

Bush voters are overwhelmingly more likely than Kerry voters to say that government should have a role in the arena of traditional values. This corresponds with the finding that Bush voters are also more likely to say that moral values were important in their presidential votes. Although one question uses the word "traditional" and the other "moral" when discussing values, it is clear that in both instances, Bush voters are willing to endorse a connection between values and both the presidential vote and government actions.

In the poll, 75 percent of Bush voters said the government should enforce moral values, compared to 33 percent of Kerry voters. The numbers aren't exactly shocking, but they go a long way toward explaining what happened and highlighting a growing cultural divide between the so-called "Red States" and "Blue States." This would seem to be the only possible explanation for medicinal marijuana facing any kind of legal challenge. Of course, I don't know anyone who doesn't support medicinal marijuana. But, then, I voted for Kerry. I'll have more thoughts on that later.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Michael Kinsley of the L.A. Times says screw morals altogether.

Update

2004-11-23T09:26:00.000-05:00

Just so you all know, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, though it seems like my computer has. Spyware is making me nuts and making it pretty much impossible for me to blog with any regularity until I get the problem fixed. I'll be back to normal blogging once I do.

Gays Post-ed

2004-11-21T15:15:00.000-05:00

I've been very complimentary of the Washington Post's balanced political coverage lately, but it's time to throw a little criticism its way. Yesterday, the Post printed an insert called "Both Sides Magazine," which appears to essentially be a set of pages devoted entirely to denouncing the gay lifestyle and explaining why homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to marry and aren't a serious part of the civil-rights movement. AMERICAblog has links to the pdf files of the pages in question, and I've also put the links below if you don't want to follow through multiple pages. It's an advertising supplement, so you can say the Post can choose to run any advertising and that the advertisers can say what they want; it's free speech. However, the fact is that if you read this "magazine," you'll see it's putting forth an anti-gay opinion, that homosexuality cannot be genetic, among other things, that the Post would not run against other minority groups (blacks, Jews, Muslims, etc.). If they're running material against this minority but wouldn't against another, it suggests that the Post agrees with the sentiments of this advertisement, which is a startling admission from a fairly liberal newspaper. Either that or the Post is saying that gays are not a legitimate minority group, which may be an even more startling statement. But read the "magazine" and decide for yourself.

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Secret Santa

2004-11-21T13:41:00.000-05:00

It's not just for work anymore, apparently.

Chairman Mehlman

2004-11-21T12:29:00.000-05:00

Michael Barone has a piece in this week's U.S. News & World Report about how Ken Mehlman's appointment to Republican National Committee chairman, as well as some other analysis of the election, the parties and some astute political analysis. Barone may be a bit of an ass, but go ahead and read what he's written. I should have more on this later.

Out today

2004-11-20T18:25:00.000-05:00

Busy day. Just made it to my computer. I wanted to let everyone know there probably won't be any posts today after this one. I've just got too many things to get done tonight, and my parents are in town, blah, blah, blah. I'll be back at some point tomorrow. Have a good evening.

SI on FCC and MNF

2004-11-19T15:32:00.000-05:00

In response to this post on the irrational hand-wringing over Monday Night Football's TowelGate "scandal," reader Jeni comments that this story in Sports Illustrated points out in detail the sex/race issue that's been discussed by Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy and on sports talk radio stations. For SI.com, Jeffri Chadiha says people are tip-toeing around this layer of the issue.

Personally, the skit didn't bother me one bit. What the segment did do, however, was make me wonder if America was ready to see a naked, blonde, white woman with her arms wrapped around an outspoken, controversial, highly paid black man. From what I can tell from everybody's reaction, the country definitely wasn't.

Isn't that what this is really all about? Once we get past all the people complaining about how inappropriate the skit was for the Monday Night Football audience and how so many children will be scarred after being exposed to such a tawdry scene before their bedtime and all the decision-makers in the NFL who have raced away from this topic as if it were a time bomb, this is an issue that comes down to race. Aside from Tony Dungy, nobody wants to talk about that aspect of the story, because that's the really scary part. It might tell us something about ourselves, that our country hasn't come as far in the area of race relations as we'd like to believe. Even now, with so many people still talking about Owens and Sheridan, I doubt we can fully address it like it needs to be addressed.

If we want to take this to its logical conclusion, Chadiha should add that the Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" also featured a white/black mix, though he might say that a white man with a black woman is somewhat more sociologically acceptable. He said people won't address it. Well, damn it, I will.

Obviously, this is a beautiful white woman leaping into the arms of a strong, rich, famous black man. That didn't occur to me when I first watched it; I was probably too busy looking at the naked woman to notice the guy who was catching her. But does Chadiha really think that's the reason people are in an uproar, that this is another race issue, that people are still carrying old biases in their head and can't handle a white woman and a black man together? Does he not think this is just the latest in the FCC's quest to crack down on anything on TV that doesn't jive with 100% of Americans' views of what should be on TV? I think you can know this isn't an issue of race by picturing the same scene with the woman fully clothed or even possibly in a swimsuit (though not too scantily clad; Lord, no). Does anyone think there would have been any rational complaint about it? None. No FCC involvement. No holier-than-thou pronouncements from the NFL. Nothing. Why not? Because they didn't show a naked woman on national TV in prime time. The race issue is a red herring. I'm not saying it doesn't pop up in American life today, but you're just fishing for something to write about if you say it's the main reason behind this scandal. This is about poor judgement by the NFL, the Philadelphia Eagles and ABC, along with puritanical dissent-crushing by the FCC. It's just not about race.

UPDATE: Reader Katy posts the following comment: "I personally don't see anything wrong with a white and black relationship. If they care for each other, or have some sort of physical attraction for one another, then who are we to say no? The only part I don't care for is the naked woman. That's what HBO and other questionable channels are for. Certainly not where children can see it. Bad form."

I'd start by saying I really fail to see the big deal with nudity, even within religious circles. Are we really supposed to carry shame around? Is it the worst thing in the world for children to see a naked person, male or female, on television or anywhere else? Shouldn't parents be more worried about them seeing violence, death and destruction than the human body? But, OK, I'll grant you that, since the majority of Americans seem bent on keeping nudity off the airwaves, that TV stations should try to respect that by not showing nudity during the prime-time hours. I think it should be a pretty forgiveable offense if they do, but we should probably discourage it.

This, however, wasn't even nudity. It was the suggestion of nudity. She might have been naked; she might not have been. We saw a woman's back that appeared to have nothing covering it. That's it. Are we really going to get uptight about that? Seriously. What exactly is going to happen if children see a woman's uncovered back? Parents sit here and make such a huge deal about things like this because it's "for the children" when the children themselves have better things to worry about, like crayons and sandboxes and Playstation. Naked woman do not signal Armageddon. Women's naked backs certainly don't.

I don't want to give anybody ideas, but ...

2004-11-19T12:07:00.000-05:00

... this would have to be fun for you cubicle freaks out there.

Annan gone?

2004-11-19T09:16:00.000-05:00

I'm not exactly the first one to say UN Secretary General Kofi Annan absolutely must go, but I'd love to see these guys be the last (from the Khaleej Times, via Instapundit).

Clinton never goes away

2004-11-18T18:41:00.000-05:00

In honor of former President Clinton's opening of his new library today, I thought I'd post a column I wrote for the Web site I was writing for in 2001 about Clinton's legacy as a president and how he'll be remembered. Read, enjoy and feel free to disagree:

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat met on the South Lawn of the White House in September 1993, the world watched with renewed hope of peace in the Middle East.
Then-President Bill Clinton smiled and watched as the two leaders followed Israel’s recognition of the PLO with an historic peace accord. After less than nine months in office, Clinton had already helped forge an agreement between two perennial enemies. America’s relatively young president looked like a promising leader.
However, almost eight years to the day after that famous Sept. 9 peace accord was signed, America was rocked by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Since then, Clinton has taken many hits in the press for not doing enough to guard against terrorism or to remove power from Middle Eastern threats Saddam Hussein and the now-infamous Osama bin Laden. This has come to the forefront even more recently, as information has come to light that both his and Bush’s administrations were served by an FBI that may have answered to nobody. While Bush has suffered the majority of the political damage due to the statements of Democratic congressmen and liberal members of the press, there are those out there who think Clinton is as much to blame as the current president for not doing enough to prevent the events of Sept. 11.
But with Clinton now out of office, he has time to sit around and think about his own legacy, one he has made no secret he wants to be a great one. Clinton had his share of triumphs and much-publicized failures while in office. But, 100 years from now, should he be remembered with the likes of Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson or with Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover? Before we can decide how he will be remembered, we have to look at what he will be remembered for.
The Good
· During his reign, the United States enjoyed the largest economic expansion in its history. Clinton deserves credit not for what he did, but for what he didn’t do. He didn’t tamper with the economy and was smart enough to leave economic management to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
· In addition, the U.S. had its largest budget surplus ever, the unemployment rate dipped to its lowest in more than 40 years, welfare rolls were slashed in a more judicious manner than in any administration since its inception under Roosevelt and wages grew faster than they had in more than 20 years.
· Clinton turned the biggest federal budget deficit in history into the biggest surplus - $230 billion – by the time he left office in January 2001.
· The U.S. led a 1999 NATO air campaign in Afghanistan which helped end ethnic violence in Kosovo and led to president Slobodan Milosevic’s downfall, aiding Vojislav Kostunica’s rise to power.
· Clinton showed finely tuned skills of diplomacy and was very well suited for foreign relations.
· In 1995, Clinton went around Congress’s stagnancy and aided the recovery of the Mexican economy which, if it collapsed, would have hurt banks and jobs in America.
The Bad
· The worst is his dishonesty. Lying under oath in front of a federal grand jury is inexcusable, no matter what the subject.
· His affair with intern Monica Lewinsky wasn’t nearly as bad as his reckless disregard for the consequences of these actions on his ability to govern. When the country had the surplus and the economic strength to fund programs to extend America’s booming wealth, Clinton and his administration had to scramble just to stay in office during impeachment instead of doing his job.
· Clinton rarely was willing to take a stand on his own opinions. He repeatedly swayed with what the polls said the public wanted, which some say prevented him from being aggressive with Bin Laden or Hussein, because the general public didn’t support aggression.
· He would not send American troops to Rwanda to oppose genocide in the country. Similarly, in Sierra Leone and East Timor, the U.S. pushed other countries such as Nigeria and Australia to intervene rather than offer military support itself.
· He waited too long to send relief to the Balkans in 1995, where ethnic cleansing and war were ravaging the area.
· His expansive health care plan he tried to push through in his first year in office was shot down by Congress. When he left office, 15.5% of the population lacked health insurance, including more than 10 million children.

Clinton was an intelligent, charismatic president who led the country in a time of unparalleled economic growth and success in America. He was the personification of the word “President” for millions of Americans, especially minorities who felt like they finally had a chief executive who would champion their interests.
But Clinton’s presidency, in many ways, mirrors what happened in the Middle East. After that promising beginning in 1993, the foundation had crumbled by 2001. Clinton’s dishonesty and recklessness have doomed his legacy regardless of his responsibility to the Sept. 11 attacks. A man who could have been remembered as a great leader will likely be remembered as a fallen one.

Big Brother's glare

2004-11-18T13:44:00.000-05:00

With TiVo and ReplayTV buckling at advertisers' complaints about users being able to fast-forward through commercials, we have legislation being pushed in Congress right now that could make it a federal crime to do just that, possibly even overlapping into the previews of DVDs and other avenues. Don Kaplan of The New York Post has the story.

But now lawmakers are realizing that the bill is written so loosely that it could make criminals out of viewers sitting at home who use a remote control to fast-forward past commercials. (The bill specifically allows people to fast-forward through parts of a movie if it is too gory or sexually explicit — a right people already have, of course.)

"We are extremely concerned about the chilling effect that certain segments of this bill could have on future as well existing technology — such as DVRs," said Jeff Joseph, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association, which represents hardware manufacturers.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is also trying to block the bill, warning of the "implication that certain basic practices that consumers have enjoyed for years — like fast-forwarding through advertisements — constitute criminal copyright infringement."

Can anybody with some semblance of law experience tell me how fast-forwarding through TV commercials is any different from not looking at a billboard on the side of the road, an ad on one of those little kiosk things in the mall or any other of the thousand advertisements we're bombarded with every day that we find a way to ignore? Should pop-up blockers be illegal too? I suppose they could set up TVs to where you couldn't change the channel or even mute it during commercials too. I'm no legal expert, so I really don't know how the line is drawn here. It seems to me like the lines are probably vague, at best, separating this kind of legislation from other legislation banning all sorts of ad-skipping.

More Oil-for-food stuff

2004-11-18T13:39:00.000-05:00

Again, from the Wall Street Journal, this time in a column by Anne Bayefsky. Read it all.

Awwww, me?

2004-11-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

I'm flattered. OK, it's not really me. But give me a minute of glory. I don't ask for much.

I blame beer

2004-11-17T15:51:00.000-05:00

From the "... and how much did this study cost?" department, the Chronicle of Higher Education says college undergraduates don't study much. Yeah, but they sure can drink a lot.

Surfing the Hunting Superhighway

2004-11-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

This story would be really funny ... if it weren't pretty damn creepy.

Inexplicably rare Oil-for-food update

2004-11-17T15:38:00.000-05:00

This may just be the biggest worldwide scandal to go down in decades, and it's getting so little MSM attention that it's literally scary. The Oil-for-food program was a complete and utter disaster, and there's new news from Fox concerning just how deep it went.

Investigators working for Illinois Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the panel, are expected to say they have traced funds from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's kickback scheme through a Jordanian bank and into the hands of families of bombers who attacked Israeli citizens.

It has long been established that Saddam paid bounties of $15,000 to $25,000 to the Palestinian families of the murderers. Hyde's committee will reveal at the hearing that some of the reward money was deposited from illegal profits Saddam made by demanding 10 percent kickbacks on all the contracts of companies that did business with the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program.

I'm glad somebody's following this story, and it deserves to have someone dig to the bottom of it. I'm afraid some people in the MSM's disdain for Bush is keeping them from pursuing this story like it should be because it could definitely vindicate Bush's invasion of Iraq if Saddam is proven to have interacted too closely with terrorists. I'm not sure most people understand the gravity of this story. I'm not even sure most people know much of anything about this story. That's a sad thing.

UPDATE: And now more from the best newspaper in the world, the Wall Street Journal. Let's not let this story die. Kofi Annan should be gone.

The FCC is drooling

2004-11-17T09:58:00.000-05:00

The other day, I talked about the FCC and its jelly backbone involving three whopping complaints about the show "Married By America." Now, I'm sure the FCC is ready to levy another record fine for a segment during the opening to Monday Night Football that is apparently being called by some (gasp!) worse than Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during halftime of the Super Bowl. Get ready for TowelGate.

The highlight of the intro was actress Nicollette Sheridan, a star of Desperate Housewives, dropping the towel that appeared to be her only covering before jumping into the arms of Philadelphia star receiver Terrell Owens.

Owens did not drop her but also did not call for a "fair catch."

What ABC was calling for is open to debate.

"We have heard from many of our viewers about last night's MNF opening segment," said ABC in a statement, "and we agree that the placement was inappropriate. We apologize."

Meanwhile, the NFL -- still sensitive from the national uproar caused by the exposure of Janet Jackson's right breast during the last Super Bowl halftime show -- was not amused.

Yeah, well, the No Fun League is never "amused." League officials sit back and collect the money as Levitra peddles erectile dysfunction products on viewers 7,000 times per game and any number of beer commercials parade gorgeous, scantily clad women in front of the camera to sell their products, but the NFL is "not amused" at a fun Monday Night Football opening that showed the back of a woman who might possibly be naked, ya know, if the camera would just pan down a little bit. Is this seriously what we've come to? I seriously wish we'd just get over ourselves with this quasi-puritanical mindset that people are shocked (SHOCKED!) when they see a naked woman or, Heaven forbid, even the hint that a woman could possibly be naked on TV. After all it was a just a "towel malfunction" anyway, right? Memo to the FCC, the NFL and America: lighten up, get a date, realize people are naked underneath their clothes, don't try to pretend like sex is sinful or doesn't exist, and HAVE FUN. Life is WAY too short to get all high and mighty about a beautiful faux-naked woman on TV.

Public vs. private school

2004-11-16T22:07:00.000-05:00

I attended public schools throughout my stellar career in academia, sleeping my way to numerous B's and the occasional A during my many years floundering through the public-school system in Knoxville, Tennessee. What I always noticed was that I was extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of teachers I had all the way through college, really, and I could count the really good teachers/professors I had on one hand. That always made me wonder about how much different/better a private-school education might have been, and this study from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is looking into some interesting comparisons.

The data again show that urban public school teachers are more likely than either urban households or the general public to send their children to private schools. Across the states, 12.2 percent of all families (urban, rural, and suburban) send their children to private schools —a figure that roughly corresponds to perennial and well-known data on the proportion of U.S. children enrolled in private schools. But urban public school teachers send their children to private schools at a rate of 21.5 percent, nearly double the national rate of private-school attendance. Urban public school teachers are also more likely to send their children to private school than are urban families in general (21.5 vs. 17.5 percent).

You'd have to think those numbers would be because the urban teachers know full well how good or bad the schools they teach in really are, so they make the effort to keep their kids out of them. I find those numbers interesting in that so many teachers have so little confidence in their own schools. They see what they have access to and want their children to have something better. Again, it makes me wonder about the public schools in this country and what can be done to improve them.

Need a pick-me-up?

2004-11-16T19:53:00.000-05:00

Get it here. Just by clicking that link, you become a wonderful person.

Conservative "values"

2004-11-16T19:08:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned previously Bush's inexplicable aversion to the gay community and how I had hoped it was going to slow down in this second term now that he didn't need the Religious Right support so much. This goes for the entire Republican party, which seems ready to go against gays completely, even calling for them not to be able to teach school, in addition to not being able to marry or possibly not even enter civil unions. I find the opposition to this community abhorrent, and Timothy M. Gay writes about that in today's Washington Post.

Hillary vs. Rudy

2004-11-16T10:40:00.000-05:00

That appears to be the consensus among voters, according to a new Gallup poll on who Americans want to see running for president in 2008. When Republicans were asked to just pick a name, the numbers didn't really favor anyone, but the numbers changed dramatically when those polled were given a three-way choice.

More than half of Republicans could not answer the open-ended question on their party's next nominee, suggesting many have not given it much thought, in part because George W. Bush ran uncontested for the Republican nomination this year. Not surprisingly, there is little consensus even among Republicans who do make a choice as to whom they might want to be the standard-bearer in 2008.

When asked for their preferences among the leading Republican contenders -- Giuliani, McCain, and Jeb Bush -- 47% of Republicans choose Giuliani, 27% McCain and 17% Bush.

When Giuliani was pitted against McCain and Jeb Bush, he came away with a commanding 20-point cushion over McCain, who is popular in his own right. It's still WAY too early to make any kind of a reasonable prediction about the 2008 race, but I think it's interesting how people are already thinking about who they want to see. Of course, how many people actually thought Kerry would be the guy back in 2000? It's impossible to look ahead four years, but it's still fun to talk about.

Low output warning

2004-11-15T15:36:00.000-05:00

Just a heads-up, I'm going out tonight and don't anticipate having any thoughts even remotely related to a computer anytime this evening. So this very well may be the last post of the day. Could be one more, but don't count on it. In the meantime, please visit one of the great blogs I have listed to the right or maybe check out one of the sponsors below that. No, I'm not trying to be a shill, but it never hurts to grease the hand a little. That's all for now.

FCC -- Freedom Clearly Collapsing

2004-11-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

Jeff Jarvis has done what some journalists should have done long ago: look into the FCC's real reasons for stifling the speech of such media outlets as Howard Stern and Fox. In Fox's case, it was the infamous "Married By America" that wasn't actually Watched By America, cancelled, and then Fox was fined for some "indecent" content that they, supposedly, received 159 complaints about. Well, that number was somewhat inflated, it appears, and Jarvis has the goods.

The FCC confesses that they come from only 23 individuals.

It is shocking enough that what tens of millions of us are permitted to see by our government can be determined by 159 ... or 90 ... or 23.

But it gets even better: I examined the complaints and found that all but two of them were virtually identical. In other words, one person took the time to write a letter and 20 other people then photocopied or merely emailed it to the FCC many times. They all came from an automated complaint factory like the one I write about here. Only two letters were not the form letter.

So in the end, that means that a grand total of three citizens bothered to take the time to sit down and actually write a letter of complaint to the FCC. Millions of people watched the show. Three wrote letters of complaint.

Read it all. This is a disturbing finding, that the FCC would levy a $1.2 million fine on a network for something that's only questionably indecent and that hardly anybody complained about. Sadly, though, it's not a surprising one. Keep in mind, all of our rights to free speech are affected when the FCC makes a ruling like this; it's not just Fox that feels the crunch. If we allow the FCC to operate in this manner, we'll all be screwed.

Two down ...

2004-11-15T11:06:00.000-05:00

OK, so I wasn't exactly the only one to make this prediction, but it's looking like two of my three picks for leaving the Bush cabinet have come to pass; let's just get it over with now, Rummy. After Ashcroft resigned last week, the Associated Press is reporting Colin Powell has resigned as Secretary of State, along with Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Not too surprising to most, here's a bit of the AP piece.

Powell, who long has been rumored planning only a single term with Bush, told his aides that he intends to leave once Bush settles on a successor, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The White House was preparing an announcement to confirm Powell's resignation. According to one official, Powell expects that his departure date will be sometime in January. It was not immediately clear whether he would leave before Bush's second inauguration, on Jan 20.

I don't think Powell's ever gotten comfortable as the political animal the Bush Administration sort of forced him to be, going out there into the media to defend Bush's decisions he appeared to disagree with time and time again. It's not to say he was always right, just that I think they clashed on many opinions, and Bush doesn't listen too intently to those with whom he disagrees. I think that was difficult for Powell, and I think that's a big reason why he felt he needed to leave. It'll be interesting to see if he pops back up in politics. I won't be surprised if this is the end of high-ranking political work for Powell.

For language freaks

2004-11-14T19:11:00.000-05:00

Being a journalist whose trade is in the written word, the English language is one of my strange, awkward passions. Give this site a look. It's a study in what the most-used words are in the language, and you can search by word or by rank. Interesting stuff.

Don Knotts is ...

2004-11-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

... Dubya! This is fabulous. Watch it. Now. You can thank me later.

Office fun

2004-11-14T12:54:00.000-05:00

For those of you stuck at a desk all day, this site has some fake signs you can print out that will likely freak out your fellow employees. Print them out, tack them up and watch anarchy reign. I know at least one person who should love these.

The real Fallujah

2004-11-14T12:47:00.000-05:00

My confidence in the MSM's ability to cover the Iraq war has been pretty much shot over the past couple of years, but there are places online to get real first-hand news about what's going on. Kevin Sites, a freelance journalism following troops through Fallujah, has a fantastic site, complete with pictures and words from right in the middle of the fire. Go there and enjoy.

"Bridge Too Far"

2004-11-14T12:30:00.000-05:00

It seems like most reasonable people, with the possible exception of Bush, figured instituting democracy in a country like Iraq was going to be problematic at best, near-impossible at worst. Many of the war's supporters are starting to realize what most people saw from the beginning: as great as democracy can work in most corners of the globe, making that kind of fundamental change doesn't work with any kind of certainty everywhere, especially in the largely chaotic Middle East. Robert D. Kaplan has a piece in today's New York Times on just this topic.

By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives - the most fervent of Wilsonians - simply took that liberal idealist argument of the 1990's to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India - to make it more like England - were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by colonial forces.

The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.

The U.S. has been at conflict with some other country with almost no break for the better part of the past 30 years. Some people are hoping Iraq will serve as a lesson that maybe war isn't always the best answer, which is something I think we could take away from this conflict. With elections coming up at the end of January, you do have to wonder what happens when the election gets closer. If we get through the election, can the government thrive on its own? These are questions the Bush administration should have had answered before they invaded.

Loyalty over good work

2004-11-14T12:14:00.000-05:00

This is one of the kinds of things I was afraid might happen if Bush was re-elected, that he'd use his "mandate" to justify making all sorts of changes that may or may not be necessary. One of those appears to be coming to pass, as Bush takes a hard line on the CIA because of a lack of loyalty to him, according to Newsday. And, no, I didn't make that up.

On Friday John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the intelligence division who served as acting CIA director before Goss took over, announced that he was retiring. The spokesman said that the retirement had been planned and was unrelated to the Kappes resignation or to other morale problems inside the CIA.

It could not be learned yesterday if the White House had identified Kappes, a respected operations officer, as one of the officials "disloyal" to Bush.

Is this seriously what it's come to? We're firing people because they're not walking the Bush line? There's little doubt that the CIA made myriad blunders during the leadup to the Iraq war, saying there were WMDs when there weren't, misidentifying the level of resistance, etc., but wholesale purging really isn't the answer, especially if "loyalty" is part of the standard that can keep your job. The people at the CIA have to be willing to step out there and make a decision that doesn't necessarily jive with Bush's thinking, and this is a move that could prove to stifle an already damaged operation. Not a promising move by Bush.

Busy yesterday

2004-11-14T12:11:00.000-05:00

OK, so the goings-on Saturday got a bit more, er, involved than I had expected, and I hardly posted anything at all with no warning whatsoever. Yes, I'm a poor example for rest of the blogosphere. Yes, I'm a heathen. But, yes, I'll do much more today. Keep watching.

Mandate?

2004-11-13T10:13:00.000-05:00

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is questioning whether Bush's statements of having a "mandate" and "political capital" are really warranted, if he's really received the overwhelming approval of Americans he seems to be claiming. Certainly plenty of media outlets are touting this idea, but it's not clear he's received any more of a "mandate," in terms of the voters, than any other president in recent times.

While White House officials tout the total vote count for Bush as evidence of wide support, the increase in voter turnout and the size of the U.S. population also means that greater than usual numbers of voters opposed the victorious candidate. As Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher put it (11/5/04), "It's true that President Bush got more votes than any winning candidate for president in history. He also had more people voting against him than any winning candidate for president in history."

And Bush's slim majority is not all that impressive for an incumbent; Ronald Reagan, for example, claimed 51 percent of the vote in 1980, while gaining 59 percent four years later. Lyndon Johnson was the choice of 61 percent of voters in 1964, as was Richard Nixon in 1972. In terms of margin of victory, Al Hunt observed in the Wall Street Journal (11/4/04), Bush's victory was "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916."

Those are all fair criticisms. On the other side of the issue, you could say he was the first president to receive 50 percent or more of the vote since his dad in 1988, which is significant. You could also add that, with all the significant events and decisions he's been involved in over the past four years, this election was almost completely a referendum on Bush and his policies. The fact that, after all the issues with 9/11, Iraq, the economy, gay rights, Abu Ghraib, the National Guard, North Korea, Halliburton, Dick Cheney, Saudi Arabia, Farenheit 9/11, John Ashcroft, the Patriot Act, etc., etc., more than half the American voters voted for him again, even helping him gain percentage points in nearly every state, could be read as more of a "mandate" than might be valid at first glance. I'm not sure whether I believe that or not, but that's the other side of the argument, for those who want to hear it.

Tonight, tonight

2004-11-12T16:00:00.000-05:00

As all my most loyal readers know, I'll be doing my sports work for the AJC tonight, so there won't be much posting going on. It's possible there will be one more post before I go, but don't be surprised if this one is it, at least until late tonight. If anybody out there in BlogLand picks up the Atlanta paper, my story will be on the Cartersville/Westminster AAA playoff game. You're welcome to read it and let me know how much I suck. Ciao for now.

Big media bust

2004-11-12T13:44:00.000-05:00

For someone like myself who, however critical, still has some faith in the ability of the MSM to fairly report and be the disseminator of news and opinion that it ideally should be, this piece in the Wall Street Journal today was a sobering one.

Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media's ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%--what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago. The larger media outlets have been pushing the edge of the partisanship envelope for a long time. People have kvetched about "spin" for years but then largely internalized it. Not in 2004. Big Media chose precisely the wrong moment to give itself over to an apparent compulsion to overthrow the Bush presidency.

What CBS and the New York Times were thinking when they succumbed to staggering levels of bias in the leadup to the election, I'll never know. Could it possibly have been, "We've gotta get that idiot Bush out of office?" I suspect it was more subtle than that, but the effect was the same. When the most prominent members of your profession can't be trusted, neither can you. That's what I and all journalists face at this point, along with the politicians we like to write about.

The Bush bounce

2004-11-12T09:58:00.000-05:00

As would be expected, Bush has gotten the proverbial post-election bounce in his approval ratings, pretty much at the rate you'd anticipate for a re-elected president, as Gallup shows in its latest poll, which has Bush's approval rating moving from 48% just before the election to 53% while his disapproval rating dropped from 47% to 44%.

This week, before Gallup had the new Bush approval numbers available, Assistant Gallup Poll Editor Joseph Carroll reported on the history of post-election bounces (see "Will Bush Get a Post-Election Bounce?" in Related Items), showing that the average post-election bounce for all presidents since 1940 is +6 points. The average for re-elected presidents is higher (+7 points) than for defeated incumbents (+4 points).

The poll also shows the president's approval on issues such as terrorism and the economy, and it compares his bounce to that of other re-elected presidents. Nothing unexpected, but the numbers are there.

Sorry?

2004-11-11T22:11:00.000-05:00

Apparently, there are people who are intent upon sending out their "apology" to the rest of the world because the majority of people in their country voted for Bush. Isn't this incredibly disengenuous? Like the guy you knew who would always offer faux-apologies to people for things he didn't really do wrong while refusing to take any responsibility for mistakes he'd really made.

How about apologizing to the Bush voters for calling them stupid? Or intolerant? Or ignorant? How about apologizing for voting for a cardboard candidate in the early primaries and not pushing him to give people a good reason to vote for him? Or maybe for dismissing, even attacking, the Swift Vets' claims against Kerry while giving all sorts of credence to the overblown Bush National Guard story? Maybe for using the MSM as a sort of bullhorn to push their madcap theories? Possibly for staffing the nation's colleges and universities almost exclusively with people who agree with them while shutting conservative thought out?

No, let's apologize for what our "stupid" brethren did. Yep, us Kerry voters had it right all along. So, England, I'm sorry those Bush voters are a bunch of ignorant wretches. We're planning to secede anyway. Between you guys and Canada helping us out, I think we can take 'em.

UPDATE: Via a reader, apparently not everyone's sorry.

Final tantrum kicks

2004-11-11T19:26:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah, I said I was done talking about my favorite topic: liberal whining. OK, and I've continued talking about it since then. But, damn it, they just won't shut up. It's really not my fault. And I'm contending this post isn't so much about liberal whining but examining at what stage of the liberal whining cycle we're in right now. I think it's like the child who throws the tantrum after not getting the toy he wants at the store ("But I WANT the Power Ranger!!!"). He screams and kicks for awhile but, if you ignore him long enough, he'll finally settle down and go back to picking his nose. As the Washington Post notes today, the liberals may start picking their nose soon enough, as their whacked-out theories get laid to rest, one by one.

Still, messages posted on the aptly named Quixotegroup discussion cluster -- which takes its name from the literary figure Don Quixote who used his lance to tilt against windmills -- urged members to send fraud evidence to the law firm of Kerry's brother, Cameron Kerry, to persuade the Democratic candidate to "unconcede."

A high-ranking Democrat, mindful of balancing respect for the complainers and a desire to move on, summed up the conspiracy theorists with a line from Alexander Pope: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

Indeed, it does. What really gets me is I voted for Kerry. I'm not disappointed I did; in fact, I'm pretty skeptical of what another Bush term will bring. I am a bit disappointed at the idea of being lumped in with the kinds of nuts who are seriously espousing these theories. One day they'll get it. One day. We can wish.

The reports of Arafat's death ...

2004-11-11T19:23:00.000-05:00

... are finally NOT exaggerated. Some, it appears, won't be in mourning too long. OK, more than "some."

UPDATE: Like I said.

Light blogging

2004-11-11T18:36:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the apparent lack of posts much of today. I've been busy getting some stuff done. By the way, for all you BlogExplosion people pecking your way through the different blogs, selfishly trying to earn traffic for your own (OK, I do it too), I challenge you to click on at least one link in this blog. It's not that hard. And, if you have a minute, let me know in the comments here what you like/don't like/think sucks about this blog. It's a work in progress. More blogging later. Thanks for visiting. Scroll down and see my ramblings.

I.Q. = Invariably Question

2004-11-11T12:03:00.000-05:00

Along with much of the blogosphere, I talked about this chart last weekend, supposedly showing how states with lower average I.Q.'s voted for Bush while ones with higher I.Q.'s went for Kerry. I questioned the validity of the data, as did a reader of mine in the comments section, but I didn't have any concrete evidence it was wrong. Someone else apparently does, though.

What the guy did, I believe, was take average income by state and make up IQ scores off that. That gives a certain surface credibility to his made up numbers because, no doubt, there's some kind of positive correlation between IQ and income in reality. I plotted his data on a graph and it's just a straight line with minor random perturbations to make it look more authentic. There are no significant outliers like there are with real data. Moreover, his range of average state IQs is too big: from 85 in Mississippi to 113 in Connecticut. I'd bet the real range is about, say, 90 to 105.

Also, his method of faking the IQ scores off the income data badly underestimates the IQ of the big empty Republican states where the cost of living is much lower because there is so much land per person. That's how he got ridiculous numbers in the low 90s and even 80s for almost all-white states in the Great Plains and Great Basin, where people can enjoy a high standard of living on a lower income than on the two crowded coasts. In reality, those states are among the highest scorers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. But incomes are relatively low there because the cost of living is so low.

Read the whole thing. Steve Sailer has broken it down and done a good job of tearing this I.Q. theory apart, along with the one about Kerry being smarter than Bush. More on this later.

Can't arrest, must rest

2004-11-11T11:53:00.000-05:00

We don't want bank robbers arrested anyway, do we?

Boisterously Biased Channel

2004-11-11T09:25:00.000-05:00

It looks like the BBC is (finally) dumping a good bit of its staff, possibly as much as half, to try and tidy up a bit before its Royal Charter is reviewed in 2006. The story is from This Is London.

But one insider said: "It's basically the BBC saying 'This is the plan, what do you think? We're moving some big departments out, is it a good idea?' But staff aren't actually being encouraged to say, 'No, actually, it's not'. The feeling is the management has already taken these big decisions."

A BBC spokeswoman insisted: "It would be wrong to say there aren't going to be job losses and redundancies [but] any figures are no more than speculation.

"There is no answer on anything until the governors meet at the end of this month. Any losses or redundancies would be phased over a period of years."

Yes. But with stories like these and these and these, you'd think all this might have been "phased" over a period of a few weeks earlier this year. But what do I know? I'm just a stupid American.

Looking in the mirror

2004-11-10T21:40:00.000-05:00

Reading a piece by the New York Observer's Tish Durkin this evening, I felt like she was channeling me somehow. Finally, a fellow John Kerry voter who realizes the problems with the Democratic party, is willing to admit them and even propose change that doesn't involve pandering to Jerry Falwell and his minions. Her column is one of the best and most rational post-election pieces I've read from the Democratic side of the aisle.

Now as then, Democratic partisans seem to be more interested in coming off as wronged rather than defeated. We have lost an election—and so far, we are acting as if we have lost a contact lens, crawling around the red parts of the map in search of the speck of strategy that would have turned it blue. We are all set to keep on ridiculing the President’s syntax, when it is our message that no one can make sense of. The party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. has turned itself into the political equivalent of the woman who responds to her husband’s leaving her by living in her bathrobe for years: It’s O.K. for her to be miserable, so long as enough people around her know that he’s the bad guy.

Somebody call a cartoonist. The picture of an overweight donkey wearing a huge, frilly, pink robe with "Dems" written across it, sitting on the couch with a bag of Chee-tos in her lap, complaining to her girlfriends about the "asshole" who divorced her is a fun one. Pretty accurate too. The day the Democrats figure that out and get a chairman in place who realizes it as well will be a good one.

From whining ...

2004-11-10T19:23:00.000-05:00

... to fighting. Can anybody get Schwarzenegger to contact this guy?

The Left is losing

2004-11-10T18:18:00.000-05:00

I mentioned before how Bush and his fellow Republican dismantled the Democrats nationwide, at least at the federal level, even while the liberals continue to whine about their loss, claiming all kinds of excuses that fail to get at the root of the problem: themselves. Well, the Weekly Standard (yes, indeed, consider the, ahem, conservative source) has a piece today examining the rationalizations of the many irrational Democrats and showing how they're diluting themselves into thinking they're gaining ground.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate this change, however, is not to focus on Bush's share of the vote, but instead to compare the percentage of the vote received by the Left Coalition of Gore-Nader in 2000 and Kerry-Nader in 2004. It is revealing to focus on this coalition, because it represents the real opposition to the Republican party. By this measure, if the electorate was as unchanged as many have suggested, the Kerry-Nader percentage of the vote in each state in 2004 should have equaled the Gore-Nader percentage in 2000.

But this was decidedly not the case. Although John Kerry received a larger share of the vote than Al Gore in 25 states, this masks the general decrease of the Left Coalition, which was often substantial. In only three states--most noticeably in Howard Dean's Vermont, but slightly in South Dakota and Wyoming, where the Left is at its weakest--did the score of the Left Coalition clearly increase between 2000 and 2004.

That's it. Three states. A big part of this is the fact that Kerry was a weak candidate, being the droning scarecrow he was, but Gore really wasn't that much better. He'd have been buried as well if he didn't have the wind at his back of being a vice president during a time of great prosperity. For the Democrats to have given me two candidates this poor to vote for the past two elections is making me look for other options (How's the Green Party looking these days?). The Democrats are just off-kilter with most of Americans and need to figure something out. Instead, they just call their non-supporters stupid, lazy, ignorant or intolerant. Funny how people don't respond well to that, eh?

Zero sum game

2004-11-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

That's what our political process is, as Walter E. Williams writes in today's Town Hall, and it's a major cause of the division our country is facing right now. In layman's terms, it's Winner-take-all. There's only one piece of pie to be distributed, and the winner gets the whole thing. That makes the losing party, in this case the Democrats, and its supporters upset when they lose out completely in the process.

Many of the issues that divide us, aside from the Iraq war, are those best described as a zero-sum game, where one group's gain is of necessity another's loss. Examples are: racial preferences, Social Security, tax policy, trade restrictions, welfare and a host of other government policies that benefit one American at the expense of another American. You might be tempted to think that the brutal domestic conflict seen in other countries at other times can't happen here. That's nonsense. Americans are not super-humans; we possess the same frailties of other people in other places. If there were a severe economic calamity, I can imagine a political hustler exploiting those frailties here, just as Adolf Hitler did in Germany, blaming it on the Jews, the blacks, the East Coast, Catholics or free trade.

He suggests the best way for this problem to be reduced is by limiting government and its ability to control our lives. The theory goes, if the government doesn't have that big an effect on us, it won't seem as vital to us that our preferred party be in power.

I've advocated many times, though not yet on this blog, that we should move toward a Proportional Representation system at the federal and state House level, and possibly include state Senates as well, with a 5% threshold for gaining seats. What this would do is, first, give people more choices they could align with their own political philosophies. They wouldn't have to vote Republican/Democrat because their vote for a third party, be it Green, Libertarian, etc., wouldn't necessarily be wasted. This would also end the Winner-take-all system we have now, giving even the losing parties a say in what's going on and lending more voices to the political debate. In addition, over the course of 10-15 years of doing elections this way, the other parties would begin to garner more support, therefore being able to gain seats in the U.S. Senate and, eventually, compete for president.

Of course, when two parties are in control of their own two-party system, they have no incentive to intitiate a system like this, unless there was some kind of major groundswell from the American people. And since most people don't even know what a PR system would involve, and not even a majority of those people probably support it, it'll never happen. But I thought I'd toss in my solution while this guy was giving his.

UPDATE: I think, though I'm not for sure, a reader is asking in the comments section for me to explain what I mean by Proportional Representation. Well, you can either follow the link I have in the text above or read my rough sketch of what my version of PR would involve below:

When voting for Congress, instead of voting for an individual name, you would place a vote for a particular party, based on the candidates and platforms they had lined up for you to choose. If a party received at least 5% of the vote (that percentage could be ratcheted up or down if there was reason to do so), they would receive that percentage of the state's seats. For instance, if a state had 50 representatives in Congress, and the Democrats received 40% of the vote, Republicans 30%, Libertarians 16% and Green 8%, the Democrats would get 20 of the state's seats, Republicans 15, Libertarians 8, Green 4, with 3 left over. I would give the 3 extra to the party with the highest percentage, as a sort of extra spoil, meaning the Democrats would have 23 seats. Make sense? Of course, many people hate the Electoral College because they say it's too complicated. Those people would abhor this system, I'm sure.

Bush across the board

2004-11-10T12:46:00.000-05:00

The liberals have plenty of excuses why they lost the election (Voter fraud! Religious zealots! Vast Right-Wing conspiracy! Blame Pauly Shore!), but the fact that this appears to have been a total ass-whupping, from Bush right on down to his fellow Republicans for the Senate and House, sort of undermines their theories. The numbers from RealClearPolitics show that Bush gained percentage points in 49 of the 50 states, with Vermont (down 1.8 percent) being the only exception. He even gained 4.5 percent in Massachusetts, from which Kerry hails. What does this mean? I think Americans, for the most part, trusted Bush more than Kerry and didn't feel like they knew the senator well enough to put the War on Terror in his hands.

Some people still seem to believe it was a referendum on moral values, but that's clearly only part of the story. People wanted a leader, and more of them believed they had it in Bush than Kerry. Had Kerry made himself more presentable as a solid leader, maybe he would have won. Regardless of the reasons behind the huge Republican win, the people on the Republican side would be wise not to get cocky, says John Tabin of the American Spectator.

As John Fund has noted, the dark spot on the GOP's election came in the state legislatures, where increasing polarization flipped the balance in the Democrats' very narrow favor. "Republicans shouldn't forget that their new dominance is tenuous and is unlikely to last if the party remains uncompetitive on both coasts," writes Fund, and he's right. Governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Linda Lingle in Hawaii, and Bob Ehrlich in Maryland are successful at sticking to Republican principles on economic issues even as they sit across the divide on cultural issues, but they all face solidly Democratic legislatures -- which this election has made even more solidly Democratic in the former two cases (Maryland did not elect state legislators last week). State Republican parties, it seems, are having trouble striking the balance necessary to win in Blue territory, particularly during a presidential election year.

The Republicans are gaining major footholds in the federal government but losing them at the state level. This isn't exactly the type of balance of power I'd be in favor of, but at least it's something. I, for one, think it does nobody any good for one party to have too much control, so I hope the Democrats get their act together and maybe the Republicans do get a little cocky. It's only two more years until we get to "Throw the Bums Out!" Well, so to speak, anyway.

Voter fraud not quite so fraud-ish?

2004-11-10T12:04:00.000-05:00

So I've been one of the ones doubting that the numbers in many of Florida's counties suggest a full and accurate count of the votes. And I'm not even a Kool Aid-drinking liberal. But reader Heather Matthews sends in this link, apparently via a helpful but vacationing Hawspipe (no relation I'm aware of). It's from the Yale Free Press, and it compares the 2004 vote in some of the counties in question to the vote in 2000 and 1996, with some interesting results.

Election of 2000
Baker voted 5610-2392 for Bush against Gore.
Lafayette voted 1670-789 for Bush against Gore.
Liberty voted 1317-1017 for Bush against Gore.

Election of 1996
Baker voted 3684-2273 for Dole against Clinton
Lafayette voted 1126-899 for Dole against Clinton
Liberty voted 913-868 for Dole against Clinton

Read it all. There are plenty more interesting links attempting to debunk this voter fraud theory. What this information would appear to mean is that these counties are likely full of people who have been registered Democrats for decades but who often vote on the Republican side of the ticket. Many people rarely change their registered party, even if it seems they might lean more toward the other side. It's a family thing, and they probably still consider themselves Democrats. "Reagan" Democrats, perhaps. I still think this is worth looking at for the media because, like I said before, if there is a perfectly logical explanation, we deserve to hear it. Maybe with this, we already have.

Falling Fallujah

2004-11-10T10:20:00.000-05:00

In the military, they can't afford to take anything for granted, but things are looking especially good in what was supposed to be a dogfight in Fallujah thus far. Everything has obviously been far from perfect, but nothing is in war. Hopefully, this kind of information from ABC News will continue to prove true.

According to Metz, Iraqi insurgents have suffered significant losses, greater than the U.S. military anticipated. He also said there have been very few civilian casualties.

"We felt going in that at least half, if not 75 percent, of citizens had left Fallujah," Metz said. "We have seen very, very few civilians on the streets in Fallujah."

Part of the reason the battle could end soon is that many of the insurgents may have left the city before it even began, including, said Metz, the men in charge.

This would be a great military victory for us and a credit to Rumsfeld and Bush. Anything that helps stabilize Iraq is a very good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

On tap for today

2004-11-10T09:39:00.000-05:00

Well, I couldn't get to my blog last night, so that's why posting went sort of dead in the latter part of the day. My apologies to the loyal ones out there. As for today, I should have some good stuff coming up, I think. Watch for my breakdown of what the new liberal "seceded" country would look like once it combined with Canada to form Blue Nation, if the particularly whacked-out liberals had their way. That'll be up by this evening. Otherwise, I expect several posts this morning and afternoon as things catch my eye.

You've heard of "revisionist history"

2004-11-09T18:18:00.000-05:00

Now read "pre history." Dave Kopel has an interesting piece detailing how Hillary Clinton took the White House in 2008 and was re-elected in 2012.

Although Senator Clinton had quickly disposed of John Edwards, John Kerry, and Mike Easley in the primaries, she trailed the likely Republican nominee, Senator Frist, by over 15 points in the polls.

But the Bush victory in the War on Terror meant that national security was no longer the paramount issue. Millions of “Security Moms” and “Soccer Moms” decided that reproductive rights were now the most important issue, and they streamed into Clinton headquarters to volunteer. Before June 2008, abortion had been a tertiary issue for them: the only contested questions were parental notification requirements and restrictions on third-trimester abortions; the Security/Soccer Moms favored such restrictions, which they did not see as affecting their own rights. But with Roe v. Wade gone, their personal rights were now at stake.

As one former Security Mom explained, “My husband didn’t mind when they banned ‘assault weapons,’ but he never would stand for banning all guns. And I don’t mind some regulations on abortion, but I’m not going to stand for prohibition.”

Some of it's funny and some of it's serious, but it's all worth a read. Of course, if Hillary were to win in 2008 and 2012, that would mean we would have had either a member of the Bush family or a member of the Clinton family as president for a total of at least 28 consecutive years. I think there has to be some kind of issue with a Democracy that elects its leaders in a sort of patriarchal line like that. And that's only if there isn't another Bush or Clinton who would be elected in 2016. Who knows what little Bush or Clinton runt might be making the political rounds by that point?

Farewell, Falluja

2004-11-09T12:28:00.000-05:00

This is very good news from CNN. It looks like Falluja might not turn out to be as difficult to take control of as was first anticipated, though it's still pretty early to make a solid assessment of the place. Still, this is definitely a good way to start.

Nevertheless, U.S. and Iraqi forces have faced less resistance than expected, said Lt. Col. Pete Newell with Task Force 2-2 of the 1st Infantry Division.

Soldiers have dodged sniper fire and destroyed booby traps, but not as many as anticipated.

Hopefully, that will continue to be the case. Taking Fallujah could, potentially, be a turning point in Iraq. If we can control one of the supposed insurgent strongholds, it would send a clear message that we have control over the area and can overwhelm our enemy, even in a tough, urban setting. It's promising news, and let's hope it keeps up.

... and then we're goin' to the DNC!

2004-11-09T12:21:00.000-05:00

Aaaarrraahhhgggaaa!

Irony is so ironic

2004-11-09T09:43:00.000-05:00

So I say I'm going to stop talking about liberal whining, but then they just continue to up the ante further and I have to keep going. To roughly quote Michael Corleone, "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in." Now they're talking about (I am not making this up) secession, with the Blue States joining with Canada, blah, blah, blah. Hey, it worked out really well the first time. My instinct is to say this is so silly as to not even warrant a comment. However, when I read this quote from a, ahem, concerned citizen in the Washington Times, I couldn't resist.

"We were all going to move to various other countries, but then we thought — why should WE move?" the anonymous message asks. "We hold our noses as we fly over you. We are sickened by the way you treat people that are different from you. The rest of the world despises America, and we don't want to be lumped in with you anymore."

Unlike just about every example in Alanis Morrissette's song, the irony is oozing out of this statement. He can't stand the way "you treat people that are different from you," eh? But this anonymous guy obviously treats people (like "you") who are different from himself with understanding and compassion, like a brother even. Well, not a brother who he actually wants to ever interact with or even stay in the same country with, but a brother nonetheless. One of those long-distance sibling relationships. It's nice that this anonymous guy is so enlightened, treating those who think differently than him with such respect and deference. It's refreshing in these "divided" times to find someone so willing to accept his fellow man. And what's even more comforting, so many liberals think the exact same way.

Snowball, meet Hell

2004-11-09T09:34:00.000-05:00

Hell ... snowball.

UPDATE: The Republican response to just about every Kerry statement, were he to inconceivably run in 2008: "And I'm not George W. Bush either."

Is the election really over?

2004-11-08T20:13:00.000-05:00

Some people are saying no. And, while it may be wrong, it's not just liberal whining.

Here’s an interesting little sidebar of our system of government confirmed recently by the crack Countdown research staff: no Presidential candidate’s concession speech is legally binding. The only determinants of the outcome of election are the reports of the state returns boards and the vote of the Electoral College.

That’s right. Richard Nixon may have phoned John Kennedy in November, 1960, and congratulated him through clenched teeth. But if the FBI had burst into Kennedy headquarters in Chicago a week later and walked out with all the file cabinets and a bunch of employees with their raincoats drawn up over their heads, nothing Nixon had said would’ve prevented him, and not JFK, from taking the oath of office the following January.

Yes, that's Keith Olbermann, who I still have a hard time picturing anywhere but a Sportscenter news desk, talking about the post-election stories of fraud and miscounts all across the country. He writes specifically about problems in Ohio, but he also gives a nod to the major issues in Florida and the MSM's hesitancy to cover the subject. The blogosphere, on the other hand, has been all over the story. As Olbermann points out, fairly, the MSM has to be more careful, though this is a story that deserves more attention.

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

We will be endeavoring to pull those stories, along with the Warren County farce, into the mainstream Monday and/or Tuesday nights on Countdown.

I didn't think I'd ever say this, but maybe there's reason to watch Olbermann's show. Hell, nobody else is. Somebody's gotta keep him on the air. It would be good to see this getting the attention it deserves, even if it is on MSNBC. Maybe there's some kind of logical explanation, though I doubt it. If so, I think the public deserves to know what it is.

Biased? CBS? No way.

2004-11-08T20:01:00.000-05:00

The Surprise of the Week goes to broadcastingcable.com for reporting people at CBS involved in the Rathergate scandal may have been rooting for a Kerry victory because a Bush Administration may mean more problems for them upon the results of a soon-to-be-released investigation into the document forgeries. You'll forgive me if I don't have a heart attack upon hearing this news. Here's the crux of what they're saying.

Pre-election, the feeling in some quarters at CBS was that if Kerry triumphed, fallout from the investigation would be relatively minimal. The controversial piece’s producer, Mary Mapes, would likely be suspended or fired, but a long list of others up the chain of command—from 60 Minutes II executive producer Josh Howard, to Rather and all the way up to news division President Andrew Heyward—would escape more or less unscathed.

But now, faced with four more years of President Bush, executives at CBS parent Viacom could take a harder line on the executives involved.

CBS should be ashamed of the Rathergate scandal and, even moreso, with the way Rather and the network execs handled it afterward. Instead, they continue to be somewhat defiant and looking out for nothing but their own asses. CBS is a poor excuse for a news organization, in light of this mess. Being a journalist myself, I hope heads do end up rolling once this report is released.

The Clampetts have moved to Beverly ...

2004-11-08T14:27:00.000-05:00

... Hills, that is. Black gold, Texas tea, indeed. It seems Roger L. Simon has some well-placed sources who are telling him Bush garnered some major support from, of all places, Beverly Hills in California. Supposedly one of the most liberal areas in the country, with all the Hollywood elite, Beverly Hills isn't a spot that most people would consider a Republican stronghold. And, while Kerry did win the area, Bush appears to have more than doubled his 2000 percentage in the area, making it obvious that the Clampetts must have moved back, if the liberals are right.

As most have heard, the current estimates of Jewish support for Bush in the election were 25%, up from 19% in 2000. This may be a serious underestimate. The following is only preliminary (more stats are being broken down) but it comes from ... of all places... BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - perhaps the most Jewish incorporated city in the state and also the home of many of Hollywood's supposedly left/liberal personalities (as well as numerous Iranian Jews who would tilt to Bush). Bush's support in Beverly Hills was up 22 percentage points (more than double) from 2000. Caveat: these stats are still unofficial but they are obviously very significant.

Here is the breakdown for Beverly Hills:

2004 UNOFFICIAL

BUSH 42.38% KERRY 56.98% OTHER .64%

2000 OFFICIAL

BUSH 20.47% GORE 76.51% OTHER 3.02%

Florida Democrats (allegedly) got screwed

2004-11-08T09:54:00.000-05:00

It's good to see this is getting some coverage somewhere, even if it is by a relatively little-read liberal news outlet like commondreams.org. I have little doubt after reading the data that something fishy went down in Florida with the election, and it heavily benefited the Republicans. Enough to turn a Kerry win into a Bush win? Hard to say. But that's not even the point. The fact that this was going on, in a state where Bush's brother is the governor, no less, is highly disturbing. The commondreams.org piece gives some full detail into some of the fuzzy numbers, while my previous post I linked to above talks about the problems and gives you links to the actual data and report from Florida, as well as other counties across the U.S. that had problems. This story should have more legs. Why isn't the MSM interested?

UPDATE: This site has some county-by-county bar graphs that are great visual representations of the problems with the count in Florida. Regarding that count, I've had some email that is suggesting that this can be explained because many registered Democrats could vote Republican. But I would think that kind of thing would more or less balance itself out in a close election or at least come pretty close to it. It's hard to believe that explains such incredible discrepancies. But read the data, look at the graphs and decide for yourself.

Down with the gays

2004-11-08T09:48:00.000-05:00

My hope has always been the Bush's completely unnecessary push for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was simply a partisan stunt meant to drum up support from his base and get them energized to get out and vote. This story is making me wonder. I'll have more to say on this later.

Going out

2004-11-07T19:01:00.000-05:00

My plans have changed a bit tonight. I'm going to a friend's house for dinner, so blogging will be sparse at best tonight. As usual, take the time to click on some of the links to the right. I'm sure I'll be back at some point this evening, but the jury's out on whether I'll be up for blogging at that point. Either way, I'm sure I'll have plenty to say tomorrow, as usual.

From liberals whining to Europeans insulting

2004-11-07T17:50:00.000-05:00

I said I was done the liberals' dilution over Bush's win, but I never said anything about people in England. The UK's Daily Mirror had this as an explanation for why America voted for Bush.

Were I a Kerry voter, though, I'd feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets. The self-righteous, gun-totin', military lovin', sister marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport ownin' red-necks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong.'

Not everybody writing on the other side of the ocean has quite the same kind of vitriol for and misunderstanding of the American electorate. There are at least some defending us unwashed masses.

In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up with.

It's always said when you run out of sisters to bunk up with. A tragedy, it is.

Busy ... back later

2004-11-07T10:34:00.000-05:00

I've got some things to take care of today, so there won't be much blogging until after about 5 or so. Check back this evening, though, because I'm sure I'll have plenty of new posts. I don't know what the weather's like where you are, but it's gorgeous here. If it's nice out where you are, go enjoy it like I will.

Not just electoral

2004-11-07T10:24:00.000-05:00

This page from the N.Y. Times allows you to click back and forth between your basic electoral map we've all seen and a second map that gives a better perspective on how close the election was. It resizes the states to make them relate to how many electoral votes they had, and it's striking how tight everything was when viewed in this manner. Click back and forth between the two maps to get a full effect.

There are plenty more links to maps here, including one that soberingly compares a map of Pre-Civil War slave states to the 2004 electoral map. That doesn't paint a pretty picture. There are other interesting maps as well. Check them out.

Clean election?

2004-11-06T21:24:00.000-05:00

For the most part, political critics have called this a clean election with few problems standing in the way of the right candidate being elected into office. The fact is, there's always going to be some voter fraud, but the hope of even the most optimistic of Americans has to be that the miscounts and disenfranchisements and hanging chads largely balance out between the Republicans and Democrats. This election was certainly no exception to the rule that there's going to be fraud in every election, but some of these figures make you wonder if it evened out in some places.

That chart may be too difficult to decipher, with all the raw numbers. If so, go here and look at the first chart you see. This is more self-explanatory. It's showing the % change from the projected number of voters in the different counties of Florida. According to the data, no Florida county using Op-Scan readers had more than a 37.6% positive deviation from the expected number of Democratic voters, based on the number of registered voters in that county. On the contrary, none of the same counties had less than a 25.2% positive deviation in Republican voters, with 26 counties seeing those numbers more than doubled, and Liberty County having more than 8 times as many Republican voters as were expected. Keep scrolling down on that page; there are several specific examples of individual counties across the country that had problems, but that visualization of Florida could cause plenty of nightmares among Democrats.

UPDATE: I talked to my friend who works for a Florida newspaper, and this may very well be pursued now in the news down there. I don't know for sure if there's a reasonable explanation for these kinds of discrepancies, but it doesn't look like it after crunching the data. My friend assures me the numbers appear legit. This needs to be investigated, even if it's just to figure out the good explanation for it.

Google me

2004-11-06T20:11:00.000-05:00

So I've made it onto Google, it seems. Obviously, not exactly a huge leap for mankind, but a nice step for the Blog O' the Night. Thanks to everyone who's reading this. And be sure to share this blog with a friend who might enjoy my incessant ramblings. The more people who visit, the more likely it becomes that I'll keep blogging.

Are the liberals right?

2004-11-06T18:33:00.000-05:00

Well, ultimately, no. They're wrong in their analysis of this election and why it went against them for any number of reasons. But this site has an interesting chart that seems to, if you like data, back up what the liberals are saying about Bush voters being, um, not so bright. Using data from the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations," the site lists states by their average IQ and labels each as a Kerry state or a Bush state. According to the chart, the top 16 IQ states all voted for Kerry, while the bottom 26 all went for Bush.

Possible explanations for this, other than "Stupid people are voting for Bush"? You can question the data, which seems difficult to accurately compile. I'd think the overall numbers would be skewed higher than they actually are because the people who would agree to take an I.Q. test and submit their score would probably be people who knew they'd score somewhat high, generally speaking. I don't know how you get a truly random sample of I.Q. scores anywhere because it's not something everyone has, like an opinion on the election, gender, age, eye color, etc. I'd say the percentage of people who have ever actually taken an I.Q. test is quite low.

So the question from there becomes: Would smarter people from supposedly smarter sections of the country be more likely to take the I.Q. test than smarter people in supposedly not-so-smart parts of the country? Hard to say. That's a sociological question to which I definitely don't have an answer. Does the culture of "High I.Q." states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, etc., make them more inclined to submit to an I.Q. test than those in supposedly "Low I.Q." states? Again, those are just questions I can throw out there.

The obvious answer is that people in the states that vote for Bush really do have a lower average I.Q. than those in the states that voted for Kerry. Does this mean much? Not really, I don't think, especially to those who question the validity of I.Q. tests in the first place. But it is an interesting measure in correlation and statistics. Definitely give it a look. The site has some more links to related information.

The REAL Reagan Democrat?

2004-11-06T15:02:00.000-05:00

So if Clinton is the man to lead the party into the next 2 to 4 crucial years, who is the man to be the standard-bearer, the man to take the reins to reap the benefits of Clinton's political strategy? I've been saying John Edwards is the right guy for awhile, with his Southern charm, good looks, great back story, speaking style and policy positions, even if some people disagree. One of the arguments against him being the nominee for 2008 is the fact that he'll be out of politics for at least the next two years. But that just may give him something in common with one of the most successful politicians of the modern era. This story from the L.A. Times talks about why.

On the one hand, since the advent of the modern two-party system, no losing vice presidential candidate other than Franklin D. Roosevelt has come back to occupy the Oval Office. The list of those who have fallen short includes Democrats Edmund Muskie, Walter F. Mondale and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Republicans Dan Quayle and Bob Dole.

But there have been politicians who have left office, managed to stay in the spotlight and gone on to become their party's standard-bearer. In recent times, the most obvious example is Ronald Reagan.

After his second term as California's governor ended in 1974 and his 1976 bid for the GOP presidential nomination fell short, Reagan traveled the country extensively, giving speeches and campaigning on behalf of other Republican candidates. He kept his name in the newspapers and on television and piled up chits for later use.

"His movement forward was unmistakable," said Jeffrey Berry, professor of political science at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

And in 1980, he won the GOP's presidential nomination.

I could see a similar thing happening with Edwards. Once he gets through his wife's breast cancer (incidentally, my mom went through the same thing a few years ago; I hope we all wish the best to her and the Edwards family), that will just add to the Edwards story of overcoming adversity that will play great with the electorate. He's already lost his 16-year-old son Wade in a car accident; people can relate to the problems Edwards has faced and overcome, and they'd respond to it. Some people are still saying Hillary Clinton is the presumptive nominee, but there's good reason to think that's not going to happen, as the L.A. Times lays out.

Reeling from their party's loss in the presidential election, some key Democratic financiers and strategists say they have learned a clear lesson: Next time around, no Northeasterners need apply.

The blue-state party needs a face from a red state if it is going to expand beyond its base on the two coasts and preserve its hold on the Upper Midwest, where its long-standing appeal to voters has become tenuous, these insiders say.

There's probably something to this, and Chappaqua isn't exactly a place the Midwesterners look to for guidance in a time of war. This will obviously play out more over the coming years, but don't be surprised to see the Democrats begin to coalesce behind Edwards as their candidate of choice sooner rather than later in order to keep him in the limelight and show a united front for a Democratic candidate and not just against a Republican one.

The last word (hopefully) on liberal whining

2004-11-06T12:43:00.000-05:00

So was the election really pushed toward Bush by Bible-thumping, gay-hating religious zealots who would have loved liberal principles had they understood them? Paul Freedman has a piece in Slate about why all the liberal talk of moral values such as gay marriage deciding this election is wrong.

Did "moral values"—in particular, the anti-gay marriage measures on ballots in 11 states this week—drive President Bush's re-election? That's the early conventional wisdom as Democrats begin soul-searching and finger-pointing. These measures are alleged to have drawn Christian conservatives to the polls, many of whom failed to vote last time. The theory is intriguing, but the data don't support it. Gay marriage and values didn't decide this election. Terrorism did.

I suspect this is about right. What I hope is my last word on all this liberal whining so that I can move forward, even though it is fun to write about, is that the Republican sweep isn't a product of ignorance in the electorate. It isn't a product of evil Republican Pied Piperness. It isn't even the product of a poor delivery of message by the Democrats (OK, maybe a little). In the end, it's a product of the people listening, hearing and understanding the liberals' message of more government, bigger entitlements, ejecting ourselves from Iraq, national health care, higher taxes for the "rich," etc., and rejecting that very message. Generally speaking, people know what the Democrats are proposing, and they know what the Republicans are proposing. And, ultimately, they're choosing the Republicans' ideas over the Democrats'. So the liberals can wring their hands over the voters' ignorance all they want, but the "ignorant" ones are listening. And they're still hearing your message loud and clear.

UPDATE: From Reuters:

Now, amid the second-guessing and recriminations that inevitably haunt the losing side, some are beginning to ask: Has Hollywood become a liability to the Democrats?

Yes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Brooks has a piece on this very subject in today's New York Times, analyzing how liberals are constantly making excuses for their defeats, at their own peril.

The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.

The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

Liberals should read it all. Conservatives, well, just keep doing whatever you were doing before. You're doing fine. Brooks also has this paragraph, which I love.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

Why, indeed. This is the faux-intellectual mindset I've talked about previously, in which so many liberals like to make long speeches to show how smart they are while the conservatives just go about their business of life and kicking political ass. It won't be until the liberals look inward instead of outward that this has a chance of reversing itself.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: XYU sends this comment: "Kerry never talked about "ejecting" troops from Iraq--he talked about increasing troops. His argument, like his entire platform, on what Bush did wrong in Iraq was weak. He had no concrete plan for how to involve other nations, just as he had no real plan to fix social security. The democrats problem is that they are republicans minus a clear moral standing, which is what people want.You are also wrong on these two points:1. under bush, government has expanded, not decreasedand 2. of course bush benefitted from the gay marriage referendums--it's a moral issue that gets Christian voters to the polls--voters Bush is appeals to.anyway...this will not be the last word on "liberal whining". this country is being taken over by neo-conservative Christians, and it is frightening.when things get really bad (and they will-whether it was under Bush or Kerry) you can expect the real liberals to step up."

Thanks for the comment XYU. I'm not sure your arguments stand up, though, so I'll take your comment piece-by-piece:

Kerry never talked about "ejecting" troops from Iraq--he talked about increasing troops.

From the Associated Press: "We want those troops home, and my goal would be to try to get them home in my first term," Kerry said, speaking to a fellow Vietnam War veteran in the audience of his campaign event.

I'd like to have them home in a particular time frame too, but I think the American voters recognize this isn't a sound platform from which to start. The troops need to come home when Iraq's democracy can survive without them; not a minute sooner and not a minute later. To begin from a standpoint that they should be out by a certain time only emboldens the insurgents as that deadline nears.

His argument, like his entire platform, on what Bush did wrong in Iraq was weak. He had no concrete plan for how to involve other nations, just as he had no real plan to fix social security. The democrats problem is that they are republicans minus a clear moral standing, which is what people want.

His argument on Iraq was definitely weak, I agree. On the other hand, I'm not sure he had an argument available to him that would have been viable to the majority of Americans, especially one that involved trashing Bush, a man many people see as having led us out of a terrible time in U.S. history. Do people want "a clear moral standing"? I'm just not sure there's valid evidence to support this. That's part of what they want, but I think that's too simplistic.

You are also wrong on these two points:1. under bush, government has expanded, not decreased and 2. of course bush benefitted from the gay marriage referendums--it's a moral issue that gets Christian voters to the polls--voters Bush is appeals to anyway.

I never said government shrunk under Bush. It grew exponentially. But that's not his "platform," per se, and it's not what people think of when they think of Republicans. People still think of big government in conjunction with Democrats, and Kerry would have been wise to strongly stress Bush's huge government expansion. Did Bush benefit from gay marriage? It depends on what you mean. All the states where the amendment was on the ballot were states he won in 2000 and then won again in 2004. If you're saying he would have dropped some of those without gay marriage, I suppose it helped. Looking at the way the map shook out, though, I think that's doubtful.

this will not be the last word on "liberal whining". this country is being taken over by neo-conservative Christians, and it is frightening.when things get really bad (and they will-whether it was under Bush or Kerry) you can expect the real liberals to step up.

I hope they do, because I'm closer to their thinking than the conservatives. This is why I'm pointing all this out, in the hopes that some readers I have may realize the error of their ways and begin changing the way they approach politics. The liberals have two years to regroup and get a clue. If not, the Republicans will have little trouble doing this again.

Don't believe the hype

2004-11-06T08:14:00.000-05:00

Kerry actually won the election. Yep, it's true. If you don't believe it, just ask the liberals.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So after the immense problems with exit polls in, well, everywhere, that's what we're going to go back to in order to make a case for Kerry winning Ohio? That's iffy math, no matter how big a Kerry supporter you are. But, OK, I'm game. Let's use the exit polls. CNN says Bush won males 52%-47%, with females tied at 50% each, under the heading "Exit Polls." All right, maybe that's just some crazy conservative CNN bias. Let's see what the Associated Press and the television networks had through Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International in Ohio.

Are you:
Male 47 47 52
Female 53 50 50
Are you:
White 86 44 56
Black 10 84 16
Hispanic/Latino 3 65 35
Asian 1 - -
Other 1 - -
AGE
18-29 21 56 42
30-44 30 47 52
45-59 29 48 52
60 or over 20 43 57

I don't know which exit polls Tom Paine is looking at, and I'm sure it's comforting for the liberals to think that, not only are the people who disagree with them stupid and ignorant, but the liberals really won in the end anyway. And somehow I doubt they would have complained if Kerry was given Ohio but lost the popular vote. Would he have been, er, "Selected, not elected"?

A blog-free night

2004-11-05T16:19:00.000-05:00

It's Friday night and, at least for now, that means covering high school football for me. I'm covering a Westminster High School game for the AJC that pretty much nobody cares about, but I'm not paid to care, just to be there and write about it. I won't be back blogging for a little while. But take the time to visit some of the blogs linked to the right, and feel free to hit the email link to shoot me a line. There are a couple of good posts below from earlier today, as well as a later update and a comment.

Meanwhile, South Knox Bubba is joining many others in lamenting the Republican wins, Roger L. Simon is trying to explain Jane Smiley's inane ramblings, the Diplomads are re-posting about the Democrats' plan to "Nixon" Bush, Anne Marie Cox is blogging about teen dreams of a Republican sleepover and Jeff Jarvis is giving us some fabulous Dan Rather quotes from Election Night. So there's plenty going on out there. Enjoy. I'll be back later.

If he can't be in the White House ...

2004-11-05T13:51:00.000-05:00

... he might as well be the point man to get others there. Bill Clinton has been busy building his library and making speeches all over the country, giving sparks to the campaigns of fellow Democrats. He even famously talked to Kerry from his hospital bed to give him advice on how he could beat Bush. Clinton wants power, and there's one place where that need for power could be fed while he helped Democrats all across the country: DNC Chairman. That's the issue tackled in today's L.A. Times editorial.

Clinton could make a virtue of his penchant for incessant strategizing and late-night gab sessions. He could hire a co-chair to do the grind of planning the fundraising and keeping up party discipline. Let Clinton be the big thinker and inspirer in chief. Even at half speed after his heart surgery, he probably gained Sen. John F. Kerry at least a point in the election.

Clinton has become the main link to a successful past in a Democratic Party whose future could hardly look bleaker.

I have to admit, I really like this idea. I've never been a fan of Terry McAuliffe's smiling mug, piling up loads of cash but not producing any results. He's been a bit a lightning rod for the Democrats, dragging controversy around as he led election after election of solid Democratic defeats. Clinton would be just the man to rally the troops, to strategize and to put to use his considerable skills as a politician. McAuliffe's had his chance; let's hand the reins over to a man who's already a proven winner.

UPDATE: A reader emails, "But what role did Dick Morris play in 1992? If you look at Clinton's history, his road to the White House was in the passenger seat of the Dick Morris station wagon. This includes his gubernatorial campaign and his Presidential campaigns.

I don't think they need Bill Clinton - it is clinging to the past. Yes, most of what he touched turned to political gold. But I think he sends a message to the people the Democrats are trying to convince that "well, we couldn't make it without him..." You can't lean on him to be a one man show. Besides, he's nearly 60 and his wife will be battling to gain footing for 4 years to insure her run at the White House. I think the Dem's need a new leader, but why can't they find a Harold Ford, Jr./Barack Obama type. Someone youthful and up-and-coming to lead the charge. Look at it this way - they need their own Theo Epstein, not a Joe Torre. Besides, he won't do it for the same reason Spurrier won't go back to Florida...

I would love to see them bring in a younger, less Kennedy influenced person. Find someone who will navigate the ship down a path that the American people actually want to see and come out swinging. I just think Clinton would not revitalize the party or the issues. Because for one reason or another the democratic party did not connect with the people in 2004 on the issues."

Good thoughts. The problem with Ford, Obama and that ilk is that they're still ambitious as politicians themselves, the man that drives the car, not the one that keeps it filled with gas. Clinton is beyond the driving stage, and I think he would be the spark the Democrats need to bridge the gap between this down time and the time when they find the right man to lead them for years to come. Maybe Clinton wouldn't do it because of the whole "You can't go home again" adage. Maybe it's better for him to sit on the sidelines and only peek his head into the game from time to time to stump for a candidate or be an advisor. That doesn't necessarily mean what's best for him is best for the party.

The Left gets louder

2004-11-05T12:30:00.000-05:00

This time, it's Paul Krugman from the New York Times, lamenting his favored party's complete collapse on Election Night.

This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.

Krugman's contention is that, without 9/11, Bush never would have won. Of course, if you want to go back and trace things back to a world without 9/11, you're going to have to do a lot more than just turn those planes back toward their intended destinations on that Tuesday morning. He talks about the "aura" of 9/11, but it's much larger and brighter than an aura. It colors almost every policy we implement now, every budget, every cabinet meeting, every debate, every day of Bush's presidency. Erasing that changes everything, and there's no accurate way to imagine a world without that kind of threat again.

Also continuing the Left's assault on Middle America is Slate's Jane Smiley, who less-than-subtly calls Bush voters ignorant slobs who are being led astray by a conniving group of ill-tempered power-mongers. Alas, I'm not making this up.

The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do—they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.

That is a great example of the elitism I've been talking about for a few days now that's emanating from the Left, but the inaptly named Smiley was just getting warmed up.

The architects of this strategy knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now—Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

In review, Bush voters are ignorant, racist, amoral, angry, stupid sheep who only vote for people who appeal to their most base urges. While I do enjoy seeing the Left squirm, I hope this ends soon. People who think like this deserve to be on the losing side. This kind of rhetoric is almost making me glad Bush won. And that's no good for anybody.

A Bush push

2004-11-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

I'm getting emails asking about what is in store for a second Bush term, especially in terms of his agenda and his cabinet. As far as the former goes, it hasn't taken Bush long to begin laying that out, and you can bet it will be an ambitious, though hopefully not as partisan as the previous term, vision. The following is from Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune, via the Macon Telegraph.

Bush called bipartisan cooperation a "model" for which he will strive. But he also made it clear that he believes his popular-vote majority and an enlarged GOP majority in Congress lend him muscle for his agenda, with or without the help of Democrats.

"Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," Bush said Thursday, his elation evident in a 40-minute exchange with reporters in a theater-like room of the Old Executive Office Building.

Bush, bantering at times with reporters, described how he views his electoral mandate: "I've got the will of the people at my back."

Ruh-roh, Shaggy. Bipartisan cooperation a "model"? He intends "to spend" the political capital he's earned? I definitely don't like the rhetoric Bush is beginning this second term with, though I suppose it's understandable considering the numbers of people who voted for him and his margin of victory. After that, he goes on to mention that there will be changes in his cabinet, and I'm seeing some pretty large alterations, in fact.

First, Rumsfeld has to go. He's already been in there long enough, with Abu Ghraib, the 9/11 Commission problems, Al Qaqaa, Guantanimo, etc., etc. He should have been out long ago, and the transition to a second term, when presidents are expected to make changes, is the perfect time for a loyal guy like Bush to nudge Rumsfeld out the door.

Secondly, look for Ashcroft to be gone as well. His time as Attorney General hasn't been nearly as controversial lately as Rumsfeld, mostly because attention has been so focused on Iraq instead of Ashcroft's Justice Department. There are still too many issues with the prosecution of the War on Terror, not to mention Ashcroft's extremely conservative ideology that turns many people off.

The final change will probably be Colin Powell, who I see leaving on his own accord. This one's shakier, I think, than Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, but I really think Powell is over trying to deal with this Administration. I think his advice has been overlooked way too many times, and he's been forced to play the straight man on "Meet the Press" for Bush too often for his liking. He'll leave graciously, thank the president for giving him the chance to serve, and walk out the door with a big, damn smile on his face. Powell could still be president if he wanted to be, but he doesn't look like he's the proverbial Second Black President, after Bill Clinton, of course. That man may very well be Barack Obama, but that's another discussion for another day.

Condi Rice will hang in there and position for a possible run at the Republican nomination in 2008, along with Giuliani, McCain and Frist. And with names like that out there, Frist looks like a major longshot, though longshots have made their way through the nominating process before. There's still plenty of time to get people completely sick of that topic, though, over the next four years.

The unravelling continues

2004-11-04T22:16:00.000-05:00

The liberals just can't seem to get a handle on themselves as they try to come to grips with the fact that their guy lost the election and the man they still hate is still in power and not looking for a good moving company. The latest is in words, instead of pictures, this time courtesy of Zombie Time. They're from a rally yesterday in San Francisco, where the people carried signs with uplifting messages, such as "Bush=Satan" and "Fuck Middle America." I'd, frankly, be ashamed to call myself a Democrat today, but I've never been called such a thing. OK, once.

Some people will say this is just the post-mortem fits of a childish group of people who didn't get their way, and they have to act it out for at least a few days to get it out of their system. They spent many months building up this great hate for a man they expected not to have to see any more of after January. I think they sincerely believed Bush had little to no chance of winning because everybody they knew said they were voting for Kerry. And 51% of the country couldn't be stupid, could they? Surely not. So now they vent, sure of the idiocy of those they disagree with, those people who live in a part of the country they can't begin to understand while sipping their cappuccino and surfing the web on their WiFi-powered laptops at Starbucks.

I hope this doesn't last long. As long as we have a two-party republic of sorts, that republic depends upon both parties being, you know, viable. Otherwise, we just have one group of idealogues running the whole show, and that's not good for anyone, even if you think you're a Republican. Here's hoping the Democrats get their act together soon enough to take some seats back in 2006; right now, between the "Sore Loserman" of 2000 and this year's petulant crying, the Democrats aren't exactly improving their stock among those who believe in working, not whining.

Increasingly sluggish blog

2004-11-04T20:36:00.000-05:00

My blog has been especially sluggish the past two days between the hours of 5 and about 8 p.m. or so, which is why there are no posts during that span. I apologize for the lack of blogging, but you can only ask for so much with a free blog. There is a pretty lengthy update to the post just below this that I added a few minutes ago, and I expect I'll be back in a couple of hours to do some more tonight. Thanks for sticking with me, if you are.

Who's really the dumb one?

2004-11-04T15:44:00.000-05:00

I wrote about this "Republicans are idiots" philosophy coming from the Far Left earlier this week, saying I thought the idea among liberals that Bush supporters were dumb was more widespread than some people realize and that nearly the opposite is true. Well, underscoring my point, here's this quote from a citizen who was interviewed for an article in today's Boston Globe.

Some Kerry supporters were fairly bursting with anger yesterday. Jessica Johnson, 59, of Cambridge, who said she had volunteered for Kerry, said she was filled with optimism on Election Day, telling herself: ''When Kerry gets into the White House, this stone, this weight on my chest, will be lifted."

''He could have made a great president," Johnson said. ''Many Americans have nothing between their ears. Americans are fat, lazy, and stupid. I don't like this country anymore."

This is the type of attitude that completely turns off those rural voters the Democrats can't seem to snag a single one of, that elitist, we-know-better-than-you attitude that is killing the Democratic party. That attitude was embodied in Kerry, who came across as a rich, pampered, elitist, New England liberal, no matter whether his policy positions were more practical than Bush's. Liberals need to understand there are ways to think other than the way they do that aren't stupid, lazy or moronic. Non-liberal opinions are just as valid as liberal ones. These people are suffocating the Democratic party into being one that can't win outside of the biggest cities in the country. And that's not where American elections are won.

UPDATE: More from the New York Times, which has even more blatant elitism from New Yorkers.

"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."

"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.

His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."

"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."

This is the mentality the Republicans are up against. And the Democrats wonder why they can't win an election. New Yorkers think they're isolated; they don't understand how Kerry could lose. They don't know anyone who voted for Bush. Yet, somehow, the guy won. Flabbergasting, ain't it? Here's more, from the NY Times piece.

"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "

I can't believe these people are that incapable of comprehending differing opinions. People don't hate you, and they're not saying they don't care if there's a terrorist attack in New York City. A Bush vote is not a "Screw New York" vote. It's a "I think Bush will protect us better than Kerry" vote. I'm not sure that's right, but that doesn't mean the opinion is without merit. The liberals have a long damn way to go before they get in touch with the people they need in order to make it into the White House.

The return of Al Qaqaa

2004-11-04T14:02:00.000-05:00

So up to the election, the media go back and forth on the Al Qaqaa deal, saying it's a huge blow to the president and then saying it might not even have much to do with Bush at all. Now we have a new story, told from the point of view of some actual soldiers, in today's L.A. Times.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.

A week ago, I'd have said this could be damning to the president. Now, it'll just get lost amid all the other issues Bush is carrying with him. In all fairness, though, I'm always skeptical when "unnamed" sources are used. That goes especially for a decidedly liberal media outlet like the LAT in a place as big and as murky as Iraq, where it wouldn't be hard at all to say four GIs told you this. Who's going to know you made it up? I'm not saying they did, just that we should be skeptical. If it is true, this is yet another example of Bush not having his military adequately prepared. On the other hand, much more was protected than wasn't, so maybe it's a bit harsh to get on them too much. I think it's about time to throw your hands up on this story and admit we don't know a damn thing, in all honesty.

Republican revolution

2004-11-04T11:58:00.000-05:00

I don't like the sound of this.

The joy of losing

2004-11-04T09:31:00.000-05:00

While I voted for Kerry and totally lack confidence in the Bush Administration, I must say I take a certain childish glee in watching liberals' heads spin like a top over the idea that (Shock!) the American people disagree with them. "How can that be!?" they ask, flummoxed. And few liberals are more fun to watch flail out of control as the New York Times' Maureen Dowd.

He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.

Are we going to blame the winning party for ... winning? He's not creating it, Maureen, the American people are. It was the American people who put a strong majority in the Senate. It was the American people who put a strong majority in the House. It was the American people who voted into power a strong majority of governorships. And it was the American people, more of them than ever before, who kept Bush in power. You can rail about Bush and his policies all you want, but it's a losing battle. The more time the liberals spend whining about Bush, the less time they're spending actually figuring out a way to beat him -- or Giuliani or Frist or McCain or whoever the GOP sends out there in 2008.

The Democratic party needs to look in the mirror on this one and figure out where they went wrong, where they so lost the majority of the American people. There's something damaged in the message and, generically, with the person delivering it. The bellyaching can't afford to go on for long because you can bet the Republicans aren't wasting any time figuring out how to hang onto the majority they have now. Conventional political wisdom says they can't keep that strong a hold on power even through one election cycle, but the conventional wisdom has a funny tendency to be wrong.

Divided?

2004-11-03T23:43:00.000-05:00

So the talk today and for the past few months seems to be about how divided we are as a country, how we've never seen the electorate so polarized on the issues and in the election. Between the war and people's disagreement with Bush's policies, the conventional wisdom is that we live in a time of extraordinary division among the American people that is causing friction between the Republican and Democratic supporters.

This is a myth that should, but won't, die with this election. First of all, there are only two parties to legitimately choose from, which means we're forced to put the two into near-50/50 range every time. That makes things appear more divided than they are. The media like to play this friction up to go along with their horse-race coverage of all elections, putting everything in Right/Left, Black/White perspective instead of honestly analyzing the issues. Do the media cover issues this way because we're "divided," are we "divided" because they cover issues this way or are we only "divided" because they say we are?

Secondly, if we seem divided, that's just a byproduct of war. It's not like this is the first time a war has pushed people deeply into their own camps. Especially on a first-term presidential election. Picking a president during a time of war is one of the most important decisions the American people can make, and that's bound to force them into agree/disagree positions. There's little middle-ground when it comes to a war.

Finally, look at the vote. Bush won 51% of the votes, 3 million more than Kerry received after Bush supposedly divided this country against itself with the war. Bush's percentage was the highest since his dad hit 54% in 1988. Are we divided into Blue/Red states? Sure, but those are our only options unless proportional representation were to miraculously become a reality.

This division, as it's called, sells papers and draws ratings, but it's just one more shadow cast upon the voters by the media. The Democrats act as if this is the first time they've badly wanted to defeat an incumbent, but it happened in 1992, 1984 and it'll happen again the next time it comes up. The Republicans would have been the same way in 1996 if they'd have had a viable candidate and a chance of winning. We're no more divided than anyone should expect us to be. Americans aren't that far off on the issues, generally speaking. And I hope Bush realizes that as he runs with his Republican-led everything in the coming years.