Feature of the Week
This week let’s spotlight the Architect of W Unleashed – the Sequel. Karl.
11.27.04 @ 08:07 PM EDT [link]

How to Talk to a Dittohead (If You Must)
With Turkey Day, the holiday season is upon us. This means that we’ll be standing around kitchens for the next month discussing politics. Speaking theoretically, some of you may encounter Dittoheads (I say theoretically because I don’t want to imply that anyone I’m talking to at one of my family get-togethers is of that ilk)! So we’ll just say that the law of averages will mean that a certain number of you will find yourselves hearing lines straight from the Rush Limbaugh show at family holiday parties. Politics seems to be a particularly frequent topic at such gatherings. (It doesn’t seen to be nearly as prevalent at company parties, for example). On top of this, there’s Ann Coulter’s new book. No way I’d enlarge her bank account by actually buying it, but Amazon had lots of interesting details. For example, she apparently offers the following advice about Talking to Liberals: “don't be defensive, always outrage the enemy, and never apologize to, compliment, or show graciousness to a Democrat.” Reflecting on these words, I realized that’s pretty much how I feel about that class of people whose sanctimoniousness, self-absorption, and enormous greed are putting at risk America’s hard-won moral stature and concern for posterity. So let’s take a week or so to turn the tables on Ann by offering some pointers on How to Talk to a Dittohead (If you Must), one topic at a time!
11.27.04 @ 12:53 PM EDT [link]

Bouncing the Reality Check
An issue left over from the election in danger of getting lost to history is the concept of the “global test.” Rove jumped on Kerry’s coinage of this term during the debates so that it became a sneering laugh line in every Bush appearance from that point on. Kerry himself never really defended it. I myself thought he was on to something. Here’s my take on what a global test is: “if people around the globe are screaming about something you are doing, maybe you ought to take another look at it.” This is no different from reconsidering a personal action if your family and friends universally advise you that something you’re doing is a bad idea. There are not-so-nice names for people who ignore that kind of advice. Any policy needs a reality check, and feedback is one of the best reality checks going. In the foreign policy arena, the opinions of foreign leaders and foreign citizens are absolutely relevant. Consider the words in the Declaration of Independence that reference “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” This is particularly true where warfare is involved! Unfortunately, the Bush Administration is faith-based rather than reality-based, so it has no interest in reality checks. If Bush cared about reality checks he wouldn’t be packing his administration with yes men. When you don’t have a mechanism for reality checking, you get re-enrolled in the school of hard knocks. What sort of hard knocks can a country get by having no respect for the opinions of mankind? Here’s a data point: US brands like Disney and Gap have seen huge declines overseas. But that’s not really the issue. It’s not that thumbing your nose at the rest of the world, ignoring unanimous and strongly expressed opinion, is bad for business. The real danger is that they just might be right.
11.25.04 @ 10:07 PM EDT [link]

Happy Thanksgiving!
That’s all. Have a great one! I’ll be giving thanks that my site traffic report tells me that there are people who apparently find some value in these musings. Thanks to all for your kind attention!
11.24.04 @ 10:12 PM EDT [link]

Litmus Test? How About Spongeworthiness?
I read a great piece by columnist Ann Woolner that few people have seen because it was on a relatively exclusive service. I�ll spotlight the key ideas. She opened the piece with a reference to Estelle Griswold, a 61 year old from Haven, Connecticut when she was arrested in her office. Her crime? Helping married people to get contraceptives. This happened in 1961. She and her co-defendant, Dr. Charles Lee Buxton, had been operating the Planned Parenthood Center of New Haven. Note that this Center counseled only married women. The case produced Griswold v. Connecticut, where the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that people have a constitutional right to privacy in the marital bed, even though the Constitution doesn't exactly say so. This is a great example of a right that could well be lost if Bush is successful in packing the Supreme Court with ideologues like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Another is the constitutional right of parents to educate their children as they see fit, a right also not spelled out in the Constitution. Scalia and Thomas are dangerous to all of the liberties the court has �discovered� over the last several centuries because 1) They supposedly see no constitutional rights not spelled out in the Constitution and 2) They have no respect for Stare Decisis. This is a Latin term meaning �old decision� (always knew that high school Latin course would be good for something some day!) The relevance to the Supreme Court is that it is a fundamental principle of American justice that once a court decides an issue, it sets a precedent that must be respected by all future courts (always knew that Firstie Constitutional Law course would pay off some day!) The alternative is chaos, where litigants are encouraged to bring contentious issues back to the courts until they get the answer they want. Only in the most extreme circumstances does the Supreme Court reverse a previous decision. One example was that of Dredd Scott, the very citation that Bush made in the debate when asked about how he would make Supreme Court decisions. The irony of all of this is that the original Dred Scott decision, which upheld the Constitution�s explicit language condoning slavery, is an example of what happens when the Constitution is interpreted according to strict constructionism. It produces results that everyone knows to be out of touch with reality, like suddenly making it illegal to use contraceptives or educate your children the way parents would like. Bush certainly doesn�t want the latter to go away (which is why I used the word �supposedly� above). So here�s how it might play out. He and his �strict constructionist� ilk want to have their cakes and cookies too, redoing 200 years of Supreme Court decisions as if they had been making the rulings all along. The result, of course, would be keeping the rulings they like and dumping the ones they don�t. So, like Elaine on Seinfeld, maybe it�s time to start hoarding those contraceptive sponges!
11.23.04 @ 09:08 PM EDT [link]

Harvest Time for the Low Hanging Fruit
The period immediately following an election is a special time for political humor engineers. As Maverick said in Top Gun, “It’s a target rich environment!” This is the time that the lame duck Congress can finally pass the “stinkers.” These are the bills that reinforce the pretensions, inconsistencies, and general dysfunction of their august body. These are the bills they don’t show the light of day in the run-up to the election for fear of giving the other side even more to chew on. This is also the very best time to take any knocks from the public, who are generally sick of politics. And, if you’re going to take knocks, it’s best to take them early, and the lame duck session before the next Congress is the best possible time. Before I get into the current bumper crop of stinkers, though, let me take a moment to count my blessings. This is a mellow time for political bloggers. In the frenzied days before the election, political ads provide a virtually infinite source of material. Then there are the shenanigans from the elections themself, which seem to get more shenan-e with each new spin. Then come the stinkers. It’s like that bountiful period between Thanksgiving and New Years, except it starts months earlier! Anyway, we’ve got some particularly ripe stinkers this year. Frequent readers of this humble site will doubtless have already guessed my favorite. It’s of course the ritual of The Raising of the Federal Debt Ceiling. Since Bush, these have been as steady as tides (that only go up, of course) and as common as barn raisings in Amish country. Here’s the latest limit, in dollars and sense (for the sheer drama of all those zeros): $8,200,000,000,000.00. Considering that there are only 80 million households, that means that the share each household will have of this debt when it inevitably reaches this limit and is raised in the next stinker session is: $102,500. How about we all just front this amount now, thus missing out on the extra interest we’ll have to pay (probably equal to the principal amount) if we let it hang out there?
11.22.04 @ 07:51 PM EDT [link]