digamma.net - notes

There’s a theory among Democrats that sometime shortly before the election, the Bush Administration will capture Osama bin Laden. Kevin Drum lists some other possibilities.

Anyone who truly believes that the Bush administration is planning such a maneuver stands to make some serious money on Tradesports. “OSAMA.CAPTURE.OCT04″ is for sale at 11.0, which means that after adjusting for the transaction costs, one could turn an investment of $11.80 into $99.20. Multiply that by how much you’re willing to bet, and you’ve got easy money - IF you truly believe what you’re saying.

The low share price indicates that most of the people making this prediction are unwilling to “put their money where their mouths are.”

In another life, I was an aspiring classicist. (Hence my pseudonym.) I draw on that experience when I say that Matthew Yglesias, great blogger and journalist that he is, should stop abusing the Latin language:

So let’s concede ad arguendo (though I hasten to add – only ad arguendo) that John Kerry has no better idea than George W. Bush of how to clean up the mess that George W. Bush and George W. Bush’s national security team have made in Iraq.

That’s the same grammatical error twice (I hasten to repeat – twice) in the same sentence.

The proper expression is arguendo. It’s the dative case, expressing purpose, and translates perfectly to the English expression “for the sake of argument.” The preposition ad takes an object in the accusative case, which would be arguendum, and in fact the phrase ad arguendum appears in Paul’s second epistle to Timothy. But ad arguendo is just plain wrong.

This has been a pedantic correction of a writer far superior to me.

The viciously funny blogger Aaron Hawkins, AKA Uppity Negro, has passed away. His sister has been spotted over there, so if you were a fan, she’d probably appreciate hearing how much we all loved his work.

Jonathan Wilde:

Though I do believe that there is a clash of worldviews between the West and militant Islam, I’d rather kill ‘em with Britney and Starbucks.

In the fall of 2002, Robert Torricelli was the Democratic candidate for US Senator from New Jersey, and didn’t have a prayer of winning. So the party decided to replace him with the veteran Frank Lautenberg. The problem was that under state election law, they had missed the deadline for such a switch by 16 days.

The New Jersey state Supreme Court sided with the Democrats, ruling, essentially, that the right of the two major parties to field a candidate in every election trumps all election law. Where in the state Constitution the court found such a right, or any special privileges for the two major parties, remained a mystery.

This month, the same thing happened in Florida. Bush’s campaign missed the filing deadline, and they got to file the next day. As Running Scared writes, it’s good to be the king. The difference between Florida 2004 and New Jersey 2002 is that in Jersey, the Republicans had the cojones to protest. The Florida Democrats are looking the other way.

I look forward to seeing the Democrats apply the same flexibility when Ralph Nader’s campaign makes a mistake getting on the ballot.

Thanks to Answer Guy for pointing out that my electoral calculations were full of crap. The Gore states from 2000 have lost seven electors to the Bush states. So the Gore states plus New Hampshire are only worth 264 electors, not enough to win.

As it happens, those are the exact 264 electors that today’s prediction from electoral-vote.com shows Kerry winning. It also shows Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, and Florida as tied, leaving Bush with only 222 electors. Bush has massively increased his lead in Ohio.

So a Kerry win is not going to be nearly as easy as I’d thought. Paging Dr. Kucinich to resuscitate Ohio seems far-fetched at this point, so he’s got to win Florida, Missouri, Colorado, or both Nevada and the Colorado ballot initiative that would give him a proportion of the state’s electors (and probably lead to a horrific legal battle.)

Florida? Missouri? Colorado? Ohio? Arizona? I don’t know which of these states scares me the least.

Atrios:

[The Marshall Plan’s] success involved serious people thinking hard about how to take the existing European societies, taking into account the various stakeholders and the conflicts between them, and figuring out how to fashion a transition to the modern mixed economies they still possess today. It didn’t involve a bunch of Heritage/AEI flunkies cruising in and trying to declare by fiat some sort of flat tax privatized parody of a libertarian paradise.

This libertarian agrees.

This libertarian got offended, but I’m not sure why. I wouldn’t call what Atrios wrote “a swipe at libertarians” - the difference between real libertarianism and “parody of a libertarian paradise” seems obvious to me. And the point applies equally to leftists who say “we need a Marshall Plan for…. (schools/poverty/drugs/crime/Africa)” - a lot of them also just want money thrown at their solutions, instead of a well thought-out plan that considers all its consequences.

Matthew Yglesias has shut down comments on his blog. Things were getting ugly there after a week in which Yglesias made a couple of strongly-worded posts about the Republicans visiting his hometown. The icing on the cake was a fairly disingenuous link from Instapundit.

Despite all this, the site still had a higher signal-to-noise ratio than many others. The three-way arguments between centrist Democrats, left-liberals, and libertarians tended to provide good perspective on issues. I’ll miss it.

People like Michael Moore or the Daily Show often use the title of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US to show that the Bush administration was ignoring warning signs before September 11th. And, if done right, it can be amusing, especially if it’s in response to someone claiming there was no warning whatsoever. But generally, I find it disingenuous and annoying.

On August 6, 2001, I didn’t get to read a Presidential Daily Briefing, but I could have told you that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the US. Anyone who was paying attention to non-blowjob-related news in the summer of 1998 could have. That summer, I read ABC’s interview with bin Laden, which contains this piece of happy news:

If the present injustice continues with the wave of national consciousness, it will inevitably move the battle to American soil, just as Ramzi Yousef and others have done.

So there was good reason to worry about al-Qaeda attacks before September 11th, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with the August 6th PDB. There are two disingenuous sides to this debate - one side, loyal to Bush, that says the US was taken totally by surprise on September 11th, which “changed everything"; and the other side, opposed to the administration, that says the August 6th PDB, which contained no new information, should have sparked a response.

What both sides have in common is a dependence on public ignorance. If, in 2001, you couldn’t remember things that happened three years before, you were probably shocked that al Qaeda would attack the US, and the PDB might seem like new information to you. All’s fair in love and war, and using this ignorance to political advantage might be a smart thing to do, but don’t ask me to like it.

You know, I love Radley Balko’s weblog, but it’s damned depressing sometimes.

The town web site of Frederick, Maryland now posts photographs of people arrested for prostitution-related offenses. Notice I wrote arrested, not convicted. Someone who understands the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments (and every other law) better than me needs to take this to court.

Oh, and if you tell your doctor you’re a heavy drinker, you can lose your driver’s license, regardless of whether or not you ever drive drunk.

John Kerry doesn’t have to win Florida this year. Nor does he have to win Ohio. Or Colorado. Or John Edwards’s home state of North Carolina. Bush won all those states in 2000, and Bush can have them again this year.

If Kerry can win every state Gore won last time (which doesn’t even include Gore’s home state of Tennessee), all he needs to add is New Hampshire. Gore lost the Granite State by all of 7,211 votes last time. John Kerry’s home state borders New Hampshire to the south, and his supporters mounted an amazing turnout in the primary. They can do it again this fall, and this time they’ll have help from Howard Dean, whose state is on New Hampshire’s western border.

Good thing I’m still registered to vote there.

ROVE: OK everybody, let’s get started. We need to come up with a message for the third night of our convention.

CHENEY: I say we go negative. Shock and awe.

ROVE: Come on, Dick. You know that won’t play with the soccer moms.

CHENEY: Psssh, soccer moms. I’ll eat their brains.

ROVE: What did I say about the brain-eating?!
(more…)

Unapologetic Naderite and good friend of mine Mark Zipkin has decided to make blogging a higher priority in his life than sleeping. And he’s actually in New York this week instead of watching it on TV from sleepy Vermont.

Now I need to blogroll a serious Badnarik supporter. Stop laughing, they must be out there.

Right now on C-Span, the Republicans are at Montgomery County Community College, on the stage where I and my choir performed several times back in my day. Glad I turned it on just now.

“The President cut taxes. It’s important to cut taxes. Aren’t you glad that he cut taxes? I’m sure glad he cut my taxes.”

By her blistering wit and intellect, you can tell this Renee Amoore woman comes from the same place as me.