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Archives for Politics
D.A. Branch for President
You can now order your (un)official Thompson/Waterston 2008 bumper stickers from my CafePress store.
Somebody Call Oliver Stone
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might find the timing of Gerry Studds’ death a little too convenient to be purely coincidental. What better way for the Republicans to diffuse the partisan charge from the Mark Foley page scandal than by reminding America, by ensuring a well-placed obituary, that the Democrats did the same thing first?
Now where did I put that tin-foil hat?
…And the City Don’t Know What the City Is Getting
News of a coup in Thailand just hit the wire.
The coup is being led by Thai army chief Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratkalin, who announced that the military and opposition Party of Democratic Reform were taking over while Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was in New York for a U.N. meeting.
The Party of Democratic Reform is seizing control of the government in a coup? Really, you can’t make this shit up.
An’ Patched Up the Crack in the Liberty Bell
Incumbents in the House of Representatives didn’t always have a 95% reelection rate. Take this passage from Davy Crockett’s official Congressional biography:
…unsuccessful candidate for election to the Nineteenth Congress in 1825; elected as a Jacksonian to the Twentieth Congress; elected as an Anti-Jacksonian to the Twenty-first Congress (March 4, 1827-March 3, 1831); unsuccessful candidate for reelection to the Twenty-second Congress in 1830; elected as an Anti-Jacksonian to the Twenty-third Congress (March 4, 1833-March 3, 1835); unsuccessful candidate for reelection to the Twenty-fourth Congress in 1834; fought at the Battle of the Alamo, San Antonio, Tex., 1836; died about March 6, 1836.
Eminent Domain Question
A friend sent me an email with his thoughts on the disappointing Supreme Court verdict for Kelo et al v. City of New London. The best line:
…do they still even bother with the just compensation part any more? Or is your compensation the privilege of living in their meticulously planned utopia?
What’ll Happen to the Market?
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about personal accounts lately, and one thing is bothering me.
If a carve-out proposal ends up passing, the entire American workforce will start dumping money into approved investment funds. A substantial number will undoubtedly choose index funds due to both their track record and their low management fees.
The S&P 500 is composed of 400 industrial, 20 transportation, 40 utility, and 40 financial companies. In a sense, the allocation is somewhat arbitrary in nature.
What will happen to the market when a huge amount of money is repeatedly dumped into a constant subset of somewhat arbitrary investments on an ongoing basis? Can you imagine the P/E ratios as the demand increases for those investments, based simply on a workforce running their portfolio on index fund autopilot?
A Message to the Advocates of Personal Retirement Accounts
Will you please stop using the comparatively low statistical life-expectancy of minorities and lower-income workers as a selling point for personal accounts. Nobody wants to be told that they will probably die before they reach retirement age. You’re just going to alienate the very audience you’re attempting to woo.
OK?
Dear Leader Studios
It looks as if North Korea is now claiming to have nuclear weapons capabilities. I guess it’s finally time for me to share my plan for removing Kim Jong Il from power peacefully at a reasonable financial cost.
We should offer him the following:
- Full immunity for all past actions.
- Full ownership of a newly-created Hollywood movie studio with a $1.5 billion annual budget.
- The exclusive rights to the James Bond movie and merchandising franchise.
Given all we know about the man, isn’t it reasonable to assume that he just might go for it?
And yes, I’m serious. Sometimes you need to think outside the box.
Name Five Female Composers of the 20th Century
I’m rather amused by the firestorm over some allegedly sexist comments Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers made last Friday at an academic conference.
Schools of law and medicine are now overrun with women, who often compose a majority of the entering student body. The supposed reluctance of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks, which Summers explicitly mentioned, is not consistent with those trends. Furthermore, I find it extremely difficult to believe that the academic establishments in math and engineering actively fought the inclusion of females either more vigorously or effectively than the legal and medical establishments.
I once asked a friend who studies contemporary classical music why so few women have risen to prominence as composers in the last century. He pointed out that just as barriers to women were beginning to fall in the visual arts, the musical establishment embraced intensely structured and mathematical artistic movements such as serialism.
Maybe this is just the perpetuation of a stereotype, but perhaps there is a fundamental difference in the types of thinking at which men and women tend to excel. Unfortunately, we’ll never really know know if the people raising the questions continue to be silenced in the name of political correctness.
Laugh About It, Shout About It. When You’ve Got To Choose…
I voted today–for Kerry.
Then I walked home, threw up, and took a shower. I still don’t really feel clean, but I think it was the right thing to do for a number of reasons.
- The Republicans are only going to pick up seats in the House and Senate, and I think divided power is the best way to slow the growth of government right now.
- With Kerry in the White House, the Republicans will hopefully start acting like they care about limited government again.
- It minimizes the risk of a Hillary Clinton candidacy in the next 12 years.
In any case, the polling place was packed. People there wouldn’t shut up about how wonderful it was that voter turnout was so high.
I have a different take.
I think high voter turnout is a really bad sign this time around. When people are apathetic, it means that everything is “good enough.” They feel they don’t have to bother voting. Today’s participation rate is going to just prove that America is angry and divided.
Being There
Friday afternoon I had some meetings in the city. When I was finished I met up with my sister, who works as an intern for CNN’s Crossfire at GWU. She managed to get us tickets to see Jon Stewart’s now-infamous guest appearance.
As someone who not only witnessed the whole affair from third row seats, but also heard portions of the unaired exchanges that occurred between commercial breaks, I got the impression that Jon Stewart was just a grandstanding prick pulling a stunt to promote his book.
I didn’t buy a word of his sanctimonious crap.
There’s no reason why he couldn’t have picked up a phone and expressed his feelings to Carlson or Begala privately. Instead, he decided to appear as a guest on a program that graciously offered to promote his book to publicly and rudely insult the hosts to their faces.
Stewart is a ass. End of story.
Pirates and Emperors
I was talking to a friend a several days ago and I made a reference to Schoolhouse Rock cartoons from the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was a little disappointed that he had absolutely no recollection of these educational shorts, which were produced for play during Saturday morning cartoons.
In any case, today I saw this parody which is almost flawless in the quality of its execution.
Why can’t we have election ads like this?
Watch Your TLDs
By the way, during tonight’s debate Cheney instructed viewers to visit www.factcheck.com to access the Annenberg Political Fact Check at the University of Pennsylvania, when he actually should have pointed them to www.factcheck.org.
His little slip sent countless visitors to a URL that now redirects to www.georgesoros.com.
The devil is in the details.
Speaking of Records
As a libertarian, I found the following attack on the vice president by Edwards in tonight’s debate particularly amusing:
The vice president, I’m surprised to hear him talk about records. When he was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of 10 to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors. He voted against the Department of Education. He voted against funding for Meals on Wheels for seniors. He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King. He voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
Mandela notwithstanding, Cheney almost sounds like my kind of guy.
Questioning Democracy
Sadly, the people of DC have once again proven unfit to rule themselves through democratic means. Marion Barry won the primary for his city council bid on Tuesday night.
What Were They Thinking?
I’m listening to the idiot Bush daughters right now at the convention.
Whose idea was it to let them follow Schwarzenegger’s brilliant speech, which even I found politically seductive?
Martha My Dear
Alton Brown, the man who reinvented the cooking show with the Food Network’s Good Eats, wrote an interesting open letter to Martha Stewart a few months ago. It included the following passages:
People want you to go down because you wouldn’t drop your head and break down and cry and tell us how ashamed you are about the things you’ve done. Conversely you didn’t pull a Kobe and act like what you did didn’t happen. You stuck by your guns and said that you didn’t believe you did anything wrong. Whether you did or not doesn’t matter. You didn’t grovel and we just hate that kind of thing. Looks too much like your sense of dignity might stem from something other than public consensus and we just can’t have that now can we. Oh and you’re successful–we don’t like that either.
And it gets even better!
While you’re in the clink, I hope you’ll take time to read a little Ayn Rand. I think you and Howard Roarke have a thing or two in common.
Read the whole letter. It’s fantastic.
Dewey Defeats Truman
When every other media outlet in the hemisphere is reporting that Edwards is Kerry’s man, you can be sure of one thing. Somebody at the New York Post is going to lose his job over this.
Get yours while supplies last!
In Final Tribute from a Grateful Nation
When I began at GWU in the fall of 1996, I distictly remember having a discussion with my new conservative and libertarian friends about Reagan. We had all assumed that he would pass away sometime during our four years as students in DC. We were resolved to pay our respects when it was finally time for him to lie in state. Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, he suffered much longer than any of us would have imagined or expected.
My friends who no longer live in DC returned this week. On Tuesday night we stood in line for almost seven hours to see his flag-draped casket in the Capitol Rotunda.
The week has felt a little like The Big Chill, only without any of the funny business. I hated that movie.
But it’s always good to see old friends. It’s just like they say, “weddings and state funerals.”
Better Than Warm Spit
John Nance Garner, who was vice president of the United States from 1932 to 1940 under FDR, once said the vice presidency wasn’t worth a “bucket of warm spit.”
It seems that John McCain would agree. He had some choice words about the position when he appeared on Conan O’Brien’s show last week:
I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?
