Say Anything Blog

Michael Savage has some questions...and they call leftists moonbats.

I’ve been looking through the Pew Research Center’s Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007...I know I lead a boring life so no need to tell me. I was looking at the graph on p.2 which plots the percentages of Americans that identify themselves as Democrats and Republicans and those that lean one way or the other. Now I know that polls are snapshots and aren’t the final word on any subject but the graph provides a plausible rebuttal to the argument that Democrats are overrepresented in polls while Republicans are underrepresented.

We can debate that one til the cows come home and it’s actually a passage on the same page that caught my attention:

Yet the Democrats’ growing advantage in party identification is tempered by the fact that the Democratic Party’s overall standing with the public is no better than it was when President Bush was first inaugurated in 2001. Instead, it is the Republican Party that has rapidly lost public
support, particularly among political independents. Faced with an unpopular president who is waging an increasingly unpopular war, the proportion of Americans who hold a favorable view of the Republican Party stands at 41%, down 15
points since January 2001. But during that same period, the proportion expressing a positive view of Democrats has declined by six points, to 54%.

That the Republicans have lost supporters is not news but I was surprised to see that the Democrats have also lost support. Those voters who aren’t diehards but vote depending on the issues and on the circumstances don’t get much respect from those who do have definitive party allegiances. It seems that they’re capable of getting the last laugh however by tipping the balance, presumably towards the Democrats this time.

Not earth shaking stuff but I found it interesting.

Who doesn’t love a good constitutional battle? U.S. Attorneys are not to enforce Congressional contempt citations against Administration members when the President has declared that executive privilege applies. Will Congress return to the days when it executed its own arrests and held its own trials?

This raises an interesting question in Constitutional law...is executive privilege the highest law in the land? The circumstances of this case are quite specific but that seems to be the President’s position.

In case you wanted to know what had the economic types buzzing in liberal blogland yesterday, the WSJ posted a graphic which purports to demonstrate the utility of the Laffer Curve when comparing corporate tax rates across nations. I’m hoping this is yet another example of media incompetence rather than bias.

The incomparable Stiftung speculates about the future...chilling stuff. It’s long but well worth the read...his is probably my favourite blog. Except for Say Anything of course.

While I am gratified to read the concerned comments penned by SA contributors about the occasionally lengthy waits for elective medical procedures in Canada, I see in Businessweek that perhaps some of that concern should be reserved for the American scene. I appreciate the ideological preference for the American model but perhaps it is time for some to consider just what the differences are between various national systems and what those differences mean to the end user.

So Mr. Chertoff’s tummy tells him America should be prepared for a terrorist attack this summer. Radley Balko makes a point I’m fond of making but he does it so much better.

“In retrospect it is apparent that I was subconsciously looking for a way to justify my faith in the leader of my country and my party, a man who was undergoing a violent attack from the news media, which I thought had never given him fair treatment in the past,” Thompson wrote.

boston.com

Just when I figured I should give up on Canadian healthcare and sign up for the NRO cruise I come across this little tidbit.

And let’s not forget that a study by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine (warning: pdf) estimates that at least 18,000 people die each year from inadequate health coverage. That’s the the equivalent of thirty World Trade Center bombings in the years since 9/11.

Now the head of the Institute of Medicine could be Ramsay Clark for all I know and I’m sure that there are excellent reasons to ignore the study but even if that figure has been exaggerated by a factor of ten...wow.

No Canadian likes the long delays patients face for some procedures but if this study is accurate then I’ll stick with the system I have.

Now this guy has an interesting job.

It could be watching you coming out of an adult entertainment parlour. I’m just saying…

h/t Boing Boing

I hadn’t noticed it myself but Bill Cara raises the interesting pattern of American economic appointments...quite a few GS honchos in there.

So says the CIA in a recently declassified report described at MSNBC. I don’t actually care...I’m just trolling for some sputtering indignation.

While familiar with the work of Samuel Huntington and his concept of the clash of civilisations, I have to confess that I’ve always regarded his work as a bit eccentric and his clash thesis as an interesting example of alarmism. Little did I know that the term was apparently coined by one Bernard Lewis, a scholar whose work some will know I don’t have much confidence in nor admiration for. That the phrase should originate with Lewis makes sense to me as much of his scholarship serves to complete the long thread allegedly connecting the various periods of Islamic and Arabic history, a long thread which I’ve never believed existed in any manner that is relevant to our contemporary world.

Many readers and posters at Say Anything have drawn upon Lewis’ and Huntington’s work for inspiration in identifying Islam as the gravest threat to western civilsiation and I confess that my reaction has typically been one of bemused dismissal. Readers interested in understanding my attitude could do worse than read Michael Hirsh’s excellent examination of Lewis and his detractors published by the Washington Monthly in 2004. This piece should serve to infuriate some if not most but it does present the chief objections to the Clash idea in a very clear and readable fashion and I commend it to those who like to see what the “other” side can possibly be thinking.

The loonie traded north of 92 cents US yesterday...the future of jokes about Canadian money grows dimmer I fear.