break the rules

TNR has advice for Kerry tonight: break the rules.

Deathly afraid of being challenged on his unraveling Iraq policy, Bush demanded--and won--a series of bizarre rules governing tonight's debate. There will be no rebuttals allowed, for instance. No follow-up questions, no movement about the stage, no audience interaction, no props, no split-screen TV shots, no moderator discretion. The perspiration-prone Kerry was even denied a chilled room. Worst of all, the rules forbid Kerry from asking Bush any direct questions, a prohibition that constrains Kerry's options and makes a mockery of our civic process precisely when open debate matters most.

But Kerry does have an amazingly simple way out of the predicament imposed by this last rule: He can ignore it. Americans have a right to ask tough questions of their president. So does the Democratic nominee. You might say that asking tough questions is the moderator's job. But the mainstream journalists who run these debates almost always serve up softballs. And time and again in this campaign, the media has abdicated its duty to press Bush on the Iraq war. Don't expect Jim Lehrer to do any differently tonight.

librul media

With the Presidential election approaching, it is important that we not inquire into the current President's route into the Iraq war. With a new and as yet unclear policy of striking a mounting threat, it is crucial to refrain from questioning the President's reliance on shaky intellegence leading to our pre-emptive force.

So says CBS.

unamerican

The Times gets it exactly right today.

It is fair game for the president to claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was a blow to terrorism, to accuse Mr. Kerry of flip-flopping and to repeat continually that the war in Iraq is going very well, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is absolutely not all right for anyone on his team to suggest that Mr. Kerry is the favored candidate of the terrorists. And at a time when the United States is supposed to be preparing the Iraqi people for a democratic election, it's appalling to hear the chief executive say that loyal opposition gives aid and comfort to the enemy abroad.

Supreme Court

topic preview

This is something we'll be discussing, time permitting, to some extent; Supreme Court appointments and the November election. John Dean projects that our President over the next four years will appoint 3 Justices, I predict at least two--including a Chief Justice shift. This is huge. The Supreme Court has been in the eye of many of our hot button storms, and will remain there.

SD Dispatch

South Dakota Dispatch:

One of the crucial issues in our elections in South Dakota is the Native vote. The Times offers a primer on the subject today.

cross-objection

Frank Rich, in the Times, agrees with O'Reilly's complaint against CNN: Crossfire should take Carville and Begala off Crossfire. O'Reilly and Rich think CNN's inclusion of these newly and lightly Kerry advisors reveils liberal bias.

Review this argument: the inclusion of liberals on a show that pits liberal vs. conservative hosts reveals bias.

I, obviously, am missing something. This is the strangest (b/c I don't get it) or stupidest argument I've heard in some time. What did O'Reilly think Carville and Begala were previous to Kerry advisors?

Here is my best attempt at understanding: because Carville and Begala work on the campaign, their presence on a media program might unfairly use the media to work for their candidate. Basically, the called foul is free media...indeed, adverts for which employees of the campaign get paid.

Make a legal argument then. If we return to common sense, and remember the show's premise, calling foul on a partisan opinion show for having blatent partisanship is, to say the least, idiodic.

wine sales

E-Wine.
I agree with Ken Starr. Please, dear reader, revive from your faint and continue on.

Ken Starr is representing the "Coalition for Free Trade and the Family Winemakers of California." Dumb name, yes; any group so blatantly inserting "family" into its title for good PR deserves a few sighs. Beyond that, though, the group is fighting various states' bans on internet wine sales. My home, NC, is one of those states. Imagine buying straight from those remote vintners in Oregon. Glorious.

Ini any event, Starr represents the good side here. Interestingly, a few ideologies clash in this one, as the Post reports.

Opposite Starr is Miguel Estrada. And the administration is weighing its interests in deciding whether to throw in a supporting brief...and on what side? The Post:

But the White House finds itself caught between two parts of Bush's political base: business interests who favor freer commerce and religious conservatives concerned about minors buying wine.
...
On the other side are New York and Michigan, who are supported by attorneys general from 35 states. (About half the states have bans on direct wine sales.) The states are joined by liquor distributors and a coalition of religious and community groups including the National Association of Evangelicals, the Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America and American Values. These groups have joined a friend-of-the-court brief to be filed today by the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals.

truth

truth and accountability. where is the line between spin and misleads?

Using the G Word

The G Word.
Been meaning since Thursday to give credit where due: Powell's statement that the United States views the killings and rapes in the Darfur region of western Sudan as genocide was the right move. It puts some significant weight on the Security Counsel as well as the US. As our foreign policy is, for now, in a paradigm shift of sorts due to the new Bush Doctrine, what does this genocide label mean as far as US military action. We invaded Iraq due to, as the current reasoning goes, past genocide. Are the ramifications for current genocide the same?

SD

Dear Readers,

Comments below on anything you know about South Dakota. Thanks for the input.

en garde

En Garde.
CBS' 60 Minutes tonight packs a punch. Ben Barnes is one thing; sure sure sure, Bush got into the National Guard via some political connections. Nothing to write home, or on a blog, about. It is quite another thing to blow, almost entirely, off that duty. Josh Marshall reports that this latter charge might just catch on in the mainstream media storyline post 60 Minutes. Kristof's column in the Times today has more.

And why does this matter? The Bush crowd (as well as mainstream media) like to say Kerry deserves the attack ads from Swift Boat Vets for Truth, et al, because he made his service in Vietnam such an issue at the Convention. (btw, that's BS...certainly, using his service in the campaign opens Kerry up to attacks on such service and on his protests thereafter; but, one never deserves lies and slander, ie, the SBVT ads.)
Likewise, Bush has used as campaign material his brief flying stint with the Guard. Remember his "return to the cockpit" en route to the USS Abe Lincoln? Bush, then, deserves investigation into his service just as Kerry deserves such inquiry. (And likewise, Bush does not deserve wide eyed slander.)

The above, though, isn't my reasoning. It is reasoning that gets around a preceding presumption that 30 years ago does not matter. While we wouldn't make these charges about the past, such reasoners say, Kerry/Bush compel us to do so because he made it an issue. I disagree. The past is relevant. That is why, as it turns out, we had the invention of biography.

A person's actions in the beginning of their adult life tell us something about the person. More so, in some respects, than even their more contemporary senate votes and policy decisions. For those people that vote on personality, policy decisions are a sorry meter. Such decisions are made within such complexity, and the commercials citing them produced with such simplicity, that voters come out of the process dumber than Gomer Pyle. It's like buying a car based on the soda they brought you at the dealership.

For those voting on person-hood, past actions (not words) is all we've got. Going to Vietnam, appearing before a Senate committee to speak against the war, ducking out of Guard service, daily jogs and favorite tv shows are all relevant and useful for that search into the person. Imagine a biographer who decided only to write about the last ten years of the subject's life.

In praise of legal writing. The decision below captures legal writing as I think it should be--this is about as good as it gets. From Andersen v. Sims. Washington law, as of 1998, describes marriage as a "civil contract" valid only when entered into "between a male and female." The plaintiffs challenge this recently amended law as violative of the Washington state Constitution; to wit, its privileges and immunities clause and substantive due process.
Judge Downing offers, I think, a fair introduction to the legal and social issues at play. Both sides should read this:

Whether or not same-sex marriage's day has arrived, the debaters of its attendant legal issues have now arrived in the courts of Washington. They do not arrive empty-handed.

Never could this or any court find itself more in tune with the lofty goals advanced by every party to a lawsuit. Here, one side is guided by the beacon of individual liberty, the cherished right of each of us to seek to live our lives in the way we find most personally fulfilling. On the other side, the view is toward the future generations to whom we will pass on our legacy and the stated goal is to enable them to enjoy the social advantages and psychological grounding that are unquestionably nurtured by a healthy family environment.

It is so, too, with the legal principles at the heart of the dispute. The equal application of the laws, championed on the one hand, is a principle at the very core of our shared societal values. The competing legal principle in this case - the separation of powers between branches of government - is fundamental to the structure of our ordered democratic society. It is the sworn task of the courts both to vigorously defend the equal rights of all individuals and also to sedulously support the laws duly enacted by the people through their representatives.

There are, of course, political ramifications to this wedlock deadlock and neither folly nor sense of duty could blind one to that circumstance. The social issue before the Court is one about which people of the highest intellect, the deepest morality and the broadest public vision maintain divergent opinions, strongly held in good faith and all worthy of great respect. Resolving their disagreement is, to be frank, a matter too big to be addressed to a lone individual and this author would naturally like nothing better than to stop at this point and, with a warm and sincere pat on the back, to send all parties off to the State Supreme Court or the State legislature or both. Regrettably or not, such an abdication of responsibility is not an option. As this case and this debate pass by this way station, some impressions and conclusions must be recorded.

Thoughts on the decision forthcoming.

Washington Marriage

Read this.

More soon.

watch your botton

Watch your Botton. Alain de Botton, auther of the well sold How Proust Can Change your Life, has a new book out: Status Anxiety. Shooting off from that, he gives us a three page mini-status-anxiety in today's Times. Give a read, if you've a few minutes to kill. To ruin the ending:

This is all sad, but not half as sad as it can be if we blind ourselves to the reality and raise our expectations of our work to extreme levels. A firm belief in the necessary misery of life was for centuries one of mankind's most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness, a defense against dashed hopes. Now it has been cruelly undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern worldview.

Now perhaps, as many of us return from summer vacations, we can temper their sadness by remembering that work is often more bearable when we don't, in addition to money, expect it always to deliver happiness.

adam and evangelicals

Don't take evangelicals for granted.

Refreshing, and interesting op-ed in the Times. A snip:

While it is true that white evangelicals tend to be more conservative socially, as well as religiously, than the average American, there is little correlation between religious conservatism and political conservatism. For example, in the social surveys, about 40 percent of Americans who believe in the literal, word-for-word interpretation of the Bible describe themselves as "politically conservative."

In the last two presidential elections, about 62 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican - or about 7.5 percent more than among other American Protestants. A majority, clearly, but nowhere near unanimity. And in terms of the electorate as a whole, it's hardly fair to say evangelicals are a dominant political force. If we measure their overall political influence as that 7.5 percent differential multiplied by their share of the electorate - they make up about 21 percent of voters- it comes to about 1.6 percentage points. Yes, as the 2000 election showed, even an edge that small can be decisive in a close race. But it hardly amounts to an overwhelming base. Moreover, those 1.6 percentage points are spread across all regions, not concentrated in the South, where the evangelicals supposedly contribute to the Republicans' red state advantage.

Clearly, claims that evangelicals have hijacked the nation's politics are greatly exaggerated. In fact, polling data show that President Bush's real base is not religious but economic, the group he jokingly referred to as "the haves and the have mores."

The General Social Survey found that 20 percent of American voters have family incomes of more than $75,000 a year, while twice that many earn $30,000 or less. The high-income group (about the same size as the evangelicals) votes Republican by an 18-point margin, while the low-income group favors Democrats by 24 percentage points. If the Republicans were to lose their 18-point advantage among the affluent, it would cost them about four percentage points nationwide in the election, more than twice the cost if they were to lose their edge among evangelicals.

And neither region nor religion can override the class divide: if recent patterns hold, a majority (about 52 percent) of poor Southern white evangelicals will vote for Mr. Kerry in November, while only 12 percent of affluent Southern white evangelicals will.

Most poorer Americans of every faith - including evangelical Christians - vote for Democrats. It's a shame that few pundits, pollsters or politicians seem to notice.

skirt flirt

An entire Times article on how to sit in the subway whilst wearing a mini-skirt.

"I don't mind if I miss and don't manage to get all the skirt down," she said. "Any skin on the plastic means more cool on the back of your legs."

The cool plastic. This makes me glad that Jerry, the speedy seat cleaner, promptly appears to wipe that plastic clean after drug-induced drooling Wendell sloshes out of the train, revealing, as he goes, the bare ass that had just been cooled by the plastic seat.

87 kajillion

And on that NO vote to Bush's 87 billion for Iraq:

Saying Kerry doesn't support the troops on account of that vote is like saying I don't like music because I forwent the new Yanni CD. Sometimes a thing just stinks.

zig zag zell

Zig Zag Zell.

The 2004 Zell Miller, at last night's GOP Convention:

Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of campaign rhetoric.
Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are. How you vote tells people who you really are deep inside.
Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations.
Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide.
John Kerry, who says he doesn't like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security.
That's the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world.
Free for how long?
For more than twenty years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure. As a war protestor, Kerry blamed our military.
As a Senator, he voted to weaken our military. And nothing shows that more sadly and more clearly than his vote this year to deny protective armor for our troops in harms way, far-away.

The 2001 Zell, in a speech introducing John Kerry:

My job tonight is an easy one: to present to you one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders - and a good friend.
...
In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington.
Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so.
John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment. Business Week magazine named him one of the top pro-technology legislators and made him a member of its "Digital Dozen."
John was re-elected in 1990 and again in 1996 - when he defeated popular Republican Governor William Weld in the most closely watched Senate race in the country.
John is a graduate of Yale University and was a gunboat officer in the Navy. He received a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three awards of the Purple Heart for combat duty in Vietnam. He later co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America.

Sad to see the mind go. I reckon Miller would have cited just where John Kerry said he would rely only upon UN authority to use force, but strange nightmares and visions just don't hold up to public scrutiny.


Update: I notice everyone (except Ramish Ponnuru) over at National Review's "The Corner" loved Zell's screed last night. Prooves a theory: people following politics love red meat. My own disdain for Miller's speech prooves theory # 2: people on the other side of the red meat become, momentarily, vegans.

miller's crossing

Miller's Crossing.

Two thoughts before bed. One, from all accounts, it looks like Zell and Dick poured the negative juice a wee bit heavy tonight. A bit shrill for the undecideds tuning in. My theory, the smeariness works on tv commercials, but not in convention speeches. We'll see what the media does with this Thursday; but, for tonight, I need to visit picturesofnicethings.com to get the snears of Cheney and snarls of Miller out of my mind's eyes before falling asleep.

Two. I got to thinking: I came closest to liking Bush during his interview with Matt Lauer, where the President said "I doubt you can win [the war on teror].

I've heard from native Texans that Bush didn't talk in jingoistic dummy-hoods when he was Gov. Rather, his language conveyed thoughtfulness, maybe introspection. I've always known he sees complexity beyond the rhetoric. And really, I think his remarks on the morning show interview were a glimpse at the Bush I could have liked. We can't "win" the war; rather, we must work to diminish to the extent possible terror's effect and propensity (not his words, but close). By 'could have liked,' I mean respected. Policy disagreements would remain.

But Bush's within-24-hour retreat from a thoughtful remark, spurred by the Kerry campaign's pounce, brings us back to the Presidential Bush; ie, simpleton.

Political campaigns always rely on jingo and stupid simplicity. Certain candidates, however, really work to overcome the hurdles of pop-voting--to wit, the sloganering shows some attempt at capsulating nuggets of thoughtful policy. In my mind, Edwards is best at this, Kerry's alright, and Bush (or his handlers) could give a damn. And what's funny: the GOP Convention (and some readers of OR) hold the opposite view. Ain't that a dandy.

In any event, this Times editorial says point two in more suave language. Give a read.

leave the gals alone

The conventional wisdom, developed over the past 12 hours by cable news and bloggers, is the Bush daughters flopped over their speech at the convention last night, revealing themselves as unsavvy ditzes. This, even according to Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes over at Fox news.

I say, leave the girls alone. I saw part of their speaking, and just read the joint speech on the GOP Convention website. Sure, their jokes fell flat at the GOP convention; but then, this is the GOP convention--they only laugh at the Kerry jokes.

Really, though. This speech was not written by the daughters. It's clearly a cute little speech prepared by a handler. And while we might praise comic delivery, I was unaware either daughter was a drama major. The larger point is this: a cute convention speech is hardly the source from which to make judgments on these girls. And, the propensity of so many pundits to do just that reveals the shallowness of so many political thinkers.

Anyway, I kinda liked this line: "Granny, we love you dearly, but you're just not very hip. She thinks 'Sex in the City' is something married people do, but never talk about."

stop flop charges

Put a flip flop in your mouth. There is one thing that the Bush campaign and voters predisposed against Kerry are relying on--like last year's Panter's running game--through this election cycle: the flip flop allegation. What I am saying in that first sentence is so unremarkable that I can hear sighs from computer illuminated faces across town. But to beat the dead horse, that's the criticism--paired with its twin: Kerry will say anything. I've heard this from friends, from commercials, and it is the theme (along with 9/11) of the GOP convention.

Giuliani offered the standard routine on Monday night, and Bush repeats the lines in his stump speech. They are, of course, incredible. Happily, Glann Kessler calls the claims on the mat in a WaPo article, here.

But, look. Here is where Kerry needs to punch back, and hard. As my mom says, we can't sit and wait for undecided and apathetic voters to reason their way out of campaign BS. Every time Bush and Co. toss around the flip flop charge, Kerry should play a commercial with Bush saying we will win the war on terror, then saying we will not win the war on terror, then saying we will win the war on terror...all within 2 months.

Clearly, context tells us these variations are slight rhetoric shifts as opposed to policy changes. But, apparently, Bush and them don't care about context. When they drop the flip flop charge, I'll believe that they do.