Month: November 2004

Unless you live under a stone, you know the Supreme Court heard arguments today on California’s compassionate use marijuana law (which you can read about on Drug War Rant and Volokh and Sollum’s blogs). You may not know that the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi filed an amicus brief in support of the potheads, not that they indulge themselves:

The question presented here is not whether vigorous enforcement of the Nation?s drug laws is good criminal policy. It most assuredly is. The question, rather, is whether the Constitution permits the Federal Government, under the guise of regulating interstate commerce, to criminalize the purely local possession of marijuana for personal medicinal use. It does not.

That’s pretty firm, I’d have to say.

From the left, we have some total bullshit about depleted uranium:

The US has been using depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq. The results, for people in Iraq and American soldiers, are truly terrifying. We’re dispersing this stuff into Iraq’s air, earth, water. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

So it’s not the nicest stuff in the world, but it’s hardly the horror the Left claims it is.

The Atrios blog entry links to a little video that manages to pack more lies in one short message than you’re likely to see anywhere else, including pictures of babies from Nagasaki and victims of Harlequin Syndrome. Per the claim above, note that the isotope of uranium with the long half-life, U238, isn’t significantly* radioactive; the bad one is U235, and its absence from the mix is what distinguishes depleted uranium from the other kind.

And just to prove that the left doesn’t have a lock on lying, check the response from SwiftVet Steve Gardner’s former employer Millenium (who allegedly fired him for his politics). It seems that Mr. Gardner hasn’t been entirely truthful about his termination.

Garbage like this pollutes the political system for all of us. If you can’t make your case without lying, perhaps you have no case to make.

*word added 12/1/04

UPDATE: Here’s what the World Health Organization (hardly a Right-Wing Christian Hate Group) has to say about the effects of DU:

Exposure to uranium and depleted uranium

* Under most circumstances, use of DU will make a negligible contribution to the overall natural background levels of uranium in the environment. Probably the greatest potential for DU exposure will follow conflict where DU munitions are used.

* A recent United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report giving field measurements taken around selected impact sites in Kosovo (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) indicates that contamination by DU in the environment was localized to a few tens of metres around impact sites. Contamination by DU dusts of local vegetation and water supplies was found to be extremely low. Thus, the probability of significant exposure to local populations was considered to be very low.

* A UN expert team reported in November 2002 that they found traces of DU in three locations among 14 sites investigated in Bosnia following NATO airstrikes in 1995. A full report is expected to be published by UNEP in March 2003.

* Levels of DU may exceed background levels of uranium close to DU contaminating events. Over the days and years following such an event, the contamination normally becomes dispersed into the wider natural environment by wind and rain. People living or working in affected areas may inhale contaminated dusts or consume contaminated food and drinking water.

* People near an aircraft crash may be exposed to DU dusts if counterweights are exposed to prolonged intense heat. Significant exposure would be rare, as large masses of DU counterweights are unlikely to ignite and would oxidize only slowly. Exposures of clean-up and emergency workers to DU following aircraft accidents are possible, but normal occupational protection measures would prevent any significant exposure.

It’s good to get an Iraqi view on some of the mythology that people like Juan Cole are pumping into the culture about Fallujah. It turns out that Cole’s view of Fallujah’s history is the Saddam view, not the academic view. See IRAQ THE MODEL for the real story:

So you can see how conflicting all these info with what the two professors had provided; No revolution inside Fallujah, no bombing at all and not even the leading role they described for the tribes near Fallujah in the revolution that magically turned to be inside Fallujah in their posts. However I agree that history is kind of repeating itself, only with reversed roles. This times it%u2019s some of the Sunnis tribes that are making the mistake of opposing, or better say not doing enough against those who oppose the change.

Anyway, I don’t know which is worse; that the two experts in Arb world didn’t know about Dr. Al Wardi and his writings or that they knew but chose Sadam’s version of Iraq’s history!?

For someone who claims to offer Informed Comment, Cole is very poorly informed.

My old California buddy Stefan Sharkansky has been doing a great job bird-dogging a Washington State governor’s race that’s seen some pretty dubious developments coming out of Democratic Party stronghold King County, home of Seattle. First they find an unexpected cache of 10,000 ballots show up out of the blue in the last few days of the count, and on the last day one of their judges approved 400 invalid absentee and provisional ballots specially rounded-up by the Democratic Party, but the good guy Dino Rossi wins anyway by a margin of 261 votes. An automatic recount ensues in any election this close unless the loser concedes and I don’t much expect that to happen. If Rossi can withstand the dirty tricks, he’s the first Republican governor in 20 years in this state, and he’ll likely be a good one according to those who know him from the state senate.

Congratulations to Governor-elect Rossi and to the Shark for helping to keep the count honest.

Here’s a unique insight into the inner life of progressive Portland from the local freebie:

If there had been a cultural dictionary of Portland during the 1980s, the definition of “Progressives” would have been Steve and Marcia Moskowitz.

He was a brainy Reedie lawyer who left the city attorney’s office to become a top aide to mayor Bud Clark. She was a spunky blue-collar Chicagoan who worked as a city planner. They went to potlucks hosted by the New Jewish Agenda and volunteered for left-leaning causes–hippies who became yuppies without selling out.

In 1992, however, the couple split up. Later that year, Steve began seeing another woman–and Marcia snapped. On Oct. 17, she drove to his Northwest apartment, knocked on his door, pulled out a .22 caliber pistol, and fired four shots into his chest, stomach and groin. Then she knelt over him and fired three more.

“That’s what happens when you shoot a gun,” she told him. He went to the emergency room. She went to jail.

Fourteen years later, Steve has a new calling. He’s now a rabbi at Temple Israel in Long Beach, Calif. He’s also got a new wife, Ana, whom he met at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland. Contacted by WW, he said he still follows local politics but was not eager to discuss the shooting.

Marcia served 18 months behind bars. She, too, has remarried (to Gary Suttenberg, a college friend of her ex-husband’s). After working as union organizer for several years, she is now executive director of the Portland Women’s Crisis Line–a job where, she says, her background is an asset, rather than a liability.

“I tell clients, ‘Right now you may feel like you’ve hit the bottom,'” she says. “‘But you will come up.'”

Marcia’s really in the right line of work, isn’t she?

Sure enough. See Real Clear Politics on the election:

This was the equivalent of The Alamo for the mainstream media. CBS News and the New York Times, and to a lesser extent their colleagues at the other major networks and newspapers, exhausted themselves in a near-pathological desire to remove George W. Bush from office. They know the days of the liberal elites in New York and Washington setting the news agenda for the American people are coming to an end. Which is why they fought so hard to eliminate President Bush and restore a Democrat to the White House.

The Democratic Party and its allies were no less aggressive. George Soros and his billions, the 527’s and their millions, Michael Moore and his propaganda “documentary” – all were thrown at this president in the most comprehensive, coordinated attack ever marshaled to defeat a sitting president.

The Democratic Party registered more voters than ever before, got more people to the polls than any time in history, and far exceeded their numbers and goals. And at the end of the day, it was all for naught. George W. Bush steamrolled to a majority of the vote while picking up 4 critical Senate seats and expanding the GOP’s margin in the House.

This is why the Democrats are apoplectic and find themselves staring into the abyss. They know they gave it everything they had and it wasn’t enough to defeat the Bush Juggernaut. And they know they are left with an empty shell of a party that is unlikely to put together as focused and disciplined an effort any time soon.

So let’s be nice to our lefty friends, they’re in a lot of pain right now.

Aren’t liberal Democrats smarter, cooler, and better-educated than backward Republicans? Probably not, according to the research of law professor Ilya Somin:

Political Knowledge by Strength of Party Identification
2000 National Election Study
Self-Described Party Alignment / Average Political Knowledge Score
(Average number of correct answers on 31 point scale)

“Strong Republican” / 18.7
“Independent-Republican” / 15.7
“Strong Democrat” / 15.4
“Independent-Democrat” / 14.2
“Weak Republican” / 14.1
“Weak Democrat” / 13.3
“Independent-Independent” / 9.5

The political knowledge score is based on a test you can see in this article. Another stereotype bites the dust.

Read The Sore-Loser Party and Bush’s Secularist Triumph.