Category: Politics

For once, I agree with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof:

In the 1950’s, 60’s and early 70’s, DDT was used to reduce malaria around the world, even eliminating it in places like Taiwan. But then the growing recognition of the harm DDT can cause in the environment – threatening the extinction of the bald eagle, for example – led DDT to be banned in the West and stigmatized worldwide. Ever since, malaria has been on the rise.

The poor countries that were able to keep malaria in check tend to be the same few that continued to use DDT, like Ecuador. Similarly, in Mexico, malaria rose and fell with the use of DDT. South Africa brought back DDT in 2000, after a switch to other pesticides had led to a surge in malaria, and now the disease is under control again. The evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.

DDT sensitivity is a classic example of Western environmentalism killing people around the world, with Good Intentions, of course.

Instapundit points to a Max Boot column reviewing films from Afghanistan and Iraq which makes the following observation:

Ultimately, Osama’s masquerade unravels, and she faces a gruesome punishment from an Islamic court. The ending, which I won’t give away, is enough to make anyone shudder ? and give thanks that U.S. troops have toppled the Taliban. Yet I don’t recall a single Hollywood feminist expressing gratitude to the U.S. military or its commander in chief for the liberation of Afghan women. No doubt Streisand, Sarandon & Co. were too busy inveighing against the horrors perpetrated by John Ashcroft.

To which Matt Yglesias responds with a bit of misdirection that’s obviously intended to make us believe the people Boot mentions actually supported the invasion:

The notion that the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in order to help Afghan women is, of course, preposterous. Look at his remarks from the time and you’ll see that though the Taliban’s oppression was certainly mentioned, the war was motivated by the small matter of 9-11 and al-Qaeda. Equally preposterous is the suggestion that feminists are or were unconcerned with the fate of Afghan women. When I heard this stuff in the winter of 2001-2002, I assumed it reflected a kind of ignorance coming from the right. Years after the evident, it’s just a kind of malicious slander. Check out the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Afghanistan page and take note of the fact that, unlike Boot and his friends, their interest in this topic didn’t begin in September of 2001.

The truth is that Boot is right and Yglesias is wrong. The Hollywood Feminists Boot mentions opposed the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban, a fact that can very easily be checked:

The peace position was also taken by the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism and War, an organization of about 80 feminists that includes women from Central Asia as well as such U.S. notables as Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, and Susan Sarandon. In a petition headlined “Not in Our Name,” the group declared, “We will not support the bombing or U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, for it would only punish suffering people and increase the hatred on which terrorists feed.”

Yglesias, consider yourself busted. The reversal of direction on Afghanistan on the part of some in the feminist establishment is one of the most shameful partisan flip-flops of recent times, but fortunately it wasn’t universal. Ellie Smeal apparently supported the invasion privately, contrary to my memory of events at the time and her public statements:

Perhaps it’s no surprise that some feminists, including Smeal, now feel the backward and violent regime deserves whatever it gets. The rare overlap between feminist and military interests made for particularly warm relations in the greenroom at an NBC station in Los Angeles when Smeal met up with three generals who were about to appear on Chris Matthews’s Hardball. “They went off about the role of women in this effort and how imperative it was that women were now in every level of the air force and navy,” says Smeal, who found herself cheered by the idea of women flying F-16s. “It’s a different kind of war,” she says, echoing the president’s assessment of Operation Enduring Freedom.

It’s too bad she didn’t go public with this sentiment, because if she had there wouldn’t be so much reason to point out that the position of the feminist establishment on Afghanistan was driven more by partisanship than by principle.

The latest buzz from Sound Politics is that the Seattle election canvas board has given enough of the questionable ballots to their candidate Gregoire to overturn the two previous counts and give the election to the annointed Democrat. Democrats in the Seattle media are circling their wagons around the canvassing board and declaring their critics insane.

I sincerely hope that Sen. Rossi takes his beef to the courts, insisting on a uniform statewide recount procedure, rejection of all ballots that weren’t properly secured, and an independent rview of the King County board’s decisions.

You don’t swing an election from 261 votes in favor of one candidate to 150 in favor of the other without some shenanigans.

You’ve probably heard about a study done by a sociology professor and some of his minions at Berkeley proporting to show anomolies in the e-voting numbers in Florida. Careful analysis of the study’s models by people with no axe to grind show that it’s a total load of crap:

“They either overlooked or did not bother to find a much better-fitting (statistical) regression model that showed that e-voting didn’t account (for the voting anomalies),” McCullough said.

Charles Stewart, an MIT political science professor, called the study “the type of exercise that you do in a graduate data-analysis class” rather than as an academic paper.

“If I were to get this article as (an academic) reviewer, I would turn it around and say they were fishing to find a result,” Stewart said. “I know of no theory or no prior set of intuitions that would have led me to run the analysis they ran.”

As we expected.

Link from Advice Goddess.

Speaking of Washington’s pollution, we’re going to have yet another recount in the governor’s race thanks to some out-of-state money raised by the Howard Dean blog. These people have no shame. This recount will be fully manual, making it substantially less accurate than the first two, and the only possible reason for it is to go fishing for enough ballots, legal or otherwise, to alter the certified outcome of the election.

The one bright spot to this debacle is that losing the third count will brand Christine Gregoire a sore loser and end her political career forever. If her people are able to find enough mystery ballots to win the election for her, she’ll have no legitimacy either, as the fraud stories are bound to come out. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Democratic Party can’t win a fair election so they have no choice but to hope for the other kind.

This is a sad day for democracy.

My old buddy Kim asks me to comment on a laundry-list of proposals that pretty well encapsulate a great deal of the liberal/progressive agenda for America. Here’s his list in bold, with my comments in roman:

1. Return war powers to Congress

They never left – while the executive claims it has war powers, they haven’t been exercised without Congressional approval in a very long time.

2. Repeal the Patriot Act

You may as well say “Surrender to Al Qaeda”. The Patriot Act contains necessary powers to fight the terrorist threat, and while any act can and should be amended until it reaches perfection, we shouldn’t radically alter this one as long as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas are active.

Continue reading “The Liberal Agenda”

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.