A MODEST civil rights victory in Texas.
Archive for 2006
October 24, 2006
STEVE GILLMOR: “YouTube, Digg, and MySpace took out TV a few months back, and now the corpse is sitting up and taking notice.”
JAMES WEBB STUMBLES? “His claim to have ‘first proposed’ an African American figure is made up of whole cloth.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES notices what I’ve been noticing:
In many ways, the economy has not looked so good in a long time.
The price of gas at the pump has tumbled since midsummer. Unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in more than five years. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average has finally returned to its glory days of the late 1990’s, setting records almost daily. . . .
But Republican candidates do not seem to be getting any traction from the glowing economic statistics with midterm elections just two weeks away.
The economy is virtually nowhere to be found among the campaign ads of embattled Republican incumbents fighting to hold onto their House or Senate seats. Nor is it showing up as a strong weapon in the arsenal of Republican governors defending their jobs from Democrats.
“I don’t know of another election cycle in which the economy was so good, yet the election prospects for the incumbent party looked so bad,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist. “If something goes wrong, Republicans are to blame. If something goes right, Republicans don’t get credit.”
Indeed. And media bias doesn’t explain why Republicans aren’t talking about the economy. But stupidity might . . . .
UPDATE: Captain Ed sees a pattern here.
I’M GUESSING NO LAWYERS WERE CONSULTED on this experiment:
Jet Blue wanted to squeeze just a few more working hours out of its pilots but it needed the facts to prove that a change in FAA regulations wouldn’t lead to a spate of crashes and flight errors. Its solution? Hook up 50 30 odd pilots to monitoring devices and make them illegally work in excess of FAA protocol in a makeshift clinical trial. Not only does such an experiment violate every ethical law in the book, it also makes hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers unwitting participants in a clinical trial that could possibly end in a fireball on the tarmac.
More here from the Wall Street Journal. (Free link.)
TOM MAGUIRE is mounting an Alcee Hastings watch.
ANDREW SULLIVAN RESPONDS to my earlier post on Ford and Corker: “The difference between the GOP and the Dems on gay issues nationally is vast, as Glenn knows.”
Unlike Sullivan, I’m not a “single issue voter” on gay issues. But I wonder if that’s true about the Democrats vs. the Republicans. As is widely recognized in the blogosphere, Sullivan has sided with the Democrats over gay marriage. But what has he gotten for that?
John Kerry, who Sullivan supported, isn’t for gay marriage: “The president and I have the same position, fundamentally, on gay marriage. We do. Same position.” Or, as he said on another occasion: “”I’m against gay marriage, . . . Everybody knows that.”
Are there any Democratic candidates in contested races who are pushing gay rights and gay marriage? I can’t think of any. Certainly, as I noted before, Harold Ford isn’t among them. And Hillary Clinton isn’t beyond reproach: “The executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda gay rights group has described Sen. Hillary Clinton as ‘a complete disappointment.’ . . . Clinton opposes same-sex marriage but supports civil unions between members of the same sex. During her husband’s administration, she supported the Defense of Marriage Act.”
And it’s not the GOP that’s circulating a “list” of gay Congressional staffers in the hopes of getting them fired.
As I say, I’m not a single-issue voter on gay rights. But Sullivan clearly is. So what, exactly, are the Democrats actually offering in exchange for his rather vehement loyalty?
And, yes, it does lapse into self-parody. And here’s more on Democrats and gay marriage:
In TN and VA, Democrats Ford and Webb say they oppose gay marriage. Webb supports civil unions, though, and he plans to vote against Virginia’s so-called “Super-DOMA,” which, according to gay rights activists and some legal scholars, would make it harder to establish civil union-type arrangements. Ford supports the Tennessee constitutional amendment. He also supported the FMA in the House.
Not overwhelming evidence of the Democrats’ superiority on this issue. Meanwhile, Corker is better on the Second Amendment, at least.
THE INSTAWIFE IS SURFING THE CHANNELS on the Big Media coverage and can’t believe how anti-Republican it is.
I’d say they’re following The Note’s advice!
“I LIKE FOOTBALL AND I LIKE GIRLS:” The Corker campaign sends this video of Harold Ford, but I don’t think it’s so bad for him.
STEVEN BARNES: “Obama is running great software.”
That sounds like the kind of thing people say about me. Only in my case I guess it’s the hardware they’re complimenting.
IT’S A NEW POLITICAL AD from David Zucker.
PETE DU PONT: “Republicans deserve to lose, but what happens if Democrats win?”
Brendan Loy doesn’t care — like Bill Quick, he belongs to the teach-’em-a-lesson crowd: “I’ll be voting for the Democrat for my local, hotly contested House race. (Heaven help the Democrats if Pelosi breaks her anti-impeachment pledge, because I’m depending on that, and they’ll lose my vote for a long, long time if they’re lying to me.)”
GRAND ROUNDS is up!
ROB HUDDLESTON writes that national coverage of the Ford / Corker race isn’t very good: “Be careful about how much credence you give the national media regarding our race here in Tennessee. Heck, be careful about other states’ races, too. They are doing a poor job in covering these races because they don’t know what is going on on a daily basis in the states. The national media’s inadequacy has been magnified by the rise of the blogs, for sure. That’s why they interview bloggers, as a way of catching up on what has been going on in each race.” Well, at least they’re trying.
UPDATE: RealClearPolitics is on the case.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Sean Braisted has the new Ford campaign ad, and comments: “There in lies the strength of Ford as compared to Corker. When Ford wants a new ad or message out there, he can do it himself relatively quickly and effectively. When Corker needs a message put out there, he needs to get someone (Fred Thompson, Ed Bryant, his Mom) to do it for him. It helps Ford that he is his own best spokesman.”
ANN ALTHOUSE: “I detect dissimulation.”
IN THE MAIL: Barack Obama’s new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
Plus, a book I ordered for my nephew, John Birmingham and Dirk Flinthart’s How to Be a Man, which looks to be chock-full of practical advice. Birmingham is probably better known to the blogosphere as the author of Weapons of Choice (involving the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hillary Clinton) and Designated Targets, but How to Be a Man isn’t science fiction.
MARC DANZIGER WRITES IN THE EXAMINER, about journalism today:
Personally, I see journalists at the New York Times first and foremost as fellow citizens with whom I share obligations. The notion that they don’t see me the same way causes me a lot of concern.
In World War II, Ernie Pyle found and publicized flaws in our military — but he did it in the context of supporting the larger war effort. In Vietnam, Joe Galloway spent his first night in the field as a journalist manning a machine gun emplacement.
That’s not what we ought to expect from our media today. We don’t need journalists as cheerleaders (not that Pyle or Galloway ever were) or as combatants. But I do know that a lot of us would feel better about the criticism leveled by the media at things the U.S. is doing if we were sure that — in the event of an ambush by enemies determined to kill some of us — they wouldn’t just see it as a good story.
Indeed.
JOHN PODHORETZ notes that blogs are providing a more nuanced account of the elections than Big Media.
IT’S A NEW POLL: Yesterday I asked how you thought the midterm elections should turn out. Today I’m asking how you think they will turn out. Vote your predictions below:
UPDATE: Okay, with 3000 votes, it’s showing 55% expecting the GOP to retain both houses, 39% expecting the GOP to lose one house, and only 6% expecting the Democrats to take both. This seems to take a pretty favorable view of the GOP’s prospects, but it’ll make an interesting test of John Podhoretz’s thesis.
WILL COLLIER reports more crushing of dissent, in Georgia.
CLIMBING THE LADDER, and then pulling it up after her? “B&C Contributing Editor Andrew Tyndall analyzed the first six weeks of Katie Couric’s tenure atop the CBS Evening News and found that woman have gotten fewer assignments. . . . In fact, since Couric’s arrival, women have received 40% fewer assignments than they did under her predecessor, Bob Schieffer.”
UPDATE: Evan Thomas says the math doesn’t add up, but I think that what’s happened is more of the CBS News timeslot is being filled with puffy features by Couric, which Schieffer didn’t do.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “It is difficult in history to find any civilization that asks as much of others as does the contemporary Middle East—and yet so little of itself.”
FOUR YEARS AGO: The D.C. snipers. Plus a present day / CNN connection.
ARNOLD KLING: “The conventional wisdom is that we would be better off if politically powerful leaders were less mediocre. Instead, my view is that we would be better off if mediocre political leaders were less powerful.”
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be toward both more power and more mediocrity . . . .