I guess I like Norm Coleman well enough, and as a senator he’s preferable to Al Franken in the same way that doing laundry is preferable to being broken on the wheel. But I hope he’s not already in the “let’s say anything to win” phase of his legal challenge:
There can be no count that is accurate or valid when 654 potentially valid absentee votes remain disenfranchised and when some votes are counted twice – leading to a violation of one of the most sacred principles of our constitution – “One person, One vote.”
What? I’ve read the Constitution before, and, contra Earl Warren, it nowhere mentions anything about how many votes each person gets. For the love of Pete, man, this is a race for the US Senate, where a vote in Minnesota is worth almost 7 times as much as a vote in California, but only 1/10th as much as a vote in Wyoming. And hell, the Senate is the club where 41 members can stop the other 59 from getting their way.
So please, Norm, don’t invoke “one man one vote.” If you have legitimate arguments to make about the way the election was handled, I guess go ahead with those if that’s what it takes to keep us from being subjected to Senator Smalley. But if your legal challenge has nothing else to rely on than “one man one vote,” please just call it quits before that phrase inflicts more harm on our constitutional order than it already has.
Now I know all signs point to a stolen election here, (amazing how they quickly forget about Florida) but the fact that EFFING STUART was even withing spitting distance of the US Senate is a travesty of modern politics!!!
Sigh…
Jamie posted this at 6:27 PM EST on Monday, January 5th, 2009 as Uncategorized
To write a highly sarcastic post arguing that the Bush administration has gotten soft in its old age, as evidenced by this article on CNN. “How do we know this family isn’t tied to al Qeada?” I’d write. “Shouldn’t we be willing to ‘take the gloves off’ on these people” I’d ask. “Why don’t we book them a one-way ticket to Cuba where they can enjoy an all-expenses-paid stay at Club Gitmo until this situation is, uh, resolved?” I’d suggest.
Unfortunately, such a post would be in extremely poor taste. What’s more, at least one commentator wouldn’t get the joke and would make some snidely approving post. I have no interest in reading that post and am, hence, refraining.
The Prophet applies broken window policing to geopolitics:
The solution, it largely turned out, wasn’t to become more tolerant of criminality by recasting it as a cultural or lifestyle choice or by invoking root causes (as The New York Times often did), but to become less tolerant of crime. In New York, turnstile jumpers, graffiti artists, even the infamous “squeegee men” were treated as the lawbreakers they were. One heartening moral of the story is that sometimes deviancy can be defined back up.
We learned a similar moral after 9/11. For years — starting around the time of Klinghoffer’s murder, as it happens — policymakers in both parties debated how to define terrorism. Is it a law-and-order issue or a military threat? If it’s a military threat, how do we define a “proportionate response” — this legalistic phrase entered the national-security lexicon back then, too. By the end of the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration found the answer in a lawerly kind of proportionality, blowing up empty office buildings as a way to “send a message” in response to attacks on America and her interests.
After 9/11, the gloves were off. The far left beseeched the government to retaliate with, at most, a proportionate response, but no one cared. We toppled the Taliban as a warm-up act. Terrorists weren’t criminals anymore, they were enemy combatants, ineligible for the Geneva Conventions. But the war in Iraq and reports of American zeal in the war on terror have left a sour taste in our mouths. That there have been no terrorist attacks on our soil only bolsters the sense that terrorism is manageable, even banal. Barack Obama leads a counteroffensive from a legal establishment that wants to treat terrorists like any other criminals. Terrorists in Mumbai or Jeddah are little more than the squeegee men of the New World Order.
It’s a great article, even if Goldberg is on the following edge of a few things.
According to the United States Geological Survey, there has been an average of 3051 earthquakes per annum in the United States since 2000.
Also according to the USGS, there have been 901 earthquakes in the United States in the past week. All of these have been relatively small — mostly 1.0 to 2.0s — but the sheer volume is disconcerting. The cluster around Yellowstone is particularly, uh, interesting.
I’m no scientist, but my understanding here is that this is either A) Good because it means that lots of pressure is being released harmlessly, or B) Bad because there’s more pressure than can be let off easily through these earthquakes.
Anyway, I’m going to fill my car’s gas tank, just in case.
Tom posted this at 11:39 PM EST on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 as Science & Evolution
I always believed you were born gay, even before that became the only acceptable opinion on homosexuality.
I now know FOUR gay people who have “gone straight” and married women.
I also know one straight guy who, after a bad break-up with a woman, decided to only date men.
What’s up with that?
Sexual orientation is complicated. My own theory is that it’s shaped both by genes and the environment. One ex-boyfriend of mine has since married a woman; I’ve lost touch with him and have no idea if they’re still together. (No comments from the peanut gallery about how I turned him straight, please. First, I’ve probably heard it already; second, this man had quite a few other issues.) I also dated a transman for a time; when a friend asked me if this made me gay or straight, I suggested that either way I was queer.
I don’t think that “born gay” is the only acceptable opinion on homosexuality, but activists on both sides are intent on framing the issue as either involuntary or voluntary. That something can be complicated is too advanced an idea for the gay and anti-gay rights activist alike.
Hubbard posted this at 1:11 PM EST on Monday, December 29th, 2008 as Here and Queer