Discourse.net

Move On's Lastest. Wow.

I think the lastest MoveOn ad featuring former US Marine Lee Buttrill is superb in terms of content and effectiveness. But I’m somewhat concerned about the way the ad skirts the campaign finance laws. As I understand it — and I’m in no way an expert — the ads can’t endorse a candidate, although they can talk about them.

If that’s the rule, this ad comes very close to the line. Rather than say “Vote for Kerry” the ad no doubt accurately indentifies the speaker as “Voting for Kerry”.

If the statement is accurate, it’s just descriptive. So perhaps technically it’s not an endorsement and thus within the letter of the law, maybe brilliantly so. But it can’t be consistent with the spirit of the campaign finance rules.

PS. There are a lot of good runner-ups on the MoveOn page, although I’m especially partial to Kenneth Berg

Why Is The Daily Howler Unusual?

The Daily Howler is almost always at least good. Today, though, the Daily Howler is great: Brit admits that Bush is ‘stretching.’ But at the great Times, he’s just “shrewd”.

Bob Somerby’s discussion of Kerry’s comments about his Vietnam service, and about Kerry’s views on Iraq are so much more straightforward than most of what one sees elsewhere that one wonders what part of the Unthinking Depths inhibit many parts of the major media.

Yet, what Bob Somerby does isn’t really rocket science. It’s called “basic research”, and “reading”, and “spotting the obvious”. So here’s the mystery: why is this sort of relatively simple exposition so rare? And why when it happens is the rest of the world so resistant to it?

"Free Country Hypothesis" Data Begins Rolling In

I recently claimed that,

The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it’s still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis.

Well, here’s our first two data points.

An Effective Ad

I have no idea if the women I had lunch with today are representative of anything, but they were not part of the University and they thought that this ad was very effective and described it to me in some detail. Having now found it on the Internet, I’m surprised — it seems a little heavy-handed to me. But based on this unscientific sample, one target audience seems to love it…

Disinfo? Breakthrough? How Should I Know

The NSA is hinting hard that it has cracked the fiber optic barrier and finds encryption ‘no more than speed bump’. As usual, might be true (esp. the parts about tracking phones and tapping undersea fiber), but bring truckload of salt to the party.

Attacks on Kerry's Vietnam Service Debunked

It’s pretty sad that this should even be necessary, but eRiposte Media: Liars and Haters Inc. offers a very thorough debunking of various implausible accusations about Kerry’s second tour of duty in Vietnam.

Blogging Forecast

Light blogging forecast while I work like a dog for a few days.

Some political blogs that I read are especially good right now, including, in no special order, Hullabaloo, Brad DeLong, FafBlog, Is That Legal?, Whiskey Bar, The Daily Howler and The Cosmic Iguana.

And, I especially want to mention The Carpetbagger Report and TalkLeft, both which are going gangbusters this week, plus those other great blogs I should have mentioned above. Especially yours, of course.

FIU Law Wins Provisional Accreditation

Congrats to our neighbors at FIU Law who (unsurpringly) have secured provisional accreditation. I’m sure it’s deserved, and I’m sure FIU will be fully accredited as soon as it can be.

I do object, however, to the claim routinely repeated by the Miami Herald that because a majority of FIU’s small class is Hispanic, this adds a great diversity element otherwise absent from the Florida bar. UM already has an substantial number of Hispanic students every year. Hispanics may not be a majority of our class, but they form a large fraction of a larger class than FIU fields. And we also have a substantial number of Black students. (I’d quote the actual numbers if I could remember what they are—they’re good numbers and we are proud of them. And they are well-credentialed students who do well here too.)

The more the merrier and all that, but I sort of resent the implication that we have not been doing well in this area for at least the dozen years I’ve been watching, and indeed no doubt much longer.

Roll The Tape

It sounded pretty bad in the newspaper, but it sounds even worse on tape. Majority Report Radio has a rare tape of GW Bush attempting to answer an unscripted question by a member of the Minority Journalists association, who I’d wager is not a member of the White House Poodle Press Corps.

Next week, GW Bush explains federalism as when you are federal?

Miserable Failure

American Progress Action Fund has a list of broken Bush promises. It is a long list, although I’m not sure how much longer it is than a comparable list might have been after, say, Clinton’s first term. Or Reagan’s.

The difference between this administration and Clinton’s, of course, is that Clinton did a lot of other things right: he managed the economy well; he lowered the deficit rather than increasing it; the tried faithfully to make peace in the mid-east; and he faced a hostile congress dominated by Republicans. (I imagine some conservatives would say something similar about the first Reagan administration.)

In contrast, in addition to his well-known economic and foreign-policy failures, Bush has no substantial domestic policy successes to brag about (except tax cuts if you are wealthy), despite having a solidly Republican Congress.

Hypothesis: It's Still A Free Country

Thanks to Beth Novak for pointing me to the NYCLU site on Protecting Protest:

Protecting Protest is a campaign of the New York Civil Liberties Union to ensure that protest can take place safely and legally during the Republican National Convention this August. We’re defending civil liberties from a storefront near Madison Square Garden, in the courts by challenging NYPD demonstration control tactics, at City Hall, and on the streets.

The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it’s still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis.

Electoral Vote Predictions Mapped

The Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 is a classy web based chart that maps the latest poll results onto an elecoral map. It even has an RSS feed.

And then there’s the interesting commentary, e.g.,

The featured poll today is a special poll of New Mexico commissioned by Libertarian party candidate Michael Badnarik and conducted by Scott Rasmussen on Aug. 4. The result is Kerry 50%, Bush 43%, Badnarik 5%, a surprisingly strong showing by him. If pollsters regularly asked Kerry/Bush/Badnarik instead of Kerry/Bush/Nader, Badnarik might do better. That might actually affect the election since Nader sucks votes almost entirely from Kerry whereas Badnarik is much more of an equal-opportunity gadfly drawing from both sides. Could the questions asked by the pollsters actually change the election results? Time for a Ph.D. thesis on Heisenberg’s principle (“observing the system changes the system”) as applied to politics. No change in the electoral college as New Mexico was already leaning to Kerry, only now the lead is a bit more solid.