Do Dems Have An Electable Major Candidate?

Take a look at this very interesting article by an American working and writing in England. Sarah Churchwell makes the point that, with one notable exception, the only Democrats elected President since FDR have all been Southerners. The exception was Kennedy and that was a long time ago.

Churchwell is making an argument for the Party of the Donkey to take a closer look at John Edwards. On the other hand, senior political observer Robert Novak reports that Edwards isn't popular with the folks who run the Democratic Party:

Once their great hope for the future, Edwards now is massively unpopular among party regulars who neither like nor trust him.

On the surface, he seems a perfect candidate: eloquent, smart, handsome and shrewd. Yet, the prospect of an Edwards-led ticket evokes the deepest apprehension inside the party as another flawed presidential nominee.

If Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are the only likely candidates for the Democrats, and Clinton and Obama have the curse of "northernness" while the party doesn't want Edwards, does that leave the Democrats with an electable candidate? It would appear the answer is "no." If true, that is a relief.

WSJ on Wooing Women Voters

Kimberley A. Strassel, writing in the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, talks about two major ways in which GOP candidates can make a pitch for women's votes. One deals with fighting for flextime rights for employees, a topic unions dominated by men, and their Democratic clients, have opposed. The other, dealing with the tax code's discrimination against married women, is even more interesting:

Most married women are second-earners. That means their income is added to that of their husband's, and thus taxed at his highest marginal rate. So the married woman working as a secretary keeps less of her paycheck than the single woman who does the exact same job. This is the ultimate in "inequality," yet Democrats constantly promote the very tax code that punishes married working women.

Quote of the Day

The following statement is attributed to Bill Buckley, in an Opinion Journal column by Peggy Noonan:

Politics is not an ennobling profession.

I don't believe I've read a truer statement today; it will certainly do as my quote of the day.

Here Comes Fred Thompson

An event we've been waiting for will apparently occur next week, and may have been put in motion today. It is reported that Fred Thompson will announce on September 6. This gives him a good excuse to miss the New Hampshire GOP debate on September 5. You can't blame him for not wanting to share a stage with political irrelevancies like Brownback, Tancredo and Paul.

According to this Associated Press article on Breitbart.com, Fred Thompson will announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President next week. Another source, on the Red State blog, says close supporters and insiders are being notified today by phone. Jonathan Martin, writing on The Politico website, says a campaign source has told him the formal announcement will happen on September 6. Finally, The Trail, a WaPo website, says he may announce on Leno on Wednesday, Sept. 5.

Now we will learn whether the wait has been worth it. Is Fred Thompson this generation's Ronald Reagan or just a tall Southern politician with some acting credits? For the sake of us former idealists who've been mugged by reality, I hope he is a Reagan clone.

Hot News for Al Gore

This article from The Arizona Republic reports that the Phoenix area will hit a record today for the summer with the most days over 110 degrees (n=29). They have already tied the previous record of 28 days.

We try to be fair and report milestones on both sides of this issue. Recently, most milestones have been on the global cooling side of the argument. This event is much-needed good news for the folks concerned about global warming.

U.S. Poverty Rate Drops

Check out this Associated Press article reporting the first significant drop in U.S. poverty rates since 2000. Do you suppose George Bush will get any credit for this? I doubt it; the poor guy cannot get a break, and the fault for that is probably his.

The reporter writing the article says some very politically incorrect things, check this out:

Poverty has not been a big issue in the campaign, and political scientists said they doubted the new numbers would change that.

"The poor are politically mute," said Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. "What rational politician would listen to the poor? They don't vote, they don't write checks, why care?"

Democrat John Edwards has made fighting poverty a centerpiece of his campaign. But, Jacobs noted, "He's struggling to raise money and he's lagging in the polls."

I have wondered why Edwards keeps harping on this issue. He gets less traction with his "two Americas" theme than Al Gore does with his "global warming" screed.

Erin Burnett, the New Money Honey

See Howard Kurtz' Washington Post article about NBC's new star business reporter: Erin Burnett. He is all but stepping on his tongue. Actually, Erin is pretty good; that is, she is pretty and she is good. Check her out on Street Signs on CNBC.

Oregon Colleges Very 1960s

This article in the The Oregonian reports on the college students at Lewis & Clark and Reed:

Students at Reed and Lewis & Clark are mostly hippie atheist liberal nerds -- at least according to the Princeton Review's 2008 edition of "Best 366 Colleges."

Reed and Lewis & Clark also both made the lists of schools with "students most nostalgic for Bill Clinton" and "Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians."

I can't speak for Oregon State and Portland State, but I spent 3 years as a grad student at the University of Oregon and these descriptors fit most of the students I knew at U. of O. in the Business School! I suspect the article describes most of Oregon's college students.

Oregon is a weird state; it has a very Twin Peaks feeling. The western part of the state, where most people live, is swathed in rain seven or eight months of the year. If you've read the diaries of the Lewis and Clark Expedition you know how depressing they found the Oregon winter.

While I studied in Oregon the most common automotive fatality was a one-car accident - in other words, vehicular suicide. The beleaguered acting President of the U. of O., Chuck Johnson, killed himself in this fashion. He swerved his VW head-on into a speeding logging truck on the McKenzie Highway.

Oregon's constantly gray skies are depressing. It is no place for someone with even a hint of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), take my word for it.

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

You've got to read this Wall Street Journal article summarizing research which concludes that affirmative action policies at top law schools have resulted in fewer black attorneys. Here is the key paragraph:

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

Political Correctness in Seattle

Two men were acting oddly on a ferry in the Seattle area, taking photos of technical workings and walking into areas labeled "crew only." The Captain took a couple of pictures of them and the FBI would like to talk to them. No one alleges they have necessarily done anything wrong, but their behavior does resemble that of would-be terrorists casing a target. You can see one of the pictures yourself here.

Believe it or not, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer refused to run the picture of the two men. Here is their rationale. See if you agree. Local TV stations did run the pictures.

Some people's self-preservation instinct is so underdeveloped as to make them likely winners of the Darwin Award. True, Seattle is a hotbed of coffee-addicted, tree-hugging, software-writing liberals, leavened with a few Boeing aerospace engineers. In spite of that, you'd think they would understand that ferry boats make wonderful terrorist targets and that they would be the folks doing the dying.

Here is an article that really gets P.O.'ed about political correctness, maybe a little extreme but fun.

Conservative Humor Alert

"Never Underestimate the Power of Makeup" is the title of a set of photos making their way around the conservative humor sites on the web. It really ties into the topic in the previous post.

The Likability Factor

In the 1600s, a student at Christ Church, Oxford, named Tom Brown is famous for his couplet in extemporaneous translation from the Latin:

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

This is a classical expression of the experience we've all had of disliking someone without being able to say just why. I share this with you by way of introducing an article concerning the high 'negatives' of Hillary Clinton. The polling data suggests a lot of folks truthfully could recite the following couplet:

I do not love thee, Mistress Hil,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Mistress Hil.

Of course others could and would tell you at great length the reasons why they dislike the former First Lady. I suspect many Republicans secretly hope she is nominated. The danger in that is that world circumstances might result in her election by a narrow margin.

Can the country really stomach another four years with a President so many of us cannot stand? Is it possible that we are headed for a period where widely hated Presidents are the norm? You could reasonably argue that we've been in that situation for the past 12 or more years. The mind fairly boggles....

R. Peters Says J. Warner Doesn't Get It

Ralph Peters, writing from Anbar Province in Iraq, observes that Senator John Warner has missed half the equation with his call for a symbolic troop withdrawal. Says Peters, Sunnis are helping the Marines whomp Al Qaeda in Anbar. This is better-than-good news, and Warner has missed it.

To be sure, Iraqi politicians are hopeless idiots, perhaps even worse than our own. Still, to expect any politicians to accomplish much is to emulate Pollyanna. Give Peters' article a look.

George Will's September Song

Read George Will's Washington Post column on the reception likely to be received by the report of General Petraeus concerning progress (or the lack thereof) in Iraq. As he astutely observes, everyone in Washington will be listening for what they want to hear, and essentially nothing else. As he notes:

When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi parliament goes back into session at about the same time he makes his report. Nobody has much optimism in their ability to put together a self-ruling country out of their three main groups: Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia.

Global Warming Can't Get a Break

See this article which shows that New York City yesterday tied the record for the coldest August day on record, a record set in 1911. July averaged 1.5 degrees colder than normal, and August is headed in the same direction. How frustrating when the weather just won't cooperate with the Chicken Littles crying about a global warming falling sky.

Americans Reject World Knowledge

This article reports a study which shows that Americans aren't very interested in U.S. politics and even less interested in the politics of other countries. Well...duh! Current U.S. politics aren't very interesting; a bunch of second-raters yelling "yo momma" at each other in tinny little voices.

Politics overseas can be more interesting but for residents of the world's sole superpower, perhaps not very relevant to everyday life. It takes something like 9/11 to interest most Americans in the political concerns of folks overseas. Without a recurrence, that interest doesn't persist. And why should it? If you don't personally travel overseas and trade overseas, what happens there doesn't seem much relevant to daily life here.

GWOT Humor

The following story is making the rounds on the Internet, the author and source are unknown. It is, however, funny in its own way.

While hiking through Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden found a bottle on the sand & picked it up. A female Genie rose from the bottle and with a smile said, "Master, may I grant you one wish?"

Osama responded, "You ignorant, unworthy daughter-of-a-dog! Don't you know who I am? I don't need any common woman giving me anything."

The shocked Genie said, "Please, sir, I must grant you a wish or I will be returned to that bottle forever."

Osama thought a moment, then grumbled about the impertinence of the Genie and said, "Very well, I want to awaken with three American women in my bed in the morning. So just do it and be off with you."

The annoyed Genie said, "So be it!" and disappeared.

The next morning Bin Laden woke up in bed with Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, and Hillary Clinton at his side.

His manhood was gone, his knees were broken, and he had no health insurance.

God is Good!

Peters on Iran

Ralph Peters, Lt. Colonel, U.S. Army Ret., often has a savvy take on matters military, and he writes a column for the New York Post. Here he notes an overlooked implication of the U.S. government formally designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

Apparently, a formal designation as terrorists creates an option to attack their bases in Iran, as we've stated we will attack terrorists wherever they may be found. The Bush White House may figure they've nothing to lose in attacking Iran; nobody on Pennsylvania Avenue is running for reelection.

Broder on Fred Thompson

The Washington Post's David Broder is the dean of mainstream Washington political journalists. His knowledge of American politics is legendary. He reports on a two hour interview he conducted with soon-to-be candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Fred Thompson. Considering that he writes for a key member of the MSM with a liberal editorial policy, Broder has a relatively positive response to Thompson.

Broder quotes Thompson as follows:

There's no reason for me to run just to be president. I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there -- different, more far-reaching ideas -- that is worth doing.

Thompson waiting until September to announce his candidacy will either turn out to be a masterstroke or a disaster, nobody yet knows which. I hope for all our sakes it turns out well.

Potentially Huge News

If this story in the London Telegraph proves to be true, it is likely to be your first notice of the most important story happening during your lifetime. If the speed of light can be exceeded, space travel becomes feasible and everything we think we now know about physics will need to be reexamined. The implications are potentially enormous.

We have every reason to be skeptical of this story and others like it. Remember the flurry of stories over "cold fusion" which proved to be, if not exactly a hoax, relatively bad science and certainly untrue?

Coulter Lists Dem Losers

Ann Coulter trots out a list of former Democratic icons that have become laughingstocks when we learned more about them. Check out her Yahoo News column here. She chronicles eight darlings of the left whom we now see as losers.

Of Joe Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame, she wisecracks

Wilson is now demanding a congressional investigation into who leaked the classified information that his wife wears the pants in the family. The Joe Wilson celebrity tour officially ended when The Washington Post editorialized: "It's unfortunate that so many people took (Wilson) seriously" -- not the least of whom were reporters at The Washington Post itself.

The President Still Doesn't Get It

This article from the National Review Online starts out with a nice premise, and then doesn't do much with it. The premise is that the President is mad at us for torpedoing his amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants bill and plans to get even with us by actually enforcing the immigration laws we now have. Much of the rest of the article is a kind of boring recitation of what can be done to enforce existing laws.

However, I think author Mark Krikorian is correct that the President believes we will be inconvenienced by a lack of illegal workers in our fields and factories. He thinks we will balk at higher prices driven by the need to get the job done with legal workers. My guess is that he is wrong.

With the exception of some meat packers and vegetable growers, who will be in a bind at least temporarily, most of us will look at enforcement efforts and say "it is about time." If workers' Social Security Numbers don't match up, and the workers can't get the problems corrected within a reasonable period, fire them. If the only jobs illegal immigrants can hold in this country are casual day labor jobs, paid off the books, most will return home or stay home.

Then the next task is to really get serious about rounding up visitors who have overstayed their visas and sending them home. We need to know who is in our country, why, where they are located, and for how long. Once we get control of illegal immigration, then a streamlined legal immigration policy that focuses on engineers, nurses and others with in-demand education and skills makes sense. But only then....

Dwarf Countdown: -1

There are a host of nobodies and almost-nobodies trying to gain their parties' nominations this year. Those who have little or no chance of winning the nomination are engaged in very public ego trips, and to what end?

One of the "dwarfs" in the presidential sweepstakes, Tommy Thompson, has had a belated moment of self-insight and withdrawn from the Republican race for the party nomination. A New York Times article about the withdrawal is here.

Now if we can only weed out a bit more of the "underbrush" in these two fields, the debates may become worth a watcher's time. I have not been able to bring myself to watch one yet.

Good News from South Korea

The mainstream media (MSM) have left the impression in recent months that the U.S. image in South Korea has deteriorated badly. See this Christian Science Monitor article on Yahoo News for recent polling evidence that South Korea is still a solid U.S. ally, that the U.S. presence in South Korea remains popular and that South Koreans still view North Korea as a major threat.

The survey results also contradict the impression of an increasing public tilt toward China. In fact, one of the most striking findings is that the public strongly prefers the US over China.

When asked which of the two countries Korea should maintain close ties with for the sake of its national interest, 20 percent picked China, while an overwhelming 79 percent selected the US.

Those findings don't exactly fit the horrible international picture the MSM is trying to paint. Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when the MSM moved from reporting the actual news to "selling" a world view of the U.S. as a monster.

No sole superpower can be universally popular, neither the Brits nor the Romans were. Nevertheless, as superpowers go, the U.S. has left relatively light (or no) footprints in most parts of the world. We have mostly been what Mark Steyn calls below "a benign hegemon." Wouldn't it be nice if our MSM reported the glass to be half full once in awhile? I, for one, would find that refreshing.

Global Cooling?

NASA has released the data for average annual temperatures in the 48 contiguous states, going back to 1880. It turns out the warmest year on record was 1934. The year previously thought to be warmest, 1998, moved to second place. Third place is held by 1921, and fully half of the ten warmest years occurred before World War II. Now...where is the evidence of recent global warming in these figures?

Read Mark Steyn's Sunday ruminations on this climate story and on the liberal self-loathing implicit in all the "we have met the enemy and he is us" stories in the MSM. My favorite Steynism is the following:

There are many honorable reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but believing that our troops are sick monsters is not one of them. The sickness is the willingness of so many citizens of the most benign hegemon in history to believe they must be.

Gen. Petraeus Human Interest Story

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan tells a marvelous story about the general commanding in Iraq: General Petraeus. She notes that 16 years ago, as a much younger officer, he was the recipient of accidental "friendly fire" that darned near killed him.

The surgeon who took the bullet out of his chest and saved his life was a Dr. Bill Frist, who later became Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate. As a result of this interaction, they've been friends ever since. It is a small world....

Dept. of Justice Murder Statistics

According to this report on the Breitbart.com website, U.S. Department of Justice crime statistics show that blacks, who make up 13% of the U.S. population, constitute almost half of the country's total murder victims. Of the 16,500 people murdered in 2005, roughly 8000 were black. Furthermore, 6800 of these 8000 were males. Interestingly,

Most murder victims -- 93 percent of blacks and 85 percent of whites -- were killed by someone of their own race.

These are some scary numbers. It appears the violence in hip-hop music is no exaggeration.

Minorities Now Majority in 1 County Out of 10

See this Associated Press map for a picture of where "minorities" are now in the majority. I find several things interesting about the map, at least some of which have nothing to do with minorities. First, the fact that counties are tiny east of the Rockies and large west of the Rockies. What is that about?

Second, it is certainly no accident that most of the "minority majority" counties are in the southern U.S. The Old South makes up the eastern part of this belt, except southern Florida, and the Southwest makes up the western part. The minorities in the former are heavily African-American and the latter are largely Mexican immigrant. Southern Florida has many immigrants from the Caribbean area: Cuba, Haiti, etc. The few counties you see shaded in the upper Mountain states and Midwest are counties with Indian reservations.

One has to wonder the extent to which this map reflects past "white flight" and the degree to which it will become a guide to future migration? My guess: "substantially" is the answer to both questions.

Breast Implants And Suicide, Substance Abuse

When things are found to be correlated, causation is often implied. In other words, if A is related to B, maybe A causes B. Of course equally likely is that B causes A, or that some unspecified third variable C causes both. Scholars call this "the directionality of the causal arrow."

Here Reuters reports one of these wonderful studies where one thing is found to be correlated with another. Swedish women who had breast implants were three times as likely to commit suicide as women who did not. Of course less than 1% of the implant group committed suicide, but that was still three times the rate for a control group.

Out of the 3500 women with implants studied over 19 years,

Women with breast implants also had a tripled risk of death from alcohol and drug use. "Thus, at least 38 deaths (22 percent of all deaths) in this implant cohort were associated with suicide, psychological disorders and/or drug and alcohol abuse/dependence," the researchers wrote.

While the implication is that implants cause suicide and substance abuse, that view is likely to be wrong. Instead view this data as saying that a woman is probably relatively unhappy with her appearance to undertake implants. Not surprisingly, some number of such unhappy women find implants do not banish their feelings of being somehow "wrong." Hence, implants, suicide and substance abuse are all responses to persistent unhappiness or clinical depression, aka variable C.

Poll Numbers of President, Iraq Improving

Public opinion toward both President Bush and the "surge" in Iraq seems to be improving. This USA Today article summarizes the results of several polls which show this trend. The improvement is not large, but perhaps more important, the latest two polls show the positive trend continuing.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the improvement is the result of public disgust with the Congress, which truly hasn't covered itself with glory in the first half of 2007. Compared to this Congress, the President looks statesmanlike in comparison. And, of course, the news from Iraq has been cautiously encouraging. Still, as the article says,

None of these numbers are in and of themselves the types of public approbation exciting enough to cause champagne corks to pop in the White House.

Old News Revisited: Diversity is Difficult

A Harvard political scientist has surveyed 30,000 people and determined that diversity has negative effects, a finding he doesn't much like. I sympathize with him; this finding would not be popular with one's academic peers who want to see diversity as a positive value. The research is summarized in a long article in the International Herald Tribune. Professor Robert Putnam finds the following:

the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings.

In Management, we've known for some years that diverse work groups are less cohesive, find teamwork more difficult, and yet may come up with more creative solutions to problems. What Putnam has found occurring in communities, we have known for some time happens in work groups in industry.

"Social capital" is Putnam's term for the positive effects of neighborhood homogeneity:

Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in "social capital," a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks -- whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations -- that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote.

Putnam has reminded us of a good reason to be serious about immigration reform and control of our borders.

First Spouse 101

Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, delivers a primer on "how to be a winning first lady." To be sure, this is not the most important political story you'll ever read, maybe not even this week. She explains

Why these stories? Because it's August and no one wants to think. Because the campaign is too long and reporters have to write about something.

Nonetheless, at a time in our history when presidential races are won and lost by a few thousand votes, candidates for first spouse do matter at the margin. Who can deny that a factor in Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House is voters' hopes and fears about how husband Bill will behave and misbehave as first spouse?

Leaving aside the special case of Bill Clinton, Peggy summarizes her advice for potential first ladies as follows:

First ladies were once more or less average, and were expected to be. Now they are accomplished, worldly, and expected to be. Candidates for the first lady's job have to find a balance. It's delicate. Strong is good, aggressive not. A person who cares, yes; a person who pushes an agenda, no.

Cautious Optimism on Iraq

The always-interesting Michael Barone, writing on the CBS News website, suggests there are the beginnings of some modest optimism about outcomes in Iraq. He summarizes a recent article by two Democrats in The New York Times which says things in Iraq are getting better. He also notes recent opinion polling which shows U.S. public opinion vis-a-vis U.S. involvement in Iraq is becoming more positive, increasing from 35% to 41% approval.

My favorite sentence in Barone's article is his conclusion about the plight of the Democrats:

A political party gets itself in a bad position when military success for the nation is a "real big problem for us." Voters generally want their politicians to root for the nation, not against it.

I can't imagine a group which more deserves this problem.

More on Canadians Moving to the U.S.

James Taranto, intrepid editor of The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal online, takes the story from ABC News cited earlier today - about migration to and from Canada - and does a superior job of analyzing the figures. About the fact that 2.5 times as many Canadians move south as Americans move north, Taranto concludes

These numbers actually understate the disparity by an order of magnitude. Canada is a sparsely populated country; there are more than nine times as many Americans as Canadians. That means that when adjusted for population, 20 times as many Canadians moved south in 2006 as Americans moved north.

In other words, a typical Canadian is 20 times more likely to decide to move to the U.S. than one of our folks is to move to Canada. Now, which country is the more attractive? For sure, don't ask ABC News as they clearly haven't a clue.

Conservative Humor Alert

Ann Coulter is the right's best wielder of the acid pen. Writing in Human Events, she takes on the incestuous relationship between public school teachers and the Democratic Party. As usual, she is both funny (if conservative humor is your thing) and factual - not an easy parlay.

Her characterization of the Democratic Party as a creature of the various public employees' unions, including the National Education Association, is sadly accurate. Even better, her description of how not-young and not-hip the audience was at the You Tube debate. Give her article a look.

Disaffected Americans Moving to Canada

According to this article on the ABC News website, the number of Americans moving to Canada is at a 30 year high. The article attributes this to political disagreement with the Bush administration in particular, and the trend lines in American society in general.

The underlying political bias at ABC News becomes obvious. That 10,000+ Americans are dissatisfied enough to move north is news; that nearly 24,000 Canadians were dissatisfied enough to move south is not.

I have to feel that we are getting the best end of this trade. The U.S. is losing soreheads and misfits and gaining ambitious strivers.

Poor Canada....