Just so you know... this vindicates Greg quite a bit.
The contrarian response to this news is that in the case of the one error, the system worked. As for other potential errors: If there's anything else out there like that, wouldn't Internet users have made a similar catch?
Here's where you bring out the "five votes per machine" tag line, not to mention the paper trail. BUT: If there was enough redundancy here to correct Bush's vote total in that precinct to a number on which two backup sources agreed, then it's not as though this is just a black box situation.
Anyhow, I could see maybe a 1% chance that the process of certifying the Ohio election produces a radical shift. We'll see if Bush does the right thing in that instance, though it's very much a bridge you don't cross unless you come to it.
Two prominent NFL running back are coming off drug suspensions this weekend. One of them is about to spend some time in jail over his drug case. Another even more prominent NFL player was involved in a murder case a few years back.
So, of course, the most widely despised player in the NFL achieved that status because he talks a little bit too much trash. Makes perfect sense, right?
Arguably the most loathsome columnists in the sports journalism world are the people who waste column inches excoriating this guy. Either they honestly mean what they write, in which case they're among the dumbest people on Earth (some guy wants too much publicity? - then don't give it to him), or they're cynically using this guy's publicity to get some publicity of their own.
Either way, it stinks. The problem isn't that he won't shut up - it's that you won't shut up.
(Jon Couture, call your office: If you happen to agree with me then this would be an excellent topic/thesis to steal.)
If you don't know who I'm talking about, don't worry about it. Rather than demonizing a guy, he's much better off just being ignored. If you really want to know, the signature (so to speak) incident involving this player was when he scored a touchdown, pulled a permanent marker out of his sock, autographed the football, and gave it to the guy on the other team who was supposed to cover him. I thought this was mildly amusing, good for a ten-second chuckle. Apparently in the world of sports this was either a sign of apocalypse or a work of absolute genius or both; either way, this says something very uncomfortable about the intellect of people who spend that much time covering sports.
You want circumstantial evidence that it really was about "moral values," as something real and compelling rather than some code word for picking on the gays?
How far have we gotten as a society that this inside-media maven, among his various other "weird news" type links, sees fit to include an article about people who abstain from sex until marriage?
(How far have we gotten that somebody saw this as news in the first place? What were the journalistic inside decisions involved here?)
I'm glad that "don't have sex until marriage" is no longer the social more that it once was, but have we reached the point where the opposite is a social more?
Virgins are not freaks. If we reach the point where people think society is making them out to be freaks, and people think that the particular cultural factors responsible for this are things on which the president would have some influence, even in just a "bully pulpit role" (I disagree with even this: there are some issues that I just don't think about in a presidential context - but still), then no wonder a whole lot of people were motivated to turn out for the social conservative.
You know those nonpartisan races at the end of your ballot, where all the ballot lists is a candidate's name and occupation?
They have voter guides to give you more background on those people, of course, and you can always read their own campaign material. But I have to admit I didn't bother to do any of that for Concord local races. I also have to admit that I chose candidates based on occupation.
Guess that's what voters in this one Los Angeles school district did. This could get mildly interesting.
Good grief. Did anyone else see this piece of work?
Forget "Why we hate Europe": This piece in a nutshell is why even New Yorkers are so widely despised in this country's interior. Hint: Get over your smug, self-satisfactory circle jerk. Just because other parts of the country disagree with you doesn't mean you have a monopoly on tolerance or empathy.
What's ironic about this piece is that the attitudes and prejudices (dare I say bigotry?) of more than one person quoted in this piece are exactly why it's almost a kiss of death for a national candidate to be identify in voters' minds with people of this ilk.
UPDATE: Better people who think they're all sophisticated, yet vastly overrate themselves and have no idea how blinkered they are than this stuff. San Francisco: Gorgeous place to live, occasionally defaced by subhman idiots.
For the first time that I can remember, I may have a relevant gametime decision for a Monday night game, where the Yahoo! rules and interface will actually allow me to defer the decision until just before kickoff (and after the Sunday results are known).
Even geekier, my decision involves three players, all on the same team. Namely two running backs and a wide receiver (it's a WR/RB flex position). So I suppose the right strategy is guess which RB will get the most yardage/TDs if I'm way behind, start the WR if I want to be sure of about 50 yards worth of points and not take a chance on the backs?
Anyhow, can you picture the Oprah/Uma type introduction scene at Viking training camp? "Onterrio, this is Mewelde. Mewelde, Onterrio."
S'pose there's a Mewelde, Ontario, somewhere in the Great White North?
If I were a soldier, I'd have no problem with my commander-in-chief sending me off to a war that he honestly and reasonably believed was just. Even if I died in battle... well, that's what I signed up for.
(Extreme caveat: Easy for me to say this as a civilian, one who never did make that choice to join, though to be more precise it's that I never did lose the weight that I needed to lose to qualify circa November 2001, and by the time I was even close we'd already destroyed the Taliban in Afghanistan anyway.)
What I would have a problem with is lardass buffoons taking my name in vain as part of political agitprop.
By now you may have seen a certain commentator's "First Thoughts About The Election," ending with: May they rest in peace. And may they forgive us someday.
I wait with bated breath for the Ted Rall rebuttal about how every name on that list was (if you take Rall's anti-Pat Tillman screed at face value) that of someone who was a jingoist fool to be there to begin with. Then Rall and Moore could fight it out and leave the rest of us alone.
"'He put his life on the line. To me it's like meeting Fidel Castro."
--a schoolteacher (of second grades) in San Pablo, California, on Lech Walesa, quoted here.
And to think I was going to link to John Ellis for his pithy (and spot-on) election analysis. Well, just scroll down, and sometimes you see gems like that.
If you're trying to explain to someone the irony of comparing Lech Walesa to Fidel Castro, where do you even begin? I think I want to cry. Seriously.
Something ironic this week: The most bitter, vindictive, nasty, and hateful speech out there is coming from people who are being bitter, vindictive, nasty, or hateful expressly to assert that George W. Bush was the one who made this country as divided as it is. Examples are too numerous to single out.
What I want to know is, when did Bush himself ever say anything nearly so bitter, vindictive, nasty, or hateful? You can argue that it's what he does rather than what he says (many people around here would agree with that, the same people who think Bush has blood on his hands from Iraq, in particular the ones who think it's about oil), but even there you have a very strong burden of proof that most of the bile-posters aren't even bothering to try to meet.
So go on. Post what you think is the nastiest thing Bush ever said while in office or on the campaign trail.
In the mean time, those of you who have the gall to "apologize" on behalf of an entire nation (that on balance demonstrably disagrees with you): I'll thank you not to speak for me.
I don't understand the argument that now Bush "owes" something to his socially conservative base that he wouldn't owe to moderate voters.
Let me explain something to a whole lot of political junkies on my side of the aisle: Bush doesn't have to face another election for the rest of his life. He owes nothing to nobody.
(Conversely, he has no more or less an obligation than any other president to "reach out" or "let the country heal" or anything like that. He won fair and square; unless you're a complete nutcase you'll agree with me this time. Of course, I strongly believe he won fair and square in 2000, and many completely reasonable people disagreed.)
On the other hand, when did Arlen Specter become such an idiot? Look, the thing about an "abortion lithmus test" in either direction is that it begs too many questions. "Would you vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade" is not a legitimate question for a judicial hearing, because that's not a current case or controversy.
Against interest I actually find the second one far more plausible, but then you already know that I trusted exit polling when perhaps I should not have.
A
(quoting from Power Line)
Dick Morris, for one, thinks that properly conducted exit polling could never be so inaccurate, that these exit poll data were clearly fraudulent, and that an investigation should be conducted. It seems likely that Democrats ran the exit polling process, and deliberately generated bad data to create momentum for the Kerry campaign. This much, I think is a reasonable inference. It is also reasonable to suspect that the same people who created the bad data leaked it to Democratic bloggers as part of a strategy of depressing Republican turnout.
B
(quoting from electoral-vote.com)
Various people sent me mail saying that it is awfully fishy that the exit polls and final results were substantially different in some places. I hope someone will follow this up and actually do a careful analysis. Does anyone know of a Website containing all the exit poll data? If we go to computerized voting without a paper trail and the machines can be set up to cheat, that is the end of our democracy. Switching 5 votes per machine is probably all it would take to throw an election and nobody would ever see it unless someone compares the computer totals and exit polls. I am still very concerned about the remark of Walden O'Dell a Republican fund raiser and CEO of Diebold, which makes voting machines saying he would deliver Ohio for President Bush. Someone (not me) should look into this carefully.
...not about Bush/Kerry or gay marriage, etc.
Top Ten Reasons Kerry Lost (link may be out of date within 24 hours)
Bush's bulge: it was a bulletproof vest. Duh.
Speculation about Hillary's potentila running mate here.
Politicians clandestinely appealing to the extremists in their respective bases? Here's the game theory... The antidote of course is information and transparency. So if you're a staunch partisan, get out there and read what the extremes are saying on the other side. (I know this is why M.S. has been monitoring white supremacy sites for nearly as long as I've known him, and why MEMRI translates Middle Eastern newspapers.) Most amusing paragraph from the link (in my opinion): Abortion rates show no significant change with the party in office, while tax rates rise significantly under Democrats - the opposite of what the political rhetoric promises. This result suggests that politicians move away from the social center mostly to get votes ("strategic extremism") and diverge from the economic center because they actually prefer those policies ("nonstrategic extremism").
Some much more informative maps, including my favorite: Purple America.
Why a tax on fat is a horrible idea. The worst part of this story is that an author on a conservative web site floated the idea without irony. (Ten years ago the college newspaper I wrote for ran an ironic pro-fat-tax piece, back when the idea was so outlandish that of course it was ironic, penned masterfully by a very libertarian law student.)
Why affirmative action hurts black law students.
And finally the last word on electoral-vote.com - which, it turns out, was created by a fairly well known (at least in that world) CS guru, previously best known for being on the other side of a very sharp Usenet exchange with Linus in the early days of Linux.
Went through and moved a bunch of content from recent posts to the "extended entry" so you have less to scroll through. The election stuff grows wearisome, and also I think I made a mountain of a molehill with the two previous posts.
(Incidentally, of the three most prolific recent gay marriage commenters, I don't think M.S. and ZD have ever met in person, given class years and parts of the country; I do think M.S. and Greg have met, though I'm not certain on either count. Obviously ZD and Greg have seen each other more than once at TRASHionals, ZD being just a handle rather than a quasi-anonymity pseudonym.)
Anyhow, I want to implement something like this system (post titled "Have It Your Way"), where you could include or exclude my subtopics via the URL querystring. Before I bother spending time on this, anyone happen to know whether there's a function in MoveableType that tells you a post's category?
There's something that troubles me about when people who have married their partners are mortally offended that other people wouldn't think their marriage should be valid. I mean, yes, the reason for offense would be obvious enough. But nobody would ever actually come up to you and say that unless someone else did something to force the issue.
By way of comparison, you know where I stand on abortion. You know that, at least for procedures past some particular threshold, I think an abortion involves the taking of a human life. So how could I look someone in the eye if I'd known she'd had at least one abortion (past a given gestation point I guess, though how a stranger would ever know that precisely is beyond me)? And could I look her in the eye and tell her I thought she'd taken a human life?
Well, on the first point, it's surprisingly easy. Life is short; you can't just shun people, especially since no amount of shunning would ever actually bring the fetus back. What's done is done.
On the second point... Are you crazy?!? What possible reason would I have for wanting to do that? I'd give nearly anything short of life and limb not to create a situation that awkward, just because it's so gratuitous.
BUT... if you were so indifferent to how human beings get along with each other in practice... if you were so cruel to both me and some hypothetical classmate or co-worker of mine, that you just had to dig this up and there was absolutely no way around it... I would have to honestly say that yes, I do think she took a human life, and certainly that she made a mistake. (And even, yes, that I think she should have kept the baby. Yes of course this would be the most awkward situation ever, AND YET... if you think the awkwardness of publicly expressing my opinion would actually make this invalid... well, sorry, but I don't agree with you there.)
Getting back to the real reason for posting this: If you're gay and you're reading this, odds are you run into a whole lot of people from day to day (just on the street, etc.) who think that your life is built around a sin. Thank goodness, of course, they don't feel the need to tell you this. But the fact that their telling you this would be awkward is NOT in and of itself what makes their opinion wrong.
The "moral values" poll data may be seriously overblown. In absolute terms they weren't the #1 issue (I agree that Iraq/terrorism should be seen as one bucket; not sure whether I agree about economy/healthcare), but relative to expectation they were what surprised prognosticator types the most.
Anyhow, my feeling from a lot of the comments here this week is that we really need to talk, [...]
though I'm tempted to amend this to "You really need to talk," since I'm amenable to whatever solution (from what's plausibly on the table) brings us back together to defeat Osama/Zarqawi/et al and remain a free country.
Also, the sooner people talk these things out, the better chance we have that gay rights and/or gay marriage do not descend to the intractable, hot-button status of abortion. (Incidentally, ESR on abortion: from why he's not a left-liberal, The liberals' looney-toon feminist need to believe that a fetus one second before birth is a parasitic lump of tissue with no rights, but a fetus one second afterwards is a full human, has done half the job of making a reasoned debate on abortion nigh-impossible. - and from why he's not a right-conservative, The conservatives' looney-toon religious need to believe that a fertilized gamete is morally equivalent to a human being has done the other half of making a reasoned debate on abortion nigh-impossible.)
Some hypotheticals were to follow, but I had no good way to phrase them without not only offending someone but understanding perfectly well why the comparison was offensive. Instead we'll take it this way:
Do you know anyone in an interfaith relationship? Well of course you do, if you know me. I'm glad neither my parents nor her parents object (so far as I can tell) to the possibility that one day she might marry a Gentile (well, not just a Gentile, but this particular one) or that one day I might marry a Jew (ditto).
If they did object, I'm not sure what would come next. If we wanted to marry each other anyway, would we go against our parents' wishes? (I'd like to think so.) Could I ask them to look us in the eye and tell us, as much as we love each other, that they still opposed on principle our being together? Well, tell you what: If they were the sort of people who really did have strong theological or tradition-based reservations, I would expect them to look us in the eye and tell us that. They'd be wrong (in my opinion), and it would hurt deeply (in my emotion), but at least they'd have integrity and conviction.
I actually have a very close friend who had to break up with a woman he loved deeply, a woman with whom he was looking forward to spending his life (in many ways they were already in the process of making a life together), because her family (for religious reasons) would not bless their marriage. It may be oversimplifying to say she had to choose between him and her family/beliefs, but suffice to say she didn't choose him, and as much as it hurt him he did respect the decision. (And is now, four years later, really happy with a woman he subsequently met.)
Knowing what I know of ZD, if he were told point-blank to look M.S. in the eye and say he didn't approve of the government sanctioning M.S.'s marriage, I think he'd be deeply offended at even being asked to do this (what's the point of creating antipathy instead of agreeing to disagree and moving on?) but ultimately, as awkward as it would be and as much as everyone involved would cringe, I think he'd stand by his beliefs. And I'd respect him, apparently a lot more than other people here would. (At the very least I respect him for commenting rather than lurking; it would be much easier not to share his views knowing how unpopular they'd be here.)
(Depending on the situation, of course, I think M.S. would be justified in reacting sharply, even violently, to either ZD or more likely whoever it was that set up this cockamanie point-blank situation to begin with - that's just not how you treat people when you're learning to play nice with others in real life.)
The obvious objection here of course is that ZD is not the parent of M.S., and certainly the government of all people wouldn't be. So where does the government get off telling M.S. he can't marry who he loves?
Well, here's where my own dogma kicks in: Who gave the goverment the privilege to say who can marry, much less who can't? That the government formally claims sovereignty over the concept of "marriage" in the first place offends a lot of my sensibilities. Strictly speaking, your marriage is something between you, your mate, your family, your clergy, and whoever or whatever you believe in. The government should neither stand in your way, nor give you special rights that wouldn't be available to anyone else who chose to enter into a domestic compact.
Having written that, this may or may not sharply contradict what I expect of marriage in my own life. If it's something between myself, my mate, and my church, then the question is: Which church? And why would belief in God be a necessary condition for having a very well-defined concept of knowing with whom I want to spend my life and openly avowing a commitment to do the same?
Who or what is it that, in my opinion, would legitimize my own particular marriage? It's complicated, but it comes down to:
1. The commitment between myself and my life partner. (But it takes more than that, just in my opinion. I don't buy the people who move in together but never do anything formal below that, the people who claim that that's all they need to do because they know they'll spend their lives together. What happens when their lease is up for renewal? Call me irrational, but I just don't buy it.)
2. The blessing of each other's families; more importantly, the sense that we're becoming one family by way of the two of us. (But I have no idea what I'd do if the families in question didn't heartily approve, much less if they were the sort of people who each needed some particular threshold to give their blessing, and the thresholds somehow conflicted - You need a rabbi. You need a pastor. You must marry on Saturday. You must not marry on Sabbath.)
3. Well, really there is no 3. Maybe I'm crazy about this but I don't give a damn what the government thinks. Obviously I'd do everything I can do to get in on the legal status of partnership, because I can. But if the government got in our way, I'm dead certain we'd blaze on ahead, whereas I'm not so certain about families.
4. Church? I feel awkward posing this as a necessary condition because I know a lot of atheists or just non-churchgoers whose marriages and life partners seem in no way invalid at least to me. (Your mileage may vary. You may belong to a particular faith that chooses to recognize "marriage" only among members of your own faith who hold a ceremony at your own places of worship. If so, knock yourself out, though can you see why I think getting the government involved in that kind of definition only makes things worse for everyone involved?)
I will say that the situation of two people in different faiths is fundamentally different from the situation of two non-religious people, or two people of whom one is religious and one is not. If you're a religious adherent, and there are dogmatic issues involving the person you want to marry, I'd say the best thing you could do is figure out what it takes to get your faith's blessing for your particular life partner, and if you can't, then even this might be a more pressing issue than what the government thinks.
Except that for my selfish purposes, I can get away with honestly not caring what your church thinks, where I can't get away with being apathetic about what my government thinks, as much as I want to. Put it this way: I want the federal government to have explicitly no opinion at all on this stuff. Okay, fine, IRS code issues come up. Even there I'm appalled that there's a marriage penalty or marriage reward. If you're trying to encourage two people to stay together to raise kids, all the tax incentives should kick in with the dependents themselves. And then at the state level... well, I reserve the right to cruelly mock the backwards (in my opinion) states that amend their constitutions to preempt gay marriage, and subsequently go D'oh! when it dawns on me that, going back to the year 2000, California is one of those states. Yes, CALIFORNIA. Who knew?
My last 2004-election related comments (and hopefully last politics here for quite some time), basically a recap of some related points:
For all we (at least I) thought this election would be a referendum on Iraq policy or the war on terror or what the world thinks of Bush, it looks as though the big surprise factor was a wedge issue where Republicans appealed to... I don't want to say their base (I think the anti-gay sentiment came from enough Democrats that you can't single out Republican voters, just Republican candidates), but at least a base.
This would contradict all the game theory we've heard about capturing the center, unless it turns out that being adamantly opposed to gay marriage (rather than opposing it but not caring that much) really was the median position.
Given how this worked even with the electoral college in place, I'm not sure how this affects my claim that things would be even worse with a pure popular vote.
(If this election hinged on a few thousand marginal homphobes in Missouri or Ohio, what would things be like if turnout among homophobes in Oklahoma or Wyoming had electoral relevance?)
So I stand by the electoral college, all while feeling deeply ashamed at a lot of the people who voted for Bush (but, awful as this sounds, grateful that they did, given that I think for decisions made at the federal level, how we handle the terrorists will matter a lot more than anything related to sexuality).
How far, if at all, has this country come from the late 1970s when even being gay to begin with was taboo (and/or the source of extreme denial), even if you were as sweet and handsome as Billy Crystal's Jodie?
Just asking. No good answer myself.
So what do you do if your customers want the option of "marriage" between two men (or two women) but changing the Marriage object would break too much legacy code that relies on Marriage including one man and one woman?
First, I think you'd want to figure out what your customers really actually want. Is it precisely, formally, that the Marriage object itself change? Is there some way to accomplish what they want to accomplish without breaking the legacy code? A CivilUnion object might be the quick-and-dirty approach, but it's kind of a kludge.
Right now some of the most compelling (at first glance) arguments in favor of gay marriage involve hospital visitations, property rights, and the adoption of children. So aren't the best places to reform just the hospital visitation rules, the property inheritance rules (i.e. what you can('t) do in a will and what the tax consequences are), and the adoption rules?
That sounds like more work, but it's more directly addressing the actual problems, and a whole lot simpler than telling people that marriage shouldn't just be between a man and a woman, when the people you're trying to tell that to are about as receptive to the concept as telling them that [sorry, I can't even think of a good analogy].
UPDATE: (This is re a Greg comment some posts below here but it fits this post better than it fits that post) If we're talking about the various anti-gay-marriage initiatives, I'd want to look very strongly at exit poll breakdowns by party before dumping all this on the Republicans, much less on one particular televangelist.
For good or evil, right at this moment a whole lot of Americans just aren't ready for the formal, government-sponsored definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. As highly irrational as this position seems to me, I see absolutely nothing bigoted about it, especially if it's coming from people who very highly value marriage as a social institution and are wary of change inadvertently destroying it (and again, admittedly, they should take a look at all the various ways that heteresexuals have already ruined the institution, but still). Calling them all racist or evil isn't going to change their minds any faster than their calling gay people sinners would change those minds.
Now, having said that, M.S. heartfelt belated congratulations on your wedding. My intuition was that what made this ceremony special was you and your partner, and the love and acceptance from your respective friends and families. I'm not convinced that anything the goverment says can add or detract all that much from it, but then I'm not going through what you're going through so I'm in no good position to evaluate it.
Here's Kerry's concession.
And John Edwards introduction to Kerry.
And Cheney introducing Bush. As much as I like his Wyoming joke, both running mate speeches left me cold.
If the 2008 Democratic primary is an Edwards-Clinton affair then I have to side with Hillary. She's relatively more of a free trade advocate and relatively less of a trial lawyer. Rumor has it she can even be somewhat hawkish on foreign policy when she wants to be.
...but only if he does so while it's still 2004. Then some other guy and I would feel really smug and see our scores go up a bit in a pool already dominated by the sort of people who actually take dead pools seriously and do research and such.
[quote itself, then civics tangent, then California state ballot issues, all in the extended entry...]
(color-coded emphasis added)
"I'm really sad right now. I'm really discouraged to think there are 58 million people who could believe the Bush administration and think it's done anything good for the country," said Peggy Anderson, 60, of Littleton. "I'm just sorry that fear and lies won out."
--The Boston Globe
Not that you couldn't find a similarly ironic quote from someone who saw the apocalypse in a potential Kerry win.
Incidentally, am I demanding too much of the Internet when I'm disappointed not to have a transcript yet of a speech that began less than an hour ago?
Oh, while I'm here: I wanted to side with Craig (comment below) and strongly advocate better civics education. I'm stunned sometimes by how many people didn't know basic things about why states have as many electoral votes as they do, what exit polls are, and so on.
I won't go so far as David did, since I'm one of those idiots who (despite intending to) never researched any of the California propositions and voted solely on the summaries on the ballot. You can raise that 39% floor a bit, David, since I read the text, couldn't discern any meritorious reason to do what it would do, and voted no.
(Also voted against the measure that superceded it. For those of you who didn't see California ballots yesterday, apparently there's a movement afoot to make sure local property tax and sales tax revenues stay local. My uninformed fear was that taken to an extreme, this would leave rich locales overfunded and dirt-poor locales underfunded.)
Quick summary of California ballot propositions: Apparently we like taxpayer-funded stem cell research, hate criminals who commit a third offense (even if it's ticky-tack), and don't like gambling by either Indians or palefaces. I was in the minority on all four of these.
At least I was on with the majority in support of the DNA database thing and against the new employer-funded healthcare mandate.
It says here (Kaus) the major change from 2002 to 2004 for exit polling was that something called the National Election Pool replaced something called Voter News Service. Apparently this NEP turned out not to be so competent.
I agree with Kaus, in hindsight, that the most plausible practical reason why midday exit polls were so skewed was that angry voters vote earlier.
Other stuff from that post:
"[S]ince few [TV news people] have any idea how to read a county vote table, many of them keep pumping the Kerry wins fable."
I was going to go to complete anality and check the vote totals directly on the state web sites (as Kubi did with Florida four years ago), but it turned out to be easier following them from the Yahoo! results page. You learn a lot from the raw numbers if you know when to still ignore them (one candidate has a 2:1 margin, with 5 precincts reporting out of 1,000) and when the numbers taken on predictive value (Pennsylvania getting more and more numbers in but Kerry still staying above 60%...).
Last but not least: Florida vote totals way off from what the "anti-incumbent rule" would predict. Is it possible that the Rove "get the evangelicals out" strategy paid off after all? And if so, then did it hurt Bush in other states (not that I can tell)? I stand by my opinion that going to nationwide popular vote would have a very nasty polarizing effect (as both candidates pump up their bases) that we'd just as soon avoid.
(Not least of which is that the more solidly a single political party controls an area, the more easily that party can get away with vote fraud.)
1. What time did you go to bed?
Around midnight PST here, having learned extremely little in the last three hours I was awake (already by 9 p.m. PST, the non-close states were called and the close states were trending towards the candidate to whom they will have gone).
Went to sleep mildly irked at Kerry/Edwards for not conceding yet, given just how big a margin they'd need on the Ohio absentees/provisionals. Woke up with barely time to shower (so no time to check the news), assumed until hearing otherwise half an hour ago that the election was still waiting on Ohio. Got Lenny Kravitz's "Once You Dig In" stuck in my head (thinking about big sporting events where suddenly there's a delay for instant replay or managers arguing with umpires or such), which was awful.
Much more importantly, if your vote had been undecided or at least non-obvious:
2. Why did you vote for the candidate for whom you voted?
In my case it was pretty much spoken for. I think Republicans on balance will do better than Democrats on the most pressing issues right now. (Ironically, had we done a far better job against Osama et al than we had, if we had reason to believe the terrorists were done for then something like gay marriage would make me think going forward that it was a much closer call.) And as distressed as I am by various instances of Bush incompetence, to riff on the Economist cover from last month, I'm choosing incompetent over incoherent.
Explanations that will matter more to you (as coming from people who had to make up their mind rather than defend their already-made mind):
Dwight, judging Kerry to be "Not Proven" (in the Scottish verdict sense).
Megan McArdle, sticking with the devil she knows.
Mickey Kaus (Kerry mediocre, Bush worse).
And then there's a friend of mine who doesn't blog, who I expected to vote for Kerry (as most people who despise Bush ended up doing) without realizing how much indecision was actually there. Apparently a few months ago there was a cartoon in one of San Francisco's alt-weeklies comparing how Democrats and Republicans handled September 11. For Democrats something like "shock, denial, anger, acceptance." For Republicans something like "anger, anger, anger, anger." I think the cartoon had the opposite of its intended effect, the rebuttal being: "Why should I 'accept' September 11? Of course I'm still 'angry' about it." According to my friend, thinking about that cartoon actually became the decisive factor.
You make the call. Going by Yahoo! News (which at this moment is much more conservative than most of the networks), we have Bush 249, Kerry 242, with these states not yet "called":
Ohio and anything means Bush. I say Bush via Ohio and Nevada (at least); YMMV. Ohio and nothing else means it goes to the House (unless Bush finagled an electoral vote in Maine, I presume not).
Even if Ohio went to Kerry, he'd need Wisconsin (which he probably has) or two of the others (which he probably lacks). At this point, the only way Ohio can go to Kerry is a combination of absentees and "provisional ballots," no?
If things continue as they look right as I type this, then I'll be a perfect 50-for-50 on the 49 non-Ohio states plus D.C.
What's funny is that I will have submitted to Craig an Excel spreadsheet with exactly the right outcome, only to have subsequently asked him to flip Ohio, blemishing my perfection (and also giving me the wrong overall winner, which blemishes the perfection even more I suppose).
Apparently Fox has called Ohio, but news.yahoo.com, my arbitrary choice for source of record, has not, even though it's 51 to 49 with 93% reporting.
Oh, and there's still time for me to be wrong about Nevada.
First major news break of the night, though those of us who were clicking on individual states and hitting "refresh" aren't shocked. For awhile, Kerry was just massacring Bush there. Chalked it up to bad sample at first, but the sample kept growing and Kerry kept staying ahead.
Other than that, somewhat newsworthy is Missouri to Bush, Arkansas to Bush, Maine to Kerry.
Very vaguely newsworthy is New Jersey to Kerry, West Virginia to Bush, but really... c'mon. The rest are all slam dunks.
Still perfect on my "scorecard" for Craig. For the states still to come:
I'm definitely standing by MN to Kerry. My FL to Bush is looking good; IA to Bush is looking so-so. My (OH, WI, MI) to Kerry are all actually looking baddish. The rest shouldn't really be in doubt but YMMV. (I think of Colorado New Mexico and Hawaii as "c'mon" states: No matter what polls you saw, in the end the first two are clearly Bush and the last is clearly Kerry. That's just me though.)
They seem to have been very wrong. Why?
(And "I inadvertently anti-woofed" isn't enough of an answer. That'd be way too solipsistic.)
So far I'm 27-for-27 but anyone who wasn't 27-for-27 on these particular states needs pay better attention.
(Granted, you could have gone out on a limb with NJ for Bush or WV for Kerry, but... just, no.)
At this point I say it's something like:
If Bush takes Florida then other than Iowa, everything else I have him taking myself is just a lock, and he only needs to grab one more of (MN, WI, MI, OH, PA, or even OR, NH, or HI). Never mind that I have Bush winning zero of the states in parentheses, you'd still think he could pick one of those off, given that that's almost the entire list of true swing states. (And of course if Kerry took Iowa, Bush would need "one big or two small" instead of one.)
If Kerry takes Florida then Bush would need about half the states listed above, which is tricky given that I still don't think he'll take any of them.
UPDATE: Louisana and Mississippi just called for Bush. Duh. And I guess Missouri is a "swing state" even though everything I've seen has him taking it surprisingly easily. (We joke that this is Cardinal fan resentment, but seriously Bush went ahead in Missouri and Kerry never invested as much there as you might have thought.)
Someday he'll be eligible for the Pennsylvania Voter Hall of Fame.
They changed polling places on me. Without bothering to look at any of the election literature mailed to me, I did make the half-hour drive from my current neck of the East Bay out to Concord - and when I got to the same place where I voted for Arnold, they didn't have me on the rolls. The lady gave me a phone number for the Contra Costa County election board but the line was consistently busy.
No problem: Went "home," thankful I haven't moved my computer yet, found a sheet of paper from that same CC County Election Board (my registration had updated automatically when I did the post office "change of address" in 2003, but supposedly I needed to do some proof-of-ID thing if I ever wanted to vote in a federal election), typed in the URL from that sheet, and located my actual polling place based on what street I live on.
Of all the horror stories you'll hear today about people's names not being on the rolls, I wonder how many of those people were actually siphoned off to a different polling place without being told. Kind of a fustercluck but not as sinister as people make it out to be.
Anyhow, I found my true polling place (a travel agency whose signage is Spanish-first, English-second: this seems to reflect something about the neighborhood where I'd been living), where my name was indeed on the rolls and the friendly elderly lady behind the table explicitly disclaimed my need to show ID (I'd been pulling my license out of my wallet as I walked in).
Of note:
1. The people who claim that asking for ID is a form of intimidation (James Carville, I'm looking at you) are insane; I'm actually somewhat "intimidated" by the fact that they don't ask for ID. This is wide open for fraud.
2. The places where people have to wait 45 minutes in line smack of places that just don't have their shit together: Poor urban precincts, backwards Deep South precincts, worst of all the ones that have both going for them.
3. The only ballot questions I wish I'd read up on in advance were Indian gaming. I had to parse the wording of them both very carefully, ended up favoring one and opposing the other. Come to find out Arnold wanted me to oppose them both, but so much for that. See, I'm all for Indian gaming (or paleface gaming) if the state gets its cut.
4. But I'm against hospitals and BART retrofitting and all these other probably worthy causes that still seem just a bit greedy with their government funding needs. I voted No after No after No with a self-deprecatingly cruel (silent) laugh.
5. And anti-incumbent. So many people are pro-incumbent that it strikes me as really hard to throw out the bums that need to be thrown out. So when in doubt (i.e. when uninformed, and not helped by party affiliation labels on those nonpartisan local races), I tend to counteract that.
After reading his latest entry, I really want Dwight to meet Corwyn. Centrist apolitical person, meet centrist active Republican who would probably still (sadly) identify with everything Dwight wrote about the sad-sack nature of Republican outfits in many states. Lifelong western Pennsylvanian (with college years at Cornell), meet Long Island transplant to Portland, OR, via Stanford. Engineer, meet biotech guy. Diehard Steelers fan, meet diehart Jets fan.
I wonder how many other pairs of unknown-to-each-other people I know would really hit it off well. But it's unclear how useful this would be since the friends in question are overwhelmingly straight men (so no romantic possibilities).
Even so... I already had the R. Robert Hentzel, Mike Develin (hypersmart gamegeeks) combination earmarked, now all the more useful with them both in the Twin Cities.
...massively good news for Kerry here.
If you haven't voted yet, haven't decided yet, live in a swing state, and don't want a morass of litigation, you know what to do. It pains me to say that, as against-interest as it is. It pains me even more that I never went on one of those election market sites to take advantage of all the other investors' oversupport of Bush.
The anti-incumbent rule people were right, as were the people who pointed out the mobile phone-related flaw in current polling techniques.
The "Vote or Die" people obviously succeeded, which is a horrible thing for democracy given the degree to which the you might get drafted canard was a cynical lie.
Kerry is a fine person (relative to politicians that is, and the small possibility that he committed treason while still a naval officer nonwithstanding) and will make a passably mediocre president; some of his supporters are complete scum and need to be called out on it.
(Not that Bush doesn't have complete scum supporting him...)
M.S. took me to task (perhaps rightly) for pulling an estimate out of thin air as to the realm of possibility of fraudulent votes in a major metropolitan area.
Well guess what? They already found over 2,000 frauldent Kerry votes on Philadelphia machines before voting even began. This is one reason why Democrats like to cry "intimidation!" I'm sure if you try to cheat but are caught, that can be very intimidating.
This DeWayne Wickham person can believe whatever the hell he wants, but where was USA Today when the Clinton administration was siccing auditors on Paula Jones et al?
To be fair, CNN was there. Check out the very very retro web layout!
Here's the et al part if you hadn't been following this stuff back in the day. Newsmax has well-known biases but it's not like this is just some nutjob conspiracy theory, at least no moreso than Mr. Wickham taking the IRS to task for daring to question whether the NAACP can be so nakedly anti-Bush and still keep its exempt status.
So a Democratic administration can audit - let's just paste this here - As the Judicial Watch complaint notes, the Clinton IRS also went after organizations and even media companies it perceived as politically hostile, including:
The National Rifle Association, The Heritage Foundation, The National Review, The American Spectator, Freedom Alliance, National Center for Public Policy Research, American Policy Center, American Cause, Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for Honest Government, Progress and Freedom Foundation, Concerned Women for America and the San Diego Chapter of Christian Coalition - and not a peep from USA Today as far as I know.
But the NAACP - the en double-ay cee pee! - why, that's just different, huh?
Are you at all surprised by which nation did best?
Did you read the subject of this post and immediately think of this Onion article?
I hate it when people make observations that presuppose a bilateral conflict when no conflict needs to exist, or presuppose a zero-sum situation when a positive sum is much more likely.
Therefore, when I read someone's opinion that "John Kerry ... has consistently been on the side of consumers, workers, the environment and the public interest," (emphasis added) forigve me for not feeling inclined to read any further.
If you haven't been reading Eric S. Raymond's weblog lately, you should be. He had a long hiatus from February to September but since then, he'd:
Credibly accused John Kerry of treason (where by "credibly" I just mean I agree with him).
Put forth a radical new idea about free will and imperfect observation.
Reviewed Team America.
Explained why he might vote for Bush (of all things to push him over the limit, it's the thuggish behavior of Democrats).
Reposted a great screed: 10 reasons why he's neither liberal nor conservative.
That and a lot of stuff about art or media bias that wasn't worth singularly linking to but that you might still find edifying.
It says here that Karl Rove focused heavily on get-out-the-vote efforts among evangelicals in swing states.
This runs exactly counter to the "median voter" strategy (aka "hot dog stand problem" if you took that intro game theory class), and as the article points out it might badly backfire, but it is what it is.
Of course if the election were purely popular vote, the natural corollary to this would be big-time recruitment of evangelicals in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, all those places that the Republicans don't need a big recruiting drive as wrapped up as they are.
All of which makes me feel really smug about being right that abolishing the electoral college would polarize us even more, though really anti-smug about supporting the Karl Rove Party in real life.
I'm including this feature because it reveals a lot about the major-party candidates that you might not have noticed at first.
Topic #1: Performance-enhancing drugs. Notice how Kerry gives a duh observation rather than a concrete answer for what he'd do about it? Paradoxically, advantage: Kerry, because doing nothing beats bad ideas, especially on an issue that the president has no business touching to begin with.
(Julia and I both adamantly oppose the use of performance-degrading drugs by athletes. We think the ones at least on the teams we root for should lay off the fattening foods and the booze.)
Topic #2: Physical fitness. Kerry gives a significantly more insightful observation than Bush (that the problem is more with fitness extremes than general mediocrity). I'm nonplussed (as a Bush supporter) that in their respective answers, Bush focused on corporate America whereas Kerry focused on the classroom. Big advantage Kerry.
Topic #3: "Athletes and us." When asked to name his favorite athlete, Kerry was too much of a politician to settle on one in particular. If you didn't read very closely you'd think he came down on Bobby Orr, but really he just left it vague. Advantage Bush.
Topic #4: Pete Rose. Bush comes right out with it, "I believe Pete Rose should not be reinstated." Kerry rambles and equivocates. Advantage Bush, especially since he's dead right. Not that the president should come anywhere near this in what he actually does as an executive, but Bush being right about Pete Rose would almost influence my vote if I were still undecided.
(Especially since, consider this: Do you realize how many votes in Ohio either of these guys could have gained by giving Rose lip service?)
Topic #5: Cost to fans (excluding the stadium boondoggle part at first): Significantly better understanding by Bush of how the free market works, or at least a signficantly better explanation of why it matters. Advantage: Bush.
And now the stadium boondoggle part: Advantage Kerry by default ("I've always felt like citizen participation in the question about stadium financing is a necessary part of building a stadium" is one of the biggest pieces of bullshit to come out of Bush's mouth all year. If you'd built the damn thing with your own money, they wouldn't NEED to participate. I have a great idea: Let's double what we spend on welfare, only let's do it by referendum so that we get "citizen participation in the question about welfare." Good grief.) Too bad for his sake he didn't fully exploit this by coming down hard instead of waffling.
Topic 6: "Memorable sports moments." Throw this one out. Not a fair comparison, since Bush has throwing out a first pitch right after September 11, whereas Kerry is stuck with lying about Game 6. (Yes, I said "lying." Look it up on the web. I haven't mentioned it here before because it really doesn't matter, but do you honestly think he gave his dinner thing in Boston and then hopped a plane, just to be there? Think about the traffic to and from each airport; I just don't buy it.)
Since a lot of NFL teams are at the halfway point now, if the season ended today:
AFC Playoff Teams
1. Pittsburgh (6-1, head-to-head over NE)
2. New England (6-1, head-to-head over NYJ even if Jets win tonight)
3. Jacksonville (5-3, head-to-head over Denver)
4. Denver (5-3, head-to-head over San Diego)
--
5. NY Jets (5-1)
6. San Diego (5-3)
Wild card games: San Diego at Jacksonville (would you have predicted this in the pre-season?), NY Jets at Denver (hi Corwyn)
NFC Playoff Teams
1. Philadelphia (7-0)
2. Atlanta (6-2)
3. Minnesota (5-2)
4. St. Louis (4-3, head-to-head over Seattle)
--
5. NY Giants (5-2)
6. Seattle (4-3, better conference record than Detroit, both teams 0-0 so far in games against common opponents)
Wild card games: Seattle at Minnesota (take the "Over"), NY Giants at St. Louis (Kurt... we meet again...)
Teams .500 or better who'd left out in the cold ITSET:
Baltimore (4-3), Houston (4-3), Indianapolis (4-3), Detroit (4-3), Green Bay (4-4, the only even-.500 team in the league, though 24 of the 32 teams have played an odd # of games so far).
Point by point this is mostly right, but the one point that makes him decide for good is where I think he's most wrong.
So a lot of people around the world hate us right now. I'm really not surprised, but they're also just going to have to deal. The ones that hate us most don't hate us for snubbing Kyoto or ignoring them or whatever - they hate us for not converting to their particular strain of Islam. And they also hate us because militarily they've been absolutely routed.
I'd much rather be hated by impotent people than supposedly-tolerated-but-really-plotted-against by people who have weird absolutist religious ideas and the power to kill a whole bunch of us.
A lot of enlightened, sophisticated, deep-thinking people hated Reagan. Then again a lot of people who used to live under Soviet tyranny loved the man. You can guess why, and you can guess which opinion I value more.
Well, that's one Bush can also kiss goodbye. On Craig's weblog scroll to "angry callers"...
But I won't send CDB a second revision of that electoral prediction thing. I already sent him a revised one switching my Ohio pick to Kerry.
This may not be outright election theft, but it's damn close.
My favorite sentence from this article:
"Judge Dlott said that the evidence did not indicate that the presence of additional challengers 'would serve Ohio's interest in preventing voter fraud better than would the system of election judges.''"
It's come to this: Legislation can be struck down because a judge isn't convinced it's a good idea. Not because he is convinced that it's bad, but because he's not convinced that it's good. Unless the Times did a singularly crappy job of journalism (not out of the question given its sterling track record this year), that's honest-to-goodness what this guy's saying. Shame on him.
This is so true! For weeks now I've been meaning to place a "bet" on Kerry on one of those on-line trading sites, especially when they had Bush way ahead. Now that the markets have either corrected themselves or mostly corrected themselves, it's not such a no-brainer, but still...
Take the quiz! I only got 8 out of 20, within the margin of error of what you'd expect from a trained monkey.
Best sentence fragment from today's political news coverage:
"Schoolgirls at St. John Vianney Catholic School squealed when he shook their..."
(paraphrasing, and possibly creating strawmen, but you can look it up...)
"So you'll agree that Saddam has done these monstrous things?"
Yes / Yes / Yes / Yes [etc.]
"And that he needs to put a stop to them?"
Yes [etc.]
[time passes]
"So you'll agree that Saddam is still doing these monstrous things?"
Yes / Yes / Yes / Yes [etc.]
"And that he needs to put a stop to them now?"
Yes [etc.]
[time passes]
"So you'll agree that Saddam is still doing these monstrous things?"
Yes / Yes / Yes / Yes [etc.]
"And that he needs to put a stop to them now or else?"
Yes [etc.]
[time passes]
"So you'll agree that Saddam is still doing these monstrous things?"
Yes / Yes / Yes / Yes [etc.]
"And that this is his last warning?"
Yes [etc.]
[time passes]
"So you'll agree that Saddam is still doing these monstrous things?"
Yes / Yes / Yes / Yes [etc.]
"And that he had one last change but screwed it up?"
Yes [etc.]
"And that now he'll face the consequences?"
Yes [etc.]
"Meaning that we finally go in there and take him out, like we should have 12 years ago?"
[awkward silence]
But of course if John Kerry were in charge he'd have used his magical hypnotic negotiating powers to get them to go all the way instead of most of the way.
While I seriously doubt this blog will attract many European readers, readers who frequently comment on Slashdot, or even European readers who frequently comment on Slashdot, there are still some brutally ironic comments on this thread.
To answer the question posed in the subject line, a hint: Your condescension is showing. And then there's the very tiny matter of the corrupt bargains with Saddam made by the countries that, if you listen to Kerry, apparently are the only European ones that matter. But it's mostly the condescension.
If I'm minding my own business and a whole bunch of people I don't even know come up and accuse me of being an asshole... well, if your first instinct would be to try to empathize with them, figure out why they thought you were an asshole, and change your behavior accordingly, then you're a better person than me, and in fact a better person than 99.[something]% of real human beings.
Note that this is pretty much what those European polls, combined with the particular tone of the Slashdot posts, amount to. Feel free to object to the "minding my own business" part, but when a thread consists entirely of polling data and sanctimony, then it's egregiously begging the question on that very issue.
My Week 8 fantasy football opponents were named:
Vote for Kerry
50 Blue States
Canadian Bacon
Just got a kick out of that.
For what it's worth, Vote for Kerry laid an absolute stinkbomb. Unless I'm mistaken, lowest score in the league this year, 38+ points in a scoring system where the mean is about 92 (and will be much higher than that this week). I'll win with 89+ points, at best 8th highest of 12 scores this week (maybe more like 10th best after Monday's scores are added).
50 Blue States currently beating me 86-76 in a league where the mean was somewhere in the 50's entering this weekend. They'll win unless Miami's tight end loses several fumbles. Currently 3rd and 5th best scores of 10; probably will stay that way (6 thru 10 had lousy weeks).
Canadian Bacon currently trailing me 69+ to 48+, though I still have to sweat out Curtis Martin. Right now I'm 6th of 12 to his 11th of 12. CuMar will move him up a bit; I'll be no worse than 7th (8th if CuMar gave him the unlikely comeback win).
My hats off to Matt H-N for winning a game in which the quarterback he started and both running backs he started were on bye. Then again the other team started a QB who's not only on bye but also no longer starting in real life. For a team about to fall to 0-8, it's actually not a terrible team if the owner were active at all. Shaun Alexander alone should steal you a win or two. Travis Henry won't be worth so much anymore but Hines Ward, Andre Johnson, and Mike Vanderjagt are all respectable.
There's so much cringeworthy embarrassment here that a white commentator probably can't touch.
Seriously, though, what's the saddest passage in that article (about the feud between Jay-Z and R. Kelly)?
Two obvious candidates:
Caught the end of the first half of the Raiders-Chargers game on CBS here, just to catch some halftime higlights. Between the individual stats on the score scroll and the halftime panelists making a big deal of (e.g.) which Buffalo running back got the most carries, I've become convinced that NFL broadcasts now exist mainly to cater to fantasy football players. This makes me feel bad for all you real fans out there; on behalf of us fake fans, I apologize deeply.
A vast majority of you get to see Patriots-Steelers, the significantly better game, on CBS as I type this. In fact, if San Diego wasn't a sellout then this could well be the only local affiliate stuck with Raiders-Chargers (well, maybe LA...). For the superior game I've had to rely on running an errand now and then. Harry Kalas enunciated Ben Roeth-lis-ber-ger to Pla-xi-co Bur-ress as only he can. He and Myron Cope could do a My Fair Lady spoof.
Maybe the real reason goes back to "life is short" from a couple posts down. I like not thinking about football games on Saturday.
Maybe even further explanation of the "real reason" is that you can't do fantasy sports very easily on at the college level, and I'm no good at picking winners especially against a point spread. (Did a "survival football" league for the first time this year. Unofficially I'm still alive going into NFL Week 8, but officially it's been moot since all four other people in the Yahoo! group crashed and burned no later than Week 2 - Chicago winning at Green Bay was the big killer for them.) Fantasy teams are 90% of why I care about the NFL.
But then, when I want to spin this into something truly sanctimonious and self-serving, I actually have a high horse to climb. (I'm not being entirely facetious here: There really are a whole lot of elements of college football that I abhor.)
For a quick slice of most of what's wrong with college football, just read this column and do supplemental research as needed. It's not even that particular people are good or bad or that you can blame specific things and suggest specific solutions. Rather, there's just no good way out of any of this. As Mike Burger pointed out once on his blog (and I wasn't sure whether I agreed then, but the more I think about it the more I do agree), what singlehandedly makes things so complicated is people's extreme interest in crowning a particular national champion.
The obvious question would be "why can't college football be like college basketball?" One tournament - massive casual-fan interest and TV revenue - undisputed champion. To which these answers immediately come to mind:
1. Right now college basketball is pretty sickly itself.
2. The differences between basketball and football make this pretty much impossible. The one has a ball, two hoops, a hardwood floor, five guys playing at a time, and 15 on a college roster. The other has helmets, pads, tackling dummies, goalposts, 100 yards of turf, 11 guys on the field, and closing in on 100 per roster. College basketball compresses six rounds into three weeks; given the football injury situation, conventional wisdom is that any pace greater than one game a week is too much.
Go to clinkclank.net and compare the books that built Cindy to the books that built you, especially if you're still an active book reader.
My companion in life is an avid reader of books, one of the things I adore about her. I'm apparently not, though heaven knows I read too many web sites (and before that, magazines with pretty much the same content).
Last book I read: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a few days ago. Before that: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a month or so ago. I'm looking forward to Goblet of Fire because for once I'll get the book in ahead of the movie.
One mitigating factor to arriving at these cultural phenomena so late (the metaphor would be "late to the party," but when it's 2004 and I'm just now reading the Harry Potter books, that's like showing up after the lights go back on and the hosts are gingerly escorting the last of the drunk guests to safety, while the stoned or not-so-drunk-anymore guests smoke outside pensively) is that by the time I get around to it, I know it's going to be good.
This is the "life is short" approach. A corollary to this is that you should almost never see movies in theaters, because if they turn out to suck, you can't get those two hours back.
Nice blast from the (recent) past here.
I'd forgotten about the Michael Moore quote in particular, but I remember it from at the time. This is Moore on September 12, 2001 (i.e. right after...)
"In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race -- you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all..."
I wonder how many people made comments like that, then had the temerity subsequently to claim that Bush had squandered post-9/11 worldwide support.