Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
  -- Daniel Webster



Saturday, July 03, 2004 :::
 

I've heard that a few commentators (Maureen Dowd, for one) have made fun of the President's writing "let freedom reign" in reaction to the handover of Iraq (rather than "let freedom ring"). This strikes me as a little like someone from the Maritime culture of defeat making fun of Albertans (search for the name Scott Brison, if you care, which I don't encourage you to do). It's exactly backward: "let freedom ring"? What the heck does that mean? I'm not saying I haven't heard it before -- I'm not even saying it's not a cliché, because it is. But that doesn't mean it makes sense.


::: posted by Steven at 7:40 PM


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Dean mentioned that the White Sox are playing the Cubs this weekend. Also in interleague intracity play, the Mets are playing the Yankees, and the Red Sox are playing the Braves.

Okay, that last one is no longer intracity, but I still thought it appropriate.


::: posted by Steven at 7:32 PM


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A scheme for quantum entanglement.
We propose an efficient method to produce multi-particle entangled states of ions in an ion trap for which a wide range of interesting effects and applications have been suggested. Our preparation scheme exploits the collective vibrational motion of the ions, but it works in such a way that this motion need not be fully controlled in the experiment. The ions may, e.g., be in thermal motion and exchange mechanical energy with a surrounding heat bath without detrimental effects on the internal state preparation. Our scheme does not require access to the individual ions in the trap.
This lies between theory and practice; in practice, physicists in China recently managed to entangle five photons, setting a new record.


::: posted by dWj at 2:31 PM


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Friday, July 02, 2004 :::
 
I mentioned that the Cubs were playing the White Sox today, but I left something out: the Cubs' wives against the White Sox' wives.
Dusty Baker's wife, Melissa, will manage the Cubs' wives against their South Side counterparts in a charity 12-inch softball game from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., before Game 1 of the Cubs-Sox series at 2:20. Melissa Baker brought the idea from San Francisco, where Giants and A's wives played each other during the Bay Bridge Series, the equivalent of Chicago's city series.
The Cubs' won, I believe, 5-4, though the article as I post this doesn't have that result.


::: posted by dWj at 7:29 PM


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"You know that this is all a theater by Bush, the criminal, to help him with his campaign," [Hussein] said.
While I doubt the assertion as made, I'm sure this ancillary benefit of the trial has not escaped the notice of the President.


::: posted by dWj at 3:43 PM


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In the National League, as of this morning, four of the top five teams were in the Central division, including the surprising Brewers. In the AL, the Yankees are running away with the East; for the time being at least, Red Sox fans should worry more about Oakland and the wild card. The White Sox swept the Twins, and are on a 5 game winning streak going into this weekend's big series at Wrigley; the Twins have lost 5 in a row, and are two games behind the White Sox.


::: posted by dWj at 3:42 PM


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The jobs report this morning was disappointing, which of course has potential political ramifications; while the number of people employed has probably increased since Bush took office, and much of the weakness can't be blamed on him, the payroll number is lower than January '01, and this makes a great soundbite.

The president really has ten weeks for the economy to produce the kind of jobs that show up in the payroll survey; the jobs survey is actually done on the 12th of the month, and the October survey will be released three days after the election. September 12 is a Sunday, so the last report before the election is really going to be based on hiring that takes place by September 10, a week after the Republican convention.



::: posted by dWj at 3:42 PM


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Charles Krauthammer defends the Vice President against those who say he should apologize for his remarks to Senator Leahy.

And given the location, the floor of the Senate, it seems a reasonable choice: Time was short, and he undoubtedly reserves the right to revise and extend his remarks.


::: posted by Eric at 7:39 AM


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I knew the title of Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man was a reference to Moore's latest book and a (different and, as far as I know, unrelated) book by Al Franken; I sort of assumed it would be in Moore's style -- maybe a little more respect for the truth, but generally ranty. I was interested, then, to read Lileks say:
Note: 89 pages into the book, the title remains the sole ad hominem remark. And even so it?s a winking reference to Moore?s own work, as well as Al Franken?s deathless tome on Limbaugh. I?ll say this for the Moore book: it?s brisk and deft, and avoids screedy polemics for one-on-one factual refutations of what the authors identify as Moore?s more egregious fictitions.
He also says, "full review on Monday," which I'll be looking forward to.


::: posted by Steven at 3:17 AM


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FoxNews presents a good, detailed rundown on the state of the U.N./Iraq oil scandal by Claudia Rosett, who has been tirelessly covering it over at OpinionJournal.


::: posted by dWj at 12:50 AM


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Thursday, July 01, 2004 :::
 
I've always thought that the minimum wage was perfect liberal economics, in the sense that it perfectly encapsulates the liberal philosophy. Liberals see a problem: workers with low wages. Their solution: pass a law requiring those wages to be increased. What could be simpler?
Bruce Bartlett has a point; I commented once when Christy Whitman was governor of New Jersey that I could imagine her trying to outlaw poverty, and Pataki somewhat notoriously remarked, on signing hate-crimes legislation, that the holocaust could have been avoided if Germany had had such a law in the thirties. Pataki and Whitman are both Republicans, but they both have this sort of populist streak, and this does seem like a very archetypically liberal worldview.


::: posted by dWj at 7:08 PM


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Dave Kopel is compiling the deceptions in Mike Moore's new comedy in one place.


::: posted by Steven at 4:23 PM


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Clinton's new book misquoted a judge. It strikes me as a minor issue in the context of the book, but perhaps a more significant issue in the context of the judge.


::: posted by Steven at 4:11 PM


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Wednesday, June 30, 2004 :::
 
Some weeks ago I acquired a book collecting together various writings on science; the other day I read one written in 1981 that used the word "autochthonous". (It was an article on geology jargon, and referred to a rock that lived where it grew up.)

Scalia's Hamdi "dissent" follows a quote with the notation, "(emphasis deleted)". I'm not sure I've ever seen that before.



::: posted by dWj at 7:30 PM


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From the Corner:
BARS IN BOSTON [KJL]
Some of us were thinking of getting a group of Boston conservatives together during the Democratic convention--an oasis during the onslaught. So bleg time: Any of you own a bar and want to host a Corner night? Any ideas welcome.
The People's Republik, in Cambridge, has a choice name, and I believe a Republican owner, but it would be kind of out of the way for most people, not to mention a bit of a dive. Anyway, if you have any suggestions, let her know.


::: posted by Steven at 4:34 PM


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I had heard that Buckley was handing over control of National Review, but I hadn't heard that one of the five new trustees would be Austin Bramwell, with whom I was acquainted when he was at Harvard Law.

I mentioned his name to a friend of mine, with no further context, and she thought it an unusual name -- "like he belongs in masterpiece theatre or something" (this was a decidedly casual conversation). Yes, I said -- it does suit him, come to think of it.


::: posted by Steven at 1:54 AM


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Tuesday, June 29, 2004 :::
 
Ministerial appointments are not subject to Parliament at all, but are instead a matter of Crown prerogative (which has come to mean that it's up to the PM, with a rubber stamp by the Governor General). That then leads to the question of how the PM is determined.
So writes Chris Jones, who goes on to explain that this is the primary responsibility of the Governor General.
In the case of one party winning a majority in the House, the decision is easy: the GG asks the leader of that party whether he feels that he can form a government with the confidence of the House (A: yes), and then appoints him the PM and so on.
Now here is the clarification that I really wanted:
The key point here is that the Prime Minister continues to be Prime Minister until he resigns, dies, or is removed by the Governor General [which has not happened --- yet]: he isn't required to be sworn in again or anything.
Or loses a confidence motion, I presume, unless that simply leads the Governor General to remove him.

No confidence doesn't necessarily trigger new elections, either; the Governor-General seems to have some discretion there.

If whoever becomes Prime Minister loses a confidence vote shortly (say, within the next three to four months), Clarkson would almost certainly ask the other party leader to try to govern. If that failed, we'd be going back to the polls. On the other hand, if whoever becomes Prime Minister loses a confidence vote after say, six months, it's even money as to whether Clarkson would grant a request for new elections (although if the other party said that they could form a coalition, she might refuse the request for elections).
In 1925, a sitting Prime Minister's party finished second, but won the initial confidence vote and governed for 8 months before losing the confidence of the parliament. The governor general then refused to call new elections, giving the leader of the majority party a chance to govern first. In the event, he lost confidence in four days, and elections were called after all.

I'm further directed to a work called How Canadians Govern Themselves, which I will check out when I'm not so sodding busy. The intro page mentions that "there is nothing Canadians do in any given day that is not affected by" their government, which has always been my impression of Canada, to be honest.



::: posted by dWj at 11:13 PM


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In case you haven't seen this: someone claiming to be from the Kerry campaign has been sending around an email starting as follows:
Yesterday, the Bush-Cheney campaign, losing any last sense of decency, placed a disgusting ad called "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party" as the main feature on its website. Bizarrely, and without explanation, the ad places Adolf Hitler among those faces.

The Bush-Cheney campaign must pull this ad off of its website. The use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply wrong.
It concludes:
P.S. It's hard to believe that the Bush campaign would use images of Adolf Hitler. See it for yourself: http://www.georgewbush.com.
As Josh Chafetz says:
Indeed, do see it for yourself, because here's what the ad is: It's a series of clips of Al Gore, Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt, and John Kerry making totally over-the-top denunciations of Bush. Interspersed are clips from MoveOn.Org ads comparing Bush to Hitler. The ad ends with, "This is not a time for pessimism and rage. It's a time for optimism, steadly leadership, and progress. President Bush."


This all reminds me a bit of an email I got in college, saying that the evil Republicans who had taken Congress had just voted down a measure which was simply the text of the fourth amendment. This, it was implied, meant that they didn't recognize the text as the fourth amendment, and that they opposed the fourth amendment. But think for a moment: why would Congress, in 1995, be voting on the fourth amendment? Wouldn't you vote against adding a law to the books that just duplicated what's already in the constitution?

Well, an acquaintance looked into it further and found that the amendment the Republicans had voted against was an amendment to gut an entire bill and replace its text with that of the fourth amendment. In other words, a vote for the amendment wasn't so much a vote for the text of the fourth amendment, it was a vote to gut an other proposal.

This is similar. Suppose the Bush camp did come out with an ad equating Kerry with Hitler. That might play well in certain hard-core conservative circles, perhaps as a fundraising appeal. But they're already focusing on the swing states. Is an ad from the Bush team equating Kerry with Hitler going to make a moderate, undecided voter start leaning toward Bush or against him? If I were with the Kerry campaign, and Bush -- or even his leading supporters -- made a Kerry-Hitler ad, I'd want swing voters to see it. Since I'm supporting Bush, and some of Kerry's leading supporters have equated Bush with Hitler, I want swing voters to know about it. Apparently, the Bush campaign is thinking the same way.


::: posted by Steven at 12:25 PM


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According to the numbers currently up at Elections Canada, the Liberals have 135 and the socialist NDP -- their most obvious coalition partners -- have 19. There are 308 seats in the House. They're one shy of a majority (the Conservatives have 99, the Bloc has 54, and there's one independent, who I believe tends Conservative).

Nobody breathe too hard.

I think Harper needs to give Martin a reason not to team up with the NDP (especially if those numbers end up changing in the wrong direction). If you give a damn about any of the details, you've already checked Cosh.


::: posted by Steven at 3:46 AM


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Monday, June 28, 2004 :::
 
The Liberals appear to have a convincing plurality in the 130 range. In coalition with the NDP, they may even have a majority.


::: posted by Steven at 10:19 PM


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Colby Cosh is providing election results, in case you're interested. Atlantic Canada seems to have gone more Liberal than he'd hoped.

Incidentally, apportionment of seats among provinces isn't quite proportional to population -- each province gets at least as many representatives as it had in 1976. The maritimes are overrepresented (as are the territories, just because they get one representative each and have no people).


::: posted by Steven at 8:48 PM


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My brother has observed that some of my entries are badly formatted when they first show up, then get corrected -- in particular, some unwelcome line-breaks get removed. This is because I email those entries to blogger (you kind of suspected I was mailing it in, didn't you?), using Microsoft Outlook. If there's a way to tell Microsoft Outlook that I'm a big boy and can insert my own line breaks where I want them, thank you very much, so you can STOP MESSING UP MY EMAIL YOU STUPID PROGRAM, I haven't found it. I've found how to vary the line length (within limits), but not how to get rid of it. So if I mail an entry, I have to fix it after it shows up.

The reason for using email rather than the web interface is that I don't have to be online while I compose. The disadvantage, in addition to the Outlook problem, is that they sometimes take a while to show up.


::: posted by Steven at 8:27 PM


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For Americans wondering how big a Canadian riding is, 20 ridings are about the size of 3 congressional districts. Illinois would get 129 ridings if it were a Canadian province; there are 118 members of the lower house of our legislature, so the size of the districts is approximately the same as a Canadian riding. Massachusetts would get 66, which puts about 5 ridings in every 3 state Senate districts. This is based on a population for Quebec of 7,237,500, which is approximately what I read somewhere; it's just slightly more populous than Virginia, and gets 75 ridings, from which apportionments to other provinces is calculated. (Viriginia would get 74. Wyoming 5, California 352.)

Also, I've been emailed what looks at first glance to be an excellent explanation of minority governments. I'm terribly short of time tonight, will probably not get a chance to spend more time at this before midnight, and am quite likely not to take advantage of such an opportunity to further deprive myself of sleep. So I tease you until tomorrow.



::: posted by dWj at 7:33 PM


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Bob Dole sounds a hopeful note on Iraq.


::: posted by dWj at 7:33 PM


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Steyn has a piece on WC at OpinionJournal, and of course I want to use it to talk about Michael Moore.
The day after that, he's in ethics class helping out his new buddy, King Faisal's nephew Prince Turki, later the deeply sinister longtime head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service and now ambassador in London. This is ethics class in Georgetown, I believe, not at Miss Marie Purkins's School for Little Folks. But even so, where's Michael Moore when you need a documentary exposé of the murky decades-old ties between the House of Saud and the House of Bill?
I was thinking the other day that complaining about Moore's violent allergies to the truth are all well and good, but concede too much. While his films seem to become increasingly inaccurate — as though he's fascinated to see what he can get away with — their greater offense to The Truth is still less in the small-scale inaccuracies than the presentation of partial truths completely out of context. His six-degrees of Osama bin Laden may well be factually accurate — I don't frankly know — but I still can't concede the implication that it means more than that he's decent at data mining.

I have a friend of the left who occasionally presents me with some piece of information related to some story I haven't heard about. One incident I particularly remember is when he mentioned some gathering, and noted that the Park Service hadn't issued an estimate of the crowd size — as though this was a cover-up. "They quit doing that after the controversy over the million man march," I informed him. While I've noted other examples at the times when they've come up, every time since then that he's told me something I've thought, "If I sometimes know something crucial that he's not presenting even when I haven't heard of the 'story', what even more pertinent details is he leaving out, by accident or otherwise, this time?" This is how I feel about Moore much of the time; the lies are, if anything, quite convenient, as they're easy to point to, but the broader fraud is the bigger problem.

Oh, and of course you should read all of anything written by Mark Steyn. We all know that by now, yes?



::: posted by dWj at 7:33 PM


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But Mr Wilson also stated in his account of the visit that Mohamed Sayeed al-Sahaf, Iraq's former information minister, was identified to him by a Niger official as having sought to discuss trade with Niger.

As Niger's other main export is goats, some intelligence officials have surmised uranium was what Mr Sahaf was referring to.

At the Financial Times. Is that as funny as I think it is? I didn't sleep well last night, what with the earthquake and all. (Actually, if I did feel the earthquake, it was something I attributed to my upstairs neighbor.)


::: posted by dWj at 7:32 PM


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It's reboot time again, which means everything comes at once:
  • When I first heard that the tobacco-growers cartel was to be terminated by buying out the quota-holders, I thought it might be worth the Danegeld to end the program, but it sounds like they're overpaying. And that's without considering the principle of the thing.
  • Not apropos a web page I have on the stack, I just saw a video for a song called "You're The Only One". I'd heard of this song, from a short interview with the singer. She'd written each verse about a different ex-boyfriend. If she or the interviewer noticed the irony, it didn't come out in the interview.
  • There was recently a piece in the Economist about the status of women in the Arab world.
  • Jonah Goldberg defends dogma, i.e. unthinking adherence to certain principles. His main point:
    A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas.
    I'm not certain I agree with him (especially at the very end, where he endorses crack), but he makes a good case. He's right that "such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas," but it would also be correct to say that "such things are only possible in a society where there are people who aren't chained to the walls of their cells." It's clear that he doesn't mean to take things to that extreme (Goldberg rarely means to take anything to an extreme), and his case isn't as simple as that. I'm really not sure how to conclude this paragraph, so I'm just going to gracelessly drop it, okay?

    His point reminds me of the point (as harped on by C.S. Lewis) that you can't derive any principles without axioms, and you can't derive moral principles without moral axioms (as Lewis puts it, "you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.") In other words, any moral code will require some dogma.
  • Again apropos the MTV that I'm watching right now rather than the web pages I have open: I often see an ad for a movie that doesn't make me want to see the movie, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a TV ad for a movie I less wanted to see than "Napoleon Dynamite". I remember the ads for "Kangaroo Jack", and I know that, had I been offered the choice between seeing the movie and being clubbed to death with one of my limbs, I'd have seen the film. If you asked me the same question for "Napoleon", though, I'd need time to consider.
  • Oil would be cheaper if people weren't worried about terrorism. Also, being clubbed to death with one's limb would be unpleasant.

    Incidentally, I'm more bearish on oil than I was a month back. On the demand side, I'm less optimistic for China. On the supply side, I guess I have some hope for Iraq. The Saudis, incidentally, are planning to drill new wells, but those won't come on-line for a year and a half or so.
  • Look, MTV, if you have to mute out every word in the alleged song, why don't you just play something different? There's a lot of good stuff out there -- you probably wouldn't even have to resort to something more than six months old, the mere consideration of which I know would frighten you to incontinence.
  • I have an organic chemistry nomenclature page open. Yeah, I'm a geek.
  • Ramesh Ponnuru's recent National Review cover piece on the Lord of Darkness Eliot Spitzer is now on the web. Sorry about the typo -- I assure you, it's quite likely to happen again.
  • David Frum has a checklist for "how you know you've been in Sweden too long". Some are funny.
  • Some guy claims that Briticisms are taking over. Most of the idioms he mentions don't strike me as foreign, or even stilted -- "gone missing" is foreign? Really?
  • There's an old study evaluating news-source bias by comparing how often they cite different think tanks versus how often Congressmen with various ADA ratings cite each think tank.
  • In one sense, this article is about the history of racial interactions in Australia. In an other sense, it's about intellectual dishonesty. You probably don't want to read it unless you have too much free time -- I don't expect to remember anything from it in half a year.
  • The UK has been promoting the use of trains over other forms of transportation for environmental reasons. It turns out that cars are more fuel efficient, largely because of train safety standards.


::: posted by Steven at 4:15 AM


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I should have been sleeping a long time ago, but first I had to check Canadian Colby Cosh. The Iraqi people are now sovereign, and the Canadian people are not, but the Canadians will be choosing a new government come dawn, while the Iraqis continue to live under Anglophonic appointees (the Canadians, of course, are mostly Anglophonic, have an Anglophonic sovereign, and are ruled by Francophones).

My first thought, as the page was loading, was "Cosh had better go vote". My second thought -- still before the page loaded -- was "actually, his riding's probably a lock, so it doesn't matter." [UPDATE: I was probably wrong about that.] My third thought was, "I hope he pushes other Conservative-leaners to vote."

Almost four years back, I thought the best microcosmic (is that a word?) argument for electing Bush came at the end of George Will's last pre-election column:
For the official World Series magazine, Gore and Bush provided written answers to some questions pertaining to baseball, including, "What do you think of domed stadiums?" Gore's complete answer was:

"The design and construction of domed stadiums--in Seattle (the Kingdome was the first free-standing cement dome ever built), Houston (the Astrodome was the first stadium to use Astroturf) and Minnesota (the Metrodome is the only stadium in the U.S. whose roof is suspended without beams or rods--it's supported by air pressure), for example--have been feats of architectural and engineering excellence. But the real measure of any stadium, domed or otherwise, is how much fun you have inside."

Bush's complete answer was: "I like to go to baseball games outdoors."

Let's vote.
Cosh has come up with the Canadian equivalent:
On June 4 Stephen Harper made a campaign appearance on a farm in Jarvis, Ontario. I've heard it was a tobacco farm, or that there are tobacco farms in the area, so naturally Harper was asked about the great and pressing subject of tobacco reduction. He basically shrugged and said:
People are going to have a drink and have a smoke and that's kind of the way life is going to be.

Any other significant Canadian political leader in my lifetime--probably even that bibulous bon vivant Ralph Klein--would have recognized the question as the occasion to (a) waggle a finger at those naughty drinkers and tobacco users and (b) lay out elaborate, expensive plans for persuading people to live a little bit longer and a lot less joyfully. Harper addressed the question as though he were running for the leadership of the House of Commons, and not for the office of National Scold, National Role Model, National Health Czar, or National Bully.

Today few conventional politicians regard their mandate as limited in any respect, even if they're running for county ratcatcher. They are obliged to have an opinion on every subject (which generally causes them to possess uniformly stupid ones), and must be prepared to intervene in any area of human life according to the media-stoked collective whim of the moment. Harper is different. He does not believe it would be his job, as Prime Minister, to lash Canadians onward to a New Jerusalem of state childcare, equal incomes, fit bodies, and pure thoughts. When Paul Martin is asked about health care he sets about defining "Canadian values" for you, exactly as an archbishop might define "Catholic values" for a querulous parishioner. When Stephen Harper is asked about health care, he points out that our health-care systems are the responsibility of the provinces under the Constitution, and in logic. He doesn't insist that every province should conduct its affairs the same way, or every person possess the same habits.
Go vote.


::: posted by Steven at 3:56 AM


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So, Iraq has been officially granted sovereignty two days early. The Wall Street Journal supposes that this is an attempt "to surprise insurgents who may have tried to sabotage the step toward self rule." I won't pretend to know, myself.

I'm actually dealing with a personal internal contradiction here: 1. I'm not sure this really means a damn thing, practically, and; 2. I'm quite pleased by this news.


::: posted by Steven at 3:40 AM


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Dean, you know nothing about this Gidwitz? I suppose it makes sense for the Illinois Republicans to nominate a Pole, assuming his name is as Polish as it looks -- get the downstate to vote on party and a chunk of Chicago to vote on ethnicity. But a qualified Pole may do better than an unqualified Pole. On the other hand, Illinois did elect Carol Mosely Braun.

Who gets to choose Illinois's Lautenberg, anyway? A Republican State Committee, or is there some kind of caucus system?


::: posted by Steven at 2:05 AM


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Well, let Jack Ryan's epitaph read that he failed to meet expectations. The smartest money seems to be on something called Ron Gidwitz to be Jack Ryan's replacement; he'll be celebrating his 29th anniversary, which is obviously a big credential these days. An intriguing possibility that I've not seen in the national media — nor, indeed, in much local media — is the wife of former governor Jim Thompson. Her name is Jayne, a suspicious orthography; I know as much about her as you do, and less if you know something.


::: posted by dWj at 12:47 AM


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Arizona lost the Arena Bowl to San Jose. Arizona has lost the last three Arena Bowls.


::: posted by Steven at 12:35 AM


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In case you don't read Signifying Nothing, Chris Lawrence has something to add to Eric's comment on parliaments forming minority governments. I assume both know more about parliaments in general than I, and that at least Chris knows more about Canada. (For one thing, I had thought Westminster governments were dissolved upon losing a normal vote in the parliament, but I appear to have been mistaken.)

Dean, the Queen's representative in Canada is the Governor-General. She will call on Martin or Harper to try to form a government. From what I've been reading, Martin, as the incumbent, gets first crack if no party gets a majority, even if Harper's Conservatives get 150 of the 308 seats and Martin's Liberals only take 80. So I assume he'll get first crack (since I doubt the Conservatives will get 150 seats).


::: posted by Steven at 12:34 AM


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Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.


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