Call It A Comeback
Because if you do something so incredibly brazen no one will believe it. The Democratic Party tried to present the Bush Tax plan to voters in focus groups, they refused to believe he would pass the plan–thus, Dems didn’t fight. Being brazen has the advantage of people thinking that no one will behave that badly.
Brad DeLong takes the time to further criticize Kaus’s rant on poverty and welfare reform.
Two good stories (and maybe more by the time I get done with the papers) about Birkett’s role in the Cruz Case.
Phil Kadner offers the appropriate way to handle such cases.
Rich Miller offers why, even with all of her faults, Lisa Madigan is the better choice.
Birkett claims his experience in capital cases is vital to the role. With all of the identified problems with the Illinois death penalty, how can anyone believe a man with his experience belongs anywhere near a death penalty case?
Erratic posting alert–off and on for the next week.
Steve Rhodes gives airing to Schipper some space regarding the conspiracy theories concerning Hamas, Oklahoma City, and Iraq. It is a conspiracy theory. Sometimes they turn out to be true, but mostly not. This probably falls in the not category.
Additionally, the theory seems to be that Hamas and Iraq cooperated on this. There is little evidence that Hamas operates outside of Israel and the immediate area. Fundraising yes, operations no.
This paragraph is especially problematic:
Schippers had come full circle. His theory: A Hamas front had trained Iraqis for participation in the Oklahoma City bombing. The path of Wright?s investigation had been converging with Davis?s all along. And bin Laden was behind the entire mess. Worse still, sources were saying the same conspirators were going to strike again.
This means Hamas, al Qaeda, and Iraq were cooperating to perform this function. This is hard to believe without substantial intelligence information.
Even stranger, why are they training for a job that really requires 2-4 people at most? At best, this is sloppy thinking.
What one seems left with is:
1) Hamas might be training in the US
2) There might be a third person involved in Oklahoma City
3) Apparently terrorists are now suing for libel?
Wanting something to be true, doesn’t make it so. And most of the “evidence” seems to be based on similar reasoning to those who compare coincidences between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations.
Not Chuck Conway either….
K-Mart has more problems.
Kaus offers up comments on welfare again and loses any sort of balanced approach. First, welfare caseloads are down. This may or may not be a good sign. One of the features of welfare reform is that states have every incentive to cut-off recipients and so we see an increase in administrative cut-offs. From his link, we don’t have an analysis of what kind of cut-offs are they so whether this is good or not is hard to tell.
Admin cut-offs are for violating rules. Adding to this, caseloads should be dropping since many states are hitting the 5 year time limit–though many are evading this as well.
The second piece of news is also mixed. It is great that black children are moving out of poverty, but what does that mean about other race poverty since overall child poverty is constant? Probably that rural poverty isn’t being improved and that is going to be a serious test of welfare reform. Rural poverty is much harder to target as are rural schools.
Welfare reform did some good things, some bad things (permanent residents) and some things we just don’t understand yet. Kaus seems intent on using every piece of evidence to prove his point. The problem is he is supposed to be a journalist who has some objectivity.
Dick Morris says polling is now unreliable. Actually, it is Dick Morris who is unreliable. Polling is more challenging now than in the past, but Zogby has overcome this by taking care in getting a random, but representative sample. Other pollsters still fall within the margin of error so the whining is, as usual for Morris, what is unreliable. Likely voter models have always created divergence and now we are simply adding another layer of checks to ensure validity. Other pollsters are already following Zogby’s lead.
Learning from other people’s mistakes usually means one looks at the mistake, analyze what went wrong and then adjust behavior accordingly. Instead of doing this as a deliberate process, one could also choose to do the oppositve of the previous action and hope. It seems to me that this is what David Broder is describing. He discusses it as a radical departure from the recent past for Republicans. I see it as avenging Daddy without much thought as to the consequences.
Barney Frank just really bugs Dick Armey so he makes really stupid comments about any group Barney Franks is a member? Or maybe he is just a moron.
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