Welcome! You are reading the archives. Click here to visit the Home page and see the latest articles.

August 07, 2003

ARNOLD ON LENO

showed a lot of political chops. He’s going to be an uplifting politician—something this country has needed for many years. He said the people are doing their jobs—and it’s up to the politicians to start doing theirs. What an uplifting thing to say. It makes you feel good just to hear it. We need a lot more of that.

He came up with exactly the right line about his wealth: ‘Believe me—there’s nobody that can pay me off.’ (These quotes are from memory, but I believe it’s close to what Arnold said.)

‘That’s what Gray Davis does—he sells off this state piece by piece to special interests.’ Everybody already agrees with Arnold on this, and he stated it succinctly and at exactly the right moment.

‘We already know Gray Davis can run a dirty campaign better than anybody. We also know he can’t run a state.’ That’s surely a preview of how Arnold will handle the rigors of the campaign. It’ll be hard for Davis to overcome that when he starts slinging mud at Arnold. That line will apply Ju-Jitsu to anything Davis throws at Arnold, and make it boomerang back at Davis.

I’ll see what all the candidates have to say—but at this point Arnold’s a strong contender for my vote.

August 06, 2003

What’s the point of doing helpful things for the Palestinians when they react like this?

Israel released over 300 Palestinian prisoners today, sheerly as a goodwill gesture. It isn’t required by the roadmap whatsoever. And what was the reaction of the Palestinians?

Palestinian officials, who boycotted tearful checkpoint reunions, dismissed the festivities as a mockery of Palestinian demands to free thousands more men, women and juveniles locked in Israeli jails and detention camps.

A Major Reason for the California Recall

is that Gray Davis ran the state into the ground to the point that:

For the first time, the Census Bureau finds that more people have moved to other states from here than the other way around

That’s for the first time in history.

Amazing - Arnold’s Actually Running

Schwarzenegger Will Run in Recall Election

Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced today that he will run for governor, after weeks of speculation that he would not enter the gubernatorial race.

He had everybody faked out. What a showman. Hey, capturing the public’s attention is a key leadership skill.

August 05, 2003

On the California Recall

I understand the movement to do a recall. But the method of choosing a new Governor is unusual. Evidently anybody willing to put up a few thousand dollars can run. The voters will be presented with a long list of candidates, and the candidate with the most votes—which may not be anything approaching a majority—will win. And the whole thing comes together in a matter of a few months. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd?

In today’s LA TIMES, U.C. Law Professor Joseph R. Grodin argues that the Calfornia Constitution didn’t intend it to be done in this manner.

Article II, Section 15 of the California Constitution provides that upon the filing of a petition containing the requisite number of signatures, an election will be held “to determine whether to recall an officer and, if appropriate, to elect a successor.”

When is it “appropriate” to do that? The Constitution does not say, or at least not directly.

....In any case, the Constitution does tell us, by implication, that in the case of a gubernatorial recall it would not be appropriate to elect a successor, because we already have one.

Article X, Section 9 of the state Constitution tells us that the lieutenant governor “shall become Governor when a vacancy occurs in the office of Governor.” That is what the lieutenant governor is elected to do. To say that the lieutenant governor steps into the governor’s seat if the governor dies, or resigns, or becomes disabled, or is impeached, but not when he is otherwise removed from office, would be anomalous.

Grodin states that the Calfornia Supreme Court is soon to examine the issue.

It seems to me that making the lieutenant governor the new governor in the event of a recall makes a lot of sense. The current way of doing it is a bit of a circus.

August 04, 2003

Ann Coulter’s Views are Getting Traction

When I first heard, months before it was published, the thesis of Ann Coulter’s book TREASON, I was taken aback. It was so far out there that I wondered how it would go over.

However, her views are gaining a lot of acceptance. Here are two current examples.

From Norman Geras, in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

On Sept. 11, 2001, there was, in the U.S., a massacre of innocents. There’s no other acceptable way of putting this: some 3,000 people (and, as anyone can figure, it could have been many more) struck down by an act of mass murder without any possible justification, an act of gross moral criminality. What was the left’s response? In fact, this goes well beyond the left if what is meant by that is people and organizations of socialist persuasion. It included a wide sector of liberal opinion as well. Still, I shall just speak here, for short, of the left. The response on the part of much of it was excuse and apologia.

At best you might get some lip service paid to the events of September 11 having been, well, you know, unfortunate—the preliminary “yes” before the soon-to-follow “but” (or, as Christopher Hitchens has called it, “throat clearing”). And then you’d get all the stuff about root causes, deep grievances, the role of U.S. foreign policy in creating these; and a subtext, or indeed text, whose meaning was America’s comeuppance. This was not a discourse worthy of a democratically committed or principled left, and the would-be defense of it by its proponents, that they were merely trying to explain and not to excuse what happened, was itself a pathetic excuse. If any of the root-cause and grievance themes truly had been able to account for what happened on September 11, you’d have a hard time understanding why, say, the Chileans after that earlier September 11 (I mean of 1973), or other movements fighting against oppression and injustice, have not resorted to the random mass murder of civilians.

Why this miserable response? In a nutshell, it was a displacement of the left’s most fundamental values by a misguided strategic choice, namely, opposition to the U.S., come what may. This dictated the apologetic mumbling about the mass murder of U.S. citizens, and it dictated that the U.S. must be opposed in what it was about to do in hitting back at al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

Geras describes the Left as being opposed to the United States. Before Coulter’s book, this was unheard-of.

And from Neo-Liberal Norah Vincent, in an article strongly critical of Coulter’s book:

So, for the record, let it be said that, as Coulter asserts, there are indeed some on the American far left who despise this country, hope to see it fail and have said as much in public. Remember the infamous University of New Mexico professor, Richard Berthold, who said on 9/11: “Anyone who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote”?

Coulter’s point is being heard.

Page 2 of 2 pages  <  1 2