Les Jones

Steyn's "Jews You Can Use"

Mark Steyn compares Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed and sacked ESPN writer Gregg Easterbrook and wonders which one is ditzier.

That's the great thing about the International Jewish Conspiracy: no Jews need be involved. One day, there will be only one Jew left on the whole planet. He'll be a Dean supporter who mangled his chad and accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan. But he'll still be controlling the Bush Administration. He'll be a non-observant, self-loathing Jew who doesn't find Jackie Mason funny. He'll be the principal fundraiser for Islamic Jihad. But everything will still be his fault.

That's how devious they are. "We cannot fight them through brawn alone," Dr Mahathir told his audience. "We must use our brains also." In fact, Dr Mahathir's comrades don't use "brawn" either, unless by "brawn" you mean a West Bank schoolgirl with a Tel Aviv bus ticket.

But, on balance, that makes marginally more sense than Gregg Easterbrook�s argument for The New Republic re Kill Bill. How loopy do you have to be to sit through 90 minutes of an Italian-American video-store nerd's hommage to Hong Kong movie actors celebrating their distinctive cultural heritage of slicing each others' limbs off and figure, "I think I'll go with the Jew angle."

The Shouting Points Memo

The shouting points memo: a guide to modern political discourse. Via Jeff Jarvis.

You are not just wrong, you and those like you are intellectually insufficient and morally suspect. Why do you hate our country? Think of the children. God said to tell you that he is not pleased.

Stop interrupting me while I'm shouting. Feel the crushing weight of my arguments, which are built on logic and constructed from facts that are sturdy and sound. You just whine about how you feel.

Your information is flawed because it came from a source I know to be aligned with the forces of darkness. I am able to parse the media and edit what I see for bias and spin, while you are a gullible sap who believes everything you see on the TV or read in that wholly discredited rag you just quoted.

You speak in cliches, slogans and sound bites. I speak in pithy phrases and time-tested words of wisdom. You call names, I tell it like it is. You are vulgar, I am colorful.

My candidate is a hero. Yours is a zero. One cannot compare the youthful hijinks of my guy with the youthful wantonness of yours. My guy makes mistakes, yours commits sins of the worst kind. And likes it. My guy was misquoted, or simply misspoke, while your guy was caught on tape saying exactly what I expected him to say.

Read the whole thing.

Motor Voter Problems

Remember when "motor voter" laws were supposed to increase participation in the democratic process? Hey, I believed it. Now even liberal papers like The Boston Globe have figured out that the system is open to abuse.

I learned this firsthand in 1996, when I registered my wife's cat as a voter in Cook County, Ill., Norfolk County, Mass., and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and then requested absentee ballots from all three venues. My purpose wasn't to cast illegal multiple votes but to demonstrate how vulnerable to manipulation America's election system has become.

It was a simple scam to pull off. "Under the National Voter Registration Act -- the `Motor Voter Law' -- states are required to accept voter registrations by mail," I wrote at the time. "No longer can citizens be asked to make a trip to town hall or the county office. No longer do they have to provide proof of residence or citizenship. In fact, they don't have to exist. Motor Voter obliges election officials to add to the voter list any name mailed in on a properly filled-out registration form. Anyone so registered can then request an absentee ballot -- by mail, of course. The system is not only open to manipulation, it invites it."

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 17: National Review has more (via Jim Miller):

Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The "Motor Voter Law," the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring driver's license bureaus to register anyone applying for licenses, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making it difficult to purge "deadwood" voters (those who have died or moved away). In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. Philadelphia's voter rolls, for instance, have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time that the city's population has declined by 13 percent.

CBS's 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California � twice.

The Lionel Hutz/Montgomery Burns Debate

Via jwz and Allah, respectively.

Bloggers, Place Your Bets on the 2004 Elections

UPDATE: the winning predictions have been announced over here.

Psychics have an easy job. Just make a bunch of predictions. When you're wrong, keep quiet. When you're right, remind people endlessly. So for the 2004 election I'm keeping track of predictions to see which ones pan out. I'm concentrating on bloggers, columnists and news organizations. Know of a major prediction I missed? Post it in comments, or send a trackback link.

November 2 - the polls are open, so the betting office is closed to new bets

Now that the polls are open, I'm not taking new bets. I will still post predictions made prior to the polls opening.

November 2 additions: Mark Mellman (Kerry's Chief Pollster), Electric Venom, In the Bullpen, Blogs of War, Right on Red, Watcher of Weasels, RealClearPolitics roundup (under Other Prediction Roundups), Jeff Goldstein, Bill Hobbs, TalkLeft, RedState (under Other Prediction Roundups)

The bets so far

Adam Groves - Bush 271, Kerry 267
prediction made October 27, added October 31

Ann Coulter (various outlets) - Bush 317, Kerry 221
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Ana Marie-Cox (Wonkette) - Kerry 271, Bush 267
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Atrios - Kerry 284, Bush 254, with Kerry +3 in the popular vote
prediction made October 30, added October 31

Autonomous Source - Bush 310, Kerry 228
prediction made October 31, added November 1

Bill Hobbs - Bush 293, Kerry 245
prediction made November 1, added November 2

Bill White - Bush a bunch, Kerry 49
prediction made August 8, added October 31

Blackfive - Bush 294, Kerry 244
prediction made October 29, added November 1

Blogs of War (John Little) - Bush 280, Kerry 258
prediction made November 1, added November 2

Brothers Judd average - Bush 298, Kerry 239
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Colby Cosh - Bush 289, Kerry 249
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Countertop Chronicles - Bush 329, Kerry 209
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Daily Kos - "Kerry will win big--big as in over 5% ... and big as in 311 or more electoral votes."
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Dustbury - Bush 300, Kerry 238
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Election Projection (based on compositing polls) - Bush 286, Kerry 252
prediction made October 30, added October 31

Election Projection (based on Scott Elliott's own prediction) - Bush 356, Kerry 182
prediction made October 30, added October 31

Electoral Vote (based on compositing polls) - Kerry 298, Bush 231
prediction made October 31, added October 31. Their daily predictions were October 31 Kerry 283, Bush 246 and October 30 Bush 280, Kerry 243.

Electric Venom - "I predict Bush will win by a surprising majority."
prediction made November 1, added November 2

Frank Martin - Bush 381, Kerry 157
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Fred Barnes (Weekly Standard) - Bush 306, Kerry 232
prediction made October 28, added November 1

Generic Confusion - Bush 291, Kerry 247
prediction made October 31, added November 1

In the Bullpen - Bush 295, Kerry 243
prediction made November 2, added November 2

Irreconcilable Musings - Bush 296, Kerry 242
predicted November 1, added November 1

Jay Reding - Bush 310, Kerry 228
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Jeff Goldstein - "Bush 270 plus; screw John Kerry"
predication made November 1, added November 1

Jim Miller - Bush with 54% of popular vote
prediction made October 27, added October 31

Just on the Other Side - Bush 301, Kerry 237
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Labor Department internal study (based on analysis of outside reports) - Bush victory
published in a leak October 29, added October 31

Larry Sabato (Sabato's Crystal Ball) - Bush 276, Kerry 262
prediction made October 26, added October 31

Mark Mellman (Kerry's Chief Pollster) - "an expert forecasting model suggests that Bush will get 51.6 percent of the two-party vote"
prediction made November 2, added November 2

Mark Steyn (various outlets) - Bush 315, Kerry 223 - if he's wrong about a Bush win he'll resign from The Spectator
prediction made October 30??? (no firm date on article, just current date), added October 31

Mark the Pundit - Bush 319, Kerry 219
prediction made October 29, added November 1

Matt Welch - Kerry 300, Bush 238
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Matthew Yglesias - Bush 269 (49.3% popular), Kerry 269 (49.1% popular)
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Murdoc Online - Bush 305, Kerry 233
prediction made August 13, added November 1

My Pet Jawa - Kerry 279, Bush 259
prediction made November 1, added November 2

No Pundit - Bush victory, here's why
prediction made October 28, added November 1

One Fine Jay - Bush 281, Kerry 257
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Outside the Beltway - Bush 286, Kerry 252
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Peaktalk - Bush 290, Kerry 248
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Raving Atheist - Bush 293, Kerry 245
prediction made September 3, added October 31

Ray Fair (Fair Model) - Bush with 57% of two-party popular vote, based on purely economic indicators
prediction made July 31, added October 31

Rich Galen - Bush victory
prediction made October 29, added October 31

Right on Red - Bush 300, Kerry 238
prediction made November 2, added November 2

Skeet Skeet Skeet - Bush 298, Kerry 240
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Smug Monkey - Bush 356 (59.6% popular), Kerry 182 (40.4% popular)
prediction made November 1, added November 1

SouthKnoxBubba - Kerry 280, Bush 258
prediction made October 27, added October 31

Spoons - Kerry 304, Bush 234
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Stephen Hayes (Weekly Standard) - Kerry 291, Bush 247
prediction made October 28, added November 1

Stephen Bainbridge - Bush 296 (48.9% popular), Kerry 242 (48.1% popular)
prediction made November 1, added November 1

Sundries Shack - Bush 322, Kerry 216
prediction made October 1, added November 1

TalkLeft - Kerry 300 (52% popular), Bush 238 (47% popular)
prediction made October 31, added November 2

Tony Snow (Fox News) - Bush 280, Kerry 258
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Tradesports via VodkaPundit - Bush 286, Kerry 252
prediction made October 31, added October 31

Tucker Carlson (CNN) - Kerry 278, Bush 260
prediction made October 31 , added October 31

VodkaPundit (Stephen Green) - Bush 286, Kerry 252
Prediction made October 31, added November 1

Watcher of Weasels - Bush 279, Bin Laden 259
prediction made November 1 by email, added November 2

William Kristol (Weekly Standard) - Bush 348, Kerry 190
prediction made October 31, added October 31

WizBang (Kevin Aylward) - Bush 291, Kerry 247
prediction made October 31, added November 1

WizBang (Paul) - Kerry 274, Bush 264
prediction made October 31, added November 1

Other Prediction Roundups

• Ace of Spades
• American Prospect
• Redstate
• Washington Post
• Weekly Standard

My Prediction

And here's my map. Bush 278, Kerry 260. Prediction made October 31. I based my predictions on the parties winning exactly the same states they won in 2000. Am I playing it safe or what? Even if Bush won exactly the same states he did in 2000, he would get a bigger electoral win because of an overall trend of voters moving from blue states to red states.

Want to play?

If you'd like to put an electoral map on your site The Wall Street Journal and The LA Times have free tools that generate maps and automatically total electoral votes. Graphics tip: take a screenshot of the map, paste it into your favorite graphics program, and save it as a GIF. JPGs show nasty color banding.

Winner of the Election Prediction

Days before the election, I began tabulating blogger's predictions for the presidential race. In the end I collected over 60 responses, from Atrios to Wizbang.

The final results are in, and the electoral vote tally is Bush 286, Kerry 252. Three bloggers predicted the results: Election Projection, Outside the Beltway, and VodkaPundit.

The tiebreaker is the date of the prediction. Outside the Beltway made its prediction on November 1. Stephen Green of VodkaPundit made his prediction, based on TradeSports numbers, on October 31. Scott Elliott of Election Projection, based on a composite poll analysis, made his projection no later than October 30.

UPDATE: I originally called it for Scott Elliott, but Outside the Beltway notes that Elliott later changed his prediction slightly three days after I recorded it. That throws a monkey wrench into the results. To avoid any more bake-offs, I'm calling it a three-way tie. All three blogs did a great job of covering the election. Congrats to Election Projection, Outside the Beltway, and VodkaPundit.

Checking the Pollsters on the Popular Vote

PoliPundit and RealClearPolitics are checking the pollsters for accuracy. RCP finds that Battleground/Tarrance, Pew Research, and CBS/NY Times polls were the most accurate, while Marist College, Battleground/Lake, and FOX/Opn Dyn were the least accurate.

In a November 2 article in The Hill, Kerry chief pollster Mark Mellman wrote that the Kerry camp's internal polls indicated Bush would win 51.6% of the popular vote. Bush did in fact win 51% of the popular vote.

Virginia Postrel notes an unusual, and unusually accurate prediction made by 7-11 convenience stores:

7-Eleven's coffee cup poll--coffee buyers could pick between Bush and Kerry cups--proved remarkably accurate: 51.08 percent for Bush, 48.92 percent for Kerry.

"Our popular vote was absolutely right on," Jim Keyes, the chain's head honcho, told the Dallas Morning News. "We sell a million cups of coffee every day, so our sample size was huge."

2004 Election Fraud, Part 1

It's now received knowledge among Democrats that the Republicans stole the election in Ohio. It's common enough for the LA Weekly to casually state that Bush won the presidency "by a disputed nose in Ohio."

Oh, really? The basis of the Ohio claim is that some Democratic-heavy districts had too few machines, and some voters gave up waiting and went home. To summarize: in Democratic districts, presumably with Democratic election officials, there weren't enough machines and the lines were too long, so the Democratic voters went home. And somehow this is the Republicans' fault.

Here's Mark Naymik of the Cleveland Plain Dealer's take on it - Delays at polls weren't a scheme:

Before the Nov. 2 election, the elections board allotted each Cleveland precinct one machine for every 117 registered voters within its boundaries - the same ratio of machines that suburban precincts received.

In other words, the more registered voters a particular precinct had, the more machines it received, regardless of where that precinct was.

And in the end, the busiest precincts - when measured by the number of ballots cast per machine - were actually in the suburbs, not Cleveland, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of records from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Meanwhile, what's not being widely reported is indictments against five Democrats from the Kerry-Edwards campaign who slashed tires on Republican get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

The sons of a first-term congresswoman and of Milwaukee's former acting mayor were among five Democratic activists charged Monday with slashing the tires of [25] vans rented by Republicans to drive voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day.

Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Seth Boffeli said the five were paid employees of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) but were not acting on behalf of the campaign or party.

Admittedly, the five Democrats have only been charged, not convicted, and if none are found guilty I'll eat my hat, but I'm guessing my hat is safe. Yet in Ohio, there's not only no conviction, there's no indictment, no charges, and no names, because there's no specifics. Just vague anecdotes about people who got tired of waiting in line.

To recap. In Ohio, where Bush won by a margin of more than 100,000 votes, there's no evidence of shenanigans, just circumstances atrributed to hidden actors and ill intent. Yet in Wisconsin, where Kerry won by about 11,000 votes, there's an indictment against Kerry-Edwards staffers for slashing the tires of 25 vans rented by Republicans to take voters to the polls. But the spin is that the evil Republicans stole the election by disenfranchising Democrats.

That's just the beginning of the shenanigans in Wisconsin. More tomorrow or Friday on the suspicious voting in that state. As always, anyone who thinks that only one party in a national election cheats is just partisan, but right now the substantiated evidence against Democrats is stronger than the substantiated evidence against Republicans.

2004 Election Fraud, Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

An Ohio man has plead guilty to creating phony voter registrations. Via Powerline.

The whole voter registration business is open to abuses. Last yearthere were a group of people at one of the Sundown in the City concerts helping people to register to vote. That seems helpful, but how could you be sure they intended to turn in the cards? A group of Republicans could go to an event like that where lots of Democrats were present and then let them think they were registered. Likewise for Democrats at a Republican-packed event like a gun show.

The only reason the genius in Ohio was caught was because he filled out his registration cards with names like Mary Poppins and Brett Favre. (He was being paid by the number of voter registration cards he completed.) A barely-competent person would probably never be caught.

Jeff Jarvis Takes on the Liberal Credentialing Committee

The loony left (as opposed to the moderate left) has decided that Jeff Jarvis hasn't been a loyal party member. So despite the fact that he voted for Kerry they're re-educating him, they being Oliver Willis and Armando at Daily Kos. First up: Jarvis's response to Armando:

Gee, Armando, I didn't know you were the official arbiter of what's liberal. If I'd passed your test, would I have gotten a Liberal License? A Liberal T-Shirt, perhaps? A Liberal Membership Card?

On Williams: Gosh, I did say a lot about him but I didn't say it on the blog. I said it, for example, on WNYC. NPR. I think that is Officially Liberal. Right, Liberal Cop?

Note, well, Armando that you did not make this judgment based on a SINGLE issue or stand. You made your Official Liberalometer Meter Reading based on whether I criticized your enemies or praised your friends.

I repeat: You and Oliver and Kos and company look upon the Democratic Party as your little club. What did Groucho say again?

For Oliver Willis's anti-fans, Jarvis's response to Willis - The Politics of Immaturity - is not to be missed. Read the whole thing, but this one excerpt explains the Democrats' entire problem writ large:

[Quoting Oliver Willis]"I will always believe that the legacy of the George W. Bush years is one in which he and his party decided to simply defecate on half of the populace."

And what are you doing, Oliver? You're not only pissing on Republicans, you're pissing on Democrats you don't like. You're pissing on more than half of the country. In your game, you win. (But in the game that matters, you lose.)

UPDATE: Jarvis doesn't like the progressive re-branding of liberalism, either. "What wimpery. What balllessness. It's as if liberals are ashamed of being liberal."

Election Fraud 2002

Democrats were quick to charge Republicans election fraud in 2004, based on the flimsiest of anecdotes. In contrast, there was clear evidence of election fraud in several places on the Democrats part, leading to indictments of five Democrats (including several paid Kerry-Edwards staffers) for slashing tires on 25 Republican get-out-the-vote vans and an Ohio man's guilty plea for forging voter registrations for the NAACP.

On the other hand, if you want to talk about 2002, a New Hampshire man has been sentenced to seven months in prison for jamming a Democratic get-out-the-vote hotline.

2004 Election Fraud, Part 4 (Missouri; Democrat)

Via GatewayPundit:

Nonaresa Montgomery was found guilty by a jury late today of perjury in a trial in St. Louis Circuit Court in the St. Louis vote fraud trial. She was found not guilty of evidence tampering. Nonaresa Montgomery, a paid worker who ran Operation Big Vote during the run-up to 2001 mayoral primary, was on trial this week in St. Louis Circuit Court on charges of perjury and tampering with evidence.

Big Vote was part of a national campaign -- promoted by Democrats -- to register more black voters and get them to vote in the November elections. Montgomery is accused of hiring about 30 workers to do fraudulent voter-registration canvassing.

They were supposed to have canvassed black neighborhoods and recorded names of potential voters to be contacted later to vote in the Nov. 7 election. And they were paid by the number of cards they filled out. Instead of knocking on doors, however, they sat down at a fast-food restaurant and wrote out names and information from an outdated voter list. Board employees realized that there was a serious problem with some of the cards when they spotted the name of longtime alderman Albert �Red� Villa, who died in 1990.

See also:
 - 2002 Election Fraud (New Hampshire; Republican)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 1 (Wisconsin; Democrats)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 2 (Ohio; Democrat)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 3 (Illinois; Democrats)

2004 Election Fraud, Part 5 (Wisconsin; Undetermined)

Jim Lampley, writing in the new Huffington Post, brings up old charges of Republican election fraud in the 2004 election, based entirely on exit polls which didn't predict the election results.

In reality we had far better predictions than those exit polls, which were both random and notoriously unreliable. Take for instance the prediction of Mark Mellman - the Kerry-Edwards campaign's own pollster. He predicted a Bush win with 51.6% of the two-party vote. Mellman published that prediction in "The Hill" the morning of the election.

Democrats have spoken often and powerfully about the nation�s economic problems. But by historical standards, they are not that bad. The �misery index� is 7.8 today but was 20.5 when Jimmy Carter was defeated. Economic models of elections show Bush winning 52-58 percent of the vote.[...]

Mellman isn't alone. A CBS/New York Times poll two days before the election found Bush ahead by 3%. RealClearPolitics has a roundup of pre-election polls and their accuracy. Pew Research, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, Harris, NBC/WSJ, Reuters/Zogby, and Newsweek all predicted a Bush win. CNN/USAT/Gallup and ARG predicted a dead heat.

If you've read my blog you've seen plenty of examples of vote fraud in 2004, all perpetrated by Democrats (see links below). These are not anecdotal cases - they're all backed up by indictments at least, and in some of those caes convictions and guilty pleas.

Democrats like to imagine skullduggery in Ohio, where Bush won by a margin of more than 140 thousand votes. Yet in Wisconsin, where Kerry won by just over 11 thousand votes, there were confirmed election irregularities. In Milwaulkee, 4,609 more votes were cast than there were registered voters. Most cities are happy to get 75% voter turnout. Milwaulkee got 101% voter turnout.

Kerry took 71% the Milwaulkee votes. That doesn't necessarily mean it was Democratic vote fraud - I've long maintained that members of both parties cheat on election day - but it doesn't look good for the Democrats. In Milwaulkee there are already indictments against five Democrats - all of them members of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, with one a son of a first-term congresswoman and another the son of Milwaulkee's former acting mayor, both Democrats - who have been charged with slashing the tires of Republican get-out-the-vote vans. Yet Democrats keep trying to paint 2004 as an election stolen by Republicans.

See also:
 - 2002 Election Fraud (New Hampshire; Republican)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 1 (Wisconsin; Democrats)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 2 (Ohio; Democrat)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 3 (Illinois; Democrats)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 4 (Missouri, Democrat)

2004 Election Fraud, Part 6 (Missouri; Democrats)

Gateway Pundit has details of the trials of five St. Louis Democratic candidates and officeholders for election fraud.

Dannita Youngblood, who worked at city hall and for the city party, told a jury that her boss, Kelvin Ellis, informed Kern of the political realities in a conference telephone call, heard by others as well, within a week before the Nov. 2, 2004, election.

She said Ellis, a party stalwart and then director of regulatory affairs, told Kern he was perceived in the predominantly-black community as a "racist' and might need to spend $10 per vote to get support. She said Ellis described a need "to pay the voters to come out."

Ellis, party chairman Charles Powell Jr. and three others are on trial in federal court at East St. Louis. Neither Youngblood nor Kern, the former mayor of Belleville, was charged. Youngblood turned out to be an FBI informer. Kern did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment about her testimony...

...On Oct. 30, the St. Clair County Democratic Party provided $67,000 to Ellis and other East St. Louis Democrats to get out the vote. No county party officials are charged in the case.

St. Clair County is split into two separate election authorities. Kern trailed about 4,000 votes behind Republican Steve Reeb in votes tallied by the county clerk, but won by about 4,000 when the East St. Louis totals came in.

Ellis has been charged with murder for plotting to kill a witness to the scheme.

UPDATE June 29, 2005: Guilty verdicts for five defendants.

See also:

 - 2002 Election Fraud (New Hampshire; Republican)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 1 (Wisconsin; Democrats)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 2 (Ohio; Democrat)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 3 (Illinois; Democrats)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 4 (Missouri, Democrat)
 - 2004 Election Fraud, Part 5 (Wisconsin; Undetermined)

As always, if anyone has any substantiated claims of voter fraud by either party, send them in. No anecdotes, please, but I'll report factual findings from an election committe or arrests or prosecution by a district attorney.

Political Link Roundup

I've been purposefully doing less political blogging lately, but there were a few stories that jumped out at me, or that I wanted to note for future reference.

The Supreme Court has decided we don't need the fourth amendment after all. Uncle's hopping mad.

Meanwhile, the House is trying to erode first amendment rights to freedom of expression with the flag-burning amendment. As XRLQ put it, "The House has passed a constitutional amendment to prohibit America-hating assholes from publicly identifying themselves. Dumb, dumb, and double-dumb." We've advanced to the stage where we don't riot and kill 17 of our own people when someone desecrates one of our symbols. Do we want to go back to that?

Mystery quote: "I call on those who question the motives of the president and his national security advisers to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad." You'll never in a million years guess who said that. Answer here.

Kerry signed the Form 180 to release his military records, but in typical Gilligan's Island fashion only allowed three reporters to see them, and then only on a one-time basis, which means his critics won't be satisfied.

Captain Ed looks at the Democrats' study of Ohio voter problems: "plenty of complaints of long lines and malfunctioning machines, but did not come close to proving any fraud or suppression by Republicans, despite claims to the contrary by DNC chair Howard Dean."

Also, can we stop calling Ohio a close vote? It was a 140,000 margin. Kerry won a number of states with low five-figure margins. That includes an 11,000 vote margin in Wisconsin, where five Democrats were indicted for slashing tires on Republican get-out-the-vote vans.

P.J. O'Rourke on Mass Transit in the New Energy Bill

From OpinionJournal:

The new transportation bill, currently working its way through Congress, will provide more than $52 billion for mass transit. Mass transit is a wonderful thing, all right-thinking people agree. It stops pollution "in its tracks" (a little ecology-conscious light-rail advocacy joke). Mass transit doesn't burn climate-warming, Iraq-war-causing hydrocarbons. Mass transit can operate with nonpolluting sustainable energy sources such as electricity. Electricity can be produced by solar panels, and geothermal generators. Electricity can be produced by right-thinking people themselves, if they talk about it enough near wind farms.

Mass transit helps preserve nature in places like Yellowstone Park, the Everglades and the Arctic wilderness, because mass transit doesn't go there. Mass transit curtails urban sprawl. When you get to the end of the trolley tracks, you may want to move farther out into the suburbs, but you're going to need a lot of rails and ties and Irishmen with pickaxes. Plus there's something romantic about mass transit. Think Tony Bennett singing "Where little cable cars / Climb halfway to the stars." (And people say mass transit doesn't provide flexibility in travel plans!) Or the Kingston Trio and their impassioned protest of the five-cent Boston "T" fare increase, "The Man Who Never Returned." No doubt some lovely songs will be written about the Washington County, Ore., Wilsonville-to-Beaverton commuter rail line to be funded by the new transportation bill.

There are just two problems with mass transit. Nobody uses it, and it costs like hell.

Examples of that cost follow. Related: Amtrak's economics - losing $112 per passenger ride, and $208 per passenger ride on sleeper cars.

Daily Kos - 0 and 16

Ken Wheaton notes that with Paul Hackett's loss in Ohio Daily Kos's record is now 0 and 16 for endorsing political candidates.

You know, it's fine to endorse people who you don't think will necessarily win. Maybe every one of those candidates deserved to be elected and warranted Kos's fundraising efforts. But it's hard for Kos to pretend to be the wise, keen-eyed observer of the political landscape when all of his candidates lose.

See also:
- Rolling Stone: Howard Dean Sucks (and so does MoveOn.org)

A Reverse Living Will for Suicide

Just before I left last week I read over at Chris Byrne's that blogger Rob Smith was going to kill himself. Chris quotes a fellow named Livey whom he disagrees with, but in my experience Livey's approach is absolutely the correct one when dealing with someone who is talking about suicide:

What people are failing to realize is that Rob does not have a terminal illness. His only illness is depression and alcoholism. Those illnesses prevent him from being of "sound mind."

If a person has a terminal medical condition, I'm all for the right to die. Hell I've been involved in more than a few. I do Home Health Care and Hospice.

If he was truly wishing to die, he would not have told everyone he was drinking himself to death. That is a cry for help. I understand that people don't understand depression.

Even people who are not of sound mind can seem like it. Alcoholics are not of sound mind. Neither are people suffering from depression.

All I asked is for his friends and family to get him to a doctor, find out what is wrong with him and if he is dying, than so be it. But drinking yourself to death just because you don't want to live anymore is just wrong.

That was the minority opinion, however. Most people at Chris's thought you should respect suicidal people's right to die, be they of sound mind or not. I found that very disturbing. It's one thing for a person of sound mind to discontinue treatment of a terminal illness. It's another for a guy who's depressed and drunk to kill himself because he's got a failed marriage under his belt and bills to pay. You can support the former and still think the latter is a tragically stupid waste of human life.

Because of the current high-minded attitude towards the right to die, it's possible to imagine a world where we need reverse living wills to remind people we still want to live, so here's mine: if I ever start talking about committing suicide, or if I start acting kooky and talking cryptically about death, I'd appreciate it if my friends extended a helping hand. Make sure everything's OK. Talk to my wife. Maybe encourage me to see a doctor and get treated for depression. If my underlying problem is drug or alcohol abuse, stage an intervention to strong-arm me into drying out. Don't worry about committing some high-minded violation of my right to die. I'll get over any offense, but I won't get over killing myself.

I see today that Rob changed his mind and is checking himself into a clinic to dry out. Glad to hear it. Most people who talk about dying don't want to die. They just don't know what else to do. If someone you know talks about suicide, you can probably talk them into getting help that will save their life.

Paul Hackett Drops out of Ohio Senate Race

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184750,00.html

The Essence of Politics

Via Kevin Baker.

Is the Electoral College Unchangeable?

Michael Williams thinks so, arguing that the necessary constitutional change would require less populous states to act against their own self-interest.

The amendment process requires a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to make the proposal, and this proposal must then be ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Since there are currently 50 states in the Union, all it takes is 13 states to bury a proposed amendment.

Under the electoral college system, states with low population have a number of electoral votes disproportionate to their size, and their populations clearly have a significant interest in maintaining this power. Wyoming's 3 electoral votes give the state 0.558% of the total 538, even though its population of 498,703 is only 0.173% of the total population of the country (288,368,698). Wyoming's electoral power (and representation in Congress, incidentally) is more than 3 times higher than it's population should warrent under a purely democratic system. As a result of this math, every state that possesses a number of electoral votes below the median would be harmed by the elimination of the electoral college, and so no such amendment could ever pass.

I count eight states with only three electoral votes, the bare minimum guaranteed regardless of population. It's possible to pass a constitutional amendment without those states, but it would be very difficult.

Ace on Jeff Goldstein and Liberal Intellectual Vanity

Ace of Spades:

The left, to a man, considers itself to be educated and enlightened. It matters not how little actual schooling a particlular leftist may have had, nor how unintelligent the person might be. They all consider themselves intellectuals of sorts. If they dropped out of college after one semester, they just think of themselves as autodidacts whose genius could not be stimulated by the ossified and bourgeois teaching of the academy. If they're just plain stupid or crazy -- like, say, Charlie Sheen -- they indulge in farcial conspiracy-theorizing, reassuring themselves that they are intellectual because they know things others do not. They are one of the chosen few brave enough to see past the web of lies and glimpse the arcane truth behind, say, the implosion of the World Trade Center (a SEAL team planted those charges, you know?).

This conceit, usually wholly undeserved, of practically every leftist in the world is what makes leftism so intoxicating for the intellectually insecure, and what makes leftists so easily led and manipulated. It's an intoxicating doctrine for those who wish to conceive of themselves as intellectual and brilliant, for it provides an instant short-cut to the equivalent of an MIT education. If you simply believe these things we tell you to believe, you are one of Us, one of the Intellectually Elite, one of the Cultural Vanguard. Just as giving oneself to Christ, and believing in His power, and accepting the need for and gift of His redemption, instantly makes one "saved" and enters one's name in the Book of the Heaven, so too does accepting leftist tropes and core beliefs make one one of the Secular Elect.

OK, so that's probably an overly broad stroke, but in my experience it's true of a kind of unexamined intellectual vanity that one more often sees on the left than on the right (which is more prone to religious vanity). It's true there are some smart people on the left, but there are smart people on all sides, and assuming you're smart based on whether you always pull D or always pull R is simplistic. (And if you always pull the lever for one party you're a stooge who isn't thinking.)

It's true that there are lots of people (but not, apparently, John Kerry) who are smarter than George W. Bush. But the Bush adminstration grasped that when you're pushed you push back and that bullies only respect strength, which is a basic fact of life not grasped by many people who consider themselves intellectuals.

PS I had no idea Jeff Goldstein was a professor even after years of reading the guy.

Robert Kennedy,Jr., Story on Alleged Ohio Election Fraud

RFK, Jr. has a Rolling Stone article, Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

I covered the allegations of Ohio election fraud here and you can follow that for some relevant links.

It's true that a man was found guilty of election fraud in Ohio, but he was working for the NAACP,which last time I checked was aligned with Democrats. In fact, in every case I've found of election fraud in 2004 where charges were filed, it was by Democrats, not Republicans.

Democrats like to imagine election fraud in Ohio,where Bush won handily by 140,000 votes. They don't like to talk about Wisconsin, where Kerry squeaked by with an 11,000 vote margin, and where there were massive voting irregularities:

The Milwaukee investigation has revealed that the number of ballots counted there exceeds, by 4,609, the number of people recorded as voting. There is no evident explanation for this other than ballot box stuffing. In addition, investigators found "more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person."

And that's just the fraud that has been specifically identified. Approximately 70,000 voters registered in Milwaukee on election day, and they voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. Altogether, Kerry received 71% of the 277,000 votes cast in Milwaukee, a margin of 116,000 votes. There is no way to be sure whether more than 11,000 votes--less than 10% of Kerry's Milwaukee margin--were fraudulent. But it is entirely possible that voter fraud swung Wisconsin into the Democrats' column.

As far as Kennedy, he has an obvious political bias, so take that into account when reading him. He's also sloppy and sensationalist when he pretends to be a journalist. When Salon ran his article on thimerasol, they had to subsequently run corrections not once, but twice, three times, four times, and five times. You can read WSJ criticism of his thimerasol story here, along with Skeptico's blogger roundup.

Exit polls

Many exit polls on election night had Kerry winning. In dredging that up, RFK, Jr., pens this howler: "Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science." Riiight. Advance polling isn't even an exact science. In the run-up to the 2004 elections I collected election predictions for bloggers, columnists, and polling organizations. Needless to say, many of the ones that predicted exact percentages and electoral votes were wildly wrong.

One of the most accurate election predictions in 2004 was this one, published in The Hill the day before the election: "Taking all that and more into account, an expert forecasting model suggests that Bush will get 51.6 percent of the two-party vote."

In fact Bush won 51.2% of the two-party vote. And do you know who made that 51.6% prediction? Mark Mellman, John Kerry's chief pollster in the 2004 election, made that prediction. Kerry's own pollster knew he was going to lose. In his article he wrote:

For months, though, I’ve been assessing President Bush’s vulnerability, but win or lose, it is important to acknowledge the daunting challenge Sen. John Kerry faces. Republicans have been spinning this fact for months and they are right.

First, we simply do not defeat an incumbent president in wartime. After wars surely, but never in their midst. Republicans have been spinning this fact for months, and they are correct.

Democrats have spoken often and powerfully about the nation’s economic problems. But by historical standards, they are not that bad. The “misery index” is 7.8 today but was 20.5 when Jimmy Carter was defeated. Economic models of elections show Bush winning 52-58 percent of the vote.

One could simply suggest that the models are off, but there is more to it than that.

These models essentially confirm that the level of economic pain we are now feeling is not commensurate with voting an incumbent president out of office.

UPDATE: Instapundit notes that even Mother Jones and NPR have debunked the Ohio charges.

Salon Rebuts RFK's Rolling Stone Article

Via Mystery Pollster (a Democratic pollster who has his own criticque), Salon has a rebuttal to RFK, Jr.'s Rolling Stone article about 2004 election fraud.

If you do read Kennedy's article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data. The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk," the report the Democrats released last June.

That report does indeed point out that many people -- 26 percent -- who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn't say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn't find their names listed. The Democrats' report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same -- a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy's claim of "astounding" partisanship.

Such techniques are evident throughout Kennedy's article. He presents a barrage of seemingly important, apparently damning data to show that Kerry won the race. It's only when you dig into his claims that you see what thin ice he's on.

Continue reading "Salon Rebuts RFK's Rolling Stone Article" »

Sorting the 2008 Presidential Candidates

CNN has the results a new poll on voter's views of potential 2008 presidential candidates.

Respondents were asked whether they would "definitely vote for," "consider voting for," or "definitely not vote for" three Democrats and three Republicans who might run for president in 2008.

Regarding potential Democratic candidates, 47 percent of respondents said they would "definitely not vote for" both Clinton, the junior senator from New York who is running for re-election this year, and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party's candidate in 2004.

Forty-eight percent said the same of former Vice President Al Gore, who has repeatedly denied he intends to run again for president. Among the Republicans, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani fared better than the Democrats, and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush fared worse.

One question is whether people would like Hillary more or less once they got to see more of her as a presidential candidate. My guess is that it would take a nuclear charm offensive to put lipstick on that pig. I also think the only way Hillary could win would be for the Republicans to run a candidate with no charisma (paging Dr. Frist! Dr. Frist to the white courtesy phone!). I don't think she could win against McCain or Giuliani, both of whom are personable and politically moderate.

In fact, Giuliani has so many liberal positions (abortion being the biggest one) his biggest challenge will be surviving the Republican primaries. If I were forced to make a bet today, I'd bet Giuliani is more likely to be veep than president.

Bonus! - This could be one race where Hillary's marital problems pale in comparison to the GOP candidates. From Washington Monthly via Michael Silence.

Lurking just over the horizon are liabilities for three Republicans who have topped several national, independent polls for the GOP's favorite 2008 nominee: Sen. John McCain (affair, divorce), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (affair, divorce, affair, divorce), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (divorce, affair, nasty divorce). Together, they form the most maritally challenged crop of presidential hopefuls in American political history.

Gingrich's hypocrisy on marital issues is staggering:

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

"Like You and Me Only Better" Illustrated

P.S. I'm going to experiment with having an 11:00 post. I'm already scheduling some posts to occur automatically. I'm going to schedule a post at 11:00 so it will come after the morning rush and show up at the top of some blog aggregators.

Jeff Cooper on the Separation of State and Other Institutions

Jeff Cooper on government separation:

Certain observers have recently raised a point about Thomas Jefferson's insistence on "a wall of separation between church and state." What Mr. Jefferson intended was the avoidance of a state church, such as the Church of England, but certainly not the abolition of any religious observance on government land.

More pertinent today might well be a wall of separation between state and school. We may not wish to be taught how to think by clergymen, but to me it seems much worse to be taught how to think by politicians.

Damn that's a good point. Another fine argument for school vouchers. No sane person would support a state church, paid for by compulsory taxes, with mandatory attendance. Yet we have state schools, paid for by compulsory taxes, with mandatory attendance.

Marriage, Children, Key to Dem. and Repub. Winnings

USA Today has done a fascinating study comparing party representation in Congressional districts with number of children and marriage rates. There's lots of good information in the article, and the chart below shows one astounding correlation. Republicans control the 25 Congressional districts with the highest marriage rate, while Democrats control the 25 Congressional districts with the lowest marriage rates.

Highest percentage married
Rank	District	Party	Representative	Married
1	Ga. 7	Rep.	John Linder	66.1%
2	Tenn. 7	Rep.	Marsha Blackburn	65.3%
3	Ga. 6	Rep.	Tom Price	65.0%
4	Colo. 6	Rep.	Tom Tancredo	64.8%
5	N.J. 5	Rep.	Scott Garrett	64.0%
6	Va. 10	Rep.	Frank Wolf	63.8%
7	Ill. 13	Rep.	Judy Biggert	63.8%
8	Fla. 5	Rep.	Ginny Brown-Waite	63.5%
9	Ill. 10	Rep.	Mark Kirk	63.4%
10	N.J. 11	Rep.	Rodney Frelinghuysen	63.4%
11	Ga. 10	Rep.	Nathan Deal	63.2%
12	Mo. 2	Rep.	Todd Akin	63.0%
13	Va. 11	Rep.	Tom Davis	63.0%
14	Texas 31	Rep.	John Carter	62.9%
15	Neb. 3	Rep.	Tom Osborne	62.4%
16	Ky. 5	Rep.	Hal Rogers	62.3%
17	Texas 11	Rep.	Mike Conaway	62.2%
18	Ala. 6	Rep.	Spencer Bachus	62.2%
19	Ind. 5	Rep.	Dan Burton	62.1%
20	Ala. 4	Rep.	Robert Aderholt	62.1%
21	N.Y. 3	Rep.	Pete King	62.1%
22	Utah 3	Rep.	Chris Cannon	62.1%
23	N.J. 7	Rep.	Mike Ferguson	62.0%
24	Wash. 8	Rep	Dave Reichert	62.0%
25	Ga. 8	Rep.	Lynn Westmoreland	61.9%

Lowest percentage married
Rank	District	Party	Representative	Married
412	Fla. 23	Dem.	Alcee Hastings	43.5%
413	Minn. 5	Dem.	Martin Olav Sabo	43.4%
414	Fla. 17	Dem.	Kendrick Meek	43.3%
415	N.J. 10	Dem.	Donald Payne	42.9%
416	N.Y. 11	Dem.	Major Owens	42.6%
417	Ill. 2	Dem.	Jesse Jackson Jr.	42.4%
418	Ohio 11	Dem.	Stephanie Tubbs Jones	42.1%
419	Ill. 1	Dem.	Bobby Rush	42.0%
420	Calif. 53	Dem.	Susan Davis	41.4%
421	Calif. 33	Dem.	Diane Watson	41.3%
422	Mich. 14	Dem.	John Conyers	41.1%
423	Calif. 8	Dem.	Nancy Pelosi	40.9%
424	Tenn. 9	Dem.	Harold Ford	40.8%
425	Ill. 7	Dem.	Danny Davis	40.5%
426	N.Y. 10	Dem.	Edolphus Towns	40.5%
427	La. 2	Dem.	William Jefferson	39.7%
428	N.Y. 15	Dem.	Charles Rangel	38.9%
429	Wis. 4	Dem.	Gwen Moore	38.4%
430	N.Y. 16	Dem.	Jos Serrano	38.3%
431	Mich. 13	Dem.	Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick	37.4%
432	Ga. 5	Dem.	John Lewis	37.3%
433	Mass. 8	Dem.	Michael Capuano	37.2%
434	Pa. 1	Dem.	Robert Brady	36.2%
435	Pa. 2	Dem.	Chaka Fattah	35.9%
436	D.C. *	Dem.	Eleanor Holmes Norton	34.5%

Source: USA TODAY analysis of Census Bureau data

How Would Comic Book Superheroes Vote?

Dave's Longbox has the answer. I liked this one:

• THE HULK – LIBERTARIAN

“Hulk just want to be left alone.”

I've Had That Feeling Before

Via #9.

Sarcastro on Presidential Nominees

"I'm not a big fan of how the presidential candidates are sort of foisted upon us. The P.R. machine that determines that Paris Hilton should be a household name is essentially the same mechanism that picks who is going to be the next President of the United States."
 -- Sarcastro

Hillary Clinton: "Me too!"

At 9:30 Saturday morning Hillary announced she's running for president.

Most P.R. people recommend announcing bad news late on Friday so it gets ignored. The theory is that reporters have gone home for the weekend and by Monday odds are some other news will have overtaken yours. You don't announce something on Friday afternoon that you want people to hear, much less Saturday.

Not only did Hillary announce on a weekend, she's announcing after Barrack Obama announced. The Sunday talk shows are already booked. The Sunday editorials are already written. Obama's the news, not her.

I expected Hillary to have more media savvy than this.

U.S. AG Gonzalez Denies Right to Habeus Corpus

Think Progress via The High Road:

Yesterday, during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claimed there is no express right to habeas corpus in the U.S. Constitution. Gonzales was debating Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) about whether the Supreme Court’s ruling on Guantanamo detainees last year cited the constitutional right to habeas corpus. Gonzales claimed the Court did not cite such a right, then added, “There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

Specter pushed back. “Wait a minute. The constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?” Specter told Gonzales, “You may be treading on your interdiction and violating common sense, Mr. Attorney General.”

Why is it that every attorney general is basically an enemy of rights and freedoms for citizens? It's one thing to not extend habeus corpus to non-citizens or enemy combatants (ADDED: during a time of war), but it's clear enough to me that it's a right for citizens.

Don't know what habeus corpus is or why it's important? See the Wikipedia entry.

More Hillary Mis-steps

Tam notes Hillary's shockingly blunt statement "I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative, smart energy; alternatives and technology that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence."

That's right up there with her famous "Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you" but that "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

It isn't hard to suss out that Hillary thinks your money belongs to the government. What's more, she isn't at all bashful about saying so.

Bill Richardson's Resume

I've been curious about Bill Richardson. He's the only major Democrat running for president who's a governor. That's a huge advantage.

Senators come with lots of baggage and no executive experience. Since JFK in 1960 no Congress critter has ever been elected president without being vice-president first. Before that it was Harding in 1920. The four most recent presidents who weren't vice-presidents first were all governors: Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Carter.

Besides his current career as New Mexico's governor, Richarson is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Secretary of Energy, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. I learned all of that from this Matt Yglesias piece (thanks, Sven), which also details the challenge Richardson has in getting media attention.

I'm still reading up on Richardson and issues, but his record on gun control is mixed. He voted for the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, but has since been endorsed by the NRA. In 2003 he signed shall-issue CCW into law in New Mexico.

John Edwards, TV Preacher

The latest from John Edwards is starting to tie things together, as he tells us what Jesus thinks:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says Jesus would be appalled at how the United States has ignored the plight of the suffering, and that he believes children should have private time to pray at school."

This is a vignette of Edwards in his days as a trial lawyer who spoke in tongues:

But the obstetrician, [Edwards] argued in an artful blend of science and passion, failed to heed the call. By waiting 90 more minutes to perform a breech delivery, rather than immediately performing a Caesarean section, Mr. Edwards said, the doctor permanently damaged the girl's brain.

"She speaks to you through me," the lawyer went on in his closing argument. "And I have to tell you right now — I didn't plan to talk about this — right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you."

The jury came back with a $6.5 million verdict in the cerebral palsy case, and Mr. Edwards established his reputation as the state's most feared plaintiff's lawyer.

And like Oral Roberts, during the 2004 elections John Edwards promised he can heal you:

"We will do stem cell research," he vowed. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases. America just lost a great champion for this cause in Christopher Reeve. People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk again with stem cell research."

John Edwards, TV preacher.