Month: October 2004

During the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night, Dick Cheney referred viewers to FactCheck.com for information about Halliburton’s record. When the curious attempted to visit FactCheck.com, though, they were redirected to George Soros’s blog — and Soros had no idea why. His website says he still doesn’t know what’s going on, but CNN does. Here’s the article:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/06/debate.website.ap/index.html

I tried to watch the debate last night but had to turn it off somewhere in the middle of the discussion of domestic policy. Both men seemed petty and somewhat unfocused and, at least during the part I watched, more interested in arguing over what was or was not true than they were about discussing anything. I’ve got an image (admittedly uninformed) of Cheney as a fairly evil man, but last night he did seem far less sinister than I’ve thought of him previously. He also seemed like an argumentative liar, but so did Edwards, and I began the evening expecting at least good things from *him*. I guess that’s par for the course — while the presidential candidates have to keep it at least relatively clean, the veeps can come out swinging.

I missed this when it happened, but in case you did, too, the proposed Marriage Protection Amendment failed in the House.

On a peripherally related note, Justice Scalia raised a stir last week when he said that, for the sake of argument, he would accept that “sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.” What he meant was that even if that were true, he doesn’t think it’s the right of the court to overturn laws prohibiting it. “It is blindingly clear that judges have no greater capacity than the rest of us to decide what is moral,” he said. To him, this was an argument for not overturning legislation regulating morality; to me, this is an argument for not passing legislation regulating morality. If no one possesses the capacity to decide what is moral, perhaps no one should be trying to impose their arbitrary decisions on the rest of the population.

Here’s a moderately interesting article about the cases on the Supreme Court’s agenda for this year. This article takes the view that nothing exciting will be considered, but I think a few of these mundane issues are very interesting — particularly those about medical marijuana and wine shipments. I read a different article a few months ago that claimed that if the Supreme Court overturns the state laws preventing shipment into the state, it will crumble the PA state liquor store thing and allow anyone to sell booze. Bring it on.

The second court thing is this, which actually happened a few days ago, but is an article about the overturning of a section of the Patriot Act. The piece overturned deals with whether or not the FBI can demand information from companies, like ISPs, without a court order, and then prohibit those companies from ever disclosing that they received such a demand — apparently even to a lawyer. Chiseling away; I like that.

And, finally, in case anyone out there is living completely in a hole and didn’t see the debates or hear any of the aftermath, I would just like to say that I was very impressed with Kerry’s performance. He was clear, straightforward, and made Bush look like a petulant little man. Although one could (and I’m sure Bush’s people will) take snippets of things that Kerry said during the evening and splice them together in such a way as to make him sound like a flip-flopper (Can we say ‘thong’ instead?), I was suprised at the coherence and reasonableness of Kerry’s position on the war in Iraq. I do hate it when he says things like, “I have a plan,” because a) I know he’s just saying that because he has to but, of course, he has planned nowhere the level of detail necessary to really call it “a plan”, and b) it sounds like Nixon. On the other hand, Bush’s “stay the course” and “how can you lead the troops if you don’t think they should be there” rhetoric sounds more like Nixon. But anyway, I hear being like Nixon is cool these days anyway, thanks to Ahhnold, so maybe both candidates are doing that deliberately.

My main point here — Kerry done good. If this continues through the next two debates, I think the Dems have a damn good chance.