Handicapping the Republican candidates

In 1994 I succesfully predicted, very early, that Bill Clinton would earn the Democratic nomination. Full of myself, I've attempted to make early predictions of the nominees every election since, with a success rate of 0%. So here goes, my handicapping of the relevant candidates (see prior post for a list of irrelevant candidates).

GOP

Mitt Romney: Romney is the current front-runner, but I have a hard time seeing him gain the support of the religious right, or of moderates if his religious views become known. Granted, Bob Jones III has endorsed Romney, and te religious right likes his opposition to gay marriage and abortion (although his conversion on those issues appears to be a pure political move as he positioned himself for this run), but most theologically conservative Christians are going to see him as an idolator and heretic. For what it's worth, Jerry Fallwell disagrees with me, but James Dobson agrees. But also, non-devout people, raised in a culture where mainstream Christianity is the norm, may also be unnerved if some of the tenets of the Mormom faith become public. (I won't list any of them here--I don't believe it ought to matter, so I'm not going to participate in "outing" Romney's beliefs.)

Rudy Guiliani: Forget it. The polls showing he's popular are not targeting the right group of people, likely Republican primary voters. The more devout party members are the ones who dominate primaries, and in the Republican Party most of those people are far more conservative than Guiliani. He won't get the nomination, period. End of story.

John McCain: My good friend, Jeff, in Iowa, claims McCain's making a comeback after struggling badly. My own feeling is that his time has passed. He was news in 2000, but now seems passe. (Too bad, as he's my favorite among the Republicans). But he's an old pro, so don't count him out. A surprisingly good showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he's working hard, could set him on a path toward the nomination.

Mike Huckabee: As a true conservative, former minister, and governor, he ought to be doing better. I suspect his funny name, and the fact that, like Clinton, he's from Hope, Arkansas will doom his candidacy. Symbolism is important in the candidate selection process, and that's all working against him. Come on, say it with me, "Another president from Arkansas." It just sounds bad. Could be a good Veep pick, however, very appealing to the religious conservatives.

Fred Thompson: OK, so tell me. If the Democrats are the party of Hollywood, why is it only Republicans who run actors for elected office? Reagan, Fred Grandy (Congressman Gopher), Clint Eastwood, Arnold, and Thompson. (OK, Ben Jones, Congressman Cooter, is a Dem, but they're still outnumbered.) Thompson was supposed to have the Reaganesque quality, but so far he's disappointing people. The reason is that he's not as smooth without a script as Reagan. Thompson's great with a script, but he hasn't developed his non-scripted speaking skills, and unless he does quickly, he'll bomb in the debates. Also, he has cancer, and people simply aren't going to vote for someone with cancer--they don't want to vote for someone they think will die in office (remember Paul Tsongas). Furthermore, after seeing him in the debate, I didn't think he looked healthy, and my lovely wife agreed. So, a guy with cancer who looks ill...He might as well toss it in and go join Brownback in the hinterlands of Kansas.

So who will get the nomination? Good god, they all look dreadfully flawed in terms of winning the Republican primary. I'm going to take a flyer and say McCain. Which, if my batting average holds, means he doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.

Next posting--handicapping the Democrats. Much easier, fewer candidates. God bless the, I guess.

1 down, many to go

Just for the historical record, Sam Brownback ended his presidential bid today. The announcement received more attention than his entire campaign had to date, which goes a long way toward explaining why he's had to call it quits.

Seriously, doesn't anyone check the historical record anymore? The last member of the Senate to be elected president was Kennedy in 1960. What made Brownback think he could pull a Kennedy? Doesn't he realize nobody knows who Sam Brownback is? Americans just don't pay attention to senators outside their own states. Why should they? They can't vote for them, and those senators aren't going to put any effort into providing goodies for their state. And the press won't make many senators household names because there's just too damn many to focus on. That's why they all congregate at the White House; there's only one president, so they don't have to work hard to figure out who's important.

There are, of course, three senators running who do have name recognition: McCain, Clinton, and Obama, and one former senator, Thompson. If Brownback has some reason to think he can become as well-known as them, I wish he'd share it with me.

There are candidates more clueless than Brownback, however, named Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Dennis Kucinich, all lowly members of the House of Reps. Just to let them know, the last, and only, member of the House of Representatives to be elected president was....James Garfield in....1872. Why so few? Because the lack of recognition that senators struggle with is magnified 10 fold for representatives, many of whom aren't even known across their own state.

Sad pathetic attention whores, that's all they are.

Scary Squirrel World: More Creationist Babble

I was preparing a lecture on natural selection and looking for information on squirrel species at the Grand Canyon, where a species has subdivided into North Rim and South Rim sub-species, when I stumbled across the information I was looking for contained in a Duane Gish "research article." Oh, joy.

If you don't know, Duane Gish is a creationist, and this article apparently came from the Creation Research Society Quarterly way back in 1989. It's a classic example of the pathetic and illogical arguments of the creationists, which may explain why the Creation Research Society Quarterly, assuming it really exists, is not a peer-reivewed journal.

Gish refers to a research article that suggests the squirrel subspecies haven't diverged enough to have been separated for the millions of years the Grand Canyon has supposedly been in existence. According to him, this proves that the Grand Canyon itself is young.

If the Grand Canyon was formed during the waning stages of the Flood, as receding Flood waters drained from the emerging North American continent, there would have been no squirrels on either rim of the newly formed Grand Canyon. It would be many years after the formation of the Grand Canyon before squirrels and other animals could have arrived. It appears more likely that the tassel-eared squirrel migrated to areas on both sides of the Grand Canyon and that these areas have since become ecologically isolated from one another in relatively recent times. Evolutionists, of course, assume that this isolation occurred several million years ago, whatever the causative factors.

The illogic of this is clear. Gish clearly states that the squirrels had to have come to the Grand Canyon after it was created, but then argues this implies a recent creation for the Grand Canyon. But the arguments that the squirrels came (a) after the canyon was formed, and (b) recently, gives us no indication of how long ago the Canyon was formed, except that it was before the squirrels got there. The squirrel evidence suggest neither a millions year old Canyon nor a thousands year old one. Elementary logic-Gish's weak point-shows that the two events are simply not related to each other.

And when Gish says "Evolutionists...assume that this isolation occurred several million years ago..." he is simply lying. Geologists have evidence that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old. Evolutionary theorists don't assume the age of the canyon is necessarily related to the date of squirrel divergence. If the evidence shows that squirrels diverged only in the last few thousand years, then that's what the "evolutionists" believe. Then they ask themselves, "If the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, and the squirrel divergence between North and South Rims occured only a few thousand years ago, what does that mean? It means the squirrels migrated to the North and South Rims after the Canyon was created." So as it turns out, Gish actually agrees with the "evolutionists" on that point.

Gettin' Wet and Dirty

Tomorrow I'm participating in StreamSearch with the River Raisin Watershed Council. The Raisin is allegedly the windiest river in the world, and its upper stretches go through some amazingly undeveloped country (amazing considering we're smack in the middle of farm country). It also may be threatened by the waste from some local CAFOs, and other sources of agricultural runoff.

So tomorrow I'll be donning waders and wielding a net as we search for insects, in an effort to determine the health of the river. Insect counts have been down in the past few years, but there's no obvious reason why they should be, and the Watershed Council Director, Adrian College Biologist Jim Martin suspects it may just be the human variable in past StreamSearches.

Hopefully we'll collect lots of bugs, providing evidence the Raisin is still healthy.

On a side note, during training, my 10 year old daughter and I found a bloodworm. Dr. Martin said they actually have hemoglobin. I'm a Political Scientist, not a Biologist, so the idea of a worm having hemoglobin is really bizarre to me. It shows once again that it pays to hang out with people of different specialties--you'll learn all kinds of wild stuff.

Death Threats for Cartoonist Just Aren't Funny

You'd think anytime a cartoonist is involved, it ought to be funny. But Abu Omar al-Baghdadi's offer of a reward for the death of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks isn't funny at all.

Neither are Vilks's cartoons showing Mohammed as a dog. Gratuitously insulting a whole community of people, the vast majority of whom have never done anything to offend you, just isn't funny.

But the consequence of an unjustified insult should not be death. Of course it often is, when pride is at stake, or the offended person is a drunken idiot. But neither pride, nor drunkeness, nor religious beliefs justify putting a price on someone's head.

When I was 14, I got upset when people insulted me. Now I'm 42--if someone insults me it just makes me laugh. Like the guy a few years ago who called me un-American for opposing the war (which may be the last time someone's directly insulted me). Immediately after calling me un-American and a chicken, he ran out of the room without waiting for a response. I'm going to bother to get angry and call for his head? Seriously, I've got better things to do.

But that's the problem with fanatics--they don't have anything better to do than try to kill anyone who mocks them. The concept of live and let live--the true golden rule--is anathema to them.

Naked Hiking on a Godly Mountain

The Associated Press reports that people are getting nekkid on Mt. Everest, offending the local Nepalis who worshipo the mountain as a god. The president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association says "There should be strict regulations to discourage such attempts by climbers."

Well, I'm always hesitant when someone says "there should be strict regulations." And, really, if Everest is a god, isn't all the pi**ing and sh***ing on it more of a problem than some yahoo stripping down at 29,000 feet?

Federal Judge Defends the 4th Amendment.

Ed Brayton has sent out another good dispatch from the culture wars, alerting us civil libertarians that another portion of the USA PATRIOT Act has been struck down as unconstitutional.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed by Brandon Mayfield, the attorney from Portland, Oregon,--and a muslim--who was falsely and foolishly suspected by the FBI of being a conspirator in the Madrid train bombings 2004. Using a portion of the PATRIOT Act, they got a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court without having probable cause, and planted bugs in his house while doing a "sneek and peek" search.

No problem, except that a search without probable cause is an explicit violation of the 4th Amendment, which reads "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." The judge explained it clearly.

Now, for the first time in our Nation's history, the government can conduct surveillance to gather evidence for use in a criminal case without a traditional warrant...For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law - with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised.

Hey, all you conservatives out there who think the Constitution means exactly what it says! Are you cheering right now? If you mean what you say, then you should be. But if you throw up some jibber-jabber about security and the war on terror, then you're admitting that you don't take the Constitution nearly as literally as you claim to.

The problem stems from the way the Patriot Act was passed. Playing on the fear generated by 9/11, Republican leaders in the House and Senate jammed through the bill with no debate, and without letting anyone read the contents. Rushig to pass ill-conceived legislation is exactly the kind of thing the House tends to do, but the Senate nearly always slows things down, acting, as George Washington is alleged to have said to Jefferson, as a "cooling chamber for legislation." The Balanced Budget Amendment, the Flag Burning Amendment, the Gay Marriage Amendment, and the Contract with America are just some recent examples of the Senate blocking silly legislation passed by the House. But with the Patriot Act they forgot their proper role in the U.S. system.

And while it was Republicans who pushed it through, the Democrats are no less guilty. After all, they voted blind on major legislation, like the cowards they generally are. Anytime the Republicans murmer, "Un-American," the Dems rush to out-fascist the fascists just to prove their patriotism.

As if gutting the Bill of Rights is by any stretch of the imagination patriotic.

What doesn't George Bush manage to misunderstand?

George Bush criticized Democrats last week for "deciding to pass a bill they know will be vetoed. Well, yes, Mr. President, that's they way it works under our Constitution. Congress has authority to pass legislation, and you have the authority to veto it, but you don't have the authority to prevent them from passing a bill.

What's really going on is that Bush doesn't want to have to veto this bill, because it means denying poor children health insurance, and he knows that position's not a political winner. If he can bully Congess into not passing the bill, he won't have to take such a high profile action. It's a perfectly rational position for him, but I still can't stand the terrible civics lesson he's giving Americans--"Congress should only pass bills when the President says they can."

He also claimed that Democrats were just trying to score political points. True enough, since they probably don't have the votes to override a veto (unless a lot of Republicans get scared away from voting against poor kids' health insurance), but scoring political points is a way parties sell themselves to voters. In other words, it's the democratic way! Not many things annoy me more than people complaining about politicians "just making political points." If they didn't, how would you know where they stood on the issues?

Go away, George. We're all getting tired of you. And, no, you're not a "huge asset" to your party's candidates. It's time to start your long slow walk into retirement.

And we think it's a free country

The Wasington Post reports that the U.S. government is collecting excessive information on U.S. citizens who dare to travel abroad. The information recorded includes whom they plan to stay with overseas, the personal items carried, and even the books they take along. Ben Franklin called it so long ago--"Those who prefer a little temporary security to liberty deserve neither"

Why I'm glad to be at a small college...

My better half and I went to see Greg Brown at the Arc, a folk club in Ann Arbor, last night. Despite the metal folding chairs and lack of alchohol (you have to be a member to buy) Greg and Bo Ramsey put on a great show. The only real damper on the evening was the large presence of academic-type lefties in the crowd. I had more than enough of those while in grad school at Oregon, but of course they're legion at U.Mich, too. You may know the type: goatees, earrings, faces a mask of humorlous earnestness. Oh, hell, I usually have a goatee, too, and used to wear 6 earrings. It's the faces that distinguish them. That and their banal sophistication, like the two college-age girls standing in line behind us, "I just can't understand why some people like football." They're the types that put "No war for oil" bumper stickers on their hybrid SUVs. The type who think they're intelligent, but actually think in bumper-stickerese. The type that just banned former Harvard President Lawrence Summers from speaking at UC Davis because he isn't politically correct.

The couple in front of us were perfect examplars of the type. Despite never speaking to them, I know them. I went to grad school with them. Not them personally, but their type. The guy had the goatee, earring, and earnest look. He didn't smile the whole evening. The girl looked rich and incapable of smiling, but clapped enthusiastically at every anti-war comment Greg Brown made.

And that's what really irked me. This crowd of obviously educated people, hooting and hollering like Nascar fans every time Greg criticized the war. "War is bad! Yay us!" Yeah, I oppose the war, too. I argued publicly against going to war before it began, and was called unpatriotic and un-American by a yahoo in a cowboy hat and boots (in Michigan, folks, not Texas!). I'm comfortable with my anti-war credentials. But I didn't leave a wet spot on my seat just because a folksinger validated my political views. In fact I'd make a sizable wager that Greg's anti-war comment are the only thing that's ever gotten the rich girl excited.

And that's why I'm glad I'm at a small school. Sure, most of our faculty are liberal, very much so. But that type just isn't present in sizable numbers. I'm not sure whether they don't apply to small schools, whether they don't get hired, or whether they just don't stick around, but we're better off for their absence.

I've got to catch Greg Brown when he's not playing a college town.