It's All About the Money

Well, not ultimately.

But presidential candidates that start with large warchests of cash have a expotential advantage over their poorer bretheren. One reason that George Bush was the Republican candidate in 2000 was because he had a direct pipeline to mainstream Republican donors. He could use that early cash to raise name awareness (though it hardly seemed necessary in his case) and prime the pump for the serious fundraising needed for the long slog to the convention.

With the culture so media-connected, candidates have to hit big early. (Kids today don't remember that Robert Kennedy didn't enter into the 1968 Democratic primary until mid-March, after sitting president LBJ had made a poor showing in the New Hampshire primaries.) Every twitch from the buildup leading to the Iowa caucases to Super Tuesday is relentlessly examined, spun, and respun. Candidates that can't fund media buys in the early markets are left as footnotes in civics textbooks.

New York Republicans have struggled to mount a serious challenge to Clinton, and recent polls show her more than 25 points ahead of her nearest GOP rival. Then-Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro abandoned her bid after several stumbles; Edward Cox, son-in-law of President Nixon, said he would pass on the race despite GOP appeals.

Clinton's fundraising totals and her poll numbers make her the early favorite among potential Democratic candidates for the White House in though she repeatedly insists she isn't thinking beyond the Senate race.

Former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, one of two lesser-known Republicans challenging Clinton, raised $571,000 and ended the year with $243,000 in cash on hand.

So where is this going? Her Hillaryness is sitting on a pile of cash for her "senate campaign." Her rivals are lagging so far behind that look like they're walking backwards. With the power of the incumbency, she isn't going to need bupkiss to get re-elected. And all that leftover swag goes into fundraising for the "Hillary 2008" campaign*

Her tightwire act between now and the Super Tuesday is going to be very instructive. She is going to have to convince the Kos Kidz that she is a real-live transnational progressive while convincing the traditional Democratic base that she really does take national defense seriously.

Watch that she will not condemn the principal of use of military force or the NSA intercepts--only that the Bush administration has misused them. She won't willingly say anything that will limit executive power when she assumes office.

Kos, Cindy Sheenan, Hugo Chavez, Jack Abramoff, Hillary Clinton, NSA, Hamas....

It's going to be a hell of a ride.

* I know, it's not an official web presence, but, then, neither is this blog.

I Ain't Lileks

So I look at my blog output so far and wonder, "Why aren't I like James Lileks?"

Why the bitter edge to my posts? Why so few idyls about family and home life?

Hey, my kids started moving out last century and finally achieved escape velocity a couple of years ago. With the kids gone, my home life has reverted to two people doing things that they don't talk about to other people.

And yet.

I am going to strive mightily in 2006 to try to post a little more about where I live--the change of seasons, the way the island wakes up after winter and becomes busy with summer people, the blue skies and salt air.

Just as soon as this grey, rainy weather lets up.

Ken Blackwell: Cruel to be Kind?

Via The Corner:

BLACKWELL LEADS PETRO [Jonathan H. Adler]
An independent poll commissioned by the Ohio Republican party shows Ken Blackwell with a substantial lead over Jim Petro for the party's gubernatorial nomination. Yet the same poll shows Petro faring better in the general election. Word is that the state party is hoping to avoid a contentious primary and wants one of the candidates to drop out, yet the poll seems not to be having this effect. More on Right Angle Blog here.

The Republican party has often succumed to the John Kerry disease. That is, fronting a candidate whom they think is "electable" over one of principle. This has been the case in the Specter vs. Toomey race in 2004 and might play out again in Chaffee vs. Laffey.

Of course, all these remarks must be put in the context of a conservative, more than a Republican viewpoint. But the situation becomes like that old joke about the rat race: even it you win it, you're still a rat.

The Kos Kidz are constantly asserting that if "true Democrats" (that is, transnational progressives) were presented to the public, they would be elected by acclamation. I think that the past 25 years has shown that they are wrong. Of course I could be wrong, but I am willing to put my viewpoint to a vote.

Draft Ken Blackwell!

Post 9/11 Movies

So there is another movie to add to my list of must-see's.

Flight 93 tells the story of, well, United flight 93. The 9/11 flight that crashed into rural southwest Pennsylvania. The passengers abord that flight that September morning decided that they were not a flock, but instead were a pack and fought the hijackers. By their actions the saved uncounted lives in the nation's capitol. They spent what they could not keep to gain what could easily be lost.

Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy) wrote and directed this film.

hat tip: John J. Miller

Nostalgia Down Under

It seems as though fond rememberances for a childhood that never was are as prevelant in Australia as they are in the United States.

Tim Blair points out the inconsistancies in leftist nostalgia for a never-never past:

Christopher Bantick gets all nostalgic in The Age:

Children these days are growing up in a very different, less open, society than when I grew up in the 1950s. Curiously, even with high postwar levels of Mediterranean migration, there was less need to ostentatiously show what being an Australian meant. Those simple days were measured out with Vegemite on crusts at the school tuckshop and singing the national anthem on Monday mornings.

Not even John Howard wants to return to that sort of monoculture. Bantick’s nostalgia is perverse.

Back then, there were no wire fences in the desert keeping new arrivals from the rest of Australian society.

“New arrivals”? He’s talking about illegal arrivals, who tend to turn up without passports or any other supporting documents. By the way, Australia’s enlightened post-war Labor government tried to ship refugees home. Here’s what went on in 1949: “The Chifley Government passes the War-time Refugees Removal Act in July, with a view to forcibly repatriating approximately 900 non-Europeans who had been admitted temporarily during the war. They had declined to be repatriated, wishing to settle in Australia.”

I loved my childhood, even with the Duck and Cover drills in elementary schools, but that doesn't mean that I can't see that lots of stuff has gotten better in the last 50 years.

The Words "Innocent" and "Exonerated"

In this post on capital punishment and the court system I wrote, "Mostly the courts are right." In this NY Times piece, Joshua Marquis reports on the metrics of how large is the margin on "mostly."

To start, only 14 Americans who were once on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence alone. The hordes of Americans wrongfully convicted exist primarily on Planet Hollywood. In the Winter 2005 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, a group led by Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, published an exhaustive study of exonerations around the country from 1989 to 2003 in cases ranging from robbery to capital murder. They were able to document only 340 inmates who were eventually freed. (They counted cases where defendants were retried after an initial conviction and subsequently found not guilty as "exonerations.") Yet, despite the relatively small number his research came up with, Mr. Gross says he is certain that far more innocents languish undiscovered in prison.

So, let's give the professor the benefit of the doubt: let's assume that he understated the number of innocents by roughly a factor of 10, that instead of 340 there were 4,000 people in prison who weren't involved in the crime in any way. During that same 15 years, there were more than 15 million felony convictions across the country. That would make the error rate .027 percent — or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent....

It is understandable that journalists focus on the rare case in which an innocent man or woman is sent to prison — because, as all reporters know, how many planes landed safely today has never been news. The larger issue is whether those who influence the culture, like an enormous television network, have a moral responsibility to keep the facts straight regardless of their thirst for drama...

The words "innocent" and "exonerated" carry tremendous emotional and political weight. But these terms have been tortured beyond recognition — not just by defense lawyers, but by the disseminators of entertainment under the guise of social conscience.

"The Exonerated" played for several years Off Broadway with a Who's Who of stage and screen stars portraying six supposedly innocent people who were once on death row. The play, originally subsidized by George Soros, the liberal billionaire philanthropist, now tours college campuses and was made into a television movie by Court TV.

The script never mentions that two of the play's six characters (Sonia Jacobs and Kerry Cook) were not exonerated, but were let out of prison after a combined 36 years behind bars when they agreed to plea bargains. A third (Robert Hayes) was unavailable to do publicity tours because he is in prison, having pleaded guilty to another homicide almost identical to the one of which he was acquitted.

Here is another piece by Joshua Marquis specifically about the play, "The Exonerated."

Upcoming Movies

Taleena over at Sun Comprehending Glass has been posting reviews of movies that she has recently seen in the theater or by Netflix; so I thought I'd post about some upcoming movies that I am looking forward to or dreading.

Nanny McPhee. This Movie looks to be the corrective to the unaccountable sweetness of Disney's Mary Poppins. With Colin Firth and Emma Thompson leading the cast, It seems as though it can't miss. Emma Thompson play the title character under pounds of makeup, including warts and a snaggle tooth.

Miami Vice. Yeah, I know. Another remake of an old television show. But, doggone it, Michael Mann is the kind of a certain kind of artistic look, and the trailer shows this look in spades. It's shown in the composition of the shots, the odd muting of the sound track at critical moments, letting the music track and images develop a completely new momentum. If you have seen Manhunter, Crime Story, or Last of the Mohicans, you know what I mean.

What I wonder is, will that 1980s--glam-drug-cop schtick work in a post 9/11 political reality? We will see. Oh, yes. We will see.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The first "Pirates" movie, Curse of the Black Pearl, did what I considered impossible: it created a fun, engaging move based on a theme park ride. Granted that ride was very cinematic, and told it's own story in three acts; but still! Unfortunately, they weren't able to get Keith Richards to play Captain Jack Sparrow's father, but the very fact that they tried to get him in the movie show, I think, that they understand what made the first move good. It was fun. It had everything but parrot wearing an eyepatch and a pegleg pirate dancing a hornpipe (as was in the "Jack of All Trades" opening.)

I haven't anticipated a sequel so much since "Men in Black II." Of course MIBII was a much weaker movie than the original. Here's hoping that Verbinski can make lightning strike twice.

Lady in the Water. At this point I'll go see anything that M. Night Shyamalan puts out. Even his weaker efforts are better than 90% of what Hollywood produces. He tells big stories through small, intimate viewpoints.

And now a likely stinker:

V for Vendetta. Commenting on the Matrix sequels, a wag said, "It took George Lucas nearly 20 years to alienate his fan base. The Wachowski brothers accomplished that task in just 5." This is an attempt to recover the edgy, transgressing vibe of the original Matrix.

Yawn.

It's purportedly about a shadowy hero named only "V" who uses "terrorist tactics" (scare quotes intentional) to fight the secret police and stage a revolution in a 1984-like England...Except that he's not blowing up orphanages and gunning down shoppers in the town square, or even wearing a suicide belt to a wedding party. In the trailer "V" is using daggers to take out uniformed policemen armed with machine guns. This is much more what the U.S. Marines are doing in Baghdad that what Hamas is doing in Gaza.

And I noticed in the trailer the ever-present signs that indicate that you are in a police state say:

FAITH
THROUGH
UNITY
UNITY
THROUGH
FAITH

Feh. This must give certain people a shiver of naughty delight. "Yeah man! It's those Christers that want to oppress us!" Get over the fact that you parent forced to to attend Sunday School. That just doesn't cut it, oppression-wise.

I'd be more impressed by the writers and producers of "V" if either adultresses were being stoned in Oklahoma City's town square or young women weren't being killed by their families for dating non-Muslims in western Europe and Canada.

Draft Ken Blackwell!

City Journal has a wonderful article on Ken Blackwell, a black Regeanite running for the governorship of Ohio. He seems to be the candidate that frightens both the Democrats and the tax-and-spend Republicans in his own party:

Right now, Ken Blackwell stands at a pivotal point in American politics. He'’s taken an early lead in the race for governor of a state that was key to reelecting George W. Bush and that may well be even more crucial in picking the next American president. Moreover, Blackwell has built his early lead not by tacking toward the center of this swing state but by running on an uncompromisingly conservative platform that's won him grassroots support from both Christian groups and taxpayer organizations--a novel coalition that makes the old-boy network in his own Ohio GOP as uneasy as it makes the state'’s Democrats, who have begun a "“stop Blackwell"” campaign.

Ken Blackwell has so many people worried because he represents a new political calculus with the power to shake up American politics. For Blackwell is a fiscal and cultural conservative, a true heir of the Reagan revolution, who happens to be black, with the proven power to attract votes from across a startlingly wide spectrum of the electorate. Born in the projects of Cincinnati to a meat-packer who preached the work ethic and a nurse who read to him from the Bible every evening, Blackwell has rejected the victimology of many black activists and opted for a different path, championing school choice, opposing abortion, and staunchly advocating low taxes as a road to prosperity. The 57-year-old is equally comfortable preaching that platform to the black urban voters of Cincinnati as to the white German Americans in Ohio'’s rural counties or to the state'’s business community.

Blackwell stands apart from the group [of leading black Republicans], thanks to his deep electoral experience and his very good chance of getting elected. He has already run more political races--—from school-board seat to city councilman to secretary of state--—than all the rest of them combined. He'’s served in Washington as a HUD undersecretary and traveled the world as a U.S. ambassador. He'’s chaired a major presidential campaign, been mayor of one of Ohio'’s largest cities, and plotted supply-side fiscal policy with Jack Kemp. If he wins in Ohio, a state where Republicans are on the defensive after scandals that rocked the administration of Governor Bob Taft, Blackwell would not only become the nation'’s first elected black Republican governor but would immediately figure as a compelling 2008 vice-presidential candidate.

"Ken Blackwell represents the only chance the Republicans have in Ohio,"” says Paul Weyrich, who headed the Heritage Foundation, where Blackwell was an analyst in 1990. Weyrich, who calls Blackwell one of the few extraordinary individuals he has met in 50 years of public service, says that, without him on the ticket, Ohio Republicans "“are going down the tubes big-time for what they'’ve done there."

Serving on the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform in the mid-1990s, Blackwell became a passionate advocate of a simplified tax code and co-edited a book with Kemp, entitled IRS v. The People: Time for Real Tax Reform. So much significance did Blackwell eventually come to attach to tax reform that he agreed to chair Steve Forbes'’s 2000 Republican presidential primary campaign, centering on Forbes'’s flat-tax proposal. "Ken is an experienced fighter in the political trenches, but he also thoroughly understands the ideas he'’s fighting for,"” says Forbes. "“That'’s a very rare combination in politics."”

Tax reform! Be still my heart!

Can Ken Blackwell fulfill the unkept promise of Jack Kemp? Of Alan Keyes? Will the Republican have the first serious black candidate on a presidential ticket? In the White House?

There has been a lot of "Draft Condi" talk out in the blogosphere; but much as I admire Ms Rice and her many accomplishments, winning any elective office has not been one of them. Mr. Blackwell may be a leader in the movement to clean up the corruption that has bloomed in the Republican party since they came to congressional power in 1994.

I hereby declare my support for a "Draft Ken Blackwell" 2008 campaign.

Loose the pigeons!

The America I Knew

There has been a meme going around for a few years that has annoyed me more and more as time goes by. I call it: "The America I Knew."

Ed Asner is the worst offender:

I feel that George Bush's actions are desecrating the America that I grew up in and believed in. He is making us an imperialist government. He is choosing to replace heads of state and government he doesn't like.”

Anne Levinson chimed in this last holiday season:

If it is not too much to ask, this holiday season I'd like my country back. It's really what I want most. I think about it every day, without fail. I understand it would be easier to get me an iPod, but that joy would be short-lived compared with helping me be proud of my country again...

The America I grew up loving used to stand as a symbol of hope, of equality, of liberty and justice, not only for the rest of the world, but for its own citizens. I love this country, but the America I live in today makes me long for unwavering and principled leaders who will stand up for their citizens the way Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin stood up earlier this year in the House of Commons to support civil-marriage equality for his country's citizens...

What I am annoyed about is that both of these people are being intellectually and historically dishonest about where America is and where it used to be. They are attempting to appropriate a conservative, even reactionary, meme and use it to advance a point of view that is radically unconservative.

Both of these quotes speak of an America of living memory. Let's ask ourselves what was the America like these people are nostaglic for?

By a quick Google of published documents and biographies, Anne Levinson is approximately 47 years old, Mr. Asner is 76 years old. What America was like in Mr. Asner's memory?

• Between 1919 and 1922, a further 239 blacks were lynched by white mobs and many more were killed by individual acts of violence and unrecorded lynchings.
• In 1948, the Democratic party was split when the "Dixiecrats" walked out of the Democratic National Convention to protest the party's segregationist plank. None of these Representatives and Senators who bucked the Democratic party ever suffered punishment from their caucuses by expulsion or demotion of seniority or removal from prized committee chairmanships.

Is this the America that Mr. Asner longs for?

What about Ms Levinson's childhood?

• It wasn't until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 that the Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson to outlaw Jim Crow.
• In 1962, George Wallace was elected governor on a pro-segregation, pro-states' rights platform in a landslide victory. In his inaugural speech he declared "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever."

Surely this is not what Ms Levinson means by "unwavering and principled leaders."

A few years ago John Stossel ran one of his libertarian pieces on ABC about the culture of blame. In it, he played a couple of television commercials from the late 1950s and early 1960s for various products, laundry soap and canned coffee. I was aghast at their sexist bias and insensitivity. What was worse, I remember seeing the commercials when they first aired, and they were completely unremarkable in the cultural context of their day. Younger people who don't remember this time could fall into the "America I Knew" meme because they have no direct memory of those times. I do. Shame on those, conservative and liberal, who trot that old warhorse out.

America is a wonderful country. My favorite! And I have wonderful nostalgic memories of my boyhood. But I cannot generalize from the specific of my own experiences to say that America was better back then.

Look, if you are a progressive at least espouse a doctrine of progress. It is conservative to look back. It is silly, politically, for progressives to engage in nostalgia.

Poster Child for Capital Punishment

Maybe it's my advancing age, but the older I get the less I oppose capital punishment. My initial feelings on capital punishment spring from my native distrust of any government agency. I hesitate to entrust anyone to the mercies of a bureaucracy.

Right now the country is going through one of its periodic reassesments of capital punishment. Tookie Williams had thousands of supporters claiming that he was innocent. ABC has just launched a critically-panned show InJustice, in which every week a new criminal is shown to have been railroaded by corrupt and incompetent police and prosecutors.

And yet. Mostly the courts are right; and sometimes locking someone up for life isn't enough.

The case of Clarence Ray Allen provides a strong argument that the extreme sentence of justice is not just and "eye for and eye."

From Wikipedia:

In the 1970's Allen ran a security guard business in Central California. He knew both sides of the security business because he ran a burglary business at the same time. His employees both guarded and robbed businesses. In 1974, Allen burglarized a Fresno area supermarket, owned by Ray and Fran Schletewitz, who Allen had known for years.

As part of the burglary plot, he arranged for someone to steal a set of door and alarm keys from the market owner's son, Bryon Schletewitz, age 19, while Schletewitz was swimming in Allen's pool. Allen then arranged a date between Schletewitz and Mary Sue Kitts (his son Roger's girlfriend) for the evening, during which time the burglary took place. The burglary netted $500 in cash and $10,000 in money orders from the store's safe.

Following the commission of the burglary, Kitts told Schletewitz that Allen had committed the crime, which she knew as she had helped Allen cash money orders that had been stolen from the store. Bryon Schletewitz confronted Roger Allen, informing him that he had been told of the crime by Kitts, and Roger Allen admitted the crime. When Roger Allen told his father Clarence of Bryon's accusation, Clarance Allen stated that they (Schletewitz and Kitts) would have to be "dealt with." Allen then ordered the strangulation of Kitts by Charles Furrow, after an unsuccessful attempt to poison her with cyanide capsules. Furrow threw Kitts's body into the Friant-Kern Canal, and it has never been found. In 1978, Allen was tried and convicted for the burglary itself, the murder of Kitts, and the conspiracy to murder Kitts. For these crimes, Allen was sentenced to life in prison without possiblity of parole.

While in Folsom Prison, Allen conspired with fellow inmate Billy Ray Hamilton to murder witnesses who had testified against him, including Bryon Schletewitz. Allen intended to gain a new trial, where there would be no witnesses to testify to his acts. When Hamilton was paroled from Folsom Prison, he went to Fran’s Market, where Bryon Schletewitz worked. There, Hamilton murdered Schletewitz and fellow employees Josephine Rocha, 17, and Douglas White, 18, with a sawed-off shotgun and wounded two other people, Joe Rios and Jack Abbott. Hamilton shot Schletewitz at near point-blank range in the forehead and murdered Rocha and White after forcing them to lie on the ground within the store. A neighbor who heard the shotgun blasts came to investigate and was shot by Hamilton. The neighbor returned fire and wounded Hamilton, who escaped from the scene.

Five days after the events at Fran's Market, Hamilton was arrested while attempting to rob a liquor store. Hamilton carried a “hit list” with the names and addresses of the witnesses who testified against Allen at the Kitts trial, including the name of Schletewitz.

So the fact that this guy was locked up and the key was thrown away wasn't enough. He arranged for the murder of eight other people.

Sometimes even the government does the right thing.

Skinned Knees

Last Saturday I attended a suwari waza clinic. Suwari waza are techniques executed with both nage and uke in a sitting position. In this clinic the sensei included attacks from a standing position. I was glad to spend two hours in study on a technique that will play an increasing role in my future tests, but...

TWO HOURS moving and twisting on your knees! I have two knees without skin! I also discovered that seated moves, while similar to standing moves, require a new set of muscles to balance and walk. Shikko, the "samurai walk" looks much easier than it is to do. I have a brand new set of aches!

Fabulousness

Taleena, over at Sun Comprehending Glass posts her take on the News John Stewart is emcee-ing the 2006 Motion Picture Academy Awards Ceremony:

I hope Stewart revitalizes the Oscars. I hope that he is funny and takes great pot shots at such a self congradulatory industry. I will tune into his opening monologue, a good bet to be the most entertaining portion of the evening. I just will not hold my breath that it will remain funny. No reflection on Stewart, Hollywood continues to marginalize itself because it usually ignores or belittles those of us who place importance on religion and other traditional societal building blocks.

My take on it? Glad you asked.

Scott Ott has already addressed this one:

Stewart to Host Oscars, Rumsfeld to Give GOP Response

(2006-01-05) — Just hours after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named Comedy Channel news anchor Jon Stewart to host this year’s Academy Awards show, the White House announced that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been tapped to deliver the GOP response.

The Oscars Rebuttal Show, part of ABC-TV’s commitment to fairness, will attempt to refute and debunk the anti-Bush administration remarks that naturally flow from Mr. Stewart and his colleagues as they give little golden statues to people who make up stories and who pretend to be other people...

...A spokesman for the Academy, in announcing the emcee deal today, said, “Now, we know whose monkey Jon Stewart is.”

The Oscars (outside the industry) are a massively trivial event. The only reason that we pay any attention is that the participants, for the most part, either look fabulous or own or operate the cameras.

The "Major" awards have all the credibility (and authenticity) of the status battles for "coolest clique" we saw (or fought, or avoided) in high school. With the exception of "Best Editing," "Sound," "Visual Effects," the majors seem to be a popularity contest only loosely attached to any merit or achievement. Just take a jump to the official MPAA Database for "Best Picture" and review the list. Rocky beat out Network and Taxi Driver?

The "Minor" awards are the most interesting. These are awards given to people inventing technologies that make movies better, so of course they get a plaque rather than a statuette and their ceremony in unbroadcast. (It would make a great episode of Nova, though.) But really, these are the kids in A.V. Club, not the ones who get elected Homecoming King and Queen. I have no dogs in this hunt, no horse in this race, no favorite for which I am cheering.

I may have Tivo record the ceremony, but only for the opening monologue and the chance to view some fabulousness on the fly.

UPDATE: Mark Yost has a great editorial over at Opinion Journal about the campaign by stuntmen and stunt coordinators to be recognized by the Academy. Though the outlook for an Oscar for stunt work looks unlikely, there is an Emmy in that category:

Spice Williams-Crosby, a stuntwoman and actress, was successful at lobbying the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which gives out the Emmy Awards, to create a stunt category. But it wasn't easy.

Ms. Williams-Crosby was motivated after her friend, fellow stuntman Paul Dallas, was killed in August 1996 doing a high fall for the TV series "L.A. Heat."

"We were hit with more opposition than you can ever imagine," she says of her initial efforts. Worse yet, most of the actors she lobbied were ignorant of what stunt people did and didn't even know they were in the same union, the Screen Actors Guild. "We're risking our lives to make the actors look good," she told a peer group. "We protect you and you don't even have a clue as to who we are or what we do."

'Cause, you know, actors are seriously fabulous people.