I want to do something better than hanging out in Boston this winter break. How about Cuba? I hadn't had any good ideas until chatting with a Chilean classmate who described it as a "Martian world" and a "museum" - the 1950's cars, the Caribbean culture, and the desperation that drives a few Cubans crazy enough to attempt the channel to Miami. The cigars, the architecture, the music... sounds like a plan!
Drudge links to a Journal News story about the voting dead. The paper reports on an effective bit of The [Poughkeepsie] Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File."What I want to know is how one can become a Death Master!
A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.Nor is the Death Master nonpartisan:
Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1.But it turns out that being Death Master isn't all it's cracked up to be:
In most cases, instances of dead voters can be attributed to database mismatches and clerical errors. For instance, the Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are not dead.Or, as James Taranto would say, Hilde Stafford is still not dead.
They include Wappingers Falls resident Hilde Stafford, an 85-year-old native of Germany. The master index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997.
"I'm still alive," she said. "I still vote."
In February 2003, a band of Islamic extremists began scouring the desert expanse of southern Algeria for kidnap victims. The sparsely populated region's colored sand dunes and craggy mountains were a magnet for European tourists. Soon, foreigners began to vanish, two or three at a time. Within a month, 32 Europeans...had been rounded up.Cameras pan across the Saharan mountains. They focus on a mysterious desert-dweller esconced in rocks and focusing his telescope on a cloud of dust that eventually disgorges a touring jeep. A few gutteral commands later, guerrillas in cotton robes spring upon the unsuspecting Europeans.The leader of the cell, [Amari] Saifi, was a tall, bearded man who dressed in shabby robes and worn-out sneakers; often he wore black eye makeup to ward off the sun's glare. Known as Abderrazak al-Para, or "the paratrooper," he had deserted from the Algerian army in 1991
Webb’s novels disturbingly and consistently – indeed, almost uniformly – portray women as servile, subordinate, inept, incompetent, promiscuous, perverted, or some combination of these. In novel after novel, Webb assigns his female characters base, negative characteristics. In thousands of pages of fiction penned by Webb, there are few if any strong, admirable women or positive female role models.Global Review declines to link to the complete content, which is essentially porn writing.
Why does Jim Webb refuse to portray women in a respectful, positive light, whether in his non-fiction concerning their role in the military, or in his provocative novels? How can women trust him to represent their views in the Senate when chauvinistic attitudes and sexually exploitive references run throughout his fiction and non-fiction writings?
Cathy Cleaver Ruse, a spokeswoman for Missourians Against Human Cloning, which produced the ad, said the group had Mr. Caviezel say the Aramaic phrase in a contemporary setting but without subtitles "to make the ad a little more intriguing."... "It means 'You betray me with a kiss,' which means Amendment Two is a betrayal because it is deceptive," Ms. Ruse said. "It promises one thing and delivers another."How did they find somebody whose name is almost "Clever Ruse" to pitch this?
I was right in the middle of the Republic, studying for my midterm on Friday. Glaucon and Socrates are discussing their hypothetical "City of Pigs" and dialoguing as follows:What HopeAnne should have learned in her macro class is that greed does not make resources scarce; it makes them abundant....And if we live like that, we'll have a far greater need for doctors than we did before?I wrote in the margins, greed makes resources scarce. A very simple premise from my macro class.
-Much greater.
And the land, I suppose, that used to be adequate to feed the population we had then, will cease to be adequate and become too small. What do you think?
-The same.
Now therefore, our God,the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who keeps covenant and lovingkindness,
Do not let all [our] hardship seem insignificant before You...
However, You are just in all that has come upon us;
For You have dealt faithfully, but we have acted wickedly.
Obama wanders into a casual disquisition about the sluggish nature of democracy. The answer is not even remotely a standard, pretaped political response. He moves through some fairly arcane turf, talking about how political gerrymandering has led to a generation of politicians who come from safe districts where they don't have to consider the other side of the debate, which has made compromise--and therefore legislative progress--more difficult. "That's why I favored Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal last year, a nonpartisan commission to draw the congressional-district maps in California. Too bad it lost." The crowd is keeping up with Obama, listening closely as he segues into a detailed discussion of the federal budget. Eventually, he realizes he has been filibustering and apologizes to the crowd for "making a speech." No one seems to care, since Obama is doing something pretty rare in latter-day American politics: he is respecting their intelligence.While one could accuse TIME's editors of anointing "The Next President" (yes, that's in boldface next to Obama's pic on the cover), it's hard to argue with the choice. The caveat of his new-ness in Washington is already wearing out, having been so early and often invoked. By the time most people begin paying attention in late 2007, Obama's new-ness will be old news.
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!"Global Review isn't yet convinced that Obama can pull Hillary's support, which he'll have to do to win. But we'll watch Deval Patrick's margins in Massachusetts as compared to the pre-election polls; that could give a good indicator of just how much being black helps or hurts a candidate in an old-liberal electorate (the new-liberal electorate of the primary fell all over itself voting for Patrick).
| Rank | Candidate | Chatter | Rank Change |
| R.1 | Sen. John McCain | 1,910 | 0 |
| R.2 | Sen. Bill Frist | 1,360 | +2 |
| R.3 | Sen. George Allen | 1,300 | 0 |
| R.4 | Gov. Mitt Romney | 1,140 | -2 |
| R.5 | Secy. Condoleezza Rice | 604 | +1 |
| R.6 | Rudy Giuliani | 556 | -1 |
| R.7 | Gov. George Pataki | 376 | 0 |
| R.8 | Gov. Jeb Bush | 333 | +1 |
| R.9 | Newt Gingrich | 293 | +1 |
| R.10 | Gov. Mike Huckabee | 232 | -2 |
| R.11 | Sen. Sam Brownback | 153 | +1 |
| R.12 | Sen. Chuck Hagel | 52 | -1 |
| ............... | ............................................... | ....................... | ............... |
| D.1 | Sen. Hillary Clinton | 2,710 | 0 |
| D.2 | Sen. John Kerry | 2,200 | 0 |
| D.3 | Gov. Mark Warner | 1,120 | +2 |
| D.4 | Sen. John Edwards | 1,010 | 0 |
| D.5 | Sen. Barack Obama | 932 | +1 |
| D.6 | Al Gore | 756 | -3 |
| D.7 | Sen. Harry Reid | 553 | +5 |
| D.8 | Howard Dean | 517 | -1 |
| D.9 | Sen. Evan Bayh | 488 | -1 |
| D.10 | Gov. Bill Richardson | 479 | -2 |
| D.11 | Sen. Russ Feingold | 436 | 0 |
| D.12 | Gov. Tom Vilsack | 418 | +1 |
| D.13 | Sen. Joseph Biden | 385 | -3 |
| D.14 | Sen. Christopher Dodd | 354 | +1* |
| D.15 | Wesley Clark | 115 | -1 |
"He realized how hard this was going to be," said one Democratic official, friendly to Mr. Warner. “He’s a great general election candidate, but he thought he would have difficulty winning the primary."The political cynic would take this as code for, "He's still hoping to be vice president", the which is the role Global Review has been predicting for Warner all along. In terms of the Chatter Rankings, this should lead to a spike in Warner's chatter for the upcoming October rankings, as the news cycles through his decision not to run, and then a sharp dropoff in November and December. Global Review will keep tabs on whether he's being talked about as a vice presidential nominee, a role for which he seems uniquely suited among the madding crowd of Democratic hopefuls.
We had received a host of allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use and sale by other pages and House members...So back in the old days, when Congressmen were Congressmen and pages were nervous, they punished felonious pedophiles with the unbearable castigation of... censure?
We found no evidence of widespread sexual misconduct. We did find that Rep. Daniel Crane (R-Ill.) had had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female page and that Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) had sexual relations with a 17-year-old male page and had made advances to other teenage male pages.
When I reported our findings to [Speaker Tip] O'Neill and [Minority Leader Robert] Michel, the dishonor that these members had brought on the House infuriated the two leaders. "Get it out," they said, "and let the committee recommend disciplinary action," which its four Democratic and four Republican members did, unanimously, in July 1983. Crane and Studds were censured by the House. Crane resigned his seat. Studds chose to stay on and was retained in office by his constituents for 13 more years.
A poem for my Dad. Written over breakfast.
Speaker Dennis Hastert...admits his office was told months ago about a friendly, non-explicit 2005 email exchange between Mr. Foley and another page. In that exchange, Mr. Foley had asked the teenager "how old are you now" and requested "an email pic." In our admittedly traditional view, this was odd and suspect behavior, especially because Mr. Foley was well known as a homosexual even if he declined to publicly acknowledge it.Indeed.
But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?
After swift diplomatic consultations, the United States should press for a U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states, collectively or individually. International military pressure would continue until Sudan relented.And here, the Blue Hawks cite an example of the U.S. going forward without UN support. Kosovo, of course! This isn't entirely partisan memory; Kosovo really is a remarkably good analogue for the situation in Darfur.
The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.
If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it.
