Month: July 2002

— This article on California’a Greenhouse Gas Bill is Dan Walters at his best:

Is political hot air a greenhouse gas? This impertinent question flows from the overblown rhetoric that has accompanied the Legislature’s enactment of Assembly Bill 1493, which purports to do something important about “greenhouse gases” and global warming, although exactly what it does is as murky as the skies over Riverside on a hot summer day.

Read the whole thing.

— California’s legislators are diet-crazy (Personal Fat Trimming Preoccupies Lawmakers,) a big change from the good ole days:

Tony Beard, the Senate’s chief sergeant at arms, has seen many trends in his 21 years on the job. In the old days, he recalled, there was an ashtray on every desk, and the only jogging legislators did was “over to the Hotel Senator for a Scotch at 4 o’clock.”

Now it’s surgery, high-protein diets, and carrot sticks. What is the world coming to?

— Speaking of Bush-bashing, protein wisdom does a nice re-write on the latest piece of silliness from Tom Tomorrow and the day after:

Not the drawings so much. To be honest, I kinda like the drawings. But the commentary needed a little bit of tweaking, that’s for sure…

Check it out, and the original as well.

— Writing in the National Post, Matt Welch examines Bush’s eroding popularity, here and abroad:

The rest of the world is understandably more concerned with Washington’s expansion of external power — whether it be Bush’s new vague doctrine of pre-emption, his recent order authorizing CIA agents to kill Saddam Hussein (in self-defence), or his overt pressure on past and upcoming elections in Nicaragua, Slovakia, the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere. And the very real U.S. unilateralism — illustrated this week by its threat to withdraw from UN peacekeeping missions unless Americans receive an exemption from the new International Criminal Court — continues to annoy our long-time allies.

The administration – especially the Justice Department – does seem to be in state of disarray, as we’ve seen by the FBI’s bizarre statements on terrorist Hadayet, the LAX shooter.

— David Broder reflects on voucher implications in Lines Dividing Vouchers:

…I had to concede that the evident failure of many urban bureaucracies — the old welfare system being one notable example and the school system another — might well require traditional liberals to open their minds to the possibility of redrawing the lines between church and state. As I said to him, it was not just Republicans but smart Democrats like Bill Bradley and Joe Lieberman who saw that urban churches with their own day care, anti-drug programs, job training and housing assistance were often achieving greater success than the public agencies that were supposed to serve the same neighborhoods.

Voucher programs are opposed by suburban voters, most Republican, because they stand to erase the distinction between better-performing suburban public schools and worse-performing urban ones. That some public schools are better than others – radically – is the issue that neither these voters nor the teachers’ unions want to talk about. The Bush support for vouchers is politically dangerous, then, because they appeal only to a constituency that the Reps have by default, religious people, and to one they’ll never have, urban Blacks. The voters in play are in the suburbs, where vouchers are, and will remain, poison. So the Bush support for vouchers is either a matter of stupidity or of principle, and given the evident intelligence of Karl Rove, it must be the latter.

Link courtesy of PatioPundit on the RoboPundit feed.

— You’ve probably heard about Algor 2000’s recent attempts to blame his consultants and pollsters for losing the election, which is all kind of a sad, “the buck stops somewhere over there,” attitude. One element of his whining leads me to believe he may not be completely out-of-it, cited by The Prince of Darkness, Bob Novak:

Donna Brazile, the former vice president’s 2000 campaign manager, backed Gore by suggesting he “received some bad advice from some of the consultants.” “What bad advice?” I asked. “The advice not to campaign hard in Tennessee.” The accusation that Gore lost his home state — and therefore the election — because of consultants, ignores the fact Tennessee was delegated to the care of local Democrats. Expenditure of $1 million and a late campaign stop could not endear Gore to his fellow Tennesseeans.

At least Gore (or is it just Brazile?) admits that the critical state was Gore’s home state, Tennessee, rather than Florida. Pragmatic politics says you’ve already lost if you lose your home state and have to depend on winning the state governed by your opponent’s brother.