Author: RB

— Live from the WTC has some interesting remarks in the accounting scandals:

A brief survey of left and right accounting-savvy people I know shows that every single one of them wants reform, and none of them have the faintest clue as to how to implement it.

I’ve now heard Democrats blaming Bush’s allegiance to his fat-cat oil company buddies for all of this, as well as Republicans blaming Clinton’s flimsy morals. Let’s get real: these things happened on Clinton’s watch, and he had the same incentives working for him that the accountants had working for them, a need to create the illusion of a strong economy. My take on all of this is that we need to enforce existing law, which should be obvious. If we do that, and it doesn’t work, then we can look for more onerous remedies.

The odd part of this business is that it makes bean-counters look kind of glamorous, like the dope dealers of the 21st Century, living large outside the law. Who woulda thought?

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a name for herself in Bush v. Gore by writing “I dissent” instead of “I respectfully dissent,” but many gave her a pass owing to the short time she had to write a polite and polished dissent. In the recent REPUBLICAN PARTY OF MINNESOTA ET AL. v. WHITE, CHAIRPERSON, MINNESOTA BOARD OF JUDICIAL STANDARDS, ET AL. she shows her bitchy and mean-spirited nature again, this time using out-of-context quotations from public statements made by Justices Scalia and Rehnquist to show them up as hypocrites on the issue of muzzling judges. These statements don’t address any underlying legal principles, and simply serve to show that she’s a harpy and not a team player. The woman is threat to our democracy.

— Why the Voucher Issue Really Could Hurt the Dems – A dissent?from last week’s instant contrarianism By Mickey?Kaus takes apart hard-line Democrat fantasies comparing school choice to abortion, on the political side:

What commentators did say was that the voucher decision was a boost for vouchers, which seems undeniably true. (Even if vouchers don’t spread very rapidly, it has to help that they are now a constitutional possibility. Roe may have hurt liberals, but it’s hard to argue it didn’t increase abortions.)

Democrats are indeed vulnerable on school choice, as soon as voters understand the issue, which they don’t yet, as a whole. Inner-city blacks and rural religious whites do, because they face the hard, entrenched incompetence of the teachers’ union, but most middle-class, urban whites are blissfully ignorant of the declining quality of the schools. Democrats are wholly-owned by the teachers’ union, and they can’t afford to alienate them, while the children getting sub-standard education don’t vote.

Education in America is so bad we’d be in an economic tailspin if it weren’t for the first-generation immigrants who make our tech sector work; as soon as the “Occupied” sign goes on over our immigration policy, we’ll see that.

— Salon.com Politics | Bush resumes power after colonoscopy

Bush transferred the powers of the presidency at 7:09 a.m. EDT, Fleischer said. Anesthesia was administered and the procedure was completed at 7:29 a.m.
Fleischer said “the president awoke”at 7:31 a.m. At 9:24 a.m., he resumed powers.

It’s not clear if The President has been informed about the pre-emptive strikes that were launched while he was under, or if the aliens are now satisfied with their information about his anus.

— According to the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, I’m a centrist leaning slightly more to the left than the right. The quiz was put together by a libertarian organization, of course, one that wants you to base your politics on Hollywood values. Scientology uses an ersatz IQ test to aid in recruiting fresh meat, too; the more lost people get, the more we love self-defining tests.