Politics

Finnish police give record speeding fine

HELSINKI, Finland – Police gave a record $216,900 speeding ticket to a millionaire under a system in which traffic fines are linked to an offender’s income.

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… better get these in before the polls close, eh?

Michigan: this seems to be the one everybody’s paying attention to: I’m going to agree with Zogby that Kerry’s probably going to win this one… but that 23% Undecided is sending off warning bells in my head. If those votes go either to Dean or Edwards, watch for stories about Kerry’s stumbling; if they divide, then Kerry’s win in MI will be like most of his wins so far: a true win, but not enough of one to increase his lead.

Washington: Kerry, again – but I suspect that Dean is going to do easily well enough in the caucus to pick up delegates. No three way split.

Maine: Kerry. Dean will probably scrounge a delegate or two. No three way split. This is all purely a guess.

Overall: Kerry should do well for himself, objectively speaking – but if it isn’t enough of a blowout for the media it’ll be reported as a stumble. Dean is going to be the designated conversation piece. Edwards and Clark might as well gear up for TN and VA, because they’re not particularly relevant in these three primaries*.

Moe

*And that’s my really go-out-on-a-limb prediction for today.

UPDATE: Below.

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…about a hypothetical Kerry administration, as part of a generally good, if screedy, Bleat:

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Andrew Sullivan employs some sloppy reasoning in his latest defense of gay marriage. Understand, please, that I believe that gay marriage is the right thing to do. (And keep movin’ on down the street with your limp-wristed “civil union” compromise — half way is half right, and why stop at half right?) Here’s Andrew’s basic argument:

If the Constitution guarantees equal rights for all, and marriage is one of the most basic civil rights there is, and gay couples can and do fulfill every requirement that straight couples can, what leeway does any Court have? I’m constantly amazed by these claims of judicial “tyranny.” Was Brown v Board of Education tyranny? It’s exactly the same principle as operates here: separate but equal won’t do.

Here’s the problem with Andrew’s argument: Unless you believe the Constitution to be a “living document” (and Andrew, it appears, does not), the Constitution does not guarantee “equal civil rights for all.” Rather, the Constitution only guarantees certain civil rights. These are the civil rights that are specifically ennumerated in the Constitution. “Gay marriage” was not among them. (Racial equality was among them, however — in the 13-15th Amendments — which is why Andrew’s reference to Brown v. The Board of Education is a red herring.)

Even if you believe that the Constitution’s meaning was not fixed at the time of its drafting, however, Andrew’s argument still isn’t as self evident as he tires to portrary it. There are dozens of “basic civil rights” that even proponents of a living Constitution do not endorse.* Some are arguably more basic than the right of gays or straights to marry. Such as: The right to a job. The right to have adequate shelter. The right to an education. The right not to be discriminated against — in the workplace, in your personal life, in government, etc. — based on your looks, or your intelligence, or your athletic prowess, or the color of your hair, or the color of your eyes, or the shape of your earlobes, or the noises you make when you walk**, etc., etc.

It doesn’t matter that people are probably born gay. People are also born with blue eyes, rotten earlobes, and (to an extent) good looks — and yet the Constitution does not prohibit discrimination on those grounds in marriage, school, or work. Instead, the issue is whether the discrimination is based on an innate characteristic is worthy of protection. The Constitution clearly protects against discrimination based on your being born Black (again, see the 13th-15th Amendments). Whether the Constitution protects against discrimination based on your being born gay, is, well, much less clear . . . .***

The task of those who support allowing gay marriage through judicial (rather than legislative) means is to demonstrate that gays fall into a category deserving of specific protection under the Constitution. I think that’s a case that can be made. But Andrew Sullivan doesn’t make it with a platitude and a quick cite to the Brown decision.

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Been holding this one back until the numbers were clearer. BTW, I did manage to get the winners of SC and OK right, guessed very badly wrong on DE, sorta badly about Dean in general (he came pretty close in AZ to picking up delegates, but not quite, and didn’t do nearly well enough in NM) and more or less called it about Edwards and second place. IOW, ehh.

Now, according to my I-don’t-think-I-screwed-anything-up numbers, and assuming that the statewide pledged delegates go the way of the rest, the delegate breakdown went like this (as 12:14 AM, February 4, 2004):

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Make or break time for some of the candidates and time to face reality for most of the rest. Let’s chat, shall we?

(Poliblog, a site that needs blogrolling, was most helpful for all this)

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Thanks to the suddenly-ubiquitous Wonkette* it has been revealed that John Kerry was apparently once a bass player for a garage band, not to mention Norwegian:

From the liner notes, you might think Electramania [the high school band Kerry was in] was about to sweep the nation.

“All in all, the listener should find little more to be desired from this recording,” someone named P.W. Johnson wrote, before introducing each member of the band. Kerry, whose father was a career diplomat then stationed in the Netherlands, is described as “a resident of Oslo, Norway, and the producer of pulsating rhythm that lends tremendous force to all the numbers.”

So what does it sound like? Let’s put it this way: Kerry shouldn’t run on this record. Then again, he shouldn’t run from it, either.

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Scarily, I more or less got the last batch correct, so the heat’s on for me to get the next batch horrifically wrong. Good thing I’m so bad at this.

UPDATE: So bad, in fact, that I got the date wrong. Must have thought that January had 32 days, or something.

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Poster Fredrik Nyman provided us* with a link to a TCS column by John Ellis called Shooting the Wounded, which gives some suggestions on how Kerry should run the next stage of his campaign. In short, Ellis advocates a strategy first formulated by Lee Atwater (whose name has much the same effect on Democrats as Nathan Bedford Forrest’s did on whatever Union army was facing him at the time, and not for completely dissimilar reasons**):

The turning point of the 1988 Republican presidential nomination campaign came just after the New Hampshire primary, where then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had bounced back from a humiliating third-place finish in Iowa to defeat Sen. Bob Dole by 9 percentage points. In the days that followed, a debate raged within the Bush campaign about how to allocate its remaining resources. Campaign strategist Lee Atwater argued that the only thing to do was dump everything into South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states that followed three days later. “Shoot the wounded,” said Atwater at the time, “that’s my view.”

Atwater’s view prevailed. The Bush campaign buried South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states under an avalanche of money, organizational muscle, surrogates and media advertisements. When the votes were counted, Bush had run the table, sweeping all but the states of Washington and Missouri, and the race was over.

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This is not a ‘how dare they call X a Nazi’ post: I got my recommended daily allowance of Nazi posts this afternoon, and there’s a part of me that actually doesn’t care all that much in this particular case* about the poor victim’s feelings, possibly because she’s shown no particular interest in sparing the feelings of anybody else. Yes, yes, I’m not a Buddha.

Still, completely aside from the Godwinization, I will still note that if dKos’ ad policy is such that ads from the New Republic are to be disdained while those from Agitproperties.com, a company whose merchandising motto is “Educating America’s Moron Majority since 2002” are permitted… well, I guess he didn’t want to go all that mainstream anyway.

Moe

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Because, really, we don’t have enough people analyzing this already.

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