I would just add to Sonny’s post that, however trivial the annual number of instances of voting fraud, they consistently occur under the aegis of ACORN. You see, those trivial numbers start to add up over the years. ACORN and PIRG are maybe the two shadiest organizations still held in fairly good repute in America (full disclosure: I once worked a full day for US PIRG in Washington DC, when I was young and stupid. I quit the following day. It was the worst job I’d ever had, which was saying something).

Matt seems vexed that conservatives (like myself) refuse to admit that throwing around allegations of voter fraud is akin to intimidating voters into not exercising the franchise, or some such. From the first (of two) posts on the subject Friday:

What’s needed to make a real case for voter fraud is instances of people actually voting fraudulently — people who aren’t registered to vote voting, or people voting multiple times. But year after year nobody can ever find more than a trivial number of instances of fraudulent voting. Instead, the issue is raised every year in order to raise barriers to voting by perfectly eligible voters.

I think there’s some common ground to be had here: yes, the numbers of actual instances of people casting fraudulent ballots seems to be minimal, but it does happen, right? And efforts should be taken to stop this from occurring, yes? There is another example of fraudulent registration forms being submitted by ACORN again today:

Hamilton County received more than 160,000 documents this year related to voter registration and change of address. Of the more than 40,000 documents received from ACORN, about 10,000 have been duplicates and many have come back with invalid addresses. Of the remaining documents “I do believe fictitious ones are registered,” said Williams “We don’t cross check this. That’s supposed to be done on a state-wide database. So if that isn’t done, we don’t have the resources to do it.”

He said multiple registrations came in with the same name, but slightly different addresses or birth dates. His office has received calls from people saying they never filled out a registration card. [Emphasis mine]

Now, we can argue all day about the real-life impact of voter fraud on elections. I think it’s safe to say that, in a state that is sure to be close, as Ohio is, that even a few hundred fraudulent ballots (a “trivial” number, out of the hundreds of thousands cast) could make a huge difference. Therefore it should be a priority to get fraudulently registered voters off of the roles for the good of the democratic process. When someone casts a fraudulent ballot it’s the same thing as taking a rightfully cast ballot and throwing it in the trash.

But wanting to stop fraudulent ballots from being cast has nothing to do with racism, or suppressing voter turnout, or any other evil plot. What annoys me about Yglesias’s posts on the subject is his assumption that the other side is a collection of malignant racists simply trying to disenfranchise poor black people. It never even occurs to him that there might be, y’know, a principle to uphold.

George Will had an insightful column this week, where he takes the opportunity to rip into both Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain, reserving an extra dose of spleen for TR. It’s hardly news that McCain reveres Teddy, and he’s hardly the first modern politician to do so.

TR is a curious figure. Neoconservatives revere him for his Bully!-like manliness, which they seem to take to mean his refusal to allow pesky anachronisms like separation of powers and limited government to get in the way of his policies. Plus, he always liked a good war. Early progressives like New Republic-founder Herbert Croly felt similarly. David Brooks and Bill Kristol looked to TR as a kind of spiritual ancestor of their “national greatness” project (see here for Virginia Postrel’s sharp riposte).

Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger made the contrast between TR and the execrable Woodrow Wilson the framing device for his magisterial Diplomacy. He’s on to something, too. Weird Darwinist militancy aside, TR was a natural geopolitical strategist. He was the first politican to grasp the significance of Alfred T. Mahan’s thought for U.S. foreign — and particularly maritime — policy.

He was capable of great subtlety as well; in the realm of foreign policy, at least, he actually applied his maxim, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” (Elsewhere, it was quite the opposite: a relative said of him that “When Theodore attends a wedding he wants to be the bride and when he attends a funeral he wants to be the corpse.”)

The matter of Venezuelan debt to the European powers could have spiraled into a genuine crisis had TR not carefully handled the vain Kaiser Wilhelm II, in the service of upholding the Monroe Doctrine. He earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize by negotiating a settlement in the Russo-Japanese war — with the aim of preserving American interests in the Pacific.

I recall that it was something of a shock to discover the traditional conservative animus against TR (Mr. Will’s column marshals no new arguments in this regard, but it provides an admirable summary of the brief for the prosecution). In my youthful folly, I had held TR in rather high regard. Most of the blame for this is due to Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which traces his life right up until the moment when he receives the news that McKinley’s death has made him president.

And it’s a wonderful book: beautifully written and so engaging it reads more like a novel than a biography. Truly, I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of political persuasion. Politics aside, TR is a fascinating individual, and probably a great man of sorts — with all the difficulties that implies for the health of the republic.

Look, when his first wife and mother die within 24 hours of each other, and him barely into his 20’s, does he join a therapy group or make movies starring Susan Sarandon? No, he heads out to the Dakota Badlands to become a cowboy. He even single-handedly arrests a gang of cattle thieves.

I think part of the key to the disjunction between TR the man and TR the president is Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous line about TR’s cousin: “He has a second rate mind but a first rate temperament.” Well, TR had a first rate mind but something like a fifth rate temperament. And his mind really was first rate — he’s probably one of a mere handful of presidents to merit that distinction. Yet his wild mania and erratic judgment, which make him a fascinating subject for a biographer, made him a dangerous figure to be wielding executive power.

Meanwhile, his latter-day admirer, John McCain, shares too much of his temperament and probably not enough of his intellect. Life’s full of trade-offs.

Barney Frank and fellow Congressional Democrats think the federal government should spend more money in the interest of economic recovery, and it looks like Republicans do, too.

Oh, and there’s also the fact that for the first time in a decade, the President is talking about the G7 instead of the G8.  Any financial bailout would no doubt be largely a U.S.-U.K. endeavor, with only symbolic involvement from the other industrial powers, but this is a gratuitous kick in the groin to Russia, which became the eighth member in 1997.

Yep, it’s Bush policy at its finest: never hesitate to make your feelings known, especially when it’ll come at a cost and accomplish nothing.

The federal government is going to spend a portion of the $700 billion it’s budgeted for a financial bailout to buy stock in ailing financial institutions. At this point, I think we’re all prepared to admit that we’re in uncharted territory. I don’t know what’ll come of all this, but the plan admits of some obvious angles of analysis: for one thing, just what ailing financial institutions is the federal government going to put this money into? How is it going to decide? Just who, in this brain trust of i-bankers Treasury Secretary Paulson has hastily thrown together in the last couple weeks, is going to make those decisions? How did they get their jobs? I’d be surprised if we weren’t reading about allegations of corruption in the process for years to come.

In her take on CNNMoney, Jeanne Sahadi writes:

“We are working to develop a standardized program that is open to a broad array of financial institutions,” Paulson said.

“Such a program would be designed to encourage the raising of new private capital to complement public capital,” he said following a meeting of G-7 finance ministers and central bankers.

Any shares purchased by the U.S. government would be non-voting shares except, he said, “with the respect to the market standard terms to protect our rights as investors.”

Paulson said that developing a standard program is the best way to “use taxpayer money more efficiently and have it go farther.”

A standardized program doesn’t strike me as a particularly bad idea, but there are essentially two choices for the federal government as it buys stock in banks: either take voting shares in the institutions, in which case it opens the door for conflicts of interest and the politicization of business decisions on a scale never before seen in the United States; or take non-voting shares, in which case it provides little incentive for the institutions not to spend the money in ways they’d never risk their own.

When the government makes a decision that leaves it with only those choices, I think it’s fair to characterize it as a bad decision.

Chris Parnell really gets Tom Brokaw, doesn’t he?

Good on McCain, tamping down the misinformed excesses of the base base.

Over the course of two presidential debates, our candidates have largely failed to distinguish themselves from one another in the realm of foreign policy, confirming my long-held suspicion that, when it comes to foreign policy at least, we do not have a two-party system; we have a one-party system, and it is the party of the Establishment. And the Establishment is forever wedded to a quasi-imperial foreign policy.

The best summation of our present condition that I’ve yet seen is in Barry Posen’s review of John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics:

The post-Cold War “debate” on foreign policy between Democrats and Republicans has not been fought out over the issue of whether the United States should have an activist foreign policy: the two parties could only disagree on how much military management of the internal politics of strategically insignificant failed states the United States should undertake. The two parties agreed that the U.S. military’s Unified and Specified Commands and Commanders should continue to organize the entire globe for war; that NATO should expand; that the U.S. military should be substantially more capable than that of any other state or combination of states; and even that the U.S. military should be forward deployed–still a quarter million troops as of June 2001. They have also agreed, more or less, that the United States should preserve some degree of nuclear superiority over other nuclear powers, and that it would be better if no other nuclear powers emerged [...] And the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which portend a significant increase in the cost of hegemony to the United States, seem to have injected still more energy and commitment into an expansive U.S. foreign policy not less.

Even accepting this, however, I find it curious that no serious contender for the Oval Office has, if only for tactical electoral reasons, tried to outmaneuver his opponents by appealing directly to what might be called America’s Jacksonian constituency. Would a candidate, besides Ron Paul, not find some electoral success in saying, in effect, “Screw those bastards, we’re going home”? Certainly, Obama could have played this card in the one area where he has disagreed with John McCain: Iraq.

Now, I realize that the Robert Kagans and Max Boots of this country are heavily invested in demonstrating that Americans actually favor maximalist policies abroad, but is it true?

(Excursus) By the way, did anyone else find Kagan’s Dangerous Nation irritating as hell, not to mention mendacious? It’s as if Kagan ran into an Old West saloon shouting how some men loitering in the street were a bunch of cattle thieves. The saloon’s patrons then rouse themselves to find and lynch the supposed thieves. Upon discovering that the men were not, in fact, cattle thieves, the town turns to Kagan to say, in effect, “What the hell, man?” to which Kagan replies, “Boy, the folks in that saloon were pretty wild, huh? In fact, I wrote a book about it. It’s called Dangerous Saloon.” (End excursus)

It seems to me that the combination of the public’s ignorance, our financial solvency (dwindling), and a standing, non-draft military insulates the Establishment from the political consequences of their misrule. Nonetheless, in the coming years, I suspect the field will be open to a successful (i.e., not Ron Paul) populist (and probably demagogic) politician to push back against our geopolitical tendencies.

Until then, however, any attempt to counsel a more modest and prudent foreign policy will be tarred as isolationism — which term occupies approximately the same position in our national discourse as “child molester.”

In a Daily Beast column much worth reading, Buckley fils endorses Barack Obama for president.  (Wow, he bears a frightening resemblance to his father, doesn’t he?)

The column isn’t very substantial or persuasive, I don’t think, though I agree with most of it.  As I see it, the choice this fall is a choice between McCain’s foreign policy, which would be disastrous, and undivided Democratic leadership under the most liberal president in our history, which could but would not necessarily be disastrous.  No one wins elections running on a platform of American weakness, of course, but John McCain shows not even the slightest recognition of the relative decline of the United States in the world.  Neither does Obama, really, but his policies would squander less of what’s left of American power.

Say what you will about how well he writes and how well he speaks, Obama has basically no record of national service.  He’s a blank slate, and if Bush policy hadn’t been so thoroughly disastrous that the mere mention of the word “change” (however intended) was enough to have people seeing the Rapture, he wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning a general election.

Neither McCain nor Obama has a governing philosophy, and neither has a coherent set of ideas.  That’s dangerous, and it’s the last thing you want to see at a moment like this, when everything is up in the air. Being a “maverick” does not induce confidence, and it makes most politically conscious Americans think you’re itching to blow things up.  Nor does “hope and change” really restore one’s faith when it seems to involve making different but similarly ill-advised decisions and hoping for the best.

I simply don’t have confidence in the leaders of either party to get us back on track.  Domestic politics make it impossible to pursue a foreign policy in which we begin normalizing relations with powers we don’t like (Cuba, Iran) and spending our scarce capital more wisely in that department.

And domestic politics also makes it impossible to get our finances back in order.  Truth be told, the $850 billion we just committed to spending on the financial bailout is a drop in the bucket compared to the $55 trillion we’re facing in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare in the coming decades.  The Republicans can’t solve that problem alone, and the Democrats don’t want to.

So while I understand the desire to bemoan the Palin nomination, dismiss the latter day McCain for turning into an inauthentic political calculator, pull the lever for Obama and call it a day, this isn’t the lever that flushes the Bush administration.  It’s the lever that chooses its successor.  And whoever he is, I wish I had a sense that he took my concerns to heart.

Voter fraud is a myth, designed to disenfranchise the poor. Right Dahlia? Right Matt? Right Nico?

Oh, wait:

The secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after noticing that names did not match addresses and that most members of the Dallas Cowboys appeared to be registering in Nevada to vote in November’s general election.

“Some of these (forms) were facially fraudulent; we basically had the starting lineup for the Dallas Cowboys,” Secretary of State Ross Miller said. “Tony Romo is not registered to vote in Nevada. Anyone trying to pose as Terrell Owens won’t be able to cast a ballot.”

Agents with the secretary of state and state attorney general offices served a search warrant on the headquarters of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, at 953 E. Sahara Ave. shortly after 9 a.m. They seized voter registration forms and computer databases to determine how many fake forms were submitted and identify employees who were responsible.

I mean, it’s easy to laugh about this story, but there’s a real problem here: groups like ACORN are paying people to turn in voter registration forms and not bothering to make sure they’re legit. But instead of worrying about voter fraud, let’s just say that the GOP is trying to keep minorities from voting. It makes everything so much easier…

Some time ago, I toyed with the notion of writing an article contrasting Barack Obama with the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I nixed the idea, out of a combination of laziness and the fear that it would be too masturbatory (I know, I know, like it’s stopped me before).

Nonetheless, David Samuels boldly plows ahead with it over at the New Republic, and comes up with one of the more penetrating, non-hysterical psychological portraits of the man who may be our next president that I’ve yet read.

Sonny labels this Yglesias post as the single most stupid thing he’s read on the internet. And while I’ll gladly agree, Yglesias’ hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-us solution is pretty dumb, in the annals of internet stupidity, it can’t possibly beat out this.

Apparently not, says the Ohio State Supreme Court.

I’ve read a lot of really, really stupid things on the Internet over the years, but this takes the cake:

Fundamentally, with only so many families in the country, there’s no need for all the houses we have. The housing bust has caused a construction bust, so over time population growth will eat up the supply overhang. But that could happen more quickly if population growth was faster — i.e., more immigrants. At a minimum, if we stopped trying to drive illegals out of the country and instead put them on a path to citizenship, that would help.

I mean, I’m kind of dumbfounded that Matt Yglesias would even write something this fundamentally stupid. First off, we don’t have a crisis of excess housing, we have a crisis of people being unable to afford their housing. Leaving aside that little fact … Is Matt suggesting that we import wealthy foreigners to buy up all our excess housing? I seriously doubt it. I assume he means we should allow more poor immigrants into the country. Which would depress wages further (more inexperienced labor=more people willing to do work for next-to-free…see: current illegal immigration scheme). Which would make those houses even more unaffordable for the working class. Which would lead to more foreclosures. Which would lead to more excess housing.

Am I missing the point? Am I going to regret this post? I mean, seriously: someone explain to me what in the hell he’s talking about. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Ever listen to the Russians justify their incursion into Georgia on the grounds of human rights? Being somewhat familiar with Russians and their prejudices, it’s rung a bit hollow to me.

Over at Doublethink Online, Doug Robertson’s taken two Russian works, Lermontov’s A Hero Of Our Time, and the Soviet-era film Kidnapping Caucasian Style, and in his inimitable style has shown the complicated yet ultimately dismissive attitude Russians have for the roguish people that live to their south.

A snippet from the section on Lermontov to whet your appetite:

To their immediate credit, the Ossetes are always presented as eager to be taken into service: the traveler seemingly can hardly mark two versts in succession without a crowd of them descending upon him like so many would-be window-squeegee-ers upon a twenty-first century inner-city motorist. But no sooner have they been hired than they transform themselves into veritable living engines of inertia, apportioning the work at hand as diffusively as possible and retarding its progress by means of what one cannot help terming a strategy of deliberate counterproductivity: “There was nothing else for it,” writes the narrator, “so I hired six bullocks and a few Ossetes. One of them heaved my portmanteau on to his shoulders and the others helped the bullocks along, doing little more than just shouting.”

Immediately thereafter he catches sight of a Russian army officer (the aforementioned Maxim Maximych) who, to his astonishment, is making equally speedy progress with heavier luggage, fewer bullocks, and no Ossetian help whatsoever. The officer’s explanation for the discrepancy, for all of its telegraphic syntax, is as transparent to interpretation as it is unsparing: “Fearful rogues, these Asiatics [!] are. Do you really think they’re doing any good with all that shouting? God alone knows what it’s all about! But the oxen understand them. You hitch up twenty bullocks if you like, but they won’t budge an inch when they shout at them in that language of theirs. Dreadful scoundrels they are! But what can you do to them? They like to fleece travelers…”.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

One of the great things about my new job is that it affords me the opportunity to listen to 106.7’s Junkies on my drive to work in the morning. For those of you who live outside the beltway (you poor, unfortunate souls), the Junkies (originally the Sports Junkies, they dropped the “Sports” a few years back) are a quartet of local boys who talk about all manner of nonsense, much of it sports/entertainment related. Sometimes, like this morning, they slip into politics.

It’s interesting when they start up on politics, because of the four only one (E.B., I think; their voices all sound pretty similar over the air, especially when you only listen fifteen minutes a day) is a conservative and the rest of the guys (as well as the call screeners, producers, and everyone else in the booth) tend to gang up on him. Today, a mother of one of the Junks even called into the show to harangue E.B. for saying that Barack Obama has been known to consort with terrorists. Obama and Ayers were never close acquaintances, she argued, and even if they were, so what? Ayers isn’t an unrepentant terrorist.

Now…I’m of the mind that Bill Ayers is a nonissue, except in the sense that it makes me dislike Obama on a personal level. But to suggest that Ayers is not an unrepentant terrorist is, simply and factually, wrong. Let’s break the phrase “unrepentant terrorist” into its component parts. Was Ayers a “terrorist”? Well, he set numerous bombs in sites around the country with the intention of destroying public and private property and intimidating/scaring people. Sounds like terrorism to me. OK, is he “unrepentant”? In an irony noted by many others, there’s a New York Times article dated September 11, 2001 in which Ayers is quoted as saying

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Those don’t sound like the words of someone who is sorry for his actions.

CNN has also recently debunked the idea that Obama and Ayers barely knew each other; I’d embed the video, but for some reason the computer I’m working from hates doing that. I’ll instead link to the Weekly Standard’s summation of the report. You can watch the video there.

My point is this: the left can argue about how relevant these attacks are, but they can’t argue about the basic facts of the situation. Barack Obama is friends and political allies with an unrepentant terrorist. I’m sorry if it’s distasteful to hear, but it’s true. Should this relationship disqualify him from the presidency? Probably not. But don’t act as if Sean Hannity and the rest are making up facts.

TOM BROKAW:  Let’s take a question from the audience:  Mr. Hugh Whagbotum of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

HUGH WHAGBOTUM:  Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN:  Well, I’m glad you asked me that, Mr. Whagbotum.  Let me channel your question into one of five completely uninformative pre-prepared answers you’ve almost certainly heard many times before.

BROKAW:  Would you please be more respectful of time?

MCCAIN:  No.

BROKAW:  Senator Obama, would you please be more respectful of time?

SENATOR BARACK OBAMA:  No, but I’ll be nicer than he is about it.

BROKAW:  Senator Obama, what do you think of our nation’s tax policy?

OBAMA:  Well first off, let me just reiterate that I believe in this country.  It’s such a wonderful, dynamic place, brimming with opportunity and populated by people of extraordinary resourcefulness.  And I can’t wait to suck the life out of it with a gigantic tax increase on every small businessman who sells more than night crawlers for bait.  I can’t really get into my plans for the wealthy while kids are watching, but they’re not hard to guess.

BROKAW:  We go now to our next question, from a young black female environmentalist who hasn’t decided who she’s voting for.

YOUNG BLACK FEMALE ENVIRONMENTALIST WHO STILL HASN’T RULED OUT VOTING FOR JOHN MCCAIN:  What would you do to save the environment?

MCCAIN:  Well I’m glad you asked.  I think we can save the environment by becoming energy independent, and invading several more countries in Asia — except Pakistan, like that one over there is proposing.  That’s just insane.

BROKAW:  Could you please be more respectful of time?

OBAMA AND MCCAIN, IN UNISON:  Tom, I’m not quite sure how to explain this, if it’s not already clear, but one of us is gonna be elected President next month, and you’re a monkey who thinks he’s an organ grinder.  Shut up.  Now.

MCCAIN:  The problem in this country is the pork barrel spending, which in a typical year amounts to maybe 7% of what we just voted to spend on the financial bailout in a single week.  But I’ll veto things.  I’m a maverick.  That’s what mavericks do.  That and have highly homoerotic relationships with guys named Goose.

OBAMA:  I gotta say, John, you don’t look like you’re up to a shower scene with Val Kilmer these days.

BROKAW:  We’re running out of time.  We need to cut to that creepy looking guy with the moustache — the one who looks like he’s got half a dozen nurses buried in his backyard.  Wait, no, we’ll go to that guy who’s so nervous he’s wetting himself…

you see a reference to Omaha and misread it as “Obama.”  Has this not been the longest election ever?

My old pal Brady Miller’s new band is tearing it up in the New York club scene.  Check out the instrumentation on the lead track on the page, “Starling.”  Great stuff.