A man, a plan, a canal, Panama
Of all the issues, and all the debate, and all the faction wrangling this party has seen this year, I find it appropriate that the evaluation of each candidate is still boiling down to the same single issue. It was a core issue of our party in the 1990s, and for a while I thought it was gone. But it’s back, and this year it’s the decider.
Republicans are looking at each candidate’s statements of positions, but ultimately are deciding whether to trust those statements based on their evaluations of the candidate’s character, and I’m glad of it.
Character counts as much as ever.
Consider Rudy Giuliani. Taken at his word, by virtue of good timing the man would do more to fight abortion than any Republican President since Roe v. Wade by appointing a fifth and possibly a sixth justice to the Supreme Court who would stay true to the Constitution. He also claims he would continue various executive actions opposed to abortion. And yet, despite these promises that he would deal with abortion essentially as President Bush has done, he is despised by many anti-abortion activists.
Why? Many just don’t trust him. They look at his personal life, and they openly question whether he can be trusted in public life more than he’s shown he can be trusted in private life.
Look at Mitt Romney. On issue after issue, the former Governor has staked out positions that place him to the right of his competition. And yet, despite setting himself up as a frontrunning conservative, the man faces strong opposition from many conservative sources.
Why? Given the way he ran for the Senate in the past, his run now just leaves some Republicans with the feeling that he’s as trustworthy as a slimy car salesman. “What will it take to get you into this car today?” he might as well be asking them, when he asks for support.
Similiar stories can be told for other candidates. John McCain is branded unstable and pandering, Mike Huckabee soft and corrupt, and Fred Thompson lazy and superficial. And yet, on the issues, all of these candidates have strengths, especially where others have weaknesses. But because Republicans are looking at character first, they never get far enough to evaluate those policies.
Character counts, and while I make no claims here about who is right and who is wrong on which candidates can be trusted, I’m glad the party still works that way. The last thing we need to happen is to let our own Bill Clinton get into office, and let his personal faults distract his administration from the security of the nation.
According to a Washington Times/Rasmussen poll, 40% of Americans would vote simply to keep Senator Clinton from winning the Presidency, including 17% of Democrats. No other candidate came close in that kind of personal opposition.
Yeah, you can still count me as rooting for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.
Building a static Qt with -qt-jpeg silently fails to include JPEG support.
Here’s a little command that’s just vital for efficient use of apps like Gimp and Inkscape on the Mac:
defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true
By default quartz-wm swallows the first click on a window, the one that gives the window focus. Real Mac apps can control that behavior, but obviously X11 apps can’t, even when they are toolbar windows that really, really need to accept the first click in order not to be terribly frustrating to use.
I can’t believe I actually went two years before breaking down and looking up how to do this.
The Dodgers can quit their carping now, as they have signed free agent pitcher Hiroki Kuroda of the Hiroshima Carp.
Two upgrades (Jones, Kuroda), no young talent traded. I like it. Now let’s just hope some of those young guys really start to hit next year.
Soren Dayton has the story at Red State of how Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, New Hampshire Democrat, is giving taxpayer money to Democrats:
You see, according to the Second Quarter Statement of Disbursements of the House, her Congressional office disbursed $5,000 to the New Hampshire Democratic State Committee (NHDSC). According to the FEC filings of the NHDSC, that was for “Access To The Voter File Maintained By The New Hampshire Democratic State Committee.” The NHDSC “makes a profit” off the list according to an AP story.
In other words, a Democrat member of Congress is using government funds to provide “profit” to a state Democratic Party.
Read the whole thing to find out how Shea-Porter possibly even broke her state’s law over this.
I can’t be sure, but the movement in the last week of the Rasmussen tracking poll looks like a regression to the previous norms, although with a bump for Huckabee:
Yes, Giuliani’s back to his stable quarter of Republicans, and Huckabee has fallen from his brief dalliance over 20%. Romney’s remarkably steady at 13%, Thompson’s back from a one day slide below 10% (his first and only time in single digits, meaning now only Giuliani has not polled that low).
It’s amazing to me how close the pack is staying overall, though. It seems to me that barring some major event, nothing’s going to change until somebody quits, but with everything so close, who’s going to quit?
Oh, and what’s also interesting is that because Giuliani and Huckabee are still moving in opposite directions, it just could be that some voters are shifting from one to the other, then back. Did the reports of Giuliani’s affair being taxpayer funded cause a knee-jerk reaction toward the Baptist minister in the race? Maybe.
I think most of us know about the latest Huckabaloo: Someone (possibly associated with the Romney campaign) dug up a questionnaire Mike Huckabee filled out for a Senate run in 1992, in which he expressed support for a quarantine of AIDS patients. This is supposed to be a big deal because of a couple of points:
- Firstly, a lot of people will be offended by the idea. Essentially locking people up for life because they have an incurable disease, in some cases from birth or through a blood transfusion, bothers many Americans. Especially when Huckabee’s support for quarantines may be perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be rooted in an antipathy for homosexuals, this is a big deal politically.
- Secondly, it shows Huckabee’s ignorance of a major social and scientific issue. By 1992 it was definitively known that AIDS does not spread through casual contact, and certainly not through the air. It must pass through blood or certain other bodily fluids, not including sweat or saliva. Hence it is usually a sexually transmitted disease, making a quarantine a senseless measure.
Has he changed his position since 1992? I should hope so. He’s certainly changed his position on AIDS research to the ‘compassionate conservative’ one, after all. So will this hurt him politically? I think so. Does anyone doubt that Mitt Romney’s positions in 1994 have hurt him politically? I don’t think so, so why should Huckabee be immune?
There will be some people who think Huckabee is moderating his positions on issues like AIDS just to be more electable, the same way some people think Romney is becoming more conservative on issues like abortion to be more nominatable. And it’s perfectly fair for Huckabee to have to deal with that.
At least he’s not being unfairly tagged as lazy.
Etrian Odyssey. Etrian Odyssey sounds very nice. Atlus seems like a very nice publisher.
I mean come on: making your own map with graph paper on the DS screen? That’s just classic.
Via Slashdot Science I found this article summarizing analyses of the latest Russian election. If this is even news, then clearly someone came up with some signs of fraud, and it shouldn’t be any surprise which political party got the benefits of this alleged fraud…
The most striking image plots the percentage of the vote each party got in various districts against the turnout in that district.
Most parties have a slightly negative correlation, but one party has a correlation of 0.9: United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s party.
Combined with this, one finds out precisely how this fraud took place, too, when one looks at this next chart, plotting turnout rate against the rate of invalid ballots, a plot which interestingly slopes downward, when we have no reason to believe that fewer people will make voting errors in districts with higher turnout:
(Chart by Joseph Petviashvili)
If all this is true, it’s hard to believe that something odd didn’t happen. When the United Russia operatives were generating ballots and injecting them into the system, they forgot to find out what the standard invalid ballot rate was and duplicate that!
Russia’s election was likely illegitimate. I now join the calls for US policy with respect to Russia to be adjusted accordingly.
Update: Isn’t it interesting that in this region found by a commenter on Petviashvili’s site (don’t ask me its name; I don’t read Russian), 17,779 people voted, and every single one of them was for United Russia?