Predictions Update

Thoughts on my predictions:

Giuliani was spot on, although my Romney call is looking weaker by the day. It will be interesting to see how aggressive he gets over the next 5 days, which is about all the time he has left to turn the ship around. My guess is that he doesn't get very nasty and that this race is over. But what do I know?

Edwards dropping out is a big surprise, well the timing is anyway. I still think that Obama can win it. Hillary really annoyed me with her comments post Florida yesterday, both about Florida and Michigan. It re enforces the meme that she is untrustworthy and willing to jettison rules not written to her favor. That is something I don't want from a nominee.

Thoughts?

Posted with minimal comment

From today's endorsements in the NYT.

On John Edwards:

We have enjoyed hearing Mr. Edwards’s fiery oratory, but we cannot support his candidacy. The former senator from North Carolina has repudiated so many of his earlier positions, so many of his Senate votes, that we’re not sure where he stands.

On John McCain:

We have shuddered at Mr. McCain’s occasional, tactical pander to the right because he has demonstrated that he has the character to stand on principle.

One "repudiates earlier positions", the other one engages in "tactical pander[ing]" (like embracing Jerry Falwell?). If I didn't know better, I'd say there is some meta-story at work here.

Best Headline Ever

No more entries please, we have a winner:

Goodbye Rudy, Tuesday

Pretty good story too:

It’s worth stepping back for a moment to recall how far and how quickly Giuliani has fallen. For most of the summer and well into the fall, he was the Republican frontrunner. His campaign consisted of a hagiography: the hero of 9/11. His fundraising was strong. Now the campaign is all but broke and he’s getting his clock cleaned in some states by Ron Paul – Ron Paul! – the 97-pound libertarian who thinks the war on terror is bogus...
More broadly, you can summarize Giuliani’s problems in the line he no longer uses. When the World Trade Center towers came down, he turned to his loyal sidekick Bernie Kerik, and said he was glad George Bush was president. Now, that line is a triple loser. Kerik, his police commissioner, is under federal indictment, in a sea of troubles. Bush is despised by two-thirds of Americans, and even a majority of Republicans want to go in a different direction. As for the big scare, give Senator Joe Biden credit for writing what may be Giuliani’s obit: “There are only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”
...Yet Giuliani still wants to frighten people into voting for him. Maybe that’s why he hired the gothic-faced actor Jon Voight to stump for him in Florida. What, christopher Walken wasn’t available?

Too bad he's out, material like this is hard to come by. Oh well, I guess there's still... every other Republican candidate and the current Bush administration.

Thompson's Out

Funniest line I read about that all day is that Rudy can now brag that he's surging, finishing 5th in all the future primaries instead of 6th. Forgot where I read it though.

Update on Predictions

It's all coming together:

To wit, numbers from his native New York today. McCain leads Rudy 36-24. A month ago, Rudy was up over McCain 48-15. If he can't hold a lead in New York after taking so many early hits, where can he?

Get ready for some more embarrassing 9/11 references between now and early February as Rudy finishes surrendering all of his self respect and preempts all attempts at parody, but after then our balconies should be safe. Ciao il bambino Mussolini.

Sigfried, Roy and White House Email

Recently, someone reminded me of a classic Chris Rock bit that goes basically like this: People keep saying the tiger went crazy when it attacked Roy, the tiger went CRAZY. No it didn't. The tiger went tiger. The tiger went crazy when it was riding around the ring on a bicycle playing the trumpet.


That pretty much sums up why I've been fairly silent recently on the mendacity and lawlessness of the Bush administration - it's not news when a tiger acts like a tiger. At least it shouldn't be. But when a tiger kills its prey, eats some of it, then sodomizes the lifeless corpse, well that's news.

Let me present then, the White House email scandal, certainly not the most heinous example of White House lawbreaking, but one where the administration definitely is caught sodomizing the barely breathing body of the rule of law:

There is much cause for outrage over the White House's brazen disregard for federal public records law, which may well have resulted in the destruction of millions of official e-mails... The law is clear that e-mails sent and received by anyone in the White House -- just like all official White House documents -- should be instantaneously and automatically archived. So someone in the White House should have been making sure the law was being followed, and that all e-mails were indeed being properly stored for posterity... The matter in the news today relates not to those e-mails, but to as many as several million others -- these actually on the eop.gov accounts -- that seem to have vanished.

Which ones vanished? Why the emails from 2001 to October 2003, a period that just happens to cover the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Plame leak and the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes. How convenient. But if they are missing, why not just go to the backup tapes?

E-mail messages sent and received by White House personnel during the first three years of the Bush administration were routinely recorded on tapes that were "recycled," the White House's chief information officer said in a court filing this week.

A more clear example of the White House acting with utter disregard (and contempt) for the law would be hard to point out. Someone needs to go to jail for this.

Prediction Time

Giuliani will not win Florida. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that (if he's still in the race) he won't win NY either.

I believe Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.

John Edwards will not win South Carolina.

I believe Obama will be the Democratic nominee.

And an observation:

Mike Huckabee is batshit insane.

Now THAT's a market movement - Part 2

Intrade had a huge reversal based on New Hampshire. Obama to 40 from about 70 yesterday, Clinton to 59 from about 30. More volatility than the DJIA.

FWIW: Bill Richardson is also running behind Al Gore on Intrade. Time to drop out when you fall behind people who aren't even running.

I can't watch MSNBC

I tried to watch as much as I could last night, but my God the people MSNBC had on were terrible. Not to pile on too much, as the lefty blogosphere is doing a swell job of that already, I really must mention that Chris Matthews is unwatchable. Terrible. Horrible. Ditto with Joe Scarborough.

I've been trying to rely more on print and blogs this cycle and last night my make me abandon TV coverage of the political cycle entirely. It sucks.

Now that's a market movement

Has anyone checked out intrade lately on the status of the democratic race? Hilary is down to 25 (from about 70), Obama up to 70 (70!) from about 20 or so not that long ago. That's quite a movement in a very short period of time.

Intrade has gotten lots of press over the years for its ability to correctly predict the outcome of elections, but does anyone know if prior years have seen such volatility in the trading? My recollection is that the trading was fairly consistent in the past, but I could be very wrong on this.

Edwards running for VEEP again?

Just a thought/observation based on watching some of the debate on Saturday and reading some of Edwards' statements since Iowa.

Thoughts?

Iowa

I have to admit that I am surprised that Obama won. I wonder what this will do for him, especially in New Hampshire next Tuesday. As of now it looks like Hillary is going to finish 3rd which is disaster for her from a PR perspective. I don't think that Edwards can do much beyond Iowa, but who knows.

Huckabee won big, but I don't think it's going to matter at all. I don't think he has the money to compete going forward, and I can't see him doing well in CA, FL, NY, or even PA for that matter. I think the big news on the Rep. side is that Thompson finished 3rd.

So now we'll see

how and if Mukasey is independent of the White House. I'm not particularly optimistic, but I've been surprised before in my life.

I LOVE the WSJ Editorial Page

Since the Weekly World News is out of print. Today's Op-Ed:

[Obama] skips the tie at major indoor events, not just outdoor rallies and Rock the Vote concerts sponsored by MTV. He goes tieless not merely in his shirtsleeves, or even with a blazer. He carries the open-necked look into a realm it was never meant to go: with the two-piece, dark business suit.
This heresy earns the young senator praise from today's keepers of the style tablets. The Washington Post's Robin Givhan -- the acid-penned Madame Blackwell of the Beltway -- could hardly contain herself. "[Obama's] tieless suit," she gushed, "[is] a cross between the style of a 1950s home-from-the-office dad and a 1990s GQ man about town. It is warmly, safely, nostalgically . . . cool."
Others have noticed something else. Take the impeccably liberal Jeff Greenfield. Ask yourself," he challenged his CNN audience, "is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable." We can thank Mr. Greenfield for being reckless enough to say what many were thinking. But he mistakes Mr. Ahmadinejad's source. Mr. Obama may have gotten the idea from GQ, but the Iranian President got it from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
One of the lesser-known outcomes of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the stigmatization of the tie as a tool of Western Imperialism. The Ayatollah even denounced some of his perceived enemies as "tie-wearing cronies of the West." Today in much of the Islamist world, the tie is seen as not merely pro-Western but anti-Islamic, even though no prohibition of the garment can be found in Islamic law. There is a stricture against men wearing silk, but Muslim dandies can get around that by wearing cashmere or linen ties -- and many do.
It's hard to think of anything less hip -- or less intended to be hip -- than Islamist dogma on personal grooming. Yet despite traveling radically different routes along the way, Messrs. Obama and Ahmadinejad somehow manage to wind up in the same sartorial spot. Sort of like the way Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich share virtually identical foreign policies.

My goodness that's a good piece. In one piece they imply that Obama may not wear ties out of some fealty to Khomeni (perhaps his bare neckedness is supposed to be to Muslims what Bush's "Don't put a period on the sentence..." bullshit is to fundamentalist Christians?), but also equate Ron Paul with Kucinich. That is professionalism. That is efficiency. My one critique is that they never got Obama's middle name into the piece, but perhaps they thought it would be too obvious?

This is an embarrassment, even by the low standards of the WSJ editorial page.

Hilliary and Message Discipline

Boy, there sure are a bunch of Hilliary staffers releasing unapproved messages these days. A positively alarming amount of freelancing. I really hope she can corral those bad eggs.

Brave

Senators McCain, Dodd, Biden, Obama, Clinton, Cornyn, and Alexander, way to show bravery and leadership by not voting either way for Mukasey yesterday. Five of you are running for president. Way to go.

At least Feinstein, Landrieu, Nelson, Leiberman, Carper, Bayh, and Schumer had the balls to say they were OK with the US torturing people.

Yesterday was the time to make a stand and, once again, no stand was made. Oh, and I guess you can't hide behind the 60-vote minimum thing anymore either, huh?

Once again, to shed the reputation of being soft, you, well, have to not be soft.

Random Observations

Been a while, sorry about that, yadda-yadda, you all know the drill by now.

Profoundly disappointed in Schumer and Feinstein. I don't care what Schumer was told behind closed doors, what matters to me is that Mukasey was not willing to call waterboarding torture when he was in front of an open mike. And as far as "enforcing all the laws", when exactly did that become the bar over which the AG had to jump? Wasn't that once considered a core part of the gig?

Schumer and Feinstein have now made torture a US thing, not a Republican thing. It was bad enough to not aggressively pursue criminal complaints, but to endorse Mukasey is to give the OK to torture - plain and simple. Schumer is up again in (I believe) 2010. I don't live in NY anymore, but will gladly support a primary challenger.

Hard to see how telco's can get retroactive immunity after the testimony provided yesterday. Of course, they probably will thanks to Jay Rockefeller, but that doesn't mean that they should. Amazing.

Although, as down as I am on the Democrats these days, I am in awe of the Republicans. Pat Robertson endorses Giuliani? Seriously? What a hack. I hope that Ron Paul asks Rudy about Robertson's 9-11 comments at the next Republican debate.

Did I miss anything else?

A Dangerous, Dangerous Man

In all seriousness, I think that Giuliani may be nuts. Here are some of his thoughts on waterboarding as torture:

It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is. Because I’ve learned something being in public life as long as I have. And I hate to shock anybody with this, but the newspapers don’t always describe it accurately.

Um, what changes to the description would make it ok for you, Rudy? Only a little water? And can you please describe for us the "liberal media"? Does the "conservative media" have a different definition of waterboarding? Can we please hear that definition?

So I think America should never be for torture. America should be against torture. It violates the Geneva Convention. Certainly when we’re dealing with armed combatants, we shouldn’t get near anything like that. There is a distinction, sometimes, when you’re dealing with terrorists. You may have to use means that are a little tougher.

Um, why would you have to be tougher with a terrorist? What is it about terrorists that require them to be treated with greater toughness? Why would that greater toughness work with terrorists but not armed combatants? If it really is important to get the information, wouldn't you use the same tactics regardless of category? Why reserve your most effective (i.e. tough) methods just for terrorists?

And I see, when the Democrats are talking about torture, they’re not just talking about even this definition of waterboarding, which again, if you look at the liberal media and you look at the way they describe it, you could say it was torture and you shouldn’t do it. But they talk about sleep deprivation. I mean, on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly. That’s silly.

This nonsense drove me crazy when Rumsfeld said it (I stand all day, why can't prisoners stand? It's not torture if I do it myself), and it drives me nuts here too. Rudy, your sleep deprivation is VOLUNTARY and, I'd be willing to bet, you are not up for 24 hours at at stretch. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that when you do sleep, you sleep in a pretty nice bed. Wait, we KNOW that you do, when you are not busy staying awake on Gulfstreams. To speak about it in the way that you do is to (purposefully) obscure what's really going on. Just as the people forced to stand for days on end eventually had their legs burst out in sores, keeping people up for days and interrupting their sleep cycles can be vicious and psychologically devastating. It makes a big difference if you can sit down when you feel like it and sleep when you feel like it.

The entire piece is worth reading simply to discover for yourselves how crazy and dangerous Giuliani is. He is a madman.

Some thoughts on Presidential Powers

I don't believe the president, any president be it Bush, or Clinton, or the goddamn Dalai Lama, should have unchecked or unfettered powers. One of the many, many issues I have with the Bush administration is the aggressive expansion of executive power and how hard it is going to be to put the genie back in the bottle once it's out. Because out, it's a hard thing to surrender.

I think that the only way it could be done is if there is some sort of "Truth Commission" after the elections in 2008 where Congress conducts real investigations with real penalties for what's happened over the past 6 years. Of course, it will never happen.

I'm afraid that the Dems are slowing down their pursuit of Bush et. al. because they feel that it may be their turn in 2008 and why should they take those tools away when it will be their guy/girl who gets to weild them? Like the slow walking of the Gonzalez investigations (where a number of Dems were in no hurry to wrap them up because they believed that the great press and the embarrassing issues were a winner - they'd STILL be investigating without sanction if Gonzalez hadn't up and quit), I fear that they think these could be winning tools once they control all 3 branches of government. Which is, of course, silly. The Republican noise machine, sputtering somewhat but still effective, would never allow a Democratic president to get away with half of what the Bushies have gotten away with (and I'd agree with them). Dems could slow walk these investigations too in hopes of retaining the powers only to be bashed on the head with those powers. It is right in principle and right in politics to move aggressively to investigate an administration out of control.

Hillary is a prime example I can point to to explain why I'm so down on the Dems these days. She has recently said that she would review presidential powers if she was elected president and would consider giving some of those up. That's a good thing and the issue of presidential power is one that I've been struggling with for a while. Then, she turns around and issues a wishy-washy response on what she would do about FISA. It doesn't get much more clear than FISA. Are you willing to grant blanket immunity to companies without even knowing what they've done, when we're pretty sure that they illegally aiding the government in spying on us, or are you not? Are you interested in the rule of law, or are you not? And sadly, I can't say that Dems these days are 100% behind the rule of law. And that is profoundly disappointing.


There are some bright spots - Waxman for instance - but looking at the overall picture, I'm not at all encouraged.

OK, circle up, circle up...

And FIRE!

Dodd is threatening to filibuster the FISA bill, Armenian genocide declaration dies on the floor, opinions all over the place on Mukasey.

Quite the circular firing squad Dems have got going on these days.