Category: Politics

Cooper is a leftist of some standing, a former employee of Salvador Allende and a big deal at The Nation. His statement on Gannon should be of great interest to our more intelligent colleagues on the left, so we present it here in its entirety:

YAWN.

I hope that clears things up.

Mickey Kaus makes the million dollar quote about pseudonymous-fake-news-gay-escort-gate:

“Gannon attended White House Christmas parties — but who invited him?” It’s come to this on the left. … P.S.: Don’t hundreds of people get invited to White House Christmas parties? … I mean, Wonkette was there! Who invited her? …

This thing seems awfully personal on David Brock’s part; I wonder if there isn’t a billing dispute somewhere.

Tim Blair has an exclusive on this brilliant plan:

Democrat congressman Maurice Hinchey, speaking on CNN, persists with the idea that Karl Rove devised the fake Rathergate memos:

It doesn’t take an awful lot of imagination if you’re thinking about who it is that might have produced these false documents to try to mislead people in this very cynical way. It would take someone very brilliant, very cynical, very Machiavellian, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with the name of Karl Rove as a possibility of having done that.

Is Karl Rove truly that brilliant? Using contemporaneous reports and several eye-witness sources, this site is able to reconstruct the events of last August at Evil Rove Headquarters, located many miles beneath the earth’s surface:

Click and read, bearing in mind that some people, allegedly brilliant people I might add, won’t see any humor in it.

Harry Reid wouldn’t fudge the numbers, would he? Well, maybe he would, just a little.

Groups that battled each other during the civil war (see a rundown of Syrian ethnic factions for lowdown on Shia, Sunni, Druze, Maronite, and Orthodox Christians) are now united against the Syrian occupiers in Lebanon:

After meeting on Friday in a Beirut hotel, they urged the Lebanese people to back a peaceful “independence uprising” – using the word intifada in Arabic, the first time they had used the term.

They also called for parliament to suspend all debate unrelated to the assassination until the truth about who killed former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri emerged.

“This isn’t just the opposition,” Druze leader Walid Jumblatt earlier told reporters. “All the Lebanese are with al-Hariri, a free Lebanon and [a] Syrian withdrawal.”

If this continues, we could see the restoration of democracy in Lebanon without an invasion. The neo-cons are right, freedom is contagious. Next thing we know it will come to Iran, and then the sky’s the limit.

Meanwhile, the American left obsesses over gay prostitutes.

Lebanon link via Instapundit, who’s in the hospital with his woman, poor dear.

And it’s not at all bad.

Here in Washington we’ve got somebody sitting in the governor’s office who may very well not have won the election. Her alleged margin of victory was 129 votes, and there were several eyebrow-raising events in the course of the election and the subsequent counts and recounts.

For one thing, a batch of 400+ provisional ballots was counted before verification of eligibility, in a county that went for the alleged victor. There’s a discrepancy of 1800+ between the number of voters who signed-in at the polls and the number of ballots cast. There were at least 8 batches of ballots found after the initial count was finished on, most of which weren’t properly secured. A number of dead people are known to have voted, as well as a number of felons.

Consequently, this contest cries out for a close examination and a proper hearing of the evidence. It may very well be — I think it’s likely — that the election results should be set aside and a re-vote held with adult supervision.

But this is a scary prospect to a small but vocal minority of Washingtonians terrified with the knowledge that their fellow citizens chose a Republican governor, so they’re stonewalling like mad and doing all they can to whip up partisan resentment over the hearing due the people who voted for the alleged loser.

Part of this obfuscation comes from practitioners of dodgy math, and part from practitioners of dodgy law. Here are a couple of clues for my colleagues:

1. In statistics, two sources of uncertainty don’t cancel each other out, they add.

2. Statute isn’t the sum of law, it’s the beginning. Precedent, case law, and common law are the rest. When a statute says “but not limited to” it means it, and “illegal” is not a term of art.

Oddly, the people who are screaming the loudest that there’s nothing to see in this election by way of fraud are the same ones who complained non-stop from 2000 to the present about the presidential race in Florida in 2000. I think we all know what that means.

Sound Politics has unearthed a mountain of circumstantial evidence to the effect that votes were manufactured in Seattle. We need to find out if there is more than the appearance of fraud. Neither side should be afraid of the truth, unless they have something to hide.

Victor Davis Hanson wasn’t real impressed with Barbara Boxer’s showboating at the Condi Rice confirmation hearing:

Democratic idealism that once alone gave the nation its needed social safety net, civil rights legislation, and environmental protection is becoming ossified and in danger of ensuring a permanent party of strident second-guessing and deductive furor at the loss of almost all political power. A majority of the state legislatures and governorships is lost. The Senate is lost. The House is lost. The Presidency is lost – the Supreme Court almost. Whether Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, “minorities” no longer have any need of liberal gate-keepers – or of a particular patron like Barbara Boxer.

Only by policing its ranks of such despicable scum as Boxer does the party stand a chance of making a comeback.

King County executive Ron Sims tried to whitewash the election mess again and got busted:

After Sims praised the county’s “99.98 percent” accuracy in handling votes, he was asked what that number was based on. Logan said it was based in part on a discrepancy of 1,800 between ballots counted and voters known to have voted.

However, when that discrepancy was compared with the nearly 900,000 votes counted, blogger Stefan Sharkansky pointed out to Logan, the accuracy rate was actually 99.8 percent.

Sometimes it takes a blogger to do the math. Sims claimed his accuracy would have made a bank happy, but Sharkansky pointed out that it amounts to an error of $2000 for every million counted, not so good in fact.

Isn’t it odd that we can bring democracy to Iraq but not to Seattle? In Iraq, we only had to defeat Baathists and terrorists, but in Seattle we have a Democratic Party machine to cope with.

See Sound Politics for more.

Critics of President Bush’s plans for social security reform often hide their reflexive opposition to all things Bush behind a mask of “original intent”, claiming that the system has always been intended to make workers support retirees, so there’s something blasphemous about the private account system that makes everyone accountable for his own retirement. So let’s look at FDR’s actual intent, as expressed in this letter he sent to Congress in 1935:

In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, noncontributory old-age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions. Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations. Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age. It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.

According to the Original Design, the Ponzi Scheme should have ended in 1965, and we should be well into a system of self-supporting annuity plans.

The question the reflexive critics really should be asking is why we aren’t.