Not Sarah Palin — Joe Biden

Holy crap, we’ve got everything backward this year. I would much rather watch two more debates with Governor Palin and Senator Biden than with Senators McCain and Obama.

I genuinely liked Joe Biden in this debate. I (sometime strongly) disagree with his policies, and I desperately wanted Sarah Palin to call him on it when he claimed that deregulation caused the current financial crisis^[1], but he came across as a genuinely likeable candidate.

I know Biden has a reputation for being something of an “attack dog”, and I think that part of the reason he was more likeable tonight than he’s seemed in the past was that he was reining that instinct in. He attacked McCain’s positions, but he’s worked with McCain for decades and obviously has a lot of respect for him, so he didn’t come across as mean, which is a serious risk for him. He also didn’t say anything overtly stupid^[2], which is something I’m sure the Obama camp was worried about.

I thought that Palin did very well. She worried me a bit on the first question. I know what she was getting at when she talked about asking the parents on the sidelines of a soccer game about the economy, and I want our politicians to genuinely care about the situation that our citizens are in, rather than simply gauging the problem by Wall Street, but I was worried she was going to come across as a little too small-town in this debate.

After that, though, she did much better. I’d address each question, but there are dozens of bloggers already doing that, and most of them are doing it much better than I could. Besides, I quit watching after about an hour. I’m getting old now, and can’t stay up as late as I used to. There was some stuff I needed to do before bed, and I figured that, since Palin was performing well and Biden wasn’t showing off any of his big gaffe-making tendencies, the transcripts would be just as good. Having read them now, I’m pretty sure I was right.

All in all, I think Palin won on the issues, but I’m predisposed to believe that anyway, since the Republicans tend to be a little (but only a little) more libertarian on the issues covered last night^[3] than the Democrats are. I’m sure that my wife felt it went the other way.

Palin performed about as well as I hoped she would, and I think she’s gone a long way to calm some of the fears about her that arose from those interviews. She does better when she’s talking to the American people directly rather than talking to an interviewer, especially when the interview is then filtered through an editor.

Biden, on the other hand, did much better than I’d expected, but my opinion of him was formed mostly from reading comments he’d made here and there and from seeing clips of some of his worse gaffes, so I hadn’t really expected much. After watching him last night, I really wish he was at the top of the Democratic ticket. Obama may do better than he does with prepared speeches, but I think Biden is much better speaking off the cuff.

Again, I wish we could see more of these two and less of McCain/Obama in debates. I think both of them were more interesting to watch than their Presidential candidate counterparts, and since both candidates on each ticket are going to be covering the same talking points, we may as well hear from the people who’re more fun to watch and listen to.

1. In fact, it was too much regulation, or at least government interference. Specifically, the Federal government was encouraging lenders to engage in the very “predatory practices” that both candidates blamed for the crisis when it encouraged them to go after lower income people who, honestly, didn’t have the ability to pay for the loans that they were being given. [back]
2. He got his facts wrong several times, but so did Palin — politicians lie and it’s hard to have all the relevant facts on those little fact sheets they’re allowed, so I don’t mind the occasional factual error in these debates [back]
3. Not that there aren’t issues where it’s reversed, we just didn’t cover them in this debate very much [back]

Anyone notice that attempts to reform Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by Republicans (specifically, by George Bush) have been stymied for the last eight years hasn’t really been big on the network news stations? Instead, we get lots and lots of coverage of people like Nancy Pelosi blaming Republicans for causing the mess that they’ve been trying to fix.

I’m not saying that Republicans don’t bear their share of the blame, but it’s unfair to insist that they’ve had the Presidency for the last eight years and should’ve done something when they’ve never had a filibuster-proof majority and Democrats have been dead-set against letting them reform the FMs.

Why did Democrats try to stall reform of the FMs? I can’t say for certain, but the fact that the Dems have been getting a ton of money from them seems awfully telling. It’s even more telling that, as far as I’ve seen, no major news organizations seem to be reporting on this oddity.

I am among those who was very excited by Palin when her nomination for the Vice President position was announced. Heck, if it comes down to it, I was even pretty hopeful about the possibility of her nomination before it was announced. In the time since then, she’s performed very poorly in a few interviews (while some of the problems can be attributed to editing, not all of them can), which has cooled my enthusiasm considerably. Her poor performance in these interviews runs counter to what I’ve seen in clips from her run for Alaska’s governor position, and it makes me wonder what the difference is.

My theory is that she’s really not as comfortable discussing the issues facing the United States at large as she is with the issues that face the state of Alaska. While Alaska is, obviously, part of the United States, the focus of a governor is much, much different from the focus of a vice president. As many of her critics have noted, she has no foreign policy experience, because foreign policy is, by and large, outside of the scope of a governor’s job.

This is where the three senators on the tickets have an advantage over Palin. Their jobs may not come with any executive experience — individually, Congresspeople aren’t leaders in any real sense — but they do come with a need to be educated on issues facing the nation as a whole.

Or, at least, they come with a need to seem educated. Palin’s lack of experience has been criticized heavily ever since her nomination was announced. Her political career hasn’t been all much shorter than that of the Presidential candidate on the other side, and it includes actual executive experience, so I’m not buying into the idea that she has less relevant experience when it comes to running the country… but when it comes to running a campaign?

Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson was the first glimpse many Americans really had of who she was. Out of the entire interview, there were two minutes that made the biggest impression on America, I think. First was her response about seeing Russia from Alaskan soil, in response to a question about foreign policy experience. Second was Palin’s not knowing what Gibson meant by “the Bush Doctrine”.

That first response was, arguably, made to seem much worse than it actually was due to the way the exchange was edited, and the second is somewhat misleading due to the multiple (sometimes wildely divergent) definitions of the unofficial term “Bush doctrine”.

While I admittedly don’t know a lot about Alaskan politics, I can compare West Virginia politics to that at the national level, and there’s not nearly as much scrutiny on every single word that passes from our governor’s lips as there is on any given Senator. My suspicion is that Governor Palin’s admission that she didn’t quite know what Gibson meant when he said “Bush Doctrine” wouldn’t have been nearly as poorly received in a state Governor’s race.

So, I imagine what happened after the Gibson interview is that Senator McCain’s campaign staff started coaching Governor Palin on how to handle these sorts of questions, essentially training her on how to BS more efficiently in the national political arena. This is something that McCain and Biden have had decades to perfect and even Obama has had several years in national politics to get his BS well honed.

When national politicians are not well educated on the issues, they need to be able to pretend to be up on them. When Obama made a comment about the UN Security Council doing something about Russia even though Russia has a veto on that council, it was just as dumb as anything Sarah Palin has ever uttered in any of these interviews, but because he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, he wasn’t as heavily criticized.

All in all, I don’t believe that Sarah Palin’s bad interviews are an indication that she’s stupid by any means. I also don’t believe that they are an indication that she’s less ready to lead than Obama^[1]. I don’t even think they’re indicative that she would be unable to lead successfully if events would put her in the President’s seat. Mostly, I think they’re indicative of her being unfamiliar with the skills needed to campaign successfully on a national scale.

Hopefully, her performance in the debate this evening (which will require a related but somewhat different skill set than interviews) will be better than her performance in her interviews, but even if it isn’t, I can’t imagine that her performance could possibly be so bad that I’d start thinking that having a marginally qualified person in the Vice Presidential seat would be better than having a marginally qualified person in the Presidential seat.

1. Of course, that’s akin to saying that a first year med student is no less ready to perform surgery than a college freshman — I wouldn’t want either of them doing it. [back]

First, Mrs. S. wrote a comment to my last post that I thought people might see more readily if I put it up here:

I am sure some of you may be waiting for my husband’s post about his take on the big debate on Friday. You can blame me for his posting silence because I made him have a birthday party on Friday night so he did not get to watch the circus. Now that his birthday fun is over until next year I promise he will be back to being a slightly crazed political junkie. Thanks for reading One Stack Mind.

While we celebrated the birthday on Friday, today’s my actual birthday. No more 20-something for me, sadly. Now I’m officially starting my fourth decade of life. Honestly, I’m not really bothered by that fact, though I have jokingly whined about it some.

In case you’re not aware, that “thanks for reading” has a small subtext — if no one ever read or commented, she (probably) fears that I’d stop blogging and she’d have to listen to even more political rants than she does now. Regardless of her reasons for saying it, I do appreciate the readers (and commenters!) that I do get. Thanks for sticking around, even if I don’t post as often as I should.

Rachel Lucas put up a post last week about Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric. I’ll admit that my enthusiasm has waned somewhat because of her poor interviews, but I’m not convinced that such things have any real impact on her ability to do the job for which she’s applying. I know I probably wouldn’t interview much better, and I bet I’d be a better President than Obama (even though I’m not technically eligible for five more years).

Not interviewing well is not a dealbreaker for me on a Presidential candidate, much less on a VP candidate. On the other hand, Obama’s record (as opposed to his campaign promises) is a dealbreaker. Besides, anyone who says he won’t violate your right to self-defense (enumerated in the Constitution as the right to “keep and bear arms”) because he wouldn’t be able to get the votes to do so has no right being on a Presidential ballot.

I admit to not having read all of the comments at Rachel’s post (I’ve had a busy week/weekend), but here’s the best comment (among many good ones) I saw:

mightysamurai Says:

Honestly. If you saw any of the Palin clips, can you in good faith and true objectivity tell me that you wouldn’t rip her up if she was a Democrat, or even just someone you wanted to defeat for whatever reason?

Honestly? No, I wouldn’t. For several reasons.

1. This was (I believe) the first interview she’s done since the hit-piece concocted by Charlie Gibson. It’s understandable that she might be feeling self-conscious about what she says and that often tends to make a person look and sound like they’re nervous and don’t know what they’re talking about.

2. Palin supporters haven’t been touting her as some kind of intellectual ubermensch the way Obama supporters have been doing. Neither Palin nor her supporters ever claimed she was the greatest public speaker in politics today. But again, Obamanites cannot say the same.

3. I do not now nor have I ever questioned someone’s intelligence because “they don’t talk good”. I may whip out one of those “Obama Uh” YouTube clips when I find a lib crooning about what a great public speaker Obama is, but I don’t call him a moron because he fumbles his words when he’s away from a teleprompter. I have an entirely different set of reasons for calling Obama a moron, thank you very much.

4. I watched all the interview clips I could find and I didn’t hear Palin give any answers that were wrong. If she did make any factual errors then either they passed right by me or they weren’t in any of the clips I watched.

5. Remember Charlie Gibson.

Finally, in one of yesterday’s Sabbath posts (which is well worth the read overall), Steve H. writes:

I feel like we’re being offered a choice, here in the US. On the one hand, maturity, experience, time-tested ideas, and faith in God. On the other, an MTV messiah with no experience, discredited 1960s ideas, a tendency to self-worship, a thin skin, proven hostility to Caucasians, and a crush on Karl Marx. I don’t say we have a perfect candidate, but it’s a clear choice: the wisdom and morality of the old, versus the empty flash and arrogant stupidity of the young.

I’ve enjoyed Steve’s blog for longer than I’ve had my own, but since he’s been working on growing closer to God, he’s been better than ever in a lot of ways. It’s kind of weird, because what I used to really enjoy was the negative, mean, sarcastic attitude that he’s now trying to filter out of his life as well as his blog, and you’d think that less of that would mean less enjoyment of the blog from me, but it’s making his writing stronger, not weaker.

Maybe that’s just me, as I’ve been actively working on my walk with God for a little over a year now, and Steve’s recent posts really resonate with me as I see him going through some of the same sort of things I am, but his blog has just been getting better and better for me.

I’ll leave you with one closing thought that I’ve stolen from the end of Steve’s post:

We need a second bailout, and not the kind that comes from Man. That’s my opinion. Even if I’m wrong, correcting your own life is still the right choice, and you will be rewarded.

I’d apologize for not having posted much lately, but, really, I’m pretty sure no one’s reading anymore by this point. I’ve been off playing Spore, which is great, even if some of the individual stages seem kind of simplistic.

I have a couple of posts that I plan to write in the next couple of days if I can find the time, but in the meantime, I recommend that everyone go to read Dafydd ab Hugh’s explanation of Bush’s proposed bailout. It’s the best explanation of the bailout that I’ve seen, honestly.

Over at Q and O, Bryan Pick criticizes the “Bush Doctrine” question from Palin’s interview, and closes with this:

That said, Sarah Palin was very obviously not prepared to answer Gibson’s question. She wasn’t caught off guard because the Bush Doctrine is ill-defined or even ambiguous, but rather because she wasn’t familiar enough with the concepts involved to discuss them. In general, she allowed Gibson’s little exam to put her on the defensive and her answers were often meandering and even off-topic. Several times, when she answered a question, I had (what I think was) a better and more succinct answer in mind. I say this as someone who has been optimistic about Palin: she must improve her performance and display greater poise in the coming weeks. The sharks are circling, and they smell blood. They are prepared to be rankly biased and unfair — to misquote her to her face and to draw patently ridiculous conclusions from her statements. She will be held to a standard no one can meet, so to prevent the press from making her a liability, she must be better than good; she must be great.

I’m also still pretty optimistic about Palin — a bad interview does not mean a bad leader, after all — but she has to do better at things like this if she is going to be electable in any national campaign.

My wife often jokes that she became a Social Worker so she wouldn’t have to do math. Apparently, she could also have become a journalist:

Daily Kos up to no good again? Nah — this one comes from WaPo, doing the hard work of ignoring primary sources that are reproduced right in the piece. The boss, Laura W., and Anchor Rising did the heavy lifting so read them for the details; if you think expanding a program by $3.9 million instead of $5 million counts as cutting funds, you’re qualified to work for one of America’s most esteemed newspapers.

Emphasis Mine

Now, it’s true that Palin slashed the amount by which the program’s funding was to be increased, but that’s not what the article at the Washington Post says:

ST. PAUL — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation — “SP” — Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

[Update: Along the same lines, Soledad O’Brien accused Palin of cutting Special Needs Budget by 62% when the budget actually raised 175%.]

One of the things I’m really lax about is praying for other people. They’ll mention a need, and I’ll offer my sympathy and say that I’ll pray for them, and I do. Once, maybe twice, I’ll remember to offer up their names and their needs when I pray. Then, I forget. Not on purpose, not because I don’t care, but because I don’t maintain a good prayer list, and my memory is wholly unreliable. It’s something I need to work on.

Thankfully, though, God has a better memory than I do.

Venomous Kate has wonderful news:

The doctor said the scan results showed no remaining cancer. Considering how insidious stage 4 colon cancer is, this is nothing short of miraculous. I have no doubt that your prayers, good thoughts and kind wishes have quite a bit to do with that miracle, and I thank you.

She and her mother both know that this is likely to be a temporary reprieve, but it is a reprieve, and hopefully they’ll both make the best of the time God has given them.

Over at Wise Bread, Paul Michael asks, “Would You Sell Your Vote?”

I wouldn’t actually sell my vote, but if someone offered me money to vote for them, it would only be my own convictions against lying that would keep me from a.) taking their cash and b.) voting for the other guy, since the vote buyer obviously can’t be trusted. That’s one of the things I don’t understand about straightforward vote buying. If someone is unprincipled enough to take money to vote a certain way, why would anyone expect them to be principled enough to tell the truth about how they voted? If John Doe gives Jim cash to vote for him, what guarantee does John have that Jim actually did vote for him?

That’s why the more traditional version of vote buying works so well. Instead of offering cash to individuals to (maybe) get their vote, politicians have learned another tactic. They don’t offer money to individuals in exchange for individual votes — they offer money to a class of people in a ploy to get enough votes from that class to win the elections.

I see no ethical difference between Jim voting for John just because John handed him a hundred dollar bill and Jim voting for John because John has promised a subsidy that’ll give him several hundred bucks. If a person on welfare votes for the candidate who has promised to extend or increase his benefits, has he sold his vote? If a businessman who makes $150,000 a year votes for the candidate who has promised to cut taxes, has he sold his vote? What about the reverse? What if an investor votes for a candidate because the candidate’s opponent has promised to punitively tax profits on a company the investor has stock in, or a retiree dependent upon his Social Security votes against the man who wants to slow the benefits’ increase? Are these situations equivalent to vote selling? I can’t see any substantial reason why they aren’t.

So, how do we prevent vote buying? If there’s no ethical difference between voting because someone handed you cash to vote and voting because the candidate in question supports a policy that would give you cash, I don’t honestly think we can. We can’t stop people from voting for their own benefit. We can’t even prove they’ve done so. How do you separate those who vote a certain way because the vote benefits them personally from those who vote a certain way because they genuinely believe in the principles behind the policy (and the fact that it benefits them personally is irrelevant to them)?

Should we simply drop all laws against vote buying, and hope that people’s disgust with the slimy characters who most often engage in such outright behavior will keep the activity in check? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure that the current solution is the best one either. It’s just something to think about.

More on Palin

A couple of new Palin stories have popped up over the weekend, and I feel the need to address them, since I talked about her on Friday.

• Bristol’s Pregnancy. Politically, I couldn’t care less about Palin’s teenage daughter’s pregnancy. I think that what we’ve seen publically (a family that is supporting their daughter, who is not only carrying the baby to term, but marrying the father) speaks well of the family’s dedication to their principles, insofar as they’re openly showing love and support for their daughter. I don’t buy the idea that this is a condemnation of abstinence-only education any more than I think that a more robust sex-ed program (including, say, distribution of condoms) is somehow undermined if some teens decide they’d rather risk sex without protection.

  Beyond that, I really don’t think this is any of our business.

• Alaska Independence Party I’ve seen this mentioned on a few blogs, but the closest thing I can find to an actual news story right now is a blog post at ABC News:

  Officials of the Alaskan Independence Party say that Palin was once so independent, she was once a member of their party, which, since the 1970s, has been pushing for a legal vote for Alaskans to decide whether or not residents of the 49th state can secede from the United States.

  …

  [Lynette Clark, chairman of the AIP] says it’s not accurate to describe the party as secessionist — they just want a vote, she says, adding that the members of the AIP hold different opinions on what Alaska should be.

  “We are a state’s rights party,” says Clark, a self-employed goldminer. The AIP has “a plank that challenges the legality of the Alaskan statehood vote as illegal and in violation of United Nations charter and international law.”

  …

  “Governor Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982,” Rogers says, providing some voter registration documentation showing her to be a Republican. “As you know, if she changed her registration, there would have been some record of it. There isn’t.”

  On the assumption that this is true, I have to admit it poses something of a problem for the McCain campaign in general, as I can imagine a lot of mainstream independent and conservative voters being perturbed over Palin’s involvement in such a group. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t bother me personally — it might, in fact, be a point in her favor — but then, I’m somewhat on the fringe myself because of my somewhat libertarian bent.

  That said, I’d like to have a bit more evidence than the say-so of a couple of members of the AIP before I believe the story is true. [Update: It’s looking more and more like this isn’t true. I’m almost a bit disappointed, but I guess it’s better for the campaign this way.]

• She should be home with her son. Please. This is sexist claptrap. Biden was a suddenly-single father, and didn’t give up his political career for his sons after his first wife died. How many people saying that Palin should stay home with her children would have said the same thing about Biden^[1]? Singling out Palin makes it clear that these people believe that mothers should stay home with their children and that fathers can’t possibly get the job done alone. It’s doubly sexist and, therefore, doubly offensive.

• Ongoing investigation in Alaska If you’re not familiar, Palin is currently under investigation for having fired Walter Monegan, Alaska’s Public Safety Commissioner. Monegan claims he was fired because he failed to fire Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, an Alaskan State Trooper.

  Again, this is something that could come back to bite the McCain campaign overall, but something I don’t really care much about myself. Monegan was a political appointee, and I see nothing wrong with the idea that the governor can simply dismiss him, regardless of her reasons^[2]. Even if the reason given (Monegan’s refusal to fire Palin’s former brother-in-law) is completely true, it may not be as bad as it sounds — the brother-in-law isn’t exactly a saint, and, from what I can tell, deserved to be fired.

In Friday’s post, I said that I found Palin interesting, and that’s still true. To me, she’s still easily the most interesting of the four candidates in the national executive election, and I haven’t seen anything that sours my opinion of her, though I still reserve judgement until I see more of her.

I find it very interesting that all of this stuff coming out about Palin seems to be hitting the national news pretty quickly, but I’ve yet to see much of anything in the national media about Obama’s connections to Bill Ayers or Tony Rezko. Not that these are necessarily career enders for him, but it’s interesting that Palin (the presumptive VP pick for the GOP) seems to be getting more vetting from the media over a single weekend than Obama (the Presidential nominee from the Democrats) has gotten in his entire campaign.

Dang, this election is getting interesting after all!

1. Don’t get me wrong here. While I may not like the man’s politics, I have a great deal of respect for Biden’s dedication to his family and how he handled that situation. I just find it contradictory to laud Biden’s balance of politics and family while criticising Palin’s. [back]
2. Keep in mind that I’m a strong advocate of “at-will” employment [back]

In a Presidential election cycle with two candidates who are lukewarm at best, I wasn’t really feeling much excitement, until I heard John McCain’s pick for VP yesterday.

I first heard Sarah Palin’s name several months ago, when I saw a blogger suggest she’d make a good VP (Sorry, I don’t remember who, or I’d link). I did a little research, figured that she’d be a pretty good candidate, but dismissed the idea because I couldn’t imagine McCain making a pick that unusual. I figured he’d pick another one of his opponents in the primaries, or a Governor or Congressperson from a big battleground state. When I saw the first news notification that Palin was the choice, I thought it was either a joke, or another Palin. Discovering that it was actually Sarah Palin, I actually felt a twinge of pleasure at the idea of voting for the Republican ticket this year.

I can’t say that I know enough about Sarah Palin to say she definitely outweighs the weaknesses of the McCain candidacy. It’s possible that she’ll turn out to actually cause me to decide against voting for McCain (though it’s not like I was solidly in his camp before this pick) after I’ve seen more of her. Still, I know enough to answer some of the criticisms about her.

• She’s inexperienced (in general), and will be only a heartbeat away from the presidency. If she were running for the actual Presidency, I’d be a lot more concerned about this, but I don’t worry about it so much when she’s running for the VP slot. Still, it is a fairly valid criticism from conservatives who would rather have seen a different pick.

  From Obama supporters, though, it’s fairly nonsensical — the Vice Presidential candidate on the Republican ticket has arguably more experience than their Presidential candidate. Raising the issue won’t help them. Two years in office as Governor compares pretty well to Obama’s time in Congress, I think. Especially since Congress actually works, what, a hundred or so out of the year, and Obama has spent most of his time in office campaigning for the Presidency. Governors might take vacations of a few weeks a year, but I suspect that such vacations are much like the vacations of a President — they may go elsewhere, but they’re still “on the job.” Plus, a governorship is actual executive experience, which is something that no one else on either ticket has.

• She’s inexperienced (in foreign policy matters), and will be only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Again, not running for the actual presidency, just the VP slot, which is more than we can say about Obama. Besides, we’ve already seen from Obama’s campaign that a quick whirlwind vacattion/campaign tour of foreign countries counts as “foreign policy experience”^[1]. So, if she honestly can’t say she’s never been to a foreign country, send her to visit the troops in Iraq real quick. Then when Obama protests, run a few ads reminding everyone that he claimed that a speech in Germany counted as “Foreign Policy Experience”, and ask if he’s going back on that now.

  I particularly liked Sonny Bunch’s comments on this issue:
  

  Andrew has this exactly backwards. The McCain campaign is hoping and praying that someone will say that Palin is unready for the job. “Please,” John McCain is praying right now AS I TYPE, “Let a Democrat say that an executive with 2 years of experience and no foreign policy expertise isn’t ready for the presidency. Oh pretty please. Because you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take that soundbite, put it in an ad, slap Obama’s mug up there, and run it over and over and over again.”

  Because Palin has exactly as much experience as Obama–arguably more, since she’s an executive. The only difference is that she isn’t running for president.

  Now that I think about, I wonder if that’s part of the purpose of nominating Palin. Many of the non-policy issues Obama can criticize her for will open him up to some potential gaffes that can be turned around on him.

• She’s anti-choice, she supports drilling, she supports [insert generic conservative opinion here]. This seems to be the oddest criticism coming from the left. They act as though the fact that she’s conservative is somehow going to hurt her. She’s running as a Republican. Generally, they’re helped by being Conservative. At the very least, she won’t hurt by it any more than any of McCain’s other potential VP choices would have been.

• She’s a celebrity! Obama supporters seem to be latching onto the fact that Palin once appeared on a Vogue magazine cover and was in the running for the Miss Alaska title to indicate that her celebrity should somehow counter McCain’s “criticism” of Obama’s celebrity status. The problem is that the McCain campaign hasn’t criticized Obama for being a celebrity. The McCain campaign has criticized Obama for being just a celebrity with little else going for him, a man with little-to-no experience that would qualify him to be President (see above).

• She’s a woman. I’ve seen some disgusting sexist comments about her from some people already (particularly in the WV Gazette comment section, where I can’t really look at the commenters’ histories to tell you if they’re leftist or not). I have no more concern about her gender than I have about Obama’s race, but there are (relatively) reasonable people who have questions about whether the nation is ready for a female VP, but I don’t think that’s a huge issue.

• Biden will tear her apart in a debate. She’s won a couple of elections, so she’s probably not a stranger to debates, and she seems to handle herself well in front of people. Make sure she’s really got the issues and facts down, and she may be able to handle herself just fine. It’s not like Biden is completely reliable when speaking off the cuff. Remember that this is the man who told an Indian-American supporter that, in Delaware, “you CANNOT go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent … I’m not joking.”

I think, overall, that Palin’s reputation for fighting corruption even in her own party and her conservatism is a boon for the McCain campaign, and I’m looking forward to seeing her in campaign events and debates. Maybe her performance will be as poor as Obama supporters hope, but this is the first time the McCain campaign has really gotten my attention this cycle, and I think it’s a good move.

1. Really. Supporters of Obama have claimed that his trip to foreign countries “countered” McCain’s criticism of his lack of experience, which I discussed in my final paragraph of this post. [back]

Megan McArdle writes, in her post “Of online debate and hidden agendas,” that she’s probably going to vote for Obama, but she’s not happy about it:

Both Obama and McCain supporters seem convinced that my every utterance on the topic is part of my not-so-hidden agenda to undermine their candidate. I have no hidden agenda. My agenda is out-front and open; I’ll probably vote for Obama, but not with any expectation that I’ll like the result very much. I am not excited about this election. I do not believe that my vote is going to immanentize the eschaton. I do not think that I am engaged in a titanic battle, in which the forces of good must beat back the cosmic evil that threatens to engulf us all. I think I’m deciding which of two politicians to hand a lot of power I don’t want either of them to have.

Emphasis mine.

I was, quite honestly, prepared to vote for whomever the Democratic party nominated this year, assuming it wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Not because I expected to like them much, but because I can’t bear the thought of “President McCain.” As I’ve mentioned before, I thought a Clinton/McCain race would be a Worst Case Scenario.

The more I learn about Barack Obama, though, I’m not sure that Clinton would’ve been a worse choice. I’m getting less and less excited about this election as it approaches, because both candidates are atrocious. I don’t want either of them to win, but, come election day, I may have to break my own promise, hold my nose, and vote for McCain. He is, after all, the least repulsive Democrat running.

The smoking ban here in Kanawha County is now about six weeks old, and some bar owners are thumbing their noses at the law. Good for them. Their complaints center around the facts that they’ve lost business due to the new regulations, and that the regulations are being inconsistently enforced, which gives some competitors an unfair advantage.

Those are both valid arguments, but I have a different one. Besides the violations of property rights (which I discussed here), the ban is completely inconsistent with its stated purpose.

Allegedly, the ban was put in place to protect non-smokers in these establishments from the dangers of second-hand smoke. This is an extremely ineffectual way to do that. Bar patrons are a self-selecting group of people^[1]. They choose to enter these bars, and could just as easily choose not to do so (or to go to a bar that didn’t allow smoking, for that matter). Therefore, it is a fact that anyone exposed to smoke inside a bar chose to put themselves in a situation where they would likely be exposed to second hand smoke.

Where do smokers who are now banned from smoking in bars go? To the streets, where they are no longer in the presence of their self-selected group of alcohol-imbibing compatriots, but instead they now expose individuals who didn’t choose to enter a bar, but simply to walk down the street. We’ve protected the bar patrons at the expense of everyone else.

This is like protecting workers in a nuclear power plant from radiation by removing all the radioactive material from the plant and placing it in the middle of Central Park. Sure, the workers are safer, but everyone else is screwed.

Obviously, the Health Department’s policy is not consistent with their philosophy. Assuming I agree with their philosophy^[2]. I would like to propose a philosophically consistent smoking policy. Instead of banning smoking in private businesses that are open to the public, we ban smoking in the following places:

• Public^[3] buildings
• Private buildings whose owners choose not to allow smoking
• Outdoors on public^[3] property.

Under my proposal, any business that serves the public and chooses to allow smokers must make that fact known, preventing any non-smokers from being inadvertently exposed by entering unaware that the business is non-smoking. Private home and land owners are perfectly welcome to smoke to their hearts content on their own land.

My policy would actually do what the health department claims it’s trying to do. But, of course, the Health Department isn’t interested in actually helping protect non-smokers. It is a branch of the government, and is therefore devoted solely to controlling the nation’s citizens and turning them into its Subjects.

1. I would guess that they’re a self-selecting group of people with a higher percentage of smokers than the group that doesn’t patronize bars, but I have no statistics to back that up. [back]
2. Actually, I do sort of agree with the basic philosophy. Non-smokers should be able to avoid being exposed to second-hand smoke by taking reasonable precautions, such as avoiding bars where smoking is permitted [back]
3. ”Public”, in this case, is intended to mean “owned or maintained by the people” (that is, the government). [back] [back]

The other forty-seven percent are idiots.

I’m not much of a people-person. I generally like people when I get to know them individually, but when I’m out in public, it just seems like most people exercise so much selfish stupidity on a regular basis that I catch myself saying that I hate people pretty much every time I leave the house^[1]. This is something that I know runs counter to Christ’s teachings, and is something that I’ve been actively praying about recently.

This doesn’t help.

Nearly half of all Americans support the “Fairness” Doctrine, which would require television & radio stations to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints on the air. That’s bad enough, but even worse is the fact that 31% believe that the same thing should be true of websites.

Forty-seven percent of Americans believe that radio stations should be forced to air opposing commentary out of some bizarre sense of “fairness”. That means that 47% of Americans believe that anyone who owns a radio station should not be allowed to choose what their radio station airs. Suppose you own a radio station, and you have a talk show whose host spends a half an hour proclaiming that Jeffrey Dahmer was a bad guy. Assuming the “Fairness” Doctrine was put into place again, you would then have to devote a half an hour of broadcast time extolling Mr. Dahmer’s virtues, no matter how disgusted you might be at expressing those opinions (or how much advertising money you might lose while airing the unpalatable opinions).

As for the nonsense about requiring websites to obey the fairness doctrine, I pay for this website, and I make absolutely no bones about the fact that, while I usually do give some data in defense of my opinions, the purpose of this website is for me to express my opinions. I will not pay to allow someone else to express an opinion opposite to mine simply to obey some moron’s bizarre philosophy of “fairness”^[2].

1. My usual line is, “I like persons, but hate people,” kind of like Tommy Lee Jones’s line in Men In Black: “A person is smart. People are stupid.” [back]
2. I might, however, allow someone else to express opinions opposite to mine on this site for other reasons. There are a good number of people whose political opinions differ from mine who would be more than welcome to write a post here should they ever wish to do so, but that has more to do with my personal respect for those individuals than out of any desire to be “fair.” [back]

As you may recall, I was once informed that I am a horrible excuse for a human being because I opposed the minimum wage. Apparently, the fact that I would prefer people to actually have jobs made me a bad person.

Who’d've thunk it?

Wife and I were discussing Obama’s energy plan yesterday evening, and I mentioned that he wanted to drain Crude Oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She immediately went to the same place I did: “That’s like spending our emergency fund for no good reason.”

That is, of course, exactly what Obama’s plan (and a similar plan that’s been mentioned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) is. Beldar has more, including a vivid description of the reasons why the Reserve was created in the first place (and an explanation about why Obama’s aides’ “explanation” of his plan doesn’t really make it any less risky).

Many Americans, I fear, won’t really understand how dangerous this plan is. After all, there is a huge block of our populace who feel there is no need for an emergency fund — and, this time last year, I was one of them. These people assume that the money will keep flowing, that because they can make the payments (assuming everything remains the same), they can simply ignore the need to have anything socked away for a rainy day.

It’s my understanding that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were exactly this sort of Americans. Despite having had the income of two Harvard-educated lawyers, Michelle has said publically that they were “struggling” until Barack’s book deal went through. Given that their incomes were probably higher than that of my wife and I (and I would not classify us as “struggling” by any means, though we’re far from rich), the only reason^[1] that I can think of that they would be struggling is that they weren’t managing their money well.

I’m not trying to denigrate the Obamas for their money management abilities — I am well known among my friends for having lousy money-management abilities — but two lawyers (especially Harvard educated lawyers, one of whom graduated magna cum laude) who are struggling to make it (and, apparently, only succeeded because one of them got a lucrative book deal) do seem to have some resource management issues.

With that in mind, it comes as no huge surprise that Obama’s “energy plan” involves burning off a portion of our reserves to get immediate relief without a backup plan^[2] to restore the reserves. Obama’s long-term solution is also reflected in his money management skills of the past — he wants to research alternate energy and hope we find a solution quickly. In other words, he’s hoping for a windfall to save us.

The rational approach here is not to ignore research into alternative energy sources, but to do such research responsibly. We should not turn our backs on energy sources that we know are available (drilling in locations where oil is available and accessible, build nuclear power plants), as those sources are going to have to carry us until our research pans out.

Still, as Obama himself has pointed out many times before, these sources are not going to pan out immediately — we need the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to get us through any rough times we may encounter before we’re ready to move away from oil completely. To suggest that we should drain them now to lower gas prices in the short term is simple irresponsibility from the Obama campaign, and is little more than a thinly disguised bid to “buy” votes.

1. Actually, I can think of a second reason — Michelle was lying about “struggling” in order to seem as though she could empathize with the average American. I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt in assuming that she was telling the truth. [back]
2. i.e., drilling in locations where we are reasonably certain that there are accessible oil supplies [back]

I don’t like McCain, and have absolutely no intention of ever voting for him (he put his name on the McCain-Feingold “Screw the First Amendment” Act, so he’s persona non grata to me), but this seems pretty flimsy:

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

The attack on Harold Ford, as far as I can tell, centered around his playboy reputation. The interpretation of it being racist seems to have been centered around “pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.” That’s not anything I would’ve called racism, but I’m kind of oblivious to most racial stereotypes, so maybe it’s more overt than I realize.

Contrast that to McCain’s ad. Here’s the summary from the NY Times piece linked above:

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The McCain ad doesn’t even have the pre-existing prejudices mentioned above to make it seem racist. Instead, according to the New York Times, it is racist because it is “similar” to an ad that was racist. The Times can’t even explain why the ad is racist on its own merits, so instead, they use the alleged racism of another ad that is completely unrelated except that white women happen to be featured in both ads.

This is similar to saying that every member of the KKK breathes, therefore anyone who breathes is racist. It’s farcical — and this is supposed to be one of the most influential newspapers in the world? Please.

The problem here is that the charge of Obama’s inexperience and lack of substance is pretty hard to defend against, so the Times has to come up with something to counter it. That they’re stretching themselves this far shows exactly how vulnerable Obama is to this sort of criticism.

Not that that will stop the Times (and most other mainstream media outlets) from fawning over Obama. After all, he took a whirlwind tour of a few nations and, according to many journalists, this somehow “countered” McCain’s accusation of Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. I’ve been out of the country, but that doesn’t mean I have any experience building policy for relations between the United States and Mexico.

In 2006, the FBI got a search warrant and searched the office of William Jefferson (D-LA), looking for evidence in their investigation into whether he had accepted bribes. This sparked a huge firestorm, with legislators claiming that the separation of powers principle (and the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constutition) made such a search illegal. Ultimately, the search was deemed illegal, and Representative Jefferson was allowed to look through the materials taken and decide which “pertained to his work as a legislator^[1].”

Before the three-judge appelate court overturned his decision, though, Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled that the search was legal (this wasn’t particularly surprising, since he issued the warrant). In his ruling, Hogan explained why he felt the search was legal:

“If there is any threat to the separation of powers here, it is not from the execution of a search warrant by one co-equal branch of government upon another, after the independent approval of the third separate, and co-equal branch,” he wrote. “Rather, the principle of the separation of powers is threatened by the position that the legislative branch enjoys the unilateral and unreviewable power to invoke an absolute privilege, thus making it immune from the ordinary criminal process of a validly issued search warrant.”

Emphasis Mine

That sounds pretty solid to me, and I like the idea that two branches of the government have the power to investigate the third much more than I like the idea that members of the legislative branch are, essentially, immune to prosecution (or, at least, immune to having evidence gathered from their workplace), regardless of how many other branches of the government might suspect something fishy is going on.

Keep that in mind when you read this article, which details a vote to cite Karl Rove for Contempt of Congress. The White House claims that Congress has no authority to force employees to testify. Democratic Congressmen, obviously, disagree.

Let’s review. According to Democrats, the executive and judicial branches, together, do not have the authority to actively investigate corruption in the legislative branch. On the other hand, if anyone from the executive branch declines to roll over and confess to whatever the hell they want him to^[2], the legislative branch can cite them for committing a crime.

UPDATE: Big Lizards has more on the same topic:

That, of course, is just how the Democrats see things… today. But a few short years ago, when they were in the White House and the GOP controlled both chambers on Capitol Hill, they had a very different idea: They believed that the Executive should be supreme, and the Legislature and Judiciary subservient. President Bill Clinton repeatedly invoked “executive privilege” to shield his administration and especially himself from congressional scrutiny.

The unbroken thread that connects these two positions is that Democrats believe they, as a party, should always command all power in the United States, while their “enemies” (the Republicans) should be utterly impotent. By contrast, Republicans have consistently argued that no branch should be superior to the others; that the Founders were right to make the branches coequal… and they should stay that way.

Read the whole thing.

1. Needless to say, anything that evidenced bribery would certainly have pertained to his work as a legislator, so the ruling effectively removed any evidence that the FBI could have found from any court proceedings. [back]
2. Note that Rove has testified, and flatly denies that he was involved in any of these decisions by the Justice department [back]

Steve H. on the Los Angeles ban on new fast food restaurants:

This ban is blatantly racist. Once again, leftists are showing us they think minority members are too stupid to take care of themselves, and because leftists lack the ability to perceive their own faults, they don’t even realize they’re doing it. If a leftist does a thing, it can’t be racist. You have to wonder how far that principle can be pushed. Maybe in a few years, black people and Mexicans in Los Angeles will be required to turn in their driver’s licenses, so they can lose weight by walking. Hey, it would be healthy. And think of the lives that would be saved, because fewer drivers will be on the road, having accidents.

…

Liberals think “the soft racism of lowered expectations” is a canard. They think it’s something conservatives say in order to avoid helping minorities. And regrettably, a small faction of true racist idiots infests the political right, and sometimes their set of hateful, stupid ideas intersects with the well-intended set of ideas of the conservative mainstream. But overall, conservatives are sincere and right when they say the left treats minorities like children or as if they’re slightly retarded.

Quick aside: Steve goes on to point out that fast food restaurants are the ones that serve food that lower income individuals can afford, but there’s another problem — this ban will keep jobs out of the area, too. Maybe they’re not the best jobs, but it’s not like keeping out fast food restaurants will suddenly make a bunch of other jobs spring to life in these areas.

Back on topic, this sort of racism is, in my opinion, more dangerous than the more “traditional” form of racism, because the people engaging in it are, for the most part, honestly trying to help. They just don’t see that their attempts to help are extremely condescending and pretty counterproductive, besides. This form of racism is extraordinarily insidious, and that’s something we need to be extremely careful about.

As I’ve said here many times in the past, I’m a big fan of Dafydd ab Hugh’s Big Lizards blog. Perhaps it’s because I share his cynicism about politicians.

In a post from Sunday, Dafydd writes about Obama’s Wailing Wall prayer and its subsequent release by an Israeli newspaper:

Having read the so-called prayer, I am completely convinced that Obama fully intended for it to be “intercepted” and published… and may even have arranged for it. The “prayer” is impersonal and vague, yet contains the perfect code phrase designed to help Obama with evangelicals; I do not entertain the slightest doubt that he wanted it to be published — and published in a way that makes him out to be the “victim” of a spiteful invasion of his privacy. (In fact, Maariv says that the Obama campaign itself released the prayer to the media before the supposed theft.)

I’m agnostic, and it still infuriates me.

The whole thing is worth a read.

If Obama’s prayer was sincere, then whoever stole and released it should be ashamed. On the other hand, if he went out there with the intent of making it public, he should be ashamed.