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Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
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J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
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More On Market Manipulation for Political Purposes
Dan Gifford, a reader with significant experience in the news business, tells me that he saw these interesting items, as accurately quoted as could manage while watching TV. One was Alan Murray MSNBC reporter on October 29, 2004 at about 8:05 AM Pacific Time, on CNBC's "Morning Call": The George Bush futures contracts have fallen tremendously today meaning that people believe Bush is losing ground in the election against John Kerry.
The next is from Donald Luskin, Trend Macro's Chief Investment Officer, October 29, 2004 at about 8:50 AM Pacific Time, also on on CNBC's "Morning Call": The George Bush futures contracts are being manipulated. On several different occasions I have seen massive selling of the Bush futures come in that could not possibly have been for the purpose of making money. I think the person doing it or behind it is George Soros who has spent around 20 million that we know of so far to defeat Bush. [Soros' office told CNBC it is not responsible, according to CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera] .... Fair enough. Then if it is not Soros, then it is surrogate or at least someone who has read his book. Soros calls attacks of this sort the theory of reflexivity, which means that if you influence the perceptions of people by manipulating the theoretical reality within the financial markets, you influence the reality of real world events. In this case, the purpose would be to negatively affect the public perception that George Bush will win the presidency which may, in turn, adversely influence those planning to vote for Bush. This is exactly the tactic Soros has used in past to attack the Bank of England and other institutions and national currencies in order to change government policy.
Another reader points me to this article about Soros in FrontPage magazine: Democrats looking to George Soros as a moral compass may want to check to see which direction the needle is pointing. The billionaire might actually be able to help them out on that count: In the mid-1990s he posited that there was “something both phony and pompous about a financial speculator inveighing against the moral crisis of our age.”
Does anyone find it at all worrisome that this guy has the billions and the financial connections to manipulate commodity markets, and has expressed a willingness to spend it all to defeat George Bush--and now oil prices are at incomprehensible prices, having damaged the economy just before the election?
...
On September 16, 1992, Soros made his fund a cool billion dollars in a single day betting against the British sterling, helping to usher in what the Brits refer to as Black Wednesday. On that day, British citizens saw their currency lose 20 percent of its value. Trying to stave off the challenge to its currency, the British government had borrowed heavily before finally accepting defeat and allowing the devaluation of the pound. Soros was dubbed the Man Who Broke the Bank of England, a designation in which he seemed to take perverse pride.
Perhaps what is most interesting about the episode, considering Soros’ recent professions of moral outrage at the Bush economic plan, is his blasé attitude toward social mores in business. “If I abstain from certain actions because of moral scruples then I cease to be an effective speculator,” Soros told the London Guardian shortly after the incident. “I have not even a shadow of remorse for making a profit out of the devaluation of the pound.” Pushed further, Soros gave an example. “Let’s suppose speculation went on to push the franc,” he said. “That would be wrong and bad. But it wouldn’t stop me.”
Later on 60 Minutes, when asked whether he felt any complicity in the financial collapses in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan or Russia, Soros was similarly blunt. “I think I have been blamed for everything,” he said. “I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.” A few minutes later, he reiterated the point in even stronger language. “I don’t feel guilty because I am engaged in an amoral activity which is not meant to have anything to do with guilt,” he said. Worse was Soros’ contention that, despite the fact that a single letter from him to the Financial Times recommending a 25 percent devaluation of the country’s currency sent Russia into an economic tailspin, “I am actually trying to do the right thing.”
...
Soros weeks later remained unrepentant about the havoc he’d wreaked, going so far as to explain how the “instability” he’d caused worked to his advantage:
“The net effect is a breakdown of the system, instability, and a negative effect on the economy, the size of which we don’t know, but it could be very, very serious. I mean, Europe is going to go into a very serve recession. Business is practically collapsing in Germany, also very bad in France. … Instability is always bad. It may be bad – it may be good for a few people like me who are instability analysts, but it’s really bad for the economy.” And when the economy suffers, society suffers too. How, then, does this sit with his claim of working to better the situation of each individual and the greater, “open” society.
More recently Soros has been very publicly betting against the dollar. In an interview with CNBC last May, Soros explained, “I now have a short position against the dollar … we continue to sell the U.S. dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold.” A real patriot, hell-bent on making cash off yet another market crash – ours. Could this be a part of the Democrats’ 2004 strategy? Journalist Richard Poe believes it could be:
“In view of the catastrophes Mr. Soros has inflicted on so many foreign lands, his sudden rise to prominence in U.S. politics deserves closer inspection,” Poe writes. “Bellicose charges of vote-rigging and calls for UN intervention such as we have heard lately from high-ranking Democrats fall strangely on American ears. Yet, for George Soros, such overheated rhetoric constitutes business as usual. The Democrat strategy taking shape in America this year strongly resembles a ‘velvet revolution’ in the making. Every piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. Only the exact time and nature of the final provocation – the signal for action – remains unknown.”
From a purely cold-hearted perspective, this all might be kosher. But now that Soros is a billionaire, his sudden pangs of conscience over the role of capitalism in the U.S. seem a bit too convenient and contrived to help foster the hero image he is so obviously attempting to create for himself. “I am not so optimistic about capitalism,“ he told Charlie Rose. “It is built on false foundations.” Then where, one wonders, did all of Soros’ cash come from? He claims he is no “neo-Marxist,” but his writings throughout the 1990s have certainly had that flavor. He has declared himself, for example, “at odds with the latter-day apostles of laissez faire” and, further, doubts the markets’ ability to allocate goods properly.
...
At one point in The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros laments that “international income distribution is practically nonexistent.” Haughty words from a man with a bank account larger than the GNP of some Third World countries. If the rich getting richer pains Soros so, why not go ahead and stop accumulating massive amounts of money by raiding the treasuries of entire nations and making them poor?
“It is exactly because I have been successful in the marketplace that I can afford to advocate these values,” Soros said candidly in Soros on Soros. “I am the classic limousine liberal.”
Nevertheless, Soros blames capitalism for the coarsening of American culture. He apparently is the only one able to handle wealth properly. The rest of us savages couldn’t be trusted with his fortune:
“Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value,” Soros writes in The Capitalist Threat. “What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. [Why does Soros think people respect him???] What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.”
Tough talk for the man who also has boasted, “I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.” The word hypocrite doesn’t even begin to describe what Soros is involved in here. Schizophrenia may come closer.
Faith Without Works Is Dead
Kerry claims to oppose abortion, but wouldn't want to impose his morals on others (except about taxation, welfare, gun ownership, the environment, forcing you to hire homosexuals). So this guy asks the question: If, for example, I was a powerful Senator married to a billionaire who was "not in favor of abortion", but I thought it wrong to work directly against abortion in the legal arena, I might do some or all of the following things:
o Work to fund pregnancy crisis centers that provide non-abortion counseling
o Work to ease adoption restrictions and promote awareness of the adoption option
o Work to encourage strong marriages
o Work to encourage abstinence in young people not ready for childbearing
o Generously contribute to pregnancy centers
o Generously contribute to non-profit adoption agencies
o Generously contribute to social welfare organizations working with young mothers
I wonder what Senator Kerry's actual record is in these areas? I'm sure it must be outstanding. Surely a man of such strong faith has made enormous contributions to the areas of public policy and private charity.
Worst Translation Ever!
A friend pointed me to this horrifying example of someone who thought that they knew English writing an instruction manual.
I Don't If This Is True Or Not, But There's a Phone Number...
This was forwarded to me by someone who forwarded it from someone else. Unlike a lot of "urban legend" items that get distributed this way, this has the name of the people in question, and phone number for verification. It could still be made up--but it fits with everything that I have been able to find out from talking to people that have been there.
A few comments first: the formation of local democratic governments in Iraq? Yes, I have seen news coverage of it--but very little, because it doesn't fit the bad news model that most of the news media are interested in reporting. I don't think the claim that "all" cities have done this is correct.
Largely a foreign insurgency? There has been some news coverage of that as well--but again, very little, because it doesn't fit the "blame Bush" model. Oddly enough, what should have been big news--the arrest of Iranian government agents with explosives in Iraq--received almost no coverage.
Concerning the Lord Hutton inquiry? Yes, the BBC did hype a serious credibility problem--and now three different independent British government reports have concluded that there was no intentional deception concerning Iraq and WMDs. The latest, the Butler report, concluded that Iraq was actually attempting to buy uranium in Niger before the war. This was not a deception at all: Dear Friends,
The following information is from Rick Leatherwood who is serving as a missionary in Iraq for Kairos International. It is INFORMATION about what is actually taking place in Iraq, not a SERMON or a request for money. I do hope you will take the time to read and perhaps share the information.
Thanks.
Dear Supporters,
Please use the following article in any way you would like. Submit it to you local newspaper, let your local radio talk show read it on air, or just send it to your
friends. I can be reached at 713-397-9429.
Iraq: The Media is Misleading the World
By Rick Leatherwood
Many times in the last year my wife and I have sat with friends in Iraq who told us that the hooded terrorists whom CNN, the BBC, and Al Jazeera were interviewing and passing off to the world as representing the sentiments of the Iraqi people, were not from Iraq at all, but from Yemen, Egypt, Saudi, or somewhere else outside the country, but were definitely not from Iraq.
How do they know? The same way we know if someone is from Boston or Texas. Accents. Yet CNN and the BBC make these international terrorists appear to represent the will of the Iraqi people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Nevertheless because CNN and Co. have told this lie loud enough and long enough, people around the world now believe them and have a negative view of the Coalition led invasion of Iraq. The media has skillfully misled the world into thinking Iraqis are against America and people the world over have become discouraged and disheartened by believing their lie. Was this a calculated ploy by the media? Why has the media done this? This is a good question because the truth as we know it from having lived in Iraq over the past year is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are very grateful to the United States for liberating them.
Consequently, since arriving back in the United States my wife and I have been standing up in restaurants, cafeterias, and airport waiting rooms to let people know
that things in Iraq are not the way they are being portrayed by the international media. And what we are finding is that the American people are eager to know the
truth about what has happened in Iraq and sense they are not getting the true story through the media. Invariably as my wife and I stand up to speak in Denny's, or
Applebee's, or McDonalds, the restaurant grows quiet when they hear we have been working in Iraq. Then a minute later the restaurant breaks into applause as they hear us tell them the truth that the Iraqi people are grateful to the United States for coming and delivering them from Saddam Hussein. We then share how we have worked closely with the U.S. Military in the last year and have watched the U.S. Army conduct themselves in an exemplary fashion, exhibiting patience, kindness and sensitivity to the Iraqi people. The truth is we can all be proud of the U.S.
forces. Once again the restaurant breaks into applause.
After living for a year in Iraq, directing a non-government organization rebuilding schools, drilling water wells, providing computers to schools, and writing articles in Iraqi newspapers, it has been a privilege to travel across the U.S. sharing the story that the media does not tell. What story is this? An example would be that we have not found one person here in the U.S. who has heard about the town meetings that have taken place all across Iraq preparing the Iraqi people to take over their own country. These town hall meetings have been carried out by the efforts of the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, under Paul Bremer. I have watched this group of dedicated American civilians work tirelessly teaching the
Iraqi's about democracy, how to select a candidate, what to look for in a candidate, how to have an election, etc.
As a result there have now been elections in every major city in Iraq! This did not just happen by itself but from the hard work done by these superb people from the U.S. State Department. WHY HAS AMERICA NOT HEARD ABOUT ALL OF THIS WORK? These
town hall meetings are the backbone of a democracy and what the transfer of
power over to the Iraqis is all about, and yet the world has heard nothing
about them. A tremendous amount of training from these U.S. civilians has taken place with mayors and citizens all over Iraq, and yet as we have traveled around the
United States, we have found absolutely no one here in the United States who has heard of these meetings and the preparation that has taken place through them. This non-reporting of the many good things that have been happening on a daily basis is a distortion of the real situation in Iraq for which the media is responsible. There are 25 million people in Iraq and yet the media has continually focused on the 25 thousand who were part of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, or his Fedeyeen, or the ex-Bath party members who are obviously against the United States and the success of a new Iraq. Why has the media primarily given these people, many of them terrorists, a platform to address the world as if they represented the Iraqi people? This has been a gross misrepresentation of the truth by the international media.
This war in Iraq might have been over 10 months ago if those trying to bring freedom to Iraq had not had to overcome the efforts of the media as well as the terrorists. As it is, the media has encouraged the insurgents and has undermined the Coalition at every turn. They have done nothing to encourage the Iraqi people to take ownership and responsibility for their country, but have done everything they could to prolong the war. As a result thousands of Iraqi and American troops and
civilians have died who did not have to die. Obviously the United States has been doing everything it could to bring the violence in Iraq to an end, but the media has done everything it could to keep it going. Here lies a tragedy the world does not know.
A year ago a British scientist who was at the center of the controversy about Iraq being able to deliver WMD in 45 minutes committed suicide, causing a huge investigation into his death known as the Lord Hutton Inquiry. For the three weeks leading up to the verdict, CNN and the BBC built the story up on air and on their websites that this would be the most difficult week in the life of Tony Blair, indicating they were going to make the follow up reporting to the verdict extremely hard for Mr. Blair to overcome. But when Lord Hutton and his committee gave their report it went just the opposite as to what the media was expecting as Lord Hutton totally exonerated the British government of any wrong doing and found the BBC
guilty of having misled the nation. Remarkable, yet as could be expected, instead of follow up reporting, this new development was deemed no longer newsworthy, and just
six hours after CNN and the BBC's having to report the verdict, the story was no longer on their websites. Again the media has used this kind of distorted misrepresentation of events to mislead the world. For three weeks they completely filled Europe, Asia, Africa, and as much of America as they could with the notion that the British government was covering up the truth when it was actually the media themselves who were guilty. But CNN and the BBC are very aware of the psychological damage they were able to impose on the world during this time with the resulting negative attitude towards Tony Blair and George Bush, even though the media themselves were the ones in the wrong.
So what is the truth? Am I telling you the truth when I say the vast majority of Iraqi people are thankful to the United States? Recently I met with a reporter at Applebee's restaurant. As we started the interview I decided rather than tell her what I was doing, that I would just show her, and so I stood up as I had done many
other times in the last month and asked for the diner's attention. When the people heard that I had been in Iraq the restaurant grew quiet, but forty-five seconds later
broke into applause at the brief message I had brought them. As you can imagine the ensuing interview was quite animated and for the next hour diners dropped by with
words of appreciation for what I had said. In the course of our conversation something happened that should give us all hope and a little more insight into what is the truth about the situation in Iraq. I told the reporter, "The most interesting thing that I have found is that everywhere I go and speak, people come up and tell me that their cousin in Iraq (or whoever they might know in Iraq) is telling them the very same thing that I am saying." Two minutes later a woman came over to our table and said, "You know my cousin is in Iraq." The interview appeared on the front page of the paper the next day. Take heart America. The truth will set you free."
Mike Bardon
4253 East 5000 South.
Vernal, UT 84078
(435) 789-0912
The Belmont Club Points Out That Osama Bin Laden Wants A Truce
Important point, made over at The Belmont Club, is not just that Bin Laden is repeating Michael Moore's claims about Bush--he is also asking for a truce: It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.
For those who haven't figured this out: it sounds like bin Laden is hurting, and thinks his best hope of surviving is to have someone in the White House who is interested in a "nuanced" approach to terrorism, rather than victory over it.
The American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day. One response is to agree that the United States of America will henceforth act like Sweden, which is on track to become majority Islamic sometime after the middle of this century. The electorate best knows which candidate will serve this end; which candidate most promises to be European-like in attitude and they can choose that path with both eyes open. The electorate can strike that bargain and Osama may keep his word. The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly; to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence; the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he, the initials 'US' will always mean Unconditional Surrender.
Osama has stated his terms. He awaits America's answer.
Now, I am hearing the left arguing that Bin Laden really wants Bush re-elected, because the war in Iraq helps raise more terrorists, and because Bush is so hated. I don't think that argument flies. Before 9/11, Bin Laden's political ideas were fully implemented in Afghanistan; he was free to train terrorists, attack U.S. interests (including the World Trade Center in 1993) with impunity, and live a pretty comfortable life. Now, the Taliban are not only out of power; Afghanistan has held the first democratic elections; and Bin Laden has to spend much of his energy keeping out of sight. Anyone that thinks Bin Laden would prefer George Bush as president is kidding himself.
Attention Leftists: You Are Going To Have To Abandon Your Fantasy
A reader points out something that will doubtless cause great suffering in moonbat circles (including those working to get Senator Kerry elected): Osama admits planning the WTC attack in his new release. Where does this leave the leftwing "CIA/Mossad/Masonic plot ordered by BusHitler at the behest of the Jooze", eh? Will anyone ask Howard Dean if he still things BusHitler knew about it in advance? Will any of the moonbats at the Democratic Underground admit they were barking at fireflies, for example?
At the very least, their pert noses should be rubbed in this unpleasant fact: Osama bin Laden has admitted to planning, implementing and ordering the attack on the WTC and by extension, the Pentagon and whatever Flt. 93 was intended for. He is responsible for that atrocity.
Not the Mossad.
Not the CIA.
Not the Illuminati.
Not the Gnomes of Zurich.
Not robot-controlled airplanes under the guidance of Dick Cheney's secret bunker supercomputer.
Osama. Bin. Laden. Ordered. It. Funded. It. Approved. It. Glorifies. It.
That is reality. It should be pointed out to the Left as often as possible. How they deal with this reality is their problem, not ours.
Osama Bin Laden Is Alive, It Appears
At least according to these news accounts, he refers to both Kerry and Bush, which means that it isn't an old tape. Not surprisingly, he is taking the Michael Moore line that Bush could have prevented much of the loss of life. It's nice to know that bin Laden is so concerned about that sort of thing.
Not surprisingly, Bin Laden shows his lack of political acumen by attacking George Bush's integrity and competence (see the CBS video special report at the link above) or this report here, I guess in the hopes that undecided Americans would listen to Bin Laden and decide to vote for Kerry.
Too Much Division of Labor, I Think
The Reuters wire service news headline is depressing: GDP Grows Less Than Expected at 3.7 Percent
The rest of the story, however, is quite different: WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy grew at a healthy 3.7 percent annual rate in the third quarter this year, bolstered by strong consumer spending and accompanied by the lowest inflation in decades, the Commerce Department (search) said on Friday.
Two possible explanations:
The third-quarter expansion in gross domestic product (search) — the measure of total output within the nation's borders — came in below Wall Street economists' forecasts for a 4.2 percent pace of growth but still was up from 3.3 percent in the second quarter.
It was one of the final pieces of economic data before Tuesday's U.S. presidential election in which the economy's condition has been a focal point, and indicated generally that a solid expansion remains in place.
1. The guy who writes the headlines doesn't write the rest of the story, and perhaps doesn't read them very carefully.
2. The guy who writes the headlines has to figure out how to make this into bad news for Bush.
What makes the story so amazing is that this happened in spite of these somewhat suspiciously high oil prices. It makes you wonder what will happen if these oil prices are actually the results of hedge funds playing games with commodity futures--and oil prices suddenly fall.
The more I think about this headline/news story mismatch, the more I find myself wondering what would happen if George Bush, as a result of that little incident where he passed out while choking on a pretzel, discovered something quite dramatic. What would the Reuters news story look like? Bush Actions May Cause Unemployment For Hundreds of Thousands of Doctors & Nurses
President Bush's recent discovery of a $1 cure for cancer was announced this morning at a press conference....
There Goes Kerry's October Surprise
What happened to the 377 tons of HMX? WASHINGTON — A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday and said a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 200 tons of explosives from the Al-Qaqaa (search) munitions base soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year.
There are so many different explanations, of which this is only the latest, that for Kerry to claim that Bush is incompetent is premature, and the sort of opportunism that I expect from Kerry.
Major Austin Pearson appeared at a Pentagon news conference to say it was his mission to go the facility and clear explosives from the base. He said he did not discover that the International Atomic Energy Agency (search) had reported 377 tons of explosives were missing until Tuesday night and he said he promptly contacted military officials.
Voter Fraud in Minnesota
I've written in the past about why it is not a good idea to video tape yourself committing a felony. It is also not a good idea to send email organizing voter fraud. Apparently, American Coming Together (ACT) decided to take advantage of a weird little quirk in Minnesota law: Under Minnesota's registration law, an eligible but previously unregistered individual may register to vote in his precinct by showing proof of residence in the precinct or, in the absence of such proof, having a voter registered in the precinct vouch under oath that he personally knows that the unregistered individual is a resident of the precinct.
Okay, that sounds reasonable enough, although I find myself asking why you don't have proof of residence. No driver's license? No utility bills? Nothing? But the Bush campaign has obtained an email that ACT sent out to its volunteers: Election Day is upon us. You are confirmed to volunteer with ACT (America Coming Together) on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov 2.
If the requirement is "personally knows" then you don't need a name badge, do you? ACT is obviously intending to engage in massive fraud, registering people on election day to vote. It sounds like the plan is to go register to vote with the help of an ACT volunteer who will vouch that he "personally knows" you live in the precinct--then go do it again in several dozen other precincts.
We will be creating name badges that include your Ward and Precinct information for each of the thousands of volunteers that day to make it easier to find a volunteer to vouch for a voter at the polls.
I know that this will be very painful to Democrats, but we are going to have to insist on photo ID for voting in the future. "Vote early, vote often" was funny when it was just Chicago politics, but on a national scale? Sorry, no more.
For Gun Owners That Can't Quite Decide Who To Vote For Tuesday
As you probably know, in addition to my regularly monthly column in Shotgun News, I am also filling in for Neal Knox while he has some health problems. This is the column that, to my pleasure, appeared before the election. You can also find it here on the Shotgun News web site. If you know a gun ownership who doesn't know who to vote for on Tuesday, or doesn't see any reason to vote for Bush over Kerry or some third party candidate, have them read this.
-----
After The Election
By Clayton E. Cramer
By the time you read this, the election will be over. Either Bush will have won, Kerry will have won--or lawyers will trying to repeat the 2000 Florida disaster.
I hope that Bush will have won by a sufficiently large margin that Kerry accepts the loss, and concedes on Election Night. But as I write these words, I find myself increasingly worried that Kerry might win.
The news media are pulling out all the stops to elect Kerry: misrepresenting the final report of the Iraqi Survey Group on WMDs; reporting news based on 1973 Air National Guard memos that were produced on a modern computer; soft-pedaling the really astonishing level of violence that Bush campaign offices are suffering from drive-by shootings, from screaming demonstrators forcing entry, and other forms of intimidation.
We have won a great victory in September, with the expiration of the federal assault weapons law. If, as you read these words, the news media are filled with coverage about "President-elect Kerry," you can be sure that a new, much more extreme version of the assault weapons law will be introduced into Congress.
When President Bush took office in 2001, the federal government stopped assisting ambulance-chasers in suing the gun industry for "negligent marketing." (Negligent marketing means that gun manufacturers were obeying all laws concerning making and selling guns, but federal and state authorities were failing to enforce existing laws.) You can be sure that President Kerry will resume that assistance. Remember: one of America's most successful trial lawyers will be Vice President John Edwards.
If John Kerry is preparing his inaugural address as you read this column, remember that you can blame a lot of gun owners. John Kerry made it very clear throughout his time in the U.S. Senate which side he was on, and it wasn't our side.
A lot of American gun owners were taken in by Kerry's photo-ops with a shotgun, and did not pay attention to his voting history. If you are one of the gun owners who voted for John Kerry a few days ago, let's just say that gun ownership wasn't near the top of your list of priorities. If it was, you weren't paying attention.
Or maybe you said, "I don't want to get called for jury duty." Sorry, but that won't fly.
Many states now use driver's license information to call jurors. Would you rather spend two weeks on jury duty every few years, or lose the right to own a gun?
"There's no real difference, anyway." I suppose to a blind person, there's no real difference between red and blue. This election has given us a very clear difference-even more clear-cut than the 2000 election, where Gore's history on gun control was disappointing, but he had in the past been on our side.
Kerry has never been on our side. If you don't want to invest the time to follow politics (and many people would prefer not to do so), you could at least see what gun rights groups such as the NRA or Gun Owners of America had to say about the candidates.
There is one group of gun owners that I am especially upset with--and those are the self-righteous gun rights purists, who complained that Bush wasn't pure enough. They insisted that because Bush agreed to sign a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, they could not vote for him.
If the choice a few days ago had been between George Bush and a wishy-washy Democrat, I could understand the purists who voted Libertarian or did not vote for President at all.
But that wasn't the situation this election day. John Kerry was clearly our enemy. President Bush appointed an Attorney General who has defended the Second Amendment as an individual right. Do you think Attorney General Ashcroft made a decision like that without consulting President Bush?
If a federal assault weapons ban had made it to the Oval Office, and Bush had signed it, I could understand the purist disdain for Bush. But it didn't happen, because George Bush and House Republicans did an incredibly sly job of making sure that no assault weapon ban came to his desk. This largely defused the assault weapon issue as part of the campaign.
If you are one of those gun rights purists who did not vote for President Bush this year--and are now cringing at the prospect of what President Kerry is going to do to your gun rights--I sure hope that you learned your lesson. The rest of us are going to have four years to repent for your decision.
As Long As You Don't Frighten the Horses or Servants
British newscaster speaks, not realizing that he is on the air: Piers Morgan sparked panic among This Morning viewers today when he claimed al Qaida is about to stage a terrorist spectacular.
The former Daily Mirror editor, who is standing in for Phillip Schofield, didn't realise his comments were being broadcast live on air.
Morgan and co-presenter Fern Britton were filmed during an ad break for Trisha, the show which precedes This Morning on ITV1.
France Will Always Be On Arafat's Side
France, the nation committed to human rights and civilized behavior everywhere: PARIS, Oct. 28 (Xinhuanet) -- France will be always on the side of the Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier declared Thursday.
Unless, of course, someone figured out a way to convert French Muslims into petroleum--at which point France would cheerfully solve two problems at once.
Oil Prices Dropping
As I've mentioned in the last few weeks, there are some curious aspects to how rapidly prices went up--faster than a lot of experts thought likely, considering the actual supply and demand situation. Of course, if certain Democratic Party controlled hedge funds were actually playing games with commodities futures to drive up the price, there's a limit to how long they can play that game, before the prices start to fall.
Oil prices are suddently falling--about 10% in two days--and again, it seems like a pretty dramatic drop, if this is something to do with the real world, and not manipulation.
What Elephant in the Bathtub? Al-Qaeda & Alien Smugglers
I know that at least some of my readers are planning to vote for third party candidates (although not the Libertarian candidate) because of Bush's unwillingness to put any serious effort into the illegal alien problem. This is a mistake in an election this important, but I understand why some people, especially in California, are very frustrated. Illegal aliens are often very poorly paid, which means that government services expended on behalf of illegals are not recouped by payroll taxes that their employers pay. Anyone that doubts this is invited to visit almost any urban California emergency room, and yell la migra! Just don't be standing in front of the exits when you do this.
I don't blame the illegals. The vast majority have come to America to work because their home countries have spent decades implementing pseudo-socialist (often closer to fascist) economic policies, and America has horrible jobs that are still much better than home can provide. (A few are here because they are wanted back home--and quickly become wanted here, too.)
When I say that "home" can't provide decent jobs, I don't just mean Mexico and other points south. I mean Canada as well. (There are a lot more illegal aliens from Canada than most people realize, but Canadians look like us, and sound like us (well, mostly). Let's not overemphasize this point: some of the people that are hostile to illegal aliens have racist reasons, but the vast majority of the people with whom I talk about this are motivated by economic concerns, not ethnicity.
I've previously discussed that both Democrats and Republicans are reluctant to do anything about the illegal alien problem. Democrats see illegal aliens as future Democratic voters. (In some cases, current Democratic voters: look at the Dornan/Sanchez dispute a few years ago where at least 748 non-citizens voted.)
Republicans are terrified that pushing this issue will offend Hispanics, a fair number of whom are pretty conservative, and can be persuaded to vote Republican on occasion. At least some Republicans won't push the issue because a lot of American corporations rely on a bountiful supply of illegal aliens to keep labor costs down, and Republicans, for reasons that elude me, have decided that the contributions of a few large corporations are more important than the votes of perhaps ten million working class Americans whose wages are being depressed by the enormous supply of cheap labor. If Republicans had any guts, they would point out illegal aliens make the bottom of legal American residents (black, white, and Hispanic) much poorer than they would otherwise be--and that Democrats are playing racial politics at the expense of the working poor. The problem is that the Democrats, through their wholly owned subsidiaries, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and most American newspapers, would start screaming "racist" and "you're blaming the victim!"
Now, here's a reason to take the problem of illegal aliens seriously that is so powerful that it should even overcome the "racist" scream of the left: A top al Qaeda lieutenant has met with leaders of a violent Salvadoran criminal gang with roots in Mexico and the United States — including a stronghold in the Washington area — in an effort by the terrorist network to seek help infiltrating the U.S.-Mexico border, law enforcement authorities said. Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, a key al Qaeda cell leader for whom the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward, was spotted in July in Honduras meeting with leaders of El Salvador's notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, which immigration officials said has smuggled hundreds of Central and South Americans — mostly gang members — into the United States. Although they are actively involved in alien, drug and weapons smuggling, Mara Salvatrucha members in America also have been tied to numerous killings, robberies, burglaries, carjackings, extortions, rapes and aggravated assaults — including at least seven killings in Virginia and a machete attack on a 16-year-old in Alexandria that severely mutilated his hands.
How big does the problem get before we recognize that the federal government needs to:
...
Authorities said al Qaeda terrorists hope to take advantage of a lack of detention space within the Department of Homeland Security that has forced immigration officials to release non-Mexican illegal aliens back into the United States, rather than return them to their home countries. Less than 15 percent of those released appear for immigration hearings. Nearly 60,000 illegal aliens designated as other-than-Mexican, or OTMs, were detained last year along the U.S.-Mexico border. El Shukrijumah, born in Saudi Arabia but thought to be a Yemen national, was spotted in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in July, having crossed the border illegally from Nicaragua after a stay in Panama. U.S. authorities said al Qaeda operatives have been in Tegucigalpa planning attacks against British, Spanish and U.S. embassies. Known to carry passports from Saudi Arabia, Trinidad, Guyana and Canada, El Shukrijumah had sought meetings with the Mara Salvatrucha gang leaders who control alien-smuggling routes through Mexico and into the United States. El Shukrijumah, 29, who authorities said was in Canada last year looking for nuclear material for a so-called "dirty bomb" and reportedly has family members in Guyana, was named in a March 2003 material-witness arrest warrant by federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia, where U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty said he is sought in connection with potential terrorist threats against the United States. A former southern Florida resident and pilot thought to have helped plan the September 11 attacks, El Shukrijumah was among seven suspected al Qaeda operatives identified in May by Attorney General John Ashcroft as being involved in plans to strike new targets in the United States.
1. Aggressively punish employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens.
2. Shut the border--calling up the unorganized militia of the United States (about forty million men legally obligated to respond to the President's orders), if need be, to adequately seal both the the Mexican and Canadian borders from illegal crossings.
State governments also need to develop some guts, and tell cities and counties that they are obligated to arrest illegal aliens, and turn them over to INS, instead of the current policy of many local governments to ignore it when they find illegals.
Thanks to Michael Williams for the pointer to the Washington Times article.
More On The Explosives Story
The Washington Times has an article by Bill Gertz reporting that the missing explosives were removed by Russian forces just before the war started, as a way of removing embarrassing evidence of Russian complicity in Iraq's WMD programs. (Remember that the explosives in question were of interest to the U.N. because they have the high velocity wavefront required to implode plutonium quickly enough to make an explosion, not a fizzle. (I've read that you need a particular high velocity wavefront to bring the density up quickly enough to get a properly explosion. There are a few other details besides the velocity that I am leaving out; I don't think that everyone needs to know them.) Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.
Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.
The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.
March of the Vulgarians
Warning: This entry contains very vulgar sexual content, because it contains part of a speech by the wife of a public official.
Teresa Heinz Kerry has been pretty nasty on the campaign trail; I was a bit disappointed in how much the Governator told us about his sex life (or lack thereof) after the Republican National Convention. San Francisco Mayor Newsom's wife makes both of these characters seem downright classy--and it tells us a bit about what is considered appropriate language at a gay rights fundraiser in New York City: Mrs. Newsom, who lives in New York and is a regular on Court TV, offered the 1,100 guests at the Empire State Pride Agenda fundraiser some unusual observations about the couple’s sex life.
I get a lot of flack for arguing that homosexuals are unhealthily focused on sex. But where's the news coverage of homosexuals outraged by Ms. Newsom's remarks? Indeed,
“I know that many of you wanted to see my husband and some of you had questions out there,” she said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Is he hot? Yeah. Is he hung? Yeah.”
“Is he?” she said as she waved her hand, apparently to suggest bisexual. “Not unless you can give a better [at this point she mimicked eating a banana] than me.”"Not one person came forward to take offense or say it was inappropriate,'' [Empire Foundation executive director Alan] Van Capelle said.
Ms. Newsom now claims that her gestures were misinterpreted: Mayoral first lady Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom says way too much is being made of her sexually playful comments at a recent gay rights dinner, and that for the record she was not -- we repeat not -- pantomiming eating a banana when talking about her husband's sexuality.
Oh yeah. I believe her, don't you?
Sure, Guilfoyle Newsom said, she did make a brief reference to her husband's hunky attributes, but she insists she absolutely didn't try to simulate any form of oral sex.
She was just thrusting a pointed fist at herself while making the remarks.
...
Yes, she joked about her husband's endowments, but when answering as to whether her husband is gay, Guilfoyle Newsom said only, "Not unless you are better than me.''
At which point, she says, she raised her elbow at a 45-degree angle and pointed at herself with a closed fist and thumbs up.
"It was not a banana-mimicking gesture,'' she said. "I know what I said and did. ... I have nothing to hide.''
Is It Humor? Or Just Plain Weird?
It's from Swift Geese Veterans For Truth. It's a parody of John Kerry's testimony before Congress, and I suppose if animal rights activists were a significant chunk of the population, it wouldn't be parody, but a devastating argument for not voting for John Kerry. Instead, it's just disturbingly weird.
Airline Security Solution
I'm not sure it will work, but then again, this is what I expect from the person whose name appears at the bottom. (No guarantees about its authenticity, you understand.) Dear Sirs,
I have the solution for the prevention of hijackings, and at the same time getting our airline industry back on its feet. Since men of the Muslim religion are not allowed to look at naked women we should replace our female flight attendants with strippers.
Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing a naked woman, and of course, every businessman in this country would start flying again in hope of seeing a naked woman. Hijackings would end and the airline industry would have record sales.
Why didn't Bush think of this? Why do I still have to do everything myself? Well, I just got out of the hospital.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
Illegal Aliens Should Not Be Registered To Vote
But because we don't dare ask questions or require proof of citizenship, they do. From the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch: Among supposedly eligible voters in Franklin County are suspected terrorists arrested for alleged plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and a local shopping mall. As an imprisoned felon, one is ineligible to vote. The other, from Somalia, is not a U.S. citizen and thus broke state and federal laws when he registered in 1999, officials said.
Michelle Malkin claims that one of these guys was registered to vote by ACORN--a charge that ACORN disputes, and which, if Malkin is right about this, she hasn't adequately sourced to prove her claim.
UPDATE: Ms. Malkin has blogged that she was in error about ACORN registering this terrorist to vote.
I See Some Inconsistencies in This Story
It sounds like political derangement is becoming a big problem in Florida: WEST PALM BEACH – An 18-year-old Marine recruit remained in jail on Wednesday, charged with threatening to stab his girlfriend over her choice for president, news partner NewsChannel 5 reported in its noon broadcast.
However, the story goes on to say:
The enlistee, Steven Scott Soper, of Lake Worth, became enraged Tuesday night when his 18-year-old girlfriend said she was leaving him -- and voting for John Kerry for president.Soper, who will enter the Marines as soon as he passes the GED test, solidly supports Bush. He allegedly told girlfriend Stacey Silheira, "You'll never live to see the election."
Except that the Marines generally don't take a GED except under certain circumstances. A GED plus twelve college credits, sure, but it appears that they are quite reluctant to take just a GED, not a high school graduate. Perhaps Mr. Soper is (make that was) a Marine recruit in his mind.
ABC Playing Politics With the News?
According to Drudge, they are holding back on a tape that--let's face it--would remind a lot of Americans who al-Qaeda wants defeated in this election: The terrorist claims on tape the next attack will dwarf 9/11. "The streets will run with blood," and "America will mourn in silence" because they will be unable to count the number of the dead. Further claims: America has brought this on itself for electing George Bush who has made war on Islam by destroying the Taliban and making war on Al Qaeda.
Oh yeah, I believe ABC too.
ABCNEWS strongly denies holding the tape back from broadcast over political concerns during the last days of the election.
UPDATE: FoxNews is now reporting the story as well: The tape was handed to the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency by ABC News two days ago, multiple government sources said. ABC is said to have received the tape last weekend from a terrorist source in Waziristan, a region in Pakistan near the Afghan border where the Taliban and Al Qaeda (search) are believed to be holed up.
A Liberal Democrat Explains Why She Is Voting For Bush
Let's just say that Meryl Yourish and I don't see eye to eye on very many things, but she clearly recognizes that her liberal ideas have a better chance of surviving under President George Bush--or perhaps she isn't keen on having to wear a burkha in another 20 years. It is an eloquent statement of why someone who even voted for Mondale is voting for Bush: I disagree with nearly every single part of George Bush's domestic policies. I am pro-gay rights, pro-choice, pro-stem cell research, against huge tax cuts for big business, not a strict constructionist regarding Supreme Court Justices. I am in favor of unions (or at least, what unions were supposed to be), affirmative action, and most of the rest of the liberal agenda.
Exactly.
But the war trumps everything.
I lived twelve miles west of the World Trade Center on 9/11. I could see the smoke rising from a lookout point at a nearby park. I could smell the smoke of the burning towers every time the wind was in the east. On November 15th of 2001, I came out of a steakhouse to find the air permeated not with the odor of the steakhouse's grill, but once again, with the smell of the towers burning. Three thousand innocents died on 9/11. We are at war, and we need a president who will recognize that, and act accordingly.
"Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response."
That's not good enough. Neither is a record of pacifism and anti-war activities. I don't trust John Kerry to ensure my safety, and the safety of my country. Congress can take care of the domestic issues. I'm voting for Bush for President on Tuesday.
Democratic Violence Continues
This is another one of those liberals with a broad definition of freedom of expression: A Florida man has been charged with attempting to run over controversial Republican congresswoman Katherine Harris with his Cadillac. According to the below Sarasota Police Department report, Barry Seltzer, 46, told cops that he was simply exercising his "political expression" when he drove his car at Harris and several supporters, who were campaigning last night at a Sarasota intersection.
Unsurprisingly, he is a registered Democrat, was driving a Cadillac, and lists his occupation as "real estate investor."
This isn't one isolated incident. The amount of violence that the Democrats are using in this campaign is really worrisome. If Republicans did even a half of this, the news media would be arguing that Bush should resign from the race, and allow Kerry to take the White House by default.
Apparently Butterfly Ballots Aren't The Only Item Too Complex For Democrats
The Democrats are already filing lawsuits in Florida: But Mrs. Hood's spokesman, Alia Faraj, described the lawsuits as politically motivated, saying they were eroding public confidence in the election process by challenging "every single law we are following."
On the question of citizenship: maybe they failed to check that box before they weren't citizens? I don't know, but I do know that throwing out a form because it asks you to answer a legitimate question--are you a citizen--is equivalent to dropping the requirement that you be a citizen to vote. What are we supposed to do with incomplete or invalid registrations? Accept them anyway?
One suit challenges a ruling by Mrs. Hood to throw out forms on which new voters had failed to check a box indicating whether they were U.S. citizens, and another argued that although only 17 percent of the voters in Broward County and 20 percent in Miami-Dade County were black, more than a third of the voter-registration forms that were determined to be incomplete and invalid in both counties involved black voters.
If Republicans argued that voter registration forms are too complicated for black people to fill out correctly, this would be a sign of racism. But when Democrats make that argument?
Time To Smell The Coffee
Over at electoral-vote.com, the webmaster, who is frank about being a Kerry supporter, has the following commentary today: The Los Angeles Times has a story today that explains why this election is so much more emotionally charged than previous ones. It is not about economics, but part of a cultural war. A new LA Times poll shows Bush doing well among lower and middle income whites, whereas Kerry leads among whites earning more than $100,000 a year despite his promise to roll back the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year. As president, Bush has enacted big tax cuts for the rich but the rich are voting for Kerry. What's up here?
Two possibilities: Perhaps the high income crowd can afford the tax increase. Perhaps the low income crowd knows that Kerry's talk really means that they will get stuck with the tax increase, and the high income crowd knows this also. Remember that people with more than five million dollars don't have to pay income tax if they don't want to; they just buy municipal bonds of their state of residence, and the interest income is exempt from federal and state income tax. (Yeah, you and I could do that do, but we can't live on the interest on our savings; with five million dollars, you earn about $200,000 a year, and pay no taxes.)
I also asked him if he had seen the New Yorker article about how the billionaires met with the DNC movers and shakers at Aspen the week after the Convention? Doesn't it seem even a little odd that America's wealthiest people are spending tens of millions of dollars each to defeat a man who supposedly reduced their taxes?
David Zucker of Airplane! Does a Political Ad
And it is the funniest political ad that I have ever seen. The good news: David Zucker was just another Hollywood liberal until, as he puts it, he “got mugged on 9/11.”
Go to that web site, and click on the appropriate media type! You'll be glad you did!
Confirmation That Kerry Is Wrong
When you start getting emails from progressive Jews singing the praises of Pat Buchanan's misnamed magazine The American Conservative, and Pat Robertson is suddenly considered a credible source of information by the mainstream media. Has everyone forgotten when leftists were calling Pat Buchanan: Pat Buchanan's book is a loopy and inconsistent piece of Catholic fundamentalism that betrays a weird and self-destructive sympathy for the fascist cause.
Irony Overload: Devil Worshipper Chris Cranmer
This news story is about what I would expect of post-Christian Britain: LONDON, England (CNN) -- A devil-worshipping sailor in the Royal Navy has become the first registered Satanist in the British Armed Forces.
The irony overload is the guy's name: Chris Cranmer. Is he a relative of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, responsible for the Anglican Church's Book of Common Prayer? Chris, of course, is short for Christopher, which means "bearing Christ" in Greek.
Chris Cranmer, 24, a technician serving on the Type 22 frigate Cumberland, has been officially recognized as a Satanist by the ship's captain.
That allows him to perform satanic rituals aboard and permits him to have a non-Christian Church of Satan funeral should he be killed in action.
A spokesman for Britain's Ministry of Defence told CNN Sunday that it had a duty to allow members of the forces to practice their religion.
More On The Explosives Scandal
Someone on the ground in Iraq has some expert opinion, and he is of the opinion that the explosives might well have moved before U.S. forces arrived: How can we lose almost 400 tons of high-powered explosive material? This is one of those things that just doesn't make sense if you don't know the context. I'm having trouble understanding it myself, but I'll tell you what I do know. When we first crossed the border to start the invasion, we saw some very strange things out in the open desert. Things that weren't supposed to be there. Fighter jets. Randomly scattered tanks and armored vehicles. We even found helicopters hidden underneath foliage on the riverbanks. This was all part of Saddam's bizarre strategy. He knew we'd come in there and thump him. He was hoping that we'd level the country and then leave it in shambles. After we left, he would reemerge and pick up the high-value pieces of war machinery that he cleverly scattered throughout the countryside. Not a brilliant strategy, but please understand his limited options. We recovered most of the jets, choppers, and tanks in a relatively short period of time. We stopped seeing them around after about 3 months.
Well, it looks like Saddam also scattered his cache of explosives- removing them from his main bunker and stashing them who-knows-where. We hoped to recover those explosives before the looters got to them. Unfortunately, the looters had the inside track, because they were the ones that scattered them in the first place. These explosives would fetch a very high price, and the potential destructive capabilities are not something we'd like to deal with.
Undercounted Voters
I've seen the claim from Democrats that the public opinion surveys are missing younger voters who only have cell phones, and no land lines. I'm not sure if that is completely true, since I understand that most of the pollsters randomly dial phone numbers. But it occurs to me that there is another voting block that we can be sure the pollsters are missing: absentee ballots to be cast by service members who are out of the United States. We have something like 130,000 people in Iraq, and tens of thousands in Afghanistan. There are sound reasons to belive that these votes are going to go 3-1 or better for Bush.
Reservists, of course, are going to be voting in their home states, which I suspect are disproportionately Southern. Regular service people, however, are going to be absentee voting in the states where most of them are based. How many of them are based in Florida? I know that the Democrats tried hard to prevent military absentee ballots from being counted in the 2000 Florida fiasco, taking advantage of failures to have the envelope postmarked and similar problems. I suspect that there may be thousands of military absentee ballots arriving right now in Florida--and those voters have been missed in the phone surveys.
You May Be In For a Surprise Election Day
This blogger reports that she tried to vote early--and discovered that someone has registered to vote using her name, and a different address--and what a surprise! As a Democrat: Well drinkers, it appears your tallglassofmilk is a victim of voter fraud. Turns out that if I hadn't voted early, there's a pretty good chance I might have been hauled off in handcuffs on November 2, for attempting to vote twice. Now it might be somebody else who gets hauled away.
I think I now understand why the Bush campaign is encouraging everyone on our side to vote early--to prevent Democrats from voting in our place.
Sometime between the recall election and today, someone other than myself has taken the liberty of registering me as a democrat at an address I do not and have never lived at--and they used or forged my signature to do it.
I am unclear at this time if this is widespread or an isolated indident, random or personal, and if personal, against the tallglassofmilk or her real life persona.
The woman at the polling site was very helpful and referred me to a someone in the Los Angeles Registrar's Office, who was not very helpful and who was surprisingly uninterested in getting to the bottom of the fraud. The woman only seemed concerned with the fact that I was able to cast my vote--which I was. But that doesn't mean a crime hasn't been committed! I requested a copy of the voter registration affidavit, but I won't receive it til later next week.
Another blogger linked to this entry asks a question that I have asked several times: Question: Is there any good reason why a voter should not have to present valid identification at the polling place?
I consider one of the most important actions of the next Congress to be passing a law requiring anyone voting in a federal election to show an official picture ID.
The answer, by the way, is No.
UPDATE: It occurred to me after I posted this that some of you may not have sufficiently criminal minds to figure out why someone would register to vote under someone else's name.
Let's say that your name is Joe Jones. You register to vote under the name of a real voter named Jack Smith. Then you go and vote as Jack Smith, and then go and vote as Joe Jones. You have effectively cast three votes for John Kerry: one as Jack Smith, one as Joe Jones--and by preventing Jack Smith from voting for George Bush, you have canceled out the vote of the real Jack Smith. The net result is that you have voted three times for John Kerry.
Now, if all voting took place on one day, and you registered to vote in the same precinct under both names, there is a small chance that showing up and voting as Joe Jones and Jack Smith might get you noticed by an alert precinct worker--but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on that, especially if you vote in one identity in the morning, and the other identity in the evening. You can get around this by voting absentee in one or both identities--one of the reasons why I think absentee voting needs to be limited to those actually out of town, or hospitalized.
Of course, if you register to vote in two different precincts, the chances of getting caught by voting in person are zero. Yet another reason for requiring photo ID when you vote.
This Is Really Sad
It's an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about a new black urban fashion trend: Earl "E.J." Jackson cracked open a Miller High Life and poured a dribble into the gutter before taking a swig. "That's for my dead homies," he said.
Remembering someone who died--okay, that's makes sense. But the circumstances that the article describes are just overwhelming:
Then he got to work. Flipping on his airbrush machine, he leaned toward a pristine white T-shirt and painted fat letters until they glistened as if carved out of red Jell-O:
R. ... I. ... P. ....
His artistry drew a crowd to his easel at the corner of 90th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland. Teens walking home from nearby Castlemont High School asked him to make "Rest in Peace" shirts for their dead friends, while drivers in thumping muscle cars screeched to the curb and placed orders for deceased relatives.
The R.I.P. shirts -- airbrushed or featuring scanned photos of lost loved ones -- were just a novelty when they were first created a decade ago. But today they are an everyday ritual of death in many American cities, like choosing a casket or sending flowers. Shirt-making enterprises now thrive in areas where the homicide rates are high, including parts of the Bay Area, New York, Washington, D.C., Miami and Chicago.
Families order 100 R.I.P. shirts at a time for funerals, and groups wear them to nightclub birthday parties where the guest of honor is dead. Teenagers wear them to school, and a memorial wall of R.I.P. T-shirts is drawing daily crowds in a Virginia mall.
...
In the United States, R.I.P. has caught on particularly among young black men in dangerous neighborhoods who live in a constant state of mourning, Barrett said.
...
R.I.P. is also the bread and butter of Reagan Dolendo's family silk- screen business, Precious Memory, at the Southland Mall in Hayward.
"I always ask the customers how the person died. I want to know what I'm making and who it's for," Dolendo said. He keeps all the images of the departed on a computer, because often customers come by for repeat orders on death anniversaries and birthdays. "Jose Sanchez -- he was shot three months ago, gang related. He was 18, " Dolendo said.
Now, I understand why some people look at the murder problem in the ghetto and say, "We need gun control." But that's missing the core problem. Why would anyone murder a two year old over a PlayStation? I'm sure that wasn't done with a gun.
"Davon, 15, he died just last week."
Dolendo lingered on a picture of a smiling 2-year-old girl with pink barrettes.
"Ania. Her mom's boyfriend killed her because she wouldn't give him the PlayStation."
He sighed.
...
Y.B. worked at a burger joint about 10 blocks away, a much-loved figure known for feeding anybody, even if their pockets were empty. Y.B., who hung out with a tough crowd, was shot last year in San Francisco, E.J. said.
"That life, it got him," said E.J., airbrushing a fist onto the shirt with its pinky extended -- the hand sign for residents of the 100th avenues in East Oakland, where Y.B. lived.
"It's sad, because we have so many young guys who come in and tell us their 12- or 13-year-old cousin just died. It's gotten so I don't want to do R. I.P. anymore," E.J. said.
At Shirtique in the Hilltop Mall in Richmond, 26-year-old Sama Banya takes about three R.I.P. orders a week. But he'll never display his work -- it would be disrespectful to the dead, he said.
"In a way, making R.I.P. shirts puts you in touch with your own mortality, " he said. "Almost every time, I'm pressing the iron on a face that is my age or younger."
Asking Poor Questions Gives Poor Results
The Washington Post is reporting: A majority of likely voters says the country is headed in the wrong direction, but these Americans remain sharply divided whether President Bush or Democratic challenger John F. Kerry is the best choice to lead the country over the next four years, according to a Washington Post tracking poll.
Yet while acknowledging that generally Bush supporters and Republicans think we are headed the right direction, at least some significant fraction of people who say we are going the wrong direction are voting for Bush. Why?
Fifty-five percent of the likely voters interviewed Oct. 21-24 said they believe the country was "pretty seriously off on the wrong track," while 41 percent said it was "generally going in the right direction." Among the larger pool of self-described registered voters, and among all adults, the proportions were the same.
I can think of several explanations. The obvious one (and probably wrong) is that many of the "wrong direction" crowd don't know that Bush is President, or don't blame Bush for this "wrong direction."
Another explanation, however, is that the question is poorly written. If you ask me if America is going the "wrong direction," I would say, yes, definitely--and that's why I am voting for George Bush. The left's domination (which doesn't necessarily mean complete control) of the federal bench and news/entertainment industry is destroying the United States, taking us as a society in the wrong direction with respect to the popular culture, education, parenting, and sexualization of children. Not everything in our nation is going the wrong direction--but a number of items that concern me greatly are going in the wrong direction.
Ask better questions, and you get more sensible answers.
October Surprises
I mentioned a little earlier today about these documents that supposedly tie the Viet Cong to anti-war protesters--and perhaps to Kerry. I used the phrase "October Surprise?" as the title, implying that dropping something like that now into the campaign makes it difficult to respond to in time. Of course, the Bush family has had plenty of these October surprises, as Drudge Report reminds us: In 1992 it was the Iran Contra charges brought days before the election... In 2000 it was the DUI charges a few days before the vote... And Now...
Now, the Supreme Court managed to justify upholding the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform law's suppression of free speech on the grounds that it was necessary to prevent the appearance of corruption in the political process. I guess the same reasoning (that last-minute attacks you can't respond to prevent rational discussion of the issues) would justify passing a law prohibiting news organizations from publishing anything in the last three weeks before the election, wouldn't it? Or do the rules all change once again, because that would impair the power of the leftist media?
60 MINS PLANNED BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE
Need A Place To Throw In Some Money To Help The Cause?
Here's a 527--the Truth About Iraq--that is running a pretty decent 30 second ad in battleground states--telling Americans the good news about Iraq that they aren't going to get from the mainstream media. I just kicked in $50 to help them run commercials in this last week. You can contribute through PayPal (among other methods). I would strongly encourage you to throw in whatever you can.
No Inconsistency At All
One of Instapundit's guest bloggers, Michael Totten, thinks that Bush is being inconsistent for saying that if a state wants to create civil unions as an alternative to gay marriage, that they have that right: BUSH ON CIVIL UNIONS: President Bush said today that he favors civil unions for gays, or at least that he doesn’t agree with the Republican Party platform that opposes them. This is news to me. How can he be in favor of civil unions and also back the Federal Marriage Amendment? He can’t, at least not consistently. The FMA would ban civil unions as well as gay marriage. This is a flip I’ll take, as long as he doesn’t flop back on it.
Professor Volokh has already done a good job of demonstrating that Bush is being entirely consistent on this. All I will add to this is that Totten didn't read the article very carefully. Bush did not say that he "favors civil unions for gays." What the article quotes Bush as saying is: In an interview on Sunday with Charles Gibson, an anchor of "Good Morning America" on ABC, Mr. Bush said, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so." [emphasis added]
That's a very, very important distinction--one that Totten seems to have missed. If "a state chooses to do so" is quite different from having a judge order a state to do so.
I would argue (and I suspect that Bush might argue this also, but I really don't know for sure) that it would be a bad idea for a state legislature to pass either a marriage law for homosexuals, or its fig leaf equivalent, civil unions. That does not mean that it is unconstitutional for them to do so--just a bad idea.
October Surprise?
This article from the New York Sun, as well as other links that you can find here at Polipundit are, if accurate, devastating. While the captured Viet Cong documents do not name John Kerry, they do say, "The spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly (VC/NVN) delegations at the Paris Peace Talks." Kerry has acknowledged meeting with representatives of the North Vietnamese government on at least least two occasions in Paris--and he was a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This is not exactly a smoking gun, but it does fit in with his misrepresentations of how U.S. servicemen operated in Vietnam, does it not?
So Who Is The Civil Libertarian In The Bush Cabinet?
Interesting article from the New York Times (registration required) about resistance to shortcutting the Constitutional rights of the prisoners at Gitmo: WASHINGTON - When hundreds of prisoners arrived at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in early 2002, the Bush administration laid out a straightforward plan: once the men were interrogated, the worst of the lot would be prosecuted before special military tribunals devised to bring terrorists to justice quickly.
For all the whining about Ashcroft from the left, you would think that he was sitting in these meetings making little hangman's nooses.
A year later, with no trials yet in sight, some officials at the highest levels of the Bush administration began privately venting their frustration about both the slow pace of the Pentagon's new courts and the soundness of their rules. Attorney General John Ashcroft was especially vocal.
"Timothy McVeigh was one of the worst killers in U.S. history," Mr. Ashcroft said at one meeting of senior officials, according to two of those present. "But at least we had fair procedures for him."
John Kerry (Previous Revision) On Iraq
Mickey Kaus--who is a Democrat--points out that Kerry's campaign has tried to defend its position by pointing to a 2001 transcript about Tora Bora--but Kaus points out that Kerry's position back then doesn't match his position now: Finally, the Kerry camp may regret calling attention to that McLaughlin transcript. Earlier in the interview--which, remember, took place two months after 9/11, in the middle of our Afghan campaign against the Taliban--McLaughlin asks Kerry "What do we have to worry about [in Afghanistan]?" Here's the last part of Kerry's answer:
If Kerry wants to argue that Bush made a mistake going after Iraq, that's just fine. But he needs to admit that he made the same mistake.
I have no doubt, I've never had any doubt -- and I've said this publicly -- about our ability to be successful in Afghanistan. We are and we will be. The larger issue, John, is what happens afterwards. How do we now turn attention ultimately to Saddam Hussein? How do we deal with the larger Muslim world? What is our foreign policy going to be to drain the swamp of terrorism on a global basis? [Emphasis added]
Wait--I thought shifting the focus to Saddam was a "diversion" and distraction from the fight against Al Qaeda! Not, apparently, when Kerry saw an opportunity to score political points by advocating it.
If he wants to claim that Bush made mistakes concerning post-war Iraq--well, even Bush admits that things haven't worked out as planned. But Bob Woodward at the Washington Post is clearly miffed at Kerry's unwillingness to answer questions about what he would have done differently: At the end of last year, during 3 1/2 hours of interviews over two days, I asked President Bush hundreds of detailed questions about his actions and decisions during the 16-month run-up to the war in Iraq. His answers were published in my book "Plan of Attack." Beginning on June 16, I had discussions and meetings with Sen. John Kerry's senior foreign policy, communications and political advisers about interviewing the senator to find out how he might have acted on Iraq -- to ask him what he would have done at certain key points. Senior Kerry advisers initially seemed positive about such an interview. One aide told me, "The short answer is yes, it's going to happen."
Kerry is a political opportunist, in every worst sense of the word.
In August, I was talking with Kerry's scheduler about possible dates. On Sept. 1, Kerry began his intense criticism of Bush's decisions in the Iraq war, saying "I would've done almost everything differently." A few days later, I provided the Kerry campaign with a list of 22 possible questions based entirely on Bush's actions leading up to the war and how Kerry might have responded in the same situations. The senator and his campaign have since decided not to do the interview, though his advisers say Kerry would have strong and compelling answers.
Is The History Profession In Deep Trouble?
Dr. Ralph Luker started to foam at the mouth a while back because I made it clear that there were serious problems of politicized inaccuracy (I'm being polite) in the profession. Now, people with the right credentials are saying the same thing: In his new book, "Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud -- American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin" (PublicAffairs), Hoffer contends that his profession "has fallen into disarray" and aims a polemical blast at his fellow historians for condoning sloppy scholarship and an anything-goes ethical climate.
A specialist in Colonial history and American jurisprudence, Hoffer is a respected scholar whose previous work has generally earned the esteem of his peers. Now, setting himself up as judge, jury, and executioner, Hoffer puts historians in the dock -- and throws the book at them."
American history," he writes, "is two-faced" -- split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.
"The Herd of Independent Minds"
Marvelous metaphor to describe the political conformity pressures at Harvard, by an unashamed conservative professor, Ruth R. Wisse, in this Wall Street Journal article: The Federal Election Commission could not have foreseen that when it required employment information on political donations of over $200, it would expose scandalous uniformity in a university community that advertises its diversity. The Sacramento Bee reported that the University of California system gave more to the Kerry campaign than any other single employee group, and that Harvard was second, with only 15,000 employees to UC's 160,000. Campus bloggers computed the percentages of Kerry contributions over Bush: Cornell 93%, Dartmouth 97%, Yale 93%, Brown 89%.
The appropriateness of her name at first made me wonder if it might be a nom de plume--actually, considering the article, a nom de guerre--but no, that really is her name, and she is a professor of Yiddish Literature. Wisse is the first person present tense form of the German verb "wissen" -- to know.
Personally, I greatly enjoy being in the conservative opposition. My colleagues are cordial, and since I'm not looking for promotions I willingly sustain an occasional snub for the greater advantage of being able to speak my mind. Students making the transition from liberal to conservative are often wounded by their first exposure to the contempt that greets their support for the war in Iraq or opposition to abortion or whatever else separates them from the liberal campus. I suggest to them that, as opposed to living in constant terror of offending some received idea, they relish their freedom of expression. The self-acknowledged conservative never experiences intellectual constraint.
But this enviable autonomy doesn't extend to graduate students or untenured colleagues. Recently, I had two encounters with sobering implications for the academy. A junior professor told me that when she began teaching at Harvard she resigned from several organizations that would have betrayed her conservative leanings. She hadn't wanted to give colleagues an easy excuse for voting her down when she came up for tenure; but now that the prospect of tenure was before her, she didn't know whether she wanted to stay on in such a repressive community. My second conversation was with a rare pro-Israel Muslim whose contract as lecturer hadn't been renewed, very probably because he was critical of the way his subject was being taught. This young man was in a great mood. He was leaving for Washington, where he could make a greater contribution to national security.
Those Missing Explosives
Since the New York Times is making a big stink about claiming U.S. forces failed to properly secured 380 tons of high explosives, and 60 Minutes plans an election eve hit piece on it--it is important to make sure that everyone knows that NBC is reporting that its reporters were there when the first U.S. forces arrived in 2003--and the explosives in question weren't found: An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.
The real question now will be whether 60 Minutes reports the claim as fact or points out that there is contrary evidence.
It remains unclear, however, how extensively the U.S. forces searched the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
Vote Early, Vote Often In Ohio
George Will reports this rather worrisome disparity between voters and people: The unexamined belief that an ever-higher rate of voter registration is a Good Thing has met its limit in the center of the state that this year is the center of the political universe -- Ohio. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2003 estimate is that in Franklin County -- Columbus -- there are approximately 815,000 people 18 or over. But 845,720 are now registered.
Especially since not all of those people 18 and over are U.S. citizens, non-felons, even interested in voting, and other little details.
I'm Not Used To Seeing This Much Care In A News Story
I'm not happy with how journalists usually report poll results. They usually tell you the margin of error, but seldom warn you that the margin of error applies to both candidate's numbers. But here's a nice surprise: Fifty-one percent of likely voters said they would back Bush, and 46 percent expressed support for Kerry.
Important point: The 95% confidence interval means Bush could have as little as 48%--but Kerry could have as much as 49%. Even better, the explainer that they link to explains this more fully:
The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning the true leader was unclear.If the sampling error were plus-or-minus three percentage points, it means there is some chance that Candidate A's support could be as high as 59 percent (56 plus 3) if we had asked all 200 million adult Americans. There is also some chance that the candidate's support could be as low as 53 percent (56 minus 3).
While they haven't made this as clear as they could, what they are telling you is that the confidence interval isn't notched at the two ends; it's a bell curve distribution. A three point margin of error means that the possibility that Bush's 51% is actually 48% is much, much smaller than that it is 50%, or even 49%. Ditto for the possibility that Kerry's 46% is actually 49%. If I understand stats correctly (and I don't claim expertise), there's a 95% probability that Bush's actual support is within three points of 51%, and a 95% probability that Kerry's actual support is within three points of 46%. The chances that Bush's numbers are at the bottom of the range, and Kerry's are at the top, is quite a bit less likely than the probability for either. I don't know whether you multiply the probabilities at the edges of the confidence interval by each other, or add them, but either way, the chances that Kerry is ahead of Bush is certainly far less than the probability that Bush is ahead of Kerry.
But there's a catch.
That simple math does not mean that the chances are equal that Candidate A's support is 53 percent, 54 percent, 55 percent, or 56 percent.
The likelihood is very low that her support is 53 percent, slightly higher that it is 54 percent, higher still that it is 55 percent, and highest of all that she would actually win 56 percent of the vote.
The same is true at the other end of the scale where the candidate might win more than 56 percent. And the same logic holds true for the candidate's competition.
Do not get discouraged. We can still beat Kerry, and by a margin that will make the inevitable lawsuits irrelevant.
Electoral Vote Count
The map over at Real Clear Politics is showing Bush with 234 safe votes and Kerry with 211. New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Mexico are still in play. Bush can win the election if he takes Florida and Ohio, or Florida and New Hampshire plus any one of the other states. Without Florida, Bush needs Ohio and Michigan, and either Minnesota or Wisconsin, or New Hampshire and New Mexico.
To win, Kerry has to take Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, or Florida, Ohio, either Wisconsin or Minnesota, and either New Mexico or New Hampshire, or Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Kerry has a much harder task ahead of him than Bush--but that's why Milwaukee wants 2.5x more ballots than registered voters, I suppose.
It's Ugly; Maybe If We Ignore It, It Will Go Away
From a BBC report on another of those mass graves in Iraq: Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said.
And it would be just awful to see first-hand what Hussein did, wouldn't it? Because then Europeans couldn't stick to this theory:
"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," he said.
Long search
Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part.
The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death. Much of the world, many Britons and rather a lot of Americans believe that the planet's most risky rogue state is the United States under its current President.
Explaining America To The Europeans
The punctuation is a little deficient, there are some spelling and capitalization errors, and a few places require a little more editing. But this is a magnificient explanation of things that Europeans don't understand about America: In my normal life, I work on in a team of engineers that are based all over the globe, in point of fact, I am one of only two Americans in my little group. The result of this situation is I'm often asked to help translate the nature of American life to my co-workers.
While Americans are often accused of being ignorant of the rest of the world, I'm hear to tell you that the rest of the world doesn't know a thing about America or Americans. This is in spite of how we spew our culture over the world like an open and out of control 5 inch firehose. What most of the world actually knows about America and Americans could fit into a small monkeys fist.
In the three years since I joined this team, we've covered items from "pick up trucks", homebuilt aircraft to gun ownership. But the one thing that most of the Euros and the Asia Pacific folks dont get is:
George W. Bush.
...
I recently had someone get "red faced furious" at President Bush and his not signing the Kyoto Treaty. When I explained that President Bush could sign on tommorrow and nothing would change, as the Senate is unlikely to ratify the treaty in any form, no matter how its presented. The Senate had already voted down the treaty 98-0 once before. This person simply didn't believe me, I then asked them why then didn't President Clinton sign on to Kyoto if it were so easy? He of course, didnt have an answer. He has always been told it was Only Bush that was stopping it. When I told him that it was actually American voters who had largely stopped Kyoto, he simply could not understand how it was so, and yet, it clearly was.
...
The Secret Weapon of George W. Bush is that he has successfully made himself into being seen as one of us. We see a man who on September 11th had one thing that FDR did not have, a video camera in his face looking for any sign of human weakness. What that camera captured was a man who reacted calmly and effectively in the face of an unspeakable horror. In that few minutes in Florida, he had no way of knowing that this was just a couple of aircraft or that there werent 100 more on their way to hit every major city. He had no way of knowing if it was being done in concert with Chinese Nuclear submarines just off the coast, ready to launch missles to decapitate his government and this great nation. None of us knew. A certain porcine filmmaker wants to make that moment into a moment of ridicule and derision, but what I see when I see that moment is a man, one of us, faced with a nation suddenly gone from peace to war in the blink of an eye, with an unknown and possibly very powerful enemy, looking back at an audience of children who until a moment before had all thought that all that would happen on that day is they would get to tell their parents they sat with the president at school. Instead, for the rest of their lives they will tell their families for generations to come that they were in the very room where the President was told that "We are at War".
...
They used to get after me about how Americans dont speak more than one language, until the discovered that I speak French, German and Spanish. Then they changedthe subject and say that as a rule, Americans don't speak but one language. I then ask them how far do they have travel to find people who speak a different language. Most said less than 200 miles.
I told them we could go from the arctic circle to miami and speak nothing but English as our primary language. The fact that many Americans have to travel over 1500 miles just to find someone who doesnt speak english, it was no longer a question of American ignorance that had to be understood, but question of scale and distance that had to be understood by the Europeans.
I tell them all the time that none of them understands anything about America until they rent a car in New York and then drive to LA by way of New Orleans or Chicago. They of course ask "why we dont have trains and mass transit", I tell them we do where population density is equivalent to the way it is in Europe, but out West of the mississippi, it just doesnt make sense, (thats why we invented the airplane)! When we have a single county in California that is bigger than Holland in terms of square miles, population, GDP, it helps put things in perspective for them. When I tell them that the NY Police Department has 40,000 police officers, 250 helicopters and 50 aircraft and 125 large boats which is almost bigger than the largest army in Europe or nearly all the rest, combined! they begin to understand the scale of what we have here in the US.
Polling Numbers
There are lots of surveys coming in, nationally, and state by state. They don't all come to the same results, and this not a surprise. When you sample a population, how accurately those results scale up to the population is determined by the sample size, and how accurately you weight the raw data. (Example: if you know that your population is 49% male and 51% female, and your sample group is 57% male and 43% female, you have to adjust the raw data to correspond to the breakdown of the population.) The margin of error is a statistical measure of how accurately the sample size will match the behavior of the population. Typically, poll results are reported with a margin of error at the 95% confidence interval--which is typically about 3-4% for samples of 800-1000 people.
As you increase the sample size, the margin of error gets smaller. It doesn't get dramatically smaller, which is part of why you seldom see polls taken of 10,000 people. (I don't remember the math off the top of my head, but I think you get one of those asymptotic curves, so that you need an absurd sample size to get margin of error down in the 1% range.)
It does strike me, however, that if you combined these sample sizes together, you could reduce the margin of error slightly, and get a little more confidence in the results. Obviously, this would the different polls to be taken at about the same time. Is there some reason that we don't see metapolling, where statisticians combine several different polls to get a smaller margin of error?
Interesting Comment From Britain About Bush
This is from an otherwise negative article about Bush in the Guardian: When George W Bush's poll ratings recently dipped, every Labour MP cheered. Correction: every Labour MP except one. The Prime Minister fretted to one close friend: 'Whenever Bush weakens in the polls, they start mucking about.'
I hear that lots of Europeans think Bush is dangerous, and the article goes on to talk about how:
Who are these 'they' whose 'mucking about' makes Tony Blair so anxious? They are Iran with its sponsorship of terrorism and its ambitions to go nuclear. They are Syria. They are the psychotic regime in North Korea along with the rest of the planet's rogue and risk states.
The mind of Mr Blair was summarised for me in vivid terms by someone who has an extremely good claim to know what is going on inside it: 'Tony thinks the world is a very dangerous and precarious place. Bush is the tough guy who keeps the bad guys under their rocks.' Much of the world, many Britons and rather a lot of Americans believe that the planet's most risky rogue state is the United States under its current President.
But I suspect that Blair has a pretty good idea who the real dangers are on this planet--and rather likes having the U.S. run by someone who knows where the risk is.
Thanks to Professor Bainbridge for the link.
Does Kerry Have A Reality Grasp Problem?
For someone who has accused Bush of lying (because the pre-war intelligence reports--of many nations--were wrong), Kerry sure seems to have some disturbing problems with telling the truth: U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
This isn't a trivial matter, like whether he ran in the Boston Marathon, or whether he really is a hunter, or whether he spent Christmas in Cambodia. He made a claim--several times--about meeting with the U.N. Security Council concerning the Iraq invasion--and now his claim is being specifically denied by members of the Security Council. This is such an easy matter to verify that to tell lies about it is insane. It makes me wonder if Kerry is mentally stable enough for the job.
An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.
At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.
"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable," Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.
Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."
But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries' U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.
The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.
Riots
I have had this sneaking fear about this, because of the level of violence that Democrats have been using around the country, and the level of rage that the billionaires have been stirring up among the rent-a-mob crowd, but I wasn't going to say it, because it would make me sound paranoid. Now Senator Edwards' wife goes ahead and articulates it: Supporter: Kerry's going to take PA.
And here's the audio clip of it.
Liz Edwards: I know that.
Supporter: I'm just worried there's going to be riots afterwards.
Liz Edwards: Uh.....well...not if we win.
A Gutsy Endorsement?
Newspapers do not generally endorse candidates that are too far away from their customer base--so it somewhat surprised me to see the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison endorse George Bush. Madison is a university town--sometimes known as the Berkeley of the Midwest--and this editorial, while critical of Bush, is far more critical of Kerry. They recognize that winning the war against terrorism is the most important issue: It comes down to this: President Bush tells people what he will do. Sen. John Kerry tells people what they want to hear. Bush is confident in action even when mistaken. Kerry is comfortable in passivity even at high cost.
Yet they seem to be liberals:
So neither candidate is perfect, but one is a better choice. Overall, Bush has been an effective leader in a time of unprecedented threat.
From the presidential debates and the political platforms, it has become clear that Bush better understands the president's duties to America. Bush foes misread his resolve as arrogance and mistake his commitment for stubbornness. But his unwillingness to ease back in the struggle against terror is a strength: Not only will he hunt down terrorists, he is willing to confront the countries that shelter terrorists or lend financial support or other comforts to them.Yet voters are right to be unsatisfied with Bush's performance in specific instances, and they should expect a chastened and better- grounded Bush administration to perform more effectively in a second term. Among other challenges, Bush must appoint Supreme Court judges that will uphold the Constitution, not pass a right-wing litmus test. Bush also must re- establish credentials as a fiscal conservative. His Medicare prescription drug coverage will cost a fortune, as will continued and expensive farm subsidies.
It sounds like they are liberals who recognize that winning the war on terror is the most important issue.Bush has presided steadfastly over extraordinarily consequential times. He rose to the unprecedented challenge posed by the attacks on America of Sept. 11, 2001. He has effectively overseen a transformation of government from deliverer of largesse to provider of security. He promotes a positive, and yes, idealistic view of the power of democracy. Should we expect anything less from the leader of the free world?
No president performs flawlessly. Yet in the end, strong reservations about Kerry's overall suitability for the presidency outweigh our sharp disappointment with Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq.
Why People Go From Pro-Choice to Pro-Life
Interesting posting here. Not to worry, no gross pictures (except for what looks like spaghetti sauce on someone's face). What this guy writes is not all that unique; I've worked with people who similarly made the pro-choice to pro-life transition as a result of having a child of their own.
Growing Up in a Lesbian Home
Over at Dawn Patrol there is this fascinating discussion of a recent propaganda piece in the New York Times about the virtues of growing up in a lesbian home: Ry is simply a name that her mothers liked the sound of when they named her, an act of creativity as novel and yet, to their minds, as natural as the conception of Ry herself, a feat that involved the sperm of a gay man, the egg of a lesbian in love and one very clean glass syringe.
Here's the disturbing aspect to this:
...
As for her own sexuality, she's straight, which she said she knows with increasing certainty with each passing year. ''Yeah, you know, I made out with a girl in high school,'' she said. ''I get an A for effort.'' ...Spadola read Ry's quotation out loud: ''It took me a lot of struggle to realize that I really was attracted to men, yet now it is really hard for me to deal with men as human beings, let alone sexually.'' There was more along those lines -- Ry was intrigued but ''repulsed'' by heterosexual relations, afraid of the ''sexist soul-losing domain of oppression.'' Her parting thought: ''I cannot understand or relate to men because I am so immersed in gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a healthy straight relationship.'' ...
But the good news is that Ry's parents were supportive of her being a heterosexual--in a way that most heterosexual parents would know was not wise:
Since she was 16, Ry says, she has had a string of sensitive boyfriends, each one of them more open and artistic than the next. There was Turner, who came and lived with Ry and her mothers just after Ry graduated from high school. Then there was the composer who accompanied her to Dublin for her semester abroad. More recently, she'd fallen for Tony, a music engineer who was so mature and understanding when Ry tried to break up with him that she realized how much she loved him after all, and was awaiting his arrival in New York that week.
Ry suddenly sat up straight. ''I think it's cool how critical I am of the heterosexual world,'' she said. ''It is sexist and gross.'' Ry's mothers may not have been heterosexual role models for her, but they've always encouraged her in her relationships with men, provided they approved of her choice. When she was 16, she fell in love with her first boyfriend but was unsure of where to take things. Several months into the relationship, there were a couple of weeks, her mothers recall, when she mooned around the house, talking around and about the relationship, seeming stressed out, uncertain, in need of counsel. ''Finally, my mom said, 'You should just go have sex with him,''' Ry recalled.
Well, Here's a Surprise
Someone at Planned Parenthood actually did the right thing! They called the police!The story is about a statutory-rape case that came to light when a 13-year-old San Mateo County girl tested positive for chlamydia at a local clinic. The clinic did the right thing by reporting it to the county sheriff's department, and the girl admitted to the authorities that she'd had sex with a stranger.
Ah, but they couldn't keep going!When the sheriff's investigators then learned that the girl had an abortion scheduled, they took the rare step of using a search warrant to seize the fetus, so they could use DNA testing to verify the identity of the father—who is believed to be an adult.
Although the abortion was not done at a Planned Parenthood clinic, Margaret Sanger's organization has to have its say in this, as it does any time the government attempts to assert authority when an abortion clinic is tangled in a case of statutory rape. (As has been noted here before, the organization's own writings deny that statutory rape deserves to be called a crime.) After the the head of the county's sexual-assault unit explained the reason for the warrant—to insure that the clinic would "release the remains" (which is the proper way to describe an aborted child)—Planned Parenthood attorney Beth Parker counters that there should be no reason why authorities would have problems with a clinic:
"It makes no sense," Parker said. "If a clinic gets consent from the patient, they'd release the records."
Parker says these types of cases seem to becoming more prevalent. Most involved a patient who objects or didn't even know police had taken the fetus, which Parker contends is part of the woman's medical records.
Repeat after me, everyone: It's not "remains." It's "records."
The Guardian Retracts The Call For Assassination
They ran a column asking why we didn't have Oswald or Hinckley today--now they are apologizing, and have removed the column: The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer.
Oh yes, humorous, no question.
"Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action - an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."
How Many States Can You Vote In?
Apparently, more than one: Tens of thousands of Florida voters are also registered to vote in a second state, and more than 1,600 may have cast ballots in Florida and one of two other states in recent elections, taking advantage of an absence of safeguards to prevent illegal double voting.
Now, I would expect that this would primarily benefit Democrats, because they are the most likely to have multiple homes: a place in Sun Valley; one in Boston; one on Hilton Head.
An Orlando Sentinel examination of voting records from Florida, Georgia and North Carolina found more than 68,000 cases in which voters with the same names and dates of birth were registered in two states. In 1,650 cases, records indicate those voters cast ballots in Florida and another state in the 2000 or 2002 elections.
The study focused on Georgia and North Carolina because, among states with voting databases that are public record, they have the largest populations of Florida-registered voters.
The potential number of double voters in Florida could be in the thousands, enough to have affected Florida's 2000 election, which George W. Bush won by 537 votes.
It is a felony for voters to cast ballots in two states in the same election. But those who double vote face little chance of being caught, because election officials seldom check whether voters are registered or voting in another state.
Bush Ahead of Kerry In Hawaii
I saw this yesterday, and assumed that my eyes were playing tricks on me. Okay, it's only a 1 point lead on Kerry, well within the confidence interval, but it is still quite astonishing for Bush to even be competitive with Kerry in a Democratic stronghold.
I'm A Single Issue Voter This Election...
and it's not the issue you might think. Yes, I am no fan of gun control. I am no fan of same-sex marriage. I am no fan of higher income tax rates. But all of those are less important than the one issue that really matters: the War on Terrorism.
Mark Steyn's column points out that, sure there are parts of the Iraq War that have not gone well. Some parts have been utterly disastrous (such as Abu Ghraib). There are decisions that probably made since when Bush and his team made them, but turned out to be poor. But what's the surprise? Iraq's messy. So? What isn't? America has no Colonial Office, no political administrators with decades of experience in far-flung climes; its occupation of Iraq was learnt on the fly, because there was no other way. But the ludicrous defeatism over what's at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War.
And this is an important point. The last time we occupied nations by force and tried to rebuild them as liberal democracies, they were Germany and Japan. We have a few old men enjoying their Social Security checks who were doing the nuts and bolts work, but all the people with experience administering foreign nations have been dead a long time.
Even then, we had the advantage that both Germany and Japan had been suffering from many years of warfare. The population was exhausted, and tired of seeing constant death and destruction. The most fanatical defenders of both nations has died fighing Allied forces: the Hitler Youth recruited into the home guard and Werewolf guerilla movement, or the kamikazes.
Iraq, for all the problems that having Hussein and his evil torturing raping sons created, was simply not a nation destroyed by aerial bombardment. There weren't many last-ditch defenders of the Baathist government of Iraq willing to die for the cause; had there been, I could have pitied them as misled fanatics. It seems that the Baathist Party is more like the Mafia than kamikazes. The Baathists seem quite willing to see others die for their cause, but not themselves.
Here's the hard and painful truth: we are engaged in a war to preserve a relatively free society. It wasn't perfect on 9/11, but it wasn't way off the mark. If we spend the next fifty years fighting a limited war against Islamofascist terrorists, we are going to lose so many freedoms that you will look forward to the PATRIOT Act. Each time al-Qaeda figures out a new way to misuse some common item, we will have to impose a new set of controls on it.
Imagine what is going to be like when you can't just buy pool chemicals, but have to have a certified pool specialist (bonded, with a Homeland Security Department background check) come out to adjust your pool chemistry. If you don't see the connection--let's just say that you can buy all the materials to make poison gas at Wal-Mart right now. Al-Qaeda doubtless knows that--and after the first poison cloud drifts through a residential section of town, killing dozens and sickening hundreds, that will be a new area of regulation.
Most people don't realize that many of the common industrial pesticides are disturbingly similar to nerve agents. These pesticides are used in vast quantities to make American agriculture among the most productive in the world. I don't know how we can continue to distribute and use these chemicals in large quantities without terrorists getting hold of them, and using them. That it hasn't happened is almost certainly because Homeland Security has been working their tails off watching potential terrorists. The first successful use of some of these agents, either added to food in a factory, or added into a water system downstream of the chlorination plant, and we will have to remove these from the normal agricultural channels. Hey, organic farming is really neat, but I don't think you have any idea how expensive food is going to get.
Those of us who studied chemistry in college get very, very discouraged, because we know how much our industrial society is based on the proper use of some nasty and dangerous chemicals. You won't want to live in a society where people with even a modicum of knowledge are regularly misusing these dangerous materials--and a society with sufficient controls to prevent this misuse isn't going to be a very nice place to live, either.
I shudder to think what may happen to the right to own a gun (at least under a Kerry Administration) if one terrorist a week decided to buy a shotgun or a handgun and start murdering people at malls in the states with very restrictive concealed weapon permit laws. I wish that good sense would prevail, and California, New York, and the other restrictive places would allow law-abiding adults to carry concealed--but more likely, the whole country would end up with something like New York City gun control laws.
You name a commonly available chemical or tool, and there's probably a way for a terrorist to misuse it--and they will, until we have so tied ourselves up in knots that we are half as free, and half as prosperous as we are now. Waiting for the terrorists to come to us just isn't going to work. We must take the war to them--and it is a war.
Why Civil Libertarians Should Vote For Bush
I'm serious. Here's the problem: we are at war with a very dangerous ideology, Islamofascism. There is no negotiating an end to this war, except by the West becoming Islamic nations on the Taliban model. Now, I know that most Muslims are not insisting on this, but the evidence in Iraq shows that the lunatics will not be content with a democracy on even slightly liberal lines. It has to be Talibanesque, or Baathist, or not at all. They will continue killing people (combatants and civilians, Muslims and non-Muslims), until they achieve their ends.
What is the solution? There are several possible ways to deal with this. One solution, the Bush solution, is unconditional victory. I do not expect us to ever destroy terrorism, or even Islamofascist terrorism. As long as there are angry young men looking for someone to blame for their problems, and there are cynical older men prepared to use their idealism to advance a cause, there will be terrorism.
The best that we can hope for is the eventual replacement of the impoverished thug governments of the Middle East with an Islamic form of liberal democracy. By this, I mean that while the laws will certainly reflect Islamic traditions and beliefs (e.g., prohibiting homosexuality, alcohol, pork, giving some formal primacy to Islam as a state religion), they will otherwise tolerate other religions, allow expression of a diversity of political and religious opinions, and use representative government as the method of making decisions. This is not going to happen quickly, but I do not find it implausible that in 10-20 years, the major sources of Islamofascist terror will have dried up.
The other approach I would call the Kerry approach, but since I can't figure out what Kerry really stands for, I will call it the "criminal investigation and interdiction" approach. Instead of trying to make fundamental changes in the core problems of the Middle East (as Bush is doing), this approach regards terrorism as a criminal investigation problem. This approach requires us to stay one step ahead of the terrorists, arrest and punish them when we can identify them, and try to prevent them from committing terrorist acts beforehand.
Here's the problem: how do you prevent those terrorist attacks beforehand? Right now, civil libertarians are outraged by the PATRIOT Act--largely for statutes that predate it, sometimes by decades. If we were not fighting terrorists in Iraq right now, where would they be? Do you expect them all to go home? Of course not. Remember: they attacked us--and when we didn't seriously fight back after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and in Somalia, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa, they attacked us in New York City, on 9/11. Even if we had not invaded Iraq, we would we be fighting them somewhere--and likely as not, in the United States.
So, how are we going to stop them from attacking us in the U.S.? Does any civil libertarian seriously think that we can repeal the PATRIOT Act, and go back to the laws of September 10, 2001? Even making the best of assumptions, our government, to fight such attacks in America, is going to ask for, and need, pretty extraordinary powers. Right now, most Americans have gotten comfortable, and don't see the need for the national security state. Another 9/11 bombing--or dozens of little terrorist attacks across America, much like Israel has suffered over the last two decades--would lead to laws requiring the carrying of IDs, showing them on demand, vehicle stops and searches for bombs, and many other terribly intrusive measures.
Now, the ACLU will doubtless fight such measures. But how many American schools will have to suffer a Beslan-like attack before popular rage leads to Constitutional amendments that gut the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in the name of security? (Or worse, Americans start engaging in the sort of anti-Muslim violence that many of us feared after 9/11?)
The PATRIOT Act was a short-term measure. While there are some real dangers to enhanced governmental power, as long as they are short-term, to deal with a specific threat, we won't forget what life was like before we gave up some of our liberties. What happens if the need to maintain the national security state continues for many decades, because Islamofascists keep committing terrorist acts? Eventually, Americans will get used to living in a mild form of police state. It is better, I argue, to win the war as quickly as we can--so that we don't become used to living in a society where fear causes the population to give too much power to the police.
Winning the war against terrorism isn't going to happen by pursuing a balanced approach that sees terrorism as a "nuisance" like prostitution or gambling. Winning the war against terrorism is going to happen because we decide that we have no choice but unconditional victory. Try as hard as we might, we are not going to get 100% victory. But 100% victory has to be the goal; trying for 50% victory means that we will never even get close.
Voter Intimidation in Florida
At the places where you can vote early, there are thugs trying to intimidate voters. Unsurprisingly, Democrats are doing the intimidating: One woman who voted early in Boca Raton, at the Southwest County Regional Library, complained that as she stood in line, two men behind her were "trashing our president," Fletcher said, declining to identify the woman. She tried to ignore them. Then the man touched her arm and said, "Who are you voting for?"
"I said, `I don't think that's an appropriate question,'" the woman said she responded.
"Uh oh! We have a Bush supporter here," screamed the man behind her.
For the 2 1/2 hours she had to wait in line, she was heckled by the man. As they neared the voting room, someone in the rear of the line yelled, "I sure hope everyone here is voting for Kerry!" she reported.
That's when the man behind her held his hand over her head and screamed, "We have a Republican right here!" There were "boos and jeers" from the crowd.
"I felt intimidated, harassed and threatened!" the woman wrote in her complaint to the Republican Party.
Elaine Fandino complained to the Republican Party that she took her mother to vote on South Military Trail in Palm Beach County and was confronted by 25 people supporting John Kerry for president. The crowd was "very angry and used foul language," she reported. She said the man next to her said, "Where's my shotgun?"
One Of Those Reminders That Geniuses Don't Get Elected President
I've read that people don't generally elect politicians who are more than about 20-30 IQ points above them. This may explain why the Founding Fathers of the United States included some of the pre-eminent scientists and intellectuals of the time: Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rittenhouse, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush. The voting franchise was a bit more narrow than it is today, with only about 50-70% of men allowed to vote, usually based on owning property or having a certain level of income. As the franchise broadened in the 1820s and 1830s to include all white men (but removing free black men from the voting rolls in a number of states), the average intelligence of the electorate probably dropped, which may explain the replacement of intellectual leaders with relative pygmies.
The New York Times runs this amazing article (amazing because the Times is carrying it): To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W. Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry.
Everyone occasionally says something that isn't clear, especially if they have been running around the country giving speeches for weeks on end--but I will say that Kerry's statements are sometimes even less clear than Bush's speeches. Bush uses the wrong word; Kerry uses an incomprehensible sentence structure.
That, at least, is the conclusion of Steve Sailer, a conservative columnist at the Web magazine Vdare.com and a veteran student of presidential I.Q.'s. During the last presidential campaign Mr. Sailer estimated from Mr. Bush's SAT score (1206) that his I.Q. was in the mid-120's, about 10 points lower than Al Gore's.
Mr. Kerry's SAT score is not known, but now Mr. Sailer has done a comparison of the intelligence tests in the candidates' military records. They are not formal I.Q. tests, but Mr. Sailer says they are similar enough to make reasonable extrapolations.
Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.
Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.
There's a great story to the effect that when Adlai Stevenson, Ph.D., was running for President against Eisenhower, his intellectualism was a real barrier to getting elected. A supporter approached him at a rally and said, "Mr. Stevenson, all the smart people are going to vote for you." His response, "Madam, I need a majority." The fact of the matter is that in the democratic ideal world, the intelligence of voters would be a perfect bell curve, with equal numbers of voters below and above average intelligence. In practice, I'm sure that those of severely subnormal intelligence don't vote, nor would I want them to do so.
When Mensa was founded after World War II, one of the delusions was that bringing together really smart people would make it easier to solve social and political problems. This didn't actually work, because there turned out to be far less agreement among Mensa members that the founders had assumed. My experience attending Mensa meetings over the years leads me to believe that intelligence is not as useful an addition to the problem of intelligent political beliefs as you might expect. I don't mean that many Mensans are liberals; I mean that many Mensans seem to be almost as ignorant of the underlying facts behind public policy questions as people that I meet elsewhere.
Still, it is a little disappointing that while Bush is apparently the smarter of the two candidates, neither of them is exactly genius material. Would it be so horrible for Americans to pick between two really brilliant candidates? I know that voters don't like to vote for candidates that are dramatically more intelligent than themselves--which is why Bush's speaking skills rose dramatically on 9/11, when he needed to stop pretending to be "just folks"--but perhaps we could find some way to hide the awful truth of intelligence from most voters at election time.
