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And, how did they coordinate to do it all at the same time?
Well, about a week ago, Matt Welch posted an article titled “Hey Bloggers—Especially You Popular Political Types—Why the Hell Don’t You Accept BlogAds?”. Many bloggers responded via the comments section on Matt’s site, and Instapundit also noted it.
If you were one of the first people trying out the Net in 1993, this is what you were looking at. Click here for an amazing 1993 TV news report about the Net. (via GeekPress).
Larry Elder shows many quotes from Dean, Clark, Bill Clinton, and more, saying that Hussein has WMD and must be stopped.
The good thing about this is that the leadership on the left isn’t as crazy as they seem. When it’s not an election year… they “know a hawk from a handsaw”. It’s shocking that they feel they have to take such unreasonable, extreme positions in order to win their party’s nomination. See yesterday’s article on redistricting for more on this.
There is a situation that is not yet widely discussed, in which redistricting groups together localities that traditionally vote for one political party or the other, such that the outcome of most votes in those districts is often predictable.
This is a major force in American politics today. It gives control to fringe elements in both parties. It accentuates conflict and reduces cooperation in government. It’s a factor in why the state of California (redistricted so as to favor Democrats) got so wildly into debt: whoever won a Democratic primary was sure of being elected to the state legislature. Candidates in most primaries moved to outflank each other on the left in order to win the nomination. The resulting state officials were extremists who felt sure of re-election.
From Frank del Olmo in the LA Times:
...reapportionment is arguably the most important thing the nation’s 50 state legislatures do. The lines they draw can affect every political decision those bodies make for the rest of the decade. They also affect the makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives because state legislatures draw the House’s district lines as well.Nowadays, using computers and detailed demographic data, political operatives can design districts that are virtually guaranteed to elect either a Democrat or a Republican, depending on how the lines are drawn. But most often incumbent politicians of both parties draw the new lines to protect themselves.
...However, those ultrasafe seats also helped create the political gridlock and nasty partisanship that now exist in Sacramento and that Schwarzenegger has repeatedly said he wants to change.
That’s because incumbents with safe districts face little pressure to compromise with members of the other party and may even feel the need to stick to their ideological guns lest they anger the extreme conservatives or liberals who elected them. Which means that the moderate middle, where most American voters come down on most issues, gets the least representation.
The governor would go a long way toward changing the current culture in Sacramento, and to some extent even in Washington, by following up on a statement he made often during his campaign: to take a fresh look at how the Legislature reapportions itself and perhaps give the job to an independent citizens commission.
Via a December 12, 2003 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin (no link):
In Texas and elsewhere, redistricting has transformed American politics. The framers of the Constitution created the House of Representatives to be the branch of government most responsive to changes in the public mood, but gerrymandered districts mean that most of the four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress never face seriously contested general elections. In 2002, eighty-one incumbents ran unopposed by a major party candidate. There are now about four hundred safe seats in Congress, Richard Pildes, a professor of law at New York University, said. The level of competitiveness has plummeted to the point where it is hard to describe the House as involving competitive elections at all these days. The House isn’t just ossified; it’s polarized, too. Members of the House now effectively answer only to primary voters, who represent the extreme partisan edge of both parties. As a result, collaboration and compromise between the parties have almost disappeared. The Republican advantage in the House is modestjust two hundred and twenty-nine seats to two hundred and sixbut gerrymandering has made the lead close to insurmountable for the foreseeable future.
And from Tony Quinn in the LA Times:
A GOP gerrymander of Democratic districts in Texas will probably add six to eight Republicans to the House. Every other big state is so heavily gerrymandered that no other major changes are likely. This means the GOP majority in the House is expected to grow by at least half a dozen seats.
It’s easy to blame the party in power (Democrats in California, Republicans in Texas, etc.), but there’s a school of thought that those out of power have often agreed to this redistricting so as to make their own seats assured, abandoning the future of their party.
...most often incumbent politicians of both parties draw the new lines to protect themselves.
We certainly haven’t heard much beefing about redistricting coming from either party.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
An insightful analysis by David Frum and Richard Perle shows how and why the U.N. is outmoded:
U.N. Should Change—or U.S. Should Quit
The world body’s rules prevent America from answering threats.
...the United Nations has emerged at best as irrelevant to the terrorist threat that most concerns us, and at worst as an obstacle to our winning the war on terrorism. It must be reformed. And if it cannot be reformed, the United States should give serious consideration to withdrawal.
The U.N. has become an obstacle to our national security because it purports to set legal limits on the United States’ ability to defend itself. If these limits ever made sense at all, they do not make sense now.
Yet the U.N.’s assertion of them forces presidents and policymakers into a horrible dilemma. If we obey the U.N.’s rules, we compromise our national security. If we defy them, we expose ourselves to accusations of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
According to the U.N. Charter, nations are permitted to use military force only in two situations. Article 51 of the charter recognizes an “inherent” right to self-defense against attack. In all other cases where a nation feels threatened, it is supposed to go to the U.N. Security Council to seek authorization before it takes military action even action that might forestall an attack.
The trouble is that the U.N. defines aggression in outdated ways. For the U.N., “aggression” means invasion across national borders. Send Nazi shock troops into Poland that’s aggression. Give sanctuary to thousands of anti-American murderers, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, that’s not aggression.
...In other words, under U.N. rules, the U.S. is obliged to let terrorists strike first before retaliating and might even be prohibited from striking second. In an age when shadowy radical movements around the globe are seeking weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, these rules are clearly out of date. We need new rules recognizing that harboring terrorists is just as much an act of aggression as an invasion and that those who are targeted by terrorists have an inherent right to defend themselves, preemptively if necessary.
Very good points. Until the advent of terrorism, war between two nations involved armies of one nation moving against the interests of another. Such armies wore uniforms marking them as agents of their state government. Such war is the only kind of aggression the U.N. charter recognizes because that’s all there was at the time it was written. The charter needs to be updated if the U.N. wishes to avoid becoming a tool of the terrorists.
The point I’d like to make is that terrorism evolved in part in response to the U.N. charter. The terrorists depend on that charter to prevent nations that support them from being attacked by the nations the terrorists target.
The Bush doctrine short-circuits this plan. It is the only possible response. And it’s working, to use an apt expression, like gangbusters. Per Victor Davis Hanson:
We were warned that “preemption” in Iraq would give the green light to Pakistan and India to go to war. In fact, India’s economy and culture are more America-oriented than ever before, and Pakistan seems more afraid that such new ties with the United States will leave it odd man out.
...Iran is once more witnessing democratic demonstrations and calls for radical reform. Its spooky theocracy is no longer talking of the joys of an Islamic bomb that might take out Israel at the economical price of a few million fried Muslims.
...Syria suddenly claims that it wants to discuss peace with Israel.
...And what about the locus of our purported catastrophe in Iraq? We cannot even compare the sniping, however wretched, to missiles raining across borders, no-fly zones, broken armistices, ignored U.N. mandates, U.N.-introduced food embargoes, massive foreign invasions, bounties awarded for suicide killings, genocide, destruction of the environment, and looting of oil revenues to buy imported weaponry. For all the chaos we supposedly created, we no longer have mass graves, but instead Shiites demonstrating for democratic elections and Kurds hammering out plans for a federal state. Instead of Baathists slaughtering students, the current controversy is whether to depose Saddamites from university faculties. And the full effect of the war remains to be seen, when the neighbors of Iraq will watch in horror at free elections and debates. It isn’t easy there, but when or where has the creation of civilization in place of barbarism ever been effortless?
Baldilocks has an excellent rebuttal of the “Bush lied” argument. (via Patterico)
I’d add that the left uses this argument to duck the real issue, which of course is, did we do a good thing for ourselves and for the world by invading Iraq? Darn right we did. Victor Davis Hanson knocks that one out of the park here.
More on this tomorrow.
Born to be blogged: a flash presentation, showing the top entries, with an audio commentary on what makes cartoons funny from Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor for The New Yorker.
John Kerry, winner of the Iowa caucus, takes this position:
The war on terror is less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation. And we deserve presidential leadership that knows that and knows how to make America safer, and I will do that.
He pre-emptively removes the military from protecting the United States against terrorism. Can anyone think that the 70% reduction in Al Qaida could have been achieved if it were pursued with our military taken out of the picture?
Thank the left for this policy: pre-emptive surrender.
“The Al Qaida of the 9/11 period is under catastrophic stress,” State Department counter-terrorism coordinator Cofer Black said. “They are being hunted down, their days are numbered.”Black’s assertion, made in an interview with the London-based British Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday, is based on U.S. intelligence community estimates that about 70 percent of Al Qaida has been neutralized, officials said.
Let’s hear the left tell us about how this doesn’t make the U.S. any safer.
When the left claims that achievements like this don’t help us… aren’t they admitting that if they were in power, these achievements wouldn’t have happened?
Nixon once famously told the press “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” David Greenberg compare’s Dean’s primary-night speech to that debacle.
We May Have Dean to Kick Around
Nixon showed how to successfully rebound from a disastrous speech.Early in Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 campaign for president, his speechwriter, Raymond K. Price, was among those charged with a delicate task: Review Nixon’s disastrous “last press conference” speech of Nov. 7, 1962, and figure out how to handle it in the upcoming race.
Nixon had delivered that rambling address after losing his bid to unseat Pat Brown as governor of California. Surprising reporters by venturing down from his hotel room the morning after his defeat, Nixon sneered at “all the members of the press [who] are so delighted that I have lost” and chided them for biased coverage. He concluded, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.”
...In the end, Dean’s resilience, or lack of it, will probably determine his fate.
How desperate do you have to be to compare your candidate to Nixon in an effort to restore your candidate’s reputation? It doesn’t seem like much of a plan in any case.
Added bonus: if you haven’t already heard it, here’s James Lileks’ brilliant remix of Dean’s “Yeaggh!” speech (via JackalopePursuivant):
(humor from the Onion).
NEW YORKViacom, the global media conglomerate that includes such properties as CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, UPN, Showtime, Blockbuster Video, and Simon and Schuster, began airing a TV ad Monday that orders its employees to get back to work. “Worker efficiency needed a little boost,” said Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone. “But instead of sending an e-mail to everyone at all of our subsidiaries, we just televised a ‘Look alive, people’ warning during Ricki Lake.” The 30-second spot also included a reminder that discussion of Super Bowl pools should occur at breaks only.
Here’s a report on current developments:
Scientists are at work developing silkworms that produce pharmaceuticals instead of silk, honeybees resilient enough to resist pesticides and even mosquitoes capable of delivering vaccines, instead of disease, with every bite….
For instance, silkworms are being engineered to produce not silk, but pharmaceutical or industrial proteins of various kinds. And researchers are trying to design honeybees resistant to pesticides, diseases and parasites, which have severely cut down the population of beneficial bees in the United States….
Some bugs on the drawing board would be designed to control other human diseases such as dengue fever, Chagas’ disease and sleeping sickness. There’s even a research program that would use mosquito bites to deliver vaccines to entire human populations, eliminating the need for doctors and nurses to round up patients and use needles.
The thing is, insects, like all other living creatures, evolve over time. Not only that, insects appear to evolve quite quickly. It’s well-known, for example, that insects have rapidly evolved resistance to many insecticides:
FORT COLLINS—Insecticide resistance is one of the most widespread genetic changes caused by human activity, and scientists are only now beginning to understand these changes that allow global populations of insects to evolve resistance and become unaffected by pesticides. A new study by a team of worldwide researchers, including Colorado State University biology professor Tom Wilson, has made a major scientific breakthrough in understanding the genetics of insecticide resistance.
In a paper to be published in the Sept. 27 edition of the journal Science, Wilson and his colleagues identify the gene responsible for resistance in Drosophila, the common fruit fly. The ability of this fly to develop pesticide resistance is due to a mutation in a single gene known as DDT-R. The team’s new research results show that the overactivity of this gene alone is both necessary and sufficient for insecticide resistance.
“It is common for insecticides to work well for several years but then loose their effectiveness, because insects evolve resistance to these poisons,” said Wilson. “Because it is difficult to conduct genetic research on most pest insects, the genetics of this evolution has long remained a mystery. However, our current research has identified, for the first time, a gene responsible for insecticide resistance and how it became mutated in a model insect.”
Whatever these things are when you release them into the environment, they’re not going to stay that way. I’m not a biologist, but it appears to me that it’s completely unpredictable in what way they may evolve. The possibility of releasing genetically modified insects into the environment make me very uncomfortable.
LOGO CONTEST at Forum4Bloggers.
After just one week, the forum (F4B as it has been christened by its members) is off to a great start. We already have over 160 posts on all sorts of interesting things. I’ve learned a lot about blogging I didn’t know before.
It’s been fun starting this. Cool people from 5 different countries, including Americans from California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Tennesee, and more, are getting together to have conversations about interesting things. The members have had much input on the layout of the different sections, the name of the board, etc. Stop by and have a look.
One of our members, bigbaldhead from Chicago Illinois, proposed and is organizing a Logo Contest for the site. So if you or someone you know might be interested, check out the Contest Rules, in the Forum Announcments section.
George Kerry argues that when this country was founded, each member of the House represented about 60,000 citizens, whereas now, the number is at 670,000 citizens. He finds that this is the root cause for the undue influence of special interests in our politics.
How to Fix Politics? Believe It or Not, More Politicians...There is no constitutional rule that says the House has to remain at 435 members. On the contrary, the framers assumed that the House would keep up with population growth. Thus the Constitution requires a census for allocating seats and gives the House authority to adjust them by majority vote.
In the 1st Congress, the 65 House members each represented about 60,000 people. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as states were added and subtracted, and the population grew, the House frequently resized itself. In 1913, the 63rd Congress jumped from 391 to 435 seats and a district still only included about 200,000 people.
But that’s when it stopped. The general confusion and displacements during World War I, the Depression and World War II made the censuses of 1920, 1930 and 1940 seem provisional, and there were no increases. The calmer 1950s would have been the time to resume regular increases, but the House opted to go on doing nothing. Meanwhile, the population kept growing.
The problem is this: In districts of 670,000 people, legislators tend to lose touch with voters. Campaigns become more expensive. Dollars come first, constituents second. Ordinary people can’t afford to run for office. Democratic representation, at least as the framers understood it, doesn’t happen except by accident.
Special interests, for the most part, become disproportionately important under this system. They write the major pieces of legislation. In the key area of defense spending, patronage to sprawling districts ensures audit-free procurement, more often than not unrelated to real national security needs.
The House routinely fails, furthermore, to demonstrate serious interest in policy outside of its cash register.
In short, members in enormous, impersonal districts develop priorities that serve neither constituents nor country. We have traded a reasonably fair social covenant for unchecked depredations by the well connected against everybody else, along with a loss of balance-of-powers protections against presidential aggrandizement.
It’s a disaster. And it’s anti-democratic. Americans face a crisis: Will the institution most charged with democracy represent people or lucre?
The only way to restore genuine democratic representation is a substantial, long-overdue increase in the size of the House. We need a fivefold increase now, and a longer-term goal of maintaining districts of about 100,000 people.
It’s mind-boggling, to be sure, to contemplate a House of 2,000 or 3,000 seats, or more. Such a change would cause huge disruptions. But reluctant as we may be to do it, the alternatives are far worse. Let’s not quibble over practicalities.
He makes some very good points.
Scooby-Doo would be embarassed to be recorded yelling like this. Just listen to this goofiness.
There’s no way this guy is suitable to be President.
