« August 2003 | Main | October 2003 »
I don't get it. Conservatives really like eating their shoes. So this Kathryn Jean Lopez will be eating her shoes on August 29, 2004.
Is this Hillary talk anything more than some odd sort of conservative wish fullilment? Do they really believe if they say she's running enough times that she will?
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Daniel Drezner writes:
Just got back from seeing Bend It Like Beckham -- destined to become this year's My Big Fat Greek Wedding, with all the positives and negatives that title confers.
[First off, where has he been? It's "destined to become"? It's hardly a new movie. Cripes, I saw Bend it Like Beckham in Philadelphia last November.]
I wish he would have expanded on his analysis. I mean, *how* is it like My Big Fat Greek Wedding? He's not the first to make this comparison, but, other than they're both about immigrant families and they both have happy endings, how are the two movies similar? Did Drezner find the Anglo-Indian family in Bend It comic like the Greek-American family was portrayed as being? Did he think the similarities portrayed concerning second-generation assimilation in the Chicago and London rang true?
In a promo for the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday morning on New York City's National Public Radio affiliate WNYC, Mr. Lehrer tells us that the topic of the day is "NASCAR Dads" (a term that is fast replacing "Soccer Moms" as the political demographic cliche of choice) and asks anyone who considers themself a NASCAR Dad to call in to his show later that morning.
Of course, there is an inherent contradiction in his request, for a sure sign that you are *not* a NASCAR Dad is if you listen to NPR call-in shows!!
Kos alerts us to this pre-war statement by Richard Pearle:
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions [...]The chronic failure of the security council to enforce its own resolutions is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task. We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the UN.
But, of course, the REAL reason we're going to the U.N. now? Not poor planning. Not poor management. Not poor ideas. No one is admitting to major mistakes because no such mistakes have been made. We're going to the U.N. because of the American Left. Stanley Kurtz writes:
The president’s decision to turn to the United Nations for assistance in the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq makes a great deal of sense. It certainly isn’t the ideal approach, but given the divisions within our country, and our general unwillingness to enlarge our military, the president’s decision is reasonable.... Our culture war is real. Now it has taken its toll. In many ways we are strong. Yet disunited we are weak. Our turning to the U.N. is not necessarily a disaster. But it is a sign that our internal divisions have finally exacted a cost.
In this era of "personal responsibility," you can't lose if you blame other people.
When was the last time you heard the phrase "coalition of the willing"?
And, do you know what alert status we're in now? Is it red, orange, yellow, or mauve?
I wonder why these have gone by the way-side?
(Actually, I'm not wondering...)
Amitava Mazumdar writes that one aspect of the Iraq/Vietnam analogy may be valid:
It's pretty clear to me what these men are doing. The prospect that the Iraq project will come off successfully looks increasingly dim. So dim, that the nation's most visible war proponents have begun distancing themselves from the Bush administration's Iraq policy.But they aren't admitting that the whole idea of the unilateral occupation and rebuilding of Iraq was an awful idea. They're arguing that if only the Bush administration spent enough money and sent enough troops, things would turn out as sunny as Kristol, Kagan, Pearl, and Sullivan had always predicted.
This is, of course, what the Vietnam War hawks said after we belatedly abandoned that costly effort. The lesson we should have taken from that war was that no matter how many troops we sent, or how many more billions of dollars we spent, we could not win the Vietnam War because the Vietnamese did not want us to win it, or at least did not care who won it. The history of Western occupation throughout Asia, should have taught us the same lesson.
But Kristol, Kagan, Pearl, and Sullivan never learned that lesson. They were seduced by the myth of the inevitable success of all things American. If they were honest and honorable, they would admit their error: that the number of troops and amount of money necessary to rebuild Iraq was predictably unaffordable, and that's only after adopting the dubious assumption that the occupation ever had any chance of success at all. Instead, they are retreating to a defense that conveniently cannot be disproved: if Bush did everything their way, everything would have gone well.
As they say, read the whole thing.
In a quite disingenuous post, Glenn Reynolds provides a quote and then comments:
VIK RUBENFELD ASKS:"Isn’t it just about time that the left was asked what its plans are for combating terrorism?
The left doesn’t want us in Iraq, where we are bringing the fight right to the terrorists’ own backyard? Okay - what’s their plan?"Yes. Given that what we're up against is, essentially, "the Klan with a Koran," you'd think they'd have some ideas. I don't recall anyone suggesting that the FBI shouldn't have been in Birmingham just because there was a bombing there. . . .
Putting aside the fact that there were many people (not from the "left") who did not want the FBI in Birmingham after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed (see: states rights, outside agitators)...
First, YOU'RE in charge. Don't pass the buck. Don't start trying to deflect blame on "the left." Just because your plan isn't going that well, it's not time to start criticizing others for their plans (or supposed lack of plans). It sounds like a little brother whose been bad and tries to distract everybody by complaining that his sister has hit him. Suck it up and deal with what you've made. It's not too late for a successful outcome.
Second, who amongst the major Democratic presidential candidates was not for all-out war against the Taliban? Who wasn't for all-out war against the terrorists? Who didn't want to end the evil-doers? Now, that was a plan, and it was a good one.
The fear is, however, that, in Iraq, we've taken the war to the "terrorists' own backyard" but we haven't taken it to the terrorists. With no WMDs and no connections to al-Queda, are these fears not grounded?
Third, the Birmingham analogy is, to put it mildly, troublesome. Mr. Reynolds, are you implying that if one believes this war is not being fought as promised, that he is of the same moral quality of those who believed that the deaths of the four girls inside the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was no big deal? And that we believe that the bombers and those who supported the bombers shouldn't have been hunted down with all the retribution the United States had to bear?
Is it just me or are the "comments" part of this page not working? If they are working, sorry, I haven't been able to read them for about a week so I haven't been able to respond to anything said there. And, if they're not working, well, I don't know how you'll be able to leave a comment to tell me so.
In an Associated Press story today, we read:
"It's like your building is half built, and the contractor comes in and says that to finish the building and put the roof on, it's going to cost a lot more," said Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., a stalwart Bush supporter. "What's your choice? You've got to put the roof on."
That's a heck of an analogy. For, it's true... you need a roof, so you have to pay your contractor. You've got no choice. However, what are the odds that you'll hire this contractor again? Somewhere between slim and none, and probably you'll tell your friends and neighbors not to hire him, either.
To follow "stalwart Bush supporter," Representative Scott McInnis' analogy to conclusion, it doesn't bode well for the Bush team in 2004.
To answer Partha's question -- though the answer can be found elsewhere now -- it's not just Partha's computer. YACC, who provides our commenting service, is down, and will be down through the weekend. I would do something about substituting another service for YACC, but we're planning some big changes behind the scenes which will be unveiled shortly and make it unnecessary, so I see no great urgency to act right now. So if you want to complain about something Partha wrote (and who doesn't?) you'll have to respond to us via email.
Tyler Cowen happens to mention this odd description of the co-editor of the Almanac of American Politics:
"Michael Barone is to politics what statistician-writer Bill James is to baseball, a mix of historian, social observer, and numbers cruncher who illuminates his subject with perspective and a touch of irreverence."--Chicago TribuneI remember, growing up, hearing Bill James compared to others all the time. Galileo and Einstein were popular choices, but my favorite was one, coincidentally from the same Chicago Tribune, labeling him "the Mozart of baseball statisticians."
James was always something of a cult figure among a small group of geekydedicated baseball fans, so it feels weird enough to see that James has so hit the mainstream that people are now being compared to him. But what makes this comparison particularly strange is that Barone has been editing the AAP since 1971; the first Bill James Baseball Abstract didn't come out until 1977, and it wasn't really anything more than a pamphlet until the early 1980s. And (though I can't seem to find the figures) Barone has to have sold many more copies than James has over the years. Plus, Barone is regularly on television; James isn't. And yet it's Barone being compared to James, rather than the other way around? It seems as anachronistic as describing CNN as "the Instapundit of television news" would be. Bizarre.
In the past, I've wondered why we only see virtual filibusters nowadays, rather than the real thing. Well, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett quotes Larry Solum's explanation approvingly as to why a real filibuster (which Solum calls a 24/7 filibuster) won't work:
The contemporary filibuster is a polite affair. Charles Schumer does not talk through the night, bleary eyed and exhausted. Why not? Couldn't the filibuster be broken if the Republicans forced the Democrats to go 24/7? No. Because the 24/7 option actually gives an advantage to the minority. Why? In order to force a 24/7 filibuster, the majority must maintain a quorum at all times, but the minority need only have one Senator present to maintain the filibuster. So 24/7 both exhausts and distracts the majority, while allowing the minority the opportunity to rest and carry on their ordinary business. No modern filibuster has been broken by the 24/7 option. For more on this, see my post entitled Update on Filibusters.Interesting, but I'm not entirely convinced. Of course Larry's right, if the goal of forcing a real filibuster is simply literally to wear your opponents down; the filibusterers can always outlast the filibusterees, for the reasons stated.
But the point of requiring the Democrats to filibuster for real was never to wear them down until they gave in; the point was to create bad publicity for them. Republicans hoped that Democratic filibusters could be exploited in the press to make the Democrats look obstructionist, and get the voters angry with them -- but that plan never got off the ground. Why? Because the non-filibuster didn't have any legs in it. There was no reason for the media to cover the story, because it just wasn't very exciting. In particular, there was no video footage.
On the other hand, a real filibuster is sexy. (I don't mean that literally, unless Mary Carey moves on to the Senate after her bid for California governor succeeds.) It's news. It's not quite as exciting as a high speed car chase, but at least there's something to show to the public. Republicans would have something to point to while saying, "See? Look how ridiculous Democrats are being." It might have backfired; it might have made Republicans look like bullies. But at least it would have put pressure on one side or the other to resolve the situation. This way, Miguel Estrada was just strung along indefinitely, until he finally gave up. Which means that there's no reason to think this won't continue to happen unless and until one side picks up sixty seats in the Senate, which doesn't look too likely too soon.
If you can't trust a murderous dictator, who can you trust? What's this world coming to?
Gary Coleman is upset that people don't respect him.
So why is the aging action star taken more seriously than the erstwhile child actor?Well, that might be it."It's the height," Mr. Coleman says with a twinge of bitterness. "He's an adult-size superstar male."
Or it might be that the littler Arnold has the IQ of, well, a sitcom actor:
He has appeared on CNN, Fox News and foreign programs. Sean Hannity, the conservative, asked Mr. Coleman to name the vice president of the United States. He could not.Nah, it's probably the height.
Breaking new ground, John Zuccarini became the first person in the country to be charged with violating the recently-passed Truth in Domain Names law.
Prosecutors said that as part of the scheme, the defendant, John Zuccarini, had registered 3,000 domain names that included misspellings or slight variations of popular names like Disneyland, Bob the Builder and Teen magazine. Mr. Zuccarini used more than a dozen variations of the name Britney Spears, the prosecutors said.Perhaps I'm slow, or really naive, but what exactly is the point of this? The article quotes prosecutors as assuming this is a moneymaking scheme of some sort, and Zuccarini's past activities make that seem plausible:A child who accidentally mistyped a name into an Internet browser would be directed to a Web page controlled by Mr. Zuccarini and barraged with X-rated advertising, the authorities said. The child would also be "mousetrapped," they said; that is, unable to exit from the Web site.
...
"Children make mistakes," Mr. Comey said. "The idea that someone would take advantage of that, of a young girl, for example, trying to go to the American Girl Web site to look at dolls or a child trying to visit the Teletubbies Web site, and mistypes, to take advantage of those mistakes to direct those children to pornography sites is beyond offensive."
...
In the misspelled domain names, Mr. Zuccarini used spellings like "Dinseyland," "Bobthebiulder," "Teltubbies" and "Britnyspears," prosecutors said.
Mr. Zuccarini has long been the subject of complaints, including lawsuits, over his use of domain names, records and news reports show. In about 100 complaints raised in arbitration proceedings to resolve domain name disputes, panels have ruled against him almost every time, prosecutors said, and ordered him to transfer the names at issue to the legitimate holder.And yet, I don't quite get it. How do those schemes translate into this one? Is there a large untapped market for pornography among dyslexic eight year olds? I would understand the plan if he took advantage of sites intended for adults, like Amazon, CNN, or ESPN. But Teletubbies or Bob the Builder (whatever the heck that is)? Where exactly does the profit come from? Not that this guy sounds like a rocket scientist, but I would think he would have thought through at least this part of his plan.In 2002, the Federal Trade Commission got a permanent injunction against Mr. Zuccarini, ordering him to end his activities, dismantle certain Web sites and pay a $1.9 million judgment. But he continued to use misleading domain names to promote advertising for pornography to minors, according to a criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
It added that Mr. Zuccarini got a referral fee of 10 to 25 cents each time a visitor to one of his Web sites moved to the site of one of the advertisers. He earned $800,000 to $1 million a year through the scheme, the complaint said.
The New York Times reports on the latest unemployment data in its usual unbiased way.
The Labor Department announced yesterday that 93,000 jobs were lost in August, countering expectations that employment would finally begin to expand. The economic recovery in the United States is now in its 22nd month, without reversing constant job losses.First, note how the Times sets up the story: to begin with, it describes what "economists" say, as if there's some well-established, undisputed Economic Truth here. Only then does it describe the Bush administration position, introducing it with a "however" to make it clear that the Bush administration is in opposition to "economists" generally, and hence wrong.The unemployment rate declined to 6.1 percent from 6.2 percent in July, but economists said that was apparently because of a surge in the number of people who, having lost jobs, listed themselves as self-employed rather than unemployed. The Bush administration, however, cited the drop as a positive sign.
Second, note the phrasing: they "listed themselves as self-employed." The Times is apparently accusing these people of lying. No evidence is presented to support this accusation, of course. Why shouldn't we believe that people who list themselves as self-employed really are?
By the way, the few people who bother to read to the end of a story like this will find, in paragraph twenty-four, the one economist the Times quotes in support of this theory of dishonest unemployed losers:
"Whenever you see a spike in self-employment in this kind of economy, you know that is involuntary entrepreneurship," said Jared Bernstein, a senior labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.Ah. Count the problems with that:
Hey, everybody, Jumping To Conclusions is moving here, very shortly. A few minor bugs to work out, and we'll be here. So don't touch that dial. Wait right here.
Update: thanks to the efforts of an intrepid young Nieporent, we're up and running now. So keep watching this space.
A sentence from John Derbyshire today: "The most left-wing U.S. administration in living memory, securely in power for 8 years, with all the revenues of the post-Cold War 'peace dividend' and the internet boom to spend, couldn't give us universal health care."
The most left-wing U.S. administration in living memory? Huh? Derbyshire doesn't remember the Johnson Administration? The Great Society? The War on Poverty?
Securely in power for 8 years? Huh? He doesn't remember, uh, impeachment?
All the revenues of the post-Cold War? Huh? President Clinton, like, ended the deficit. Started paying down the debt.
Couldn't give us universal health care? Huh? He tried. Tried real hard. It was defeated. Not by President Clinton. By the Senate.
Remember all those Democratic complaints about how the Bush administration wasn't doing anything about corporate crime? How about five years in prison for Enron's treasurer?
(Think that will satisfy Democrats that progress is being made? Ha! We'll hear "So what? What about Ken Lay?" And when Lay is prosecuted, and the trial drags on, we'll hear, "Why did you arrest him unilaterally, instead of working through the UN? Now we're in a legal quagmire." (Er, sorry. I watched the first Democratic presidential debate -- the Hispanic debate -- last weekend, and the second Democratic presidential debate -- the black one -- last night. My cynicism about the Democratic party is unusually high right now.))
The Associated Press's version of the debate in Congress over proposed changes to overtime rules:
The 54-45 vote marked a rare defeat for business interests in the GOP-controlled Congress and left the fate of the emerging Labor Department regulations unclear. The House backed the new rules this summer, and congressional negotiators will have to resolve the issue.Emphasis added. As I've pointed out ad nauseum, media bias doesn't generally show up in the big obvious ways caricatured by liberals and conservatives alike. It's the implicit assumptions in the stories, presented as if they were fact:
Here were have a set of policy proposals, which the Bush administration says will help employees, and Congressional Democrats say will hurt employees. And the reporter simply assumes that Democrats are correct -- after all, a Republican surely couldn't be motivated by a desire to help employees.
It's this sort of bias, unstated, unmeasurable in the aggregate, which pervades the media. It's the bias which prevents a reporter from even considering the possibility that even if the policy helps "business interests," it might also help workers. This isn't malice; it likely isn't motivated by partisanship. It's just the result of ideological blinders; reporters have set views on the way the world works, and they convey them to all of us.
Two years. Hard to believe it. It seems almost surreal now, as it fades slightly into the distance. Almost hard to believe that it happened. And then you remember the little things, from Barbara Olsen on the plane to the horror of watching the buildings crumble, to the amazing concept of 72 hours without commercials, and it all comes back, if not quite as vividly as before.
But we've come so far. We've fought a war on terrorism in two theaters, while fighting a longer, more intense diplomatic war in between those two conflicts. In some ways, the world feels like it has changed so much since 9/11; we've gone from the End of History to the Clash of Civilizations. And yet in other ways, it feels as if it hasn't changed at all. Last year, 9/11 was a huge, emotional day. This year, the networks have forgotten about it -- or decided to ignore it -- and the media focus has shifted from remembrance of the events themselves to metastories about the way people are dealing with the anniversary of the events. Policywise, we've gone from "Oh my god, how should we react?" in 2001 to "What should we do? What's our long term strategy for foreign policy?" in 2002 to "Why did we do it? What did he know and when did he know it? How is this going to affect the 2004 election?"
In a way, it's depressing; the brief period of certainty, with a widespread shared sense of purpose, is gone. No longer does the national sense of unity endure. There will be no more 420-1 votes in Congress regarding American policy. Petty partisan squabbles again predominate, and foreign policy has been displaced by, or at least forced to share space with, the Kobe Bryant story.
And yet, in a way, it's reassuring; life does go on. The war is not over, not nearly over. There are major battles left to fight, both militarily and diplomatically. And national security will be back on the electoral agenda after completely disappearing for the 8 years of Clinton. But, we're not obsessed with it. And that's a good thing. We don't have to be. We're not Israel, constantly under siege; we can get on with our lives. We can pay attention to the campaign of the Governator and the World Series and Ben and J-Lo and the economy and the Ten Commandments in a courthouse. In the past, some -- such as Bill Maher -- have proclaimed our pre-9/11 obsession with these sorts of matters as a sign of American decadence. But it isn't; it's a sign of our strength. We can afford to pay attention to these matters, most of the time, because we focus on the important things when we need to.
So on this second anniversary of the Day Which Changed Everything, we should remember, and reflect, and mourn, and resolve to stay the course for as long as it takes until we have won this war as decisively as we won the Cold War. As we should every future 9/11. But we shouldn't wallow, and we shouldn't feel guilty about having "moved on."
A member of a mailing list I'm on forwarded an email written by a friend of his on September 12, 2001. The friend, who was mere blocks from the World Trade Center the day before, describes her feelings on hearing the impact of the planes, running in panic from the cloud of ash as the towers collapsed, and making her way home to the Upper West Side on foot. Good letter. Until she gets home:
My roommate and I went over to Bart's to watch television last night with him and his roommate. I could handle it by then. What I couldn't handle was watching that asshole who is calling himself our president try to lead this country.
Forget the touchy-feely "widespread sense of purpose" talk, David. Well, maybe it was true for most people, for however brief a moment. But here's a woman who less than 12 hours earlier, while literally running for her life, witnessed the death of thousands of people in the most brutal attack on the nation in its history. Yet, in her mind, the horror of that event pales in comparison to the reality of George Bush being president. Nice.
Mark Gauvreau Judge takes on this mindset in a sober article about the importance of hate:
But increasingly in our culture, the rule is, psychoanalyze the sinner and explain away the sin through socioeconomics - either that or it spills vats of hate on silly targets, like the president. We are in desperate need of the real thing, saved for an appropriate target.
On this and every September 11 - and every day in between - let's remember that the appropriate targets of our hate are the people who brought down those buildings, and more importantly, the people who given half a chance would not hesitate to do it again!
Over at Reason's Hit & Run, Nick Gillespie blogs about a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research which suggests that job applicants with identifiably "black" names have a tougher time than job applicants with more neutral names. The study uses the phrase "white sounding names," but gives as an example "Greg Baker," which doesn't sound stereotypically "white" to me. (I was initially confused when I read this, getting a strange sense of deja vu, but apparently this is the second such study in recent months.)
From the study's press release:
A job applicant with a name that sounds like it might belong to an African-American – say, Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones – can find it harder to get a job. Despite laws against discrimination, affirmative action, a degree of employer enlightenment, and the desire by some businesses to enhance profits by hiring those most qualified regardless of race, African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and they earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed.Gillespie adds:
The study has weaknesses (e.g. it only measures callbacks rather than job offers; it relies only on newspaper ads; etc.) but it raises tough questions about fairness in American society. What's worse, any sort of near-term remedy is far from self-evident. As the authors note,Surprisingly, neither Gillespie nor the study nor any of the participants in the long comment discussion which follows note that affirmative action, rather than being an ineffective solution, may actually be a cause of the problem. Given the existence of affirmative action, and given two applicants of similar credentials on paper, the minority applicant, on average will be less qualified, and there is no way for the decisionmaker to distinguish between the black college graduate with the 1200 SATs and the black college graduate who only had 900 SATs and needed the boost from affirmative action to get in.From a policy standpoint, this aspect of the findings suggests that training programs alone may not be enough to alleviate the barriers raised by discrimination, the authors write. "If African-Americans recognize how employers reward their skills, they may be rationally more reluctant than whites to even participate in these programs."Similarly, even supporters of affirmative action will have to acknowledge that a) these results occurred in an employment system that already has affirmative action and b) if the problem is that prospective employers worry that "race signals lower productivity," those employers will work around policies designed to ameliorate racial disparities in hiring.
I'm not naive enough to suggest that having a name like LaKeisha might not create a subconscious effect in the mind of the decisionmaker -- though as some commenters pointed out, other identifiably non-black ethnic names such as Billy Bob might have similar effects -- but to ignore the effects of affirmative action is dishonest. A rational decisionmaker, without any racist intent, would maximize his chances of getting a better applicant even given appparently equal credentials by choosing the one less likely to be black.
As we remember those horrible events of two years ago, it's also appropriate to remember how the rest of the world reacted to 9/11/2001.
We weren't always alone. Or, I suppose, to be perfectly accurate, alone with the British and the Ubeckestanis.
Andrew Sullivan doesn't like France. Yesterday he wrote:
The French today do little intellectually but constantly circle the drain of complete ressentiment. They have no other guiding political philosophy but envy and regret. The notion that they would ever engage in a U.S.-led campaign against global terror (when they are close to the tyrants that spawn such terror and dedicated to the immiseration of Israel) is a presposterous fantasy.
I suppose that's why the French were on our side and at our side in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
A persposterous fantasy, indeed.
As James Taranto puts it: "we would rather be alive and hated than dead and popular. If the rest of the world likes Americans only when we're dying, the rest of the world can go to hell."
I vastly prefer standing "alone" today withthe Brits, Aussies, and Poles - our true friends and allies - to having the entire world's sympathies on September 12, 2001.
As Al Franken's new book shows, making fun of Ann Coulter is easy. Almost too easy. But since some people take her seriously, it's important that we do.
This is from her most recent column (via Atrios).
In the wake of Dean's success, the entire Democratic Dream Team is beginning to sound like Dr. Demento. On the basis of their recent pronouncements, the position of the Democratic Party seems to be that Saddam Hussein did not hit us on 9-11, but Halliburton did.
I don't know who Dr. Demento is (it sounds like a Styx song), but I don't think the comparison is supposed to be a lauditory one.
I have a feeling, though, that Coulter is partially correct. The Democratic Party, among others, does not believe that Saddam Hussein hit us on 9-11. It was, uh, Osama bin Laden. Does Coulter have any data to the contrary? Or is she, and her editors, trying to accomplish something else?
Speaking of names, a brave person has written an exposé on the dark, sordid world of baby-naming message boards. There are women out there who want to name their children Kesleigh, Cam'rom, CrystalLynn, and Gwennog. They must be stopped.
Tim Graham today on the Corner: "Rest in peace, Johnny Cash. For many red-staters, this resonates deep."
This resonates deeply for many blue-staters, too.
What kind of a person tries to make such a shallow partisan point out of the death of such a great artist? A person like Tim Graham, I suppose.
Who would have thought that the government might take increased powers obtained in the wake of 9/11 and applied them to non-terror cases? Hard to believe, isn't it?
Unfortunately, the article fails to distinguish between what seems like reasonable uses of these laws:
In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants told victims they would receive their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax on their winnings....and unreasonable extensions:Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to retrieve the cash, deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, they simply seized it from assets held by those banks in the United States.
A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.And then there are the silly complaints:
And Muslim and civil liberties groups have criticized the government's decision to force thousands of mostly Middle Eastern men to risk deportation by registering with immigration authorities.The only people who "risk deportation" are those who are here illegally, so why on earth would "civil liberties groups" complain about this? And the people who "risk deportation" are exactly the people the law in question was designed to target, so how does it fit in with the theme of the article? Yes, non-terrorists who overstay their visas will be deported along with terrorists who do, but the law doesn't distinguish between those for obvious reasons: it can't. Terrorists rarely wear nametags.
The New York Times, in beat-a-dead-horse mode, is continuing to cover the story of New York City schools supposedly trying to inflate their performance statistics by pushing those who might otherwise drop out into GED programs, instead. Once this happens, the students aren't counted as dropouts, even if they don't finish the GED programs.
But some people are upset that schools are doing this, implying that the schools are cheating the students because GED programs aren't very effective.
Those who teach at equivalency programs say that only a small minority of the high school-age students actually finish the program — while most reach an academic dead end soon after their discharge.This reminds me of the posters up on the walls at law school put up by the bar prep companies. They tried to scare students into signing up for their bar prep classes by pointing out the horrendous pass rate for those students who take the exam a second time. Which makes sense, since the only students who take the exam a second time are students who fail the exam the first time. And students who fail the exam are -- what's the word? Oh yeah: dumb. And dumb people don't do well on tests.
So of course only a small minority of high school-age student finish GED programs. The only people in GED programs are people whose normal high school careers were complete failures. They're not Mensa members. It's not the fault of the GED programs.
But the real disgrace in the story is buried near the end, and has little to do with whether the schools inflate their statistics or not:
According to the city's statistics, slightly less than 40 percent of those who entered high school in the class of 2002 graduated on time, while 19 percent were discharged, 16 percent dropped out, 2 percent got a G.E.D. diploma, and 23 percent were still enrolled and would need more time to graduate.Remember, if anything these statistics have been inflated to make schools look better. And yet even so, only 40% of students in New York City schools graduated in four years. Forty percent. This isn't college; it's high school.
I think they should worry a little less about how they calculate their statistics, and worry a little more about why almost a quarter of their students can't finish four years of high school in four years. That doesn't include the additional 16% who drop out early; it only counts the ones who actually stick it out and try to graduate. What do those teachers do?
A lot of conservatives are upset about the 9th circuit's decision to postpone the California recall election, finding it to be more unwarranted judicial activism -- and again, as in Florida and New Jersey, activism which coincidentally happens to benefit Democrats. There has been a lot of criticism about unelected judges taking elections out of the hands of the people.
Since I do think the U.S. Supreme Court made the right call on Florida 2000, I can't rightly object to judges intervening in an election. Equal protection is a valid reason, as longstanding precedent as well as Bush v. Gore make clear, for the federal courts to intervene in the electoral process. And at least this intervention, unlike the Florida Supreme Court's, took place before the election, so it's not quite so obvious that they're manipulating the outcome to benefit the Democratic candidate.
That having been said, it seems to me that the application of the Bush v. Gore precedent to this recall situation does not compel this result.
As seems to have been acknowledged at oral argument, the standards for accepting or rejecting contested ballots might vary not only from county to county but indeed within a single county from one recount team to another.On the other hand, the California election doesn't present that problem. It merely presents the possibility that more ballots will be discarded in some counties as a result of errors -- errors by the voters, not by pollThe record provides some examples. A monitor in Miami-Dade County testified at trial that he observed that three members of the county canvassing board applied different standards in defining a legal vote. 3 Tr. 497, 499 (Dec. 3, 2000). And testimony at trial also revealed that at least one county changed its evaluative standards during the counting process. Palm Beach County, for example, began the process with a 1990 guideline which precluded counting completely attached chads, switched to a rule that considered a
vote to be legal if any light could be seen through a chad, changed back to the 1990 rule, and then abandoned any pretense of a per se rule, only to have a court order that the county consider dimpled chads legal. This is not a process with sufficient guarantees of equal treatment.
The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different systems for implementing elections. Instead, we are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied.There's a big difference between mechanical error rates being slightly different and poll workers being allowed to pick and choose which ballots they wish to count without any possibility of oversight.
As to what is going to happen, I have no idea. I've got to imagine that the Supreme Court is going to be extremely reluctant to get involved. [Update: while I was writing this, word came down that the 9th circuit is getting involved, asking the parties to file briefs on whether they should hear the case en banc. Would they do so if there weren't a decent chance of reversing the panel's decision? I don't know.]
No matter when the California recall is held, it's pretty clear that 1984 Time Man of the Year Peter Ueberroth is going to receive fewer votes than Gary Coleman.