January 2003

Steve Neal Twice!

ArchPundit January 6, 2003 No Comments

Steve Neal breaks down the suburban Cook vote and it is pretty interesting. G-Rod and Madigan both won the suburbs, but lost a majority of townships. By winning the southwestern ones big, they took the County by decent margins. The northwestern areas such as Palatine went Republican, but by relatively small margins. Frankly, the Republicans can have Palatine as long as I never have to return there.

In context of the Emerging Democratic Majority, these results fit pretty well. Evanston-an ideopolis if ever there was one went heavily Democratic and the southwestern Cook areas did as well. Those southwestern are less white than the rest of the burbs. Most interesting is that the northwestern county is damn near competitive-something new.The city was solid except for 41. Madigan faced a bit less support on the Gold Coast and in the other northwestern wards, but still had a commanding win in the city.

In DuPage, J-Ry and Birkett took 2/3 of the vote, but didn’t rack up huge margins in the other collar counties as they should have been able to do. Even worse, it is unlikely for the Republicans to have two DuPage countians on the ticket from here on out, making the future races even more difficult. While DuPage isn’t going to be voting Democratic anytime soon, the trend there is towards competitiveness.

Finally, in the "he is a smarter pundit than I am" category, Neal addressed Maria Pappas’ run for Senate and is far more positive than I was. Read it and then ignore everything I said.

I’m still not sure how well she can do against Moseley-Braun unless Daley, Madigan, Hynes (the elder), or G-Rod/Mell get behind her. Only Daley is firmly committed from what we hear so she still has a shot at two of them with Hynes obviously pulling for his son if he gets in to the race. My sense is Hynes will pull Madigan with him and G-Rod/Mell will choose between Daley’s choice-Blair, or Hynes.

Even despite that, Pappas isn’t as weak as I quickly dismissed her the other day. With Moseley-Braun’s record of sleaziness, female voters will be looking for someone to support. If she can attract some union support (more independent on endorsements in the primary than you would guess) she’d be in a position to do okay. However, with the match-ups coming she is going to have a hard time to get a plurality. 25% of the vote is locked up by Moseley-Braun with African-Americans. Obama might pull up to a 1/5 of that, but then Moseley-Braun starts out at 20%. Hynes has 20% locked up simply by connections and Blair probably 20% assuming no major blunders. Chico gets a baseline of 15-20% with Latino voters. That doesn’t leave a lot unless she can cut a deal, or break into someone’s votes. She may be able to pull votes from Chico and Hull the easiest.

Given the cluttered field it is hard to say what will occur. However, for Moseley-Braun not to be the frontrunner, Obama has to stay in. If he doesn’t the race becomes much harder for everyone else.

Then again, Moseley-Braun will probably have a campaign finance scandal that might tank her support.

CofCC hijinks

ArchPundit January 6, 2003 No Comments

Joe Conason points to the nefarious past of one William Lind . Apparently, Lind has a videotape concerning a conspiracy of something or another a marxist plot to invent political correctness. I’d follow the logic, but, well, there isn’t any. Guess who is selling it? The Conservative Citizen’s Foundation AKA the 501(c)3 foundation of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The Southern Poverty Law Center might note that the CofCC is still selling the bootlegged videotape and even have it on their front page.

Strangely enough, I had read some of Lind’s work before because he and Weyrich are big fans of mass transporation. We’ll have to assume they want segregated street cars.

Now does Weyrich know about this clown’s full range of ideas?

It would be hard for Weyrich to not know given he has written about it himself.

Of course there is this Barnes Review piece about it as well. Or listen in here.

For your Reading pleasure while I’m inconsistently posting

ArchPundit January 6, 2003 No Comments

Busy week, so the site will be updated somewhat inconsistently. For a couple good articles Talk Left hits a couple Illinois issues well. First, she reports the story that G-Ry was secretly recorded by the Feds. This isn’t so much a surprise as much as an indication to how close they are to him now.

Second, my New Yorker is sitting unread, but Scott Turow has a significant piece on death penalty reform. As a member of the reform commission his insights should be interesting.

A tribute to Paul Wellstone

ArchPundit January 5, 2003 No Comments

When Paul Wellstone died, one of his causes has been put by the wayside. This cause wasn’t one of his greatest causes by any means, but it was a very practical issue for college athletics.

As Title IX has been enforced, many schools have dropped sports to keep the opportunities for men and women roughly equal. In theory, keeping equal numbers shouldn’t be hard, except if one sport is only played by one gender and utilizes a large number of athletes compared to others. Of course, football fits both of those categories. Quite often, the less well informed whiners complain that men are losing out because of women’s more equal participation in sports. This is not really true though, since football is the primary problem. Football eats up scholarships and resources at amazing rates and except with a few exceptions from the very best programs, doesn’t make money.

It creates problems under Title IX because it is overwhelmingly male and thus with it in the mix, to make women’s opportunities equal, one must cut a bunch of ‘secondary’ sports. Most often hit are sports like wrestling that have few fans (at least outside of Oklahoma and Iowa) and are male only. Sometimes women sports are hit as well, but I assume this is a budgetary issue.

Wellstone was a college wrestler as was Jim Leach. As a piss poor high school wrestler I found this issue fascinating. Leach and Wellstone put a package together to help support specific sports that were facing the most pressure including wrestling and gymnastics. Here is a press realease about the initiatives.

Why now? Today the P-D reports on some of the movement to weaken Title IX. The strange thing is that none of the reforms work to provide more athletic opportunities for college students as any reform should. Wellstone-Leach would.

College athletics should be about providing for athletic opportunities for the most students, not for the most fans.

New Chick Track

ArchPundit January 3, 2003 No Comments

Before Scoobie gets to it, I thought I’d point out the new Chick Tract.

And don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with Chick, he hates pretty much everyone who isn’t his particular version of fundie madness. He claims the opposite.

The Political State Report

ArchPundit January 3, 2003 No Comments

Unveiling the Political State Report. Kos from The Daily Kos has the project up and running pretty damn amazingly. Yours truly is so far the only correspondent covering Illinois so if there are any Republicans or independents or just others out there (besides those stalking horses in the Harold Washington Party), drop a note to Kos and start contributing. I’m working on my first entry which will probably get posted over the weekend. Subject: Indictment Season in Illinois.

The site is quite ambitious. Kos is trying to gather bloggers on state politics from every state in the union. From those correspondents, articles on the political machinations of the state will be written hopefully with more context than typical national reporters are capable of delivering.

For my other beloved states, the ever capableThomas Spencer will be covering Missouri as will newcomers to me, David Barnes and Adam Case. Adam already has a good article up on the shift to a Republican Legislature and potential candidates for Governor. Tom discusses five counties suing the state for revenue decreases.

Iowa is uncovered–come on someone out there has to be able to talk about Iowa politics. I’m sure David Hogberg can be drafted upon his return, but what about the rest of you out there. With the caucus season starting this should be essential material.

For a fuller description, MyDD posted this:

Political State Report

Daily Kos has created a website, Political State Report, which has the bodacious potential to become not only a top-tier political website, but one that surpasses anything yet done on the web that deals with political campaigns and elections.

I wish to encourage many of the long-term posters here to e-mail Kos and join up to submit entries on the blog. Kos explains the conception, with which I concur:

Over at my weblog, I quickly found that the best insight this past election cycle came from locals sharing first-hand information on developments in their backyards. Sure, the information was often colored by partisan biases, but even that was better than the "unbiased" tripe spewed by the national media. So, the Political State Report was conceptually born.

When Kos first mentioned this a couple of months ago, I urged him on. The only caveat was that it would be one heck of a load of work. He’s up for it though, and the end product is stellar. It’s like stateline.org, but with a more ground-based viewpoint, and even further niched. Those Outflanked Democrats Wondering How to Catch Up in Media Wars could catch a serious clue from what Kos has developed.

What Kos has done is to extend the most valuable part of what went on here during the 2002 cycle; which is just fantastic, especially considering how the terrain is currently shifting.

The only serious impact that CFR seems to have, is shift the monetary funding epicenter from DC to the state political machines. This will have many repercussions, and it’s tough to tell what the end result will be– it probably differs from state to state. But as far as campaigns and elections go, one result will be that the DC-based pundits whom rely on the DC-based party structures for information, will become further removed from the action. This will be in tandem with the state party infrastructures gaining a much stronger presence in federal elections.

If Kos can manage the spectrum of contributors with an steady keel, while upping the quality of informed contributors, PSR ought to be able and ride the crest of this shift in power, empowering grassroots political reporting in a way it’s never been broadcast before– this is the kind of stuff that the internet was born for accomplishing.

King Kaufman will be moving back to San Francisco…

ArchPundit January 3, 2003 No Comments

once the St. Louis Bikefed tracks his St. Louis resident ass down for trashing cycling and Lance.

Before a sportswriter dismisses Armstrong, I suggest they should first have to try cycling up L’Alpe d’Huez, and then tell us how cyclists aren’t amazing athletes. Sportswriters obviously can’t do many of the things that the world’s best athletes can do while competing, but whining that something isn’t a sport because one is ignorant of the sport isn’t much of an argument.

Despair in the Corner

ArchPundit January 3, 2003 No Comments

Via John Cole

At the Corner:

RE: WELCOME TO 2003 [John Derbyshire]
K-Lo: So DC’s first baby of the year was born to a lesbian couple. New York’s seems to have been to a black single mother. Don’t you sometimes feel like giving in to despair?

Now, one can make an argument about the dissolution of the African-American family and how it has hurt poor African-American children especially. In fact, Daniel Moynihan said just such a thing. One can certainly say that raising a child is a difficult process and two parents are better than one. Having been raised in a single family home, I can attest my mother’s life would have been much easier with a partner. The problem is Derbyshire doesn’t make such an argument, he plays off a stereotype and dehumanizes the wonderous event of the birth of a child.

Worse, he seems to think the race of the mother was important without any context to his language. If one is making a Moynihan type argument race becomes a factor. In the way Derbyshire introduces it, well, it isn’t an argument, it is a stereotype. That child deserves the love and hope for the future, not the notion that she is already a burden on the great mind of John Derbyshire.

His comments about the lesbian couple are handled well by John Cole.

If the state is going to kill, why shouldn’t the public know how

ArchPundit January 2, 2003 No Comments

The RiverFront Times covers the secrecy surrounding executions in Missouri. I find such secrecy disturbing because if we are going to kill in the name of the state, shouldn’t the citizens understand exactly what they are doing?

(posted on Blog Saint Louis too).

Take it away Wyoming…

ArchPundit January 2, 2003 No Comments

Matt Hale has moved there and left the State of Illinois a better place leaving.

I wonder if he has some extra space for Gordon Baum and Earl Holt.

Up DATE: Upon further reading, only the, ahem, ‘church’ is going to Wyoming. Hale is staying put.

What I want to know is why in all the biographical information don’t they mention how often Matt got beaten up?