I’m not entirely sure, but I think that Andrea Harris is upset with Michael Moore.

[Caution: link is not suitable for young children. It contains the kind of words that one wishes to discourage them (and older ones as well) from using.]

Not.

The SF Examiner is crying over the upcoming death of the “assault weapons” ban.

Boo hoo.

Remember all the upset with Bush when he said that he would sign a renewal?

I said that it didn’t matter, because he knew that there would never be a bill to sign. It still looks that way. Whether his pledge to sign it will still hurt him politically still remains to be seen, of course, but I can’t imagine the gun-rights activists being indifferent to a Kerry-Edwards presidency.

Alan Murray implies that, with his pick of Senator John Edwards for veep, Senator Kerry just made a powerful enemy for himself.

…party wisdom that’s been passed down by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss, and now resides with Democratic economic guru Robert Rubin, is that big business does matter to Democrats. To be successful, a Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t need the active support of America’s CEOs, but he does need to keep them on the sidelines. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election at least in part because business was determined to dump him. Bill Clinton won election and re-election at least in part because the business community, while not strongly supportive, wasn’t threatened by him.

Thanks, Mindles, for stating better than I could my ongoing frustration with people who assume that I’m a rabid right winger because I don’t agree with rabid left-wing positions. There’s only one part of the post with which I disagree:

Bush never saw a spending bill or entitlement he didn’t like, all small government rhetoric aside.

What “small government rhetoric”? I’ve never heard any.

I had hopes that Bush planned to shrink government, despite his talk about “compassionate conservative,” but it was hope based on faith, not evidence. All I knew was that he would be preferable to Albert Gore Jr.

I also know that he will be better than John F. Kerry.

That is to damn him with faint praise.

But I’m sure that I’ll continue to be lambasted as a right-wing Bush lover.

Mark Steyn has, I think, the definitive review of Bill Clinton’s turgid and overlong autobiography. My favorite bit:

The president appears to have accidentally modified his story and started his relationship with the comely intern several months earlier than he testified to at the time: “During the government shutdown in late 1995,” he writes, “I’d had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions.”

Truly, that is one of the saddest sentences ever written. If I were the big spenders at Knopf, I’d have said: “Look, we understand that a politician with legal difficulties has to say things like ‘inappropriate encounter.’ And, if you want to write a memoir in dead pol-speak, that’s OK, we’ll pay you 20,000 bucks. But for 10 mil do us a favor and lay off the ‘I had an inappropriate encounter’ stuff. Shoot for more of ‘The shaft of light from the dying sun through the Oval Office window caught the swell of her bosom as she slid the extra-large pepperoni across the desk. I knew it was wrong. I’d penciled in that evening for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, but what the hell, the two sides of that troubled island’s sectarian conflict were separated by as deep a divide as the plunging cleavage now beckoning from her low-cut angora sweater. Ulster could wait.'”

Mark Steyn has, I think, the definitive review of Bill Clinton’s turgid and overlong autobiography. My favorite bit:

The president appears to have accidentally modified his story and started his relationship with the comely intern several months earlier than he testified to at the time: “During the government shutdown in late 1995,” he writes, “I’d had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions.”

Truly, that is one of the saddest sentences ever written. If I were the big spenders at Knopf, I’d have said: “Look, we understand that a politician with legal difficulties has to say things like ‘inappropriate encounter.’ And, if you want to write a memoir in dead pol-speak, that’s OK, we’ll pay you 20,000 bucks. But for 10 mil do us a favor and lay off the ‘I had an inappropriate encounter’ stuff. Shoot for more of ‘The shaft of light from the dying sun through the Oval Office window caught the swell of her bosom as she slid the extra-large pepperoni across the desk. I knew it was wrong. I’d penciled in that evening for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, but what the hell, the two sides of that troubled island’s sectarian conflict were separated by as deep a divide as the plunging cleavage now beckoning from her low-cut angora sweater. Ulster could wait.'”

Mark Steyn has, I think, the definitive review of Bill Clinton’s turgid and overlong autobiography. My favorite bit:

The president appears to have accidentally modified his story and started his relationship with the comely intern several months earlier than he testified to at the time: “During the government shutdown in late 1995,” he writes, “I’d had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions.”

Truly, that is one of the saddest sentences ever written. If I were the big spenders at Knopf, I’d have said: “Look, we understand that a politician with legal difficulties has to say things like ‘inappropriate encounter.’ And, if you want to write a memoir in dead pol-speak, that’s OK, we’ll pay you 20,000 bucks. But for 10 mil do us a favor and lay off the ‘I had an inappropriate encounter’ stuff. Shoot for more of ‘The shaft of light from the dying sun through the Oval Office window caught the swell of her bosom as she slid the extra-large pepperoni across the desk. I knew it was wrong. I’d penciled in that evening for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, but what the hell, the two sides of that troubled island’s sectarian conflict were separated by as deep a divide as the plunging cleavage now beckoning from her low-cut angora sweater. Ulster could wait.'”

There’s an important story that’s not getting enough press, so I figured I’d blog it to try to raise the profile a bit. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy just accepted a report from the ABA on the dysfunction in the US penal system. The upshot is that we are pissing away huge amounts of taxpayer money incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders thanks to mandatory minimum sentences created by politicians trying to seem tough on crime. The same political dynamics lead to the idiocy of alcohol prohibition. The ABA commission website has the text of the report, summaries, and some other useful material on the subject.

The system is deeply flawed, even if you think drug laws are a good idea. It makes no sense whatsoever to sentence a street level dealer to twice the amount of time given to someone who commits assault, but that’s the way things are right now. We desperately need reform of the whole penal system – perhaps this report can begin the process.

Via a comment on this post, I came across an interesting blog that I hadn’t seen before. The topic is k-12 education reform, something close to my heart since both my parents were high school teachers, my Mom for her whole career, and my Dad while he was in the Peace Corps[*].

I came out of an education system with high stakes testing, so I’m fairly comfortable with it. It seems to me that some sort of testing is necessary in order to measure teaching effectiveness. The stakes for the student should not be all-or-nothing, though. The ideal is testing that measures school performance, but which constitutes only a part of the student’s grade. The teacher and school should be assessed on aggregate test scores across all students, presumably with some cross comparison with other schools in similar circumstances (since it doesn’t make sense to compare inner city schools to suburban magnet schools, for example). The process of actually measuring school performance isn’t simple, but it is necessary to have some sort of feedback mechanism that focuses teacher and administrator attention on a meaningful performance metric.

Testing is a bit of a fad these days, which is a mixed blessing. At least some testing schemes are stupid and destructive (all or nothing tests that track students into the smart kids track or the regular track, for example). The diversity of schemes being tried suggests that at least some will work, and hopefully the good ones will be adopted by other states and school districts. In the meantime some of the kids being experimented on will suffer needlessly thanks to political stupidity, but the alternative is kids suffering due to political neglect, so it’s not obviously a losing proposition.

Anyway, go dig around the site a bit. Even if you don’t have kids, you are directly affected by this.

[*] incidentally, IMO the Peace Corps is probably the best investment in foreign relations that the US has ever made. High level bladiblahblah doesn’t last longer than the leadership of the foreign countries being engaged. Massive aid projects line the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats. Actual US citizens interacting one-on-one with local people and materially improving their lives spreads American ideals into the grassroots, and inoculates at least some people against rabid anti-Americanism in a way that lasts long after the volunteer has gone home.

If true, here’s a non-war reason to hope for a Bush reelection. Reagan could never do this, but he never had a Republican congress.

I should add that people are paying far too much attention to polls, including the approval ratings and “right-track/wrong-track” polls. It’s way too early for them to have any significance whatsoever. The campaign hasn’t even started yet, and it won’t really kick in until after the Republican convention, and not really until after Labor Day.

At this point in 1988, Dukakis was several points ahead of the president’s father, and stayed there through August. He barely got over a hundred electoral votes.

I don’t think this race is going to be close–certainly not as close as 2000 (if for no other reason than regression to the mean). It’s very unlikely that we’d have two elections so close consecutively.

I in fact think that it will be a landslide, one way or the other (and my money’s on Bush, or would be if I participated in the Iowa electronic futures market, which currently agrees with me).