Monthly Archives: October 2006

A big pick-up for Steele

Wayne Curry, who was Prince Georges Country Executive from 1994-2002, has endorsed Michael Steele for the U.S. Senate. Curry is a Democrat and an African-American. Prince Georges County, located just outside of Washington D.C. and containing a large middle class African-American community, has been the key to Steele’s election strategy, since it offered him the possibility of winning over many normally Democratic voters who (a) are unhappy (as Curry obviously »

Crunch time at the Washington Post

You can tell that the Maryland Senate race has tightened because the Washington Post is shifting resources from the Webb campaign to the campaign of Benjamin Cardin. Today’s lead headline in the paper edition is “Debate Puts Steele On Defense.” The story’s purpose is not to provide a fair report on the latest Steele-Cardin debate, but to remind area voters, especially those in the key county of Prince Georges, that »

About Those Polls

Michael Barone provides an excellent short course on the perils of polling, in the context of this year’s election. The key point is that in 2004, people who actually voted split exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats. On the other hand, current polling is showing party identification favoring the Democrats by 5 to 12 points. As Barone notes, party identification has historically changed only slowly. It is highly unlikely that »

Needed perspective

Michael Barone supplies some needed perspective in his commentary on polls and turnout in his excellent column today. In trying to maintain perspective on the current state of the critical races I have found Hugh Hewitt (and his colleague Dean Barnett who is also posting on Hugh’s site) as well as the gang at Wizbang Politics most useful. I’ll be checking them both frequently over the next week. See, for »

Sleepers awake

I should think that the Iranian mullahcracy has done enough to wake us up. Apparently not. Last week we learned (because they told us) that Iran has doubled its network of centrifuges for uranium enrichment. In his NRO column this morning, Michael Ledeen reviews the evidence supporting the proposition that Iran has been at war with us for the past 27 years. He notes that we have yet to respond. »

For Hennepin County Attorney

Hennepin County includes the city of Minneapolis and inner ring suburbs. The position of Hennepin County Attorney is the one that is about to be vacated by Democratic Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar. It is one of the most important law enforcement positions in the state, and it is a black mark against Ms. Klobuchar that she has remained silent while the gang problem has worsened markedly in Hennepin County over »

About those militias

Jack Kelly argues that to succeed in Iraq we must take out Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army. Kelly notes that, following our failure to take Sadr out in 2004 (apparently on the theory that he wasn’t a major player), he has become “the most powerful figure in Iraq, eclipsing the more-or-less moderate Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani” and one with ties to Iran. I agree that we made a major mistake »

Good Lord

Harold Ford speaks: My friend Lincoln Davis who chairs our campaign says there are, there »

Why Do They Hate Buses?

A young woman is near death in Marseilles tonight, after a group of “youths” fire-bombed this bus: More bus burnings continue in the Paris suburbs. As Blog of the Week Confederate Yankee notes, these outrages are perpetrated by “The Undescribables.” Notwithstanding the many witnesses to the crimes, news accounts never say anything about the perpetrators–except, of course, that they are “youths.” Seems like they’d be easier to catch with a »

The implications of anarchy

Oliver North argues that “parallels between [the wars in Vietnam and Iraq] are practically non-existent.” In Vietnam (at its peak) we were fighting a well-trained, well-equipped invading North Vietnmese army supported by perhaps 100,000 well-organized Viet Cong insurgents. The cost in American lives was at least 15 per day. In Iraq, says North, we are facing less an “insurgency” than “anarchy” and the daily “kill rate” for Americans is approximately »

Fighting Back

The Department of Defense has set up a web site called For the Record to combat media misrepresentations about defense matters. Lots of luck; even the Pentagon may not have enough staff for that Herculean effort. It’s worth a try, though; here is just one example: Oct. 27, 2006 »

Senate races: What the money says

Tradesports is the Internet site that brokers bets (or futures contracts) on just about everything, politics included. Donald Luskin has a good explanation of how the Tradesports futures contracts work in a column on the betting on the North Korean long-range missile test (“Tradesports’ bad call”). The Tradesports betting line introduces a reality principle that is lacking in, say, any given Star Tribune Minnesota Poll. At present, if I understand »

Leo Hindery, meet Martin Smithers

Reader Max Newton reminds us of the Business Week hit piece on President Bush — “Tragedy and telecom” — by one Leo Hindery. Business Week described Hindery as a telecom executive; Business Weeek forgot to mention that Hindery had been CEO of Global Crossing, the company that made a number of investors rich, including former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, but turned out to be riddled with fraud, and collapsed into »

She thought she knew she was right

Binyamin Jolkovsky of Jewish World Review and reader William Katz alert us to Cal Thomas’s October 25 interview with Secretary Rice, an excerpt of which Binyamin has posted exclusively here. Thomas follows up on Secretary Rice’s keynote address at the American Task Force on Palestine inaugural gala. I commented on the speech here; Joel Mowbray devoted his excellent column in Friday’s Washington Times to the speech. In the speech Secretary »

Well, That’s All Right Then!

The New York Times is a funny newspaper. On the big issues, it’s awful: unreliable, biased, arrogant, untrustworthy. But when it comes to things that don’t matter, no one is more scrupulous than the editors of the Times. That’s one of the reasons why it’s fun to cruise the paper’s Corrections section. This one from tomorrow’s paper made me laugh: An article last Sunday about »

In search of a level playing field at Dartmouth

This week the Wall Street Journal ran two letters to the editor responding to Peter Robinson’s column opposing the proposed Dartmouth alumni constitution. Both letters argue that the proposed constitution promotes alumni democracy. Yesterday a reader sent us the Chicago Dartmouth Club email by the prominent Chicago attorney John Mathias, which seems somewhat more illuminating to me than the published letters to the editor. Mr. Mathias is an occasional Power »

The St. Louis Cardinals — a closer look

At one level, the world champion St. Louis Cardinals can be considered lucky to have made the playoffs, given their mediocre regular season record. But these comments from reader and Cards fan Mark Arnold suggest that, given their injury woes, the Redbirds can be considered unlucky to have compiled a mediocre record: At the end of May, [St. Louis] had the best record in the National League. Pujols was unconscious; »