Back in Arkansas, we all knew the score.  The hill country voted Republican.  Blacks did not, nor did most of the delta.  But the dead always voted Democrat. In many states the rights of dead voters are respected, but not, apparently, in South Dakota.  From Fox News:

If you vote by mail, but die before Election Day, does your vote count? It depends on where you lived.

Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote...

Take the case of Florence Steen, an ailing 88-year-old grandmother born before women had the right to vote. One of her last wishes was to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. She wanted to be part of history, said her daughter Kathy Krause.

Steen was confined to a hospice bed in Rapid City, S.D., when she was brought an absentee ballot weeks before the June 3 primary. She studied it a long time, then marked her choice with such determination her daughter feared she would poke through the paper.

Steen died on Mother’s Day. With a heavy heart, her daughter took the ballot and dropped it in a mailbox. “In my mind, her vote counted,” Krause said. “My mother believed she had voted for a woman to be president.”

But the women down at the county courthouse told Krause the ballot had to be tossed because state law declared a voter must be alive on Election Day.

So Krause passed that word to the Clinton campaign. And Clinton drew great applause when she told the story in her concession speech four days after the South Dakota primary.

Ken, once again your ignorance is appalling. I just don't think that you have any clue concerning history or reality with what is happening in Israel. I am inclined to think that this is by choice. If you actually knew what was going on it would force you to reconsider your paradigms. I have continually chided you to seek education on the topic. I still do...please get educated!

Here is a good place to start: http://www.btselem.org/English/ This is the Israeli Information Center. Be sure to check out the pdf file about the "separation wall" in the West Bank. This is what W was talking about when he referenced not being able to make a nation out of "swiss cheese."

He murdered an Israeli policeman.

He murdered Danny Haran in front of his four year old daughter, Einat.

He beat the little girl's brains out with a rifle butt.

Her mother, Smadar Haran, hid in a crawl space with her two year old daughter, and accidentally suffocated the child while trying to keep her quiet. 

Lambrou filed a petition for a temporary injunction in an Athens court. He wanted to keep OLKE, Greece's gay and lesbian association, from continuing to use the word "lesbian." Lambrou himself was born on the island of Lesbos, the home of the poet Sappho, classical muse of all women who love women. Lambrou happens to love his native Lesbos. OLKE, he insists, has stolen the word "lesbian." Women from Lesbos are constantly confused with lesbian women, says Lambrou, who believes real Lesbians can only exist on Lesbos.

Lambrou and his actions were met with resounding applause, in Greece and around the world. Residents of Lesbos contacted him, offering their services as expert witnesses. He even received a call from Canada, from a man originally from Lesbos, who emigrated more than 30 years ago and insisted that he still suffers from the confusion.

Suddenly everything seemed possible. What if an island in the Aegean Sea manages to triumph over the entire world? What if lesbian is just a geographic designation, perhaps even a "brand," something that can be registered and protected?

The matter was brought before an Athens court in early June. The gallery filled with residents of the island of Lesbos, along with homosexual men and women.

"My wife is a Lesbian, my daughter is a Lesbian and I am a Lesbian," Lambrou's [testimony] began, to laughter from the gallery.

"Do you hear those people laughing?" the witness asked the female judge. "All of Greece is laughing about it. And now you can imagine how we are treated abroad."

Just as John F. Kennedy set his sights on the moon, Al Gore is challenging the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace.

Ok, let's think about this.  A certain amount of sun hits the earth every year.  Fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, contain solar energy stored over, well, millions of years.  So how much of fossil fuel output can solar energy replace, given the most efficient technology?  What's one divided by millions?  Biofuels, by the way, are just another form of solar energy collection.  Wind energy is solar energy plus the push from the earth's rotation.  Only in some places does the wind blow hard and regular, more or less.  Those places tend to be far away from the centers of energy demand.  What is the total bounty from wind energy?   Probably a lot less than the potential solar bounty.  Add to that the geothermal energy Gore is talking about, and you could maybe keep the lights on in Las Vegas for a good holiday weekend.  If anybody could get there. 

The Register in England has a great article about the Cambridge physicist David J C MacKay.  He is working on a book that adds up all the numbers.  Renewable energy sources don't add up.  The only energy source that can substantially add to our energy stocks is nuclear power.  Fast breeder reactors may be the ticket.  Gore isn't much interested in nuclear power, even though it creates no green house emissions.  

Al Gore warns us about global warming, and gives us charts of Manhattan underwater to make his point.   But it's worth while asking whether increased CO2 in the atmosphere might have some advantages.  Gore and the global warming evangelists see CO2 as pollution, but that's not the way the plants see it.  From Investor's Business Daily:

Even as the G-8 Summit announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, researchers at the Johann Heinrich von Theunen Institute in Germany find the rise in carbon dioxide levels may in fact be a boon to plant life on Earth.

The Theunen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon since 1999, trained CO2 jets on plants, raising CO2 concentrations in the air around them to 550 parts per million (ppm), significantly higher than today's levels.

The researchers announced on Tuesday that such increased exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields.

"Output increased by about 10% for barley, beets and wheat" when the plants were exposed to the higher levels, according to the Institute's Hans-Joachim Weigel.

That the Earth is getting greener due to higher CO2 levels was confirmed recently by satellite data analyzed by scientists Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the earth's vegetation increased by a whopping 6.2%.

"Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates," explained Lawrence Solomon in a June 7 article on the Running/Nemani findings in Canada's Financial Post.

"Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."

I have been one of the few conservatives in recent years who had anything good to say about the Washington Post.  The WaPo is a solidly Democratic paper, with a healthy liberal bias on almost all political questions.  But it seemed to me that they were what the New Republic used to be: a liberal publication capable of thinking without a constant regard for the party line.  For that reason, I have been a loyal reader.  When they disagree with me, which is a lot of the time, I know they aren't just knee-jerk liberals. 

The current editorial on Barack Obama's Iraq policy is one of the best pieces of its kind in years. 

BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: "They said we couldn't leave when violence was up, they say we can't leave when violence is down." Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might "refine" his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.

Mr. Obama reiterated yesterday that he would consult with U.S. commanders and the Iraqi government and "make tactical adjustments as we implement this strategy." However, as Mr. McCain quickly pointed out, he delivered his speech before traveling to Iraq -- before his meetings with Gen. David H. Petraeus and the Iraqi leadership. American commanders will probably tell Mr. Obama that from a logistical standpoint, a 16-month withdrawal timetable will be difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. Iraqis will say that a pullout that is not negotiated with the government and disregards the readiness of Iraqi troops will be a gift to al-Qaeda and other enemies. If Mr. Obama really intends to listen to such advisers, why would he lock in his position in advance?

The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

Of course The “New Yorker” is standing by their cover despite the condemnation that is coming pretty much from all sides including both the Obama and McCain campaign’s. They state that the satire was obvious and that their readership was smart enough to figure out the real meaning.

The problem with that logic of course is that while the “New Yorker’s” readers might be smart enough, as the WND poll shows, not everyone is a “New Yorker” kind of reader and all that cover has really done is put an image to the ridiculous beliefs of those who refuse to do even the most basic research and who probably shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

Obama is in muslin or portrayed as Muslim? Big difference Ken. Also the "cleric" is none other than Osama bin Laden. That the wingnuts will use this against Obama is already evident in their blogs. Unfortunately the people that they pander to do not have "a sophisticated sense of humor." There are large parts of the populace that still believe that Obama is a secret Muslim. I actually kind of liked the cartoon but I also think that it was in poor taste given the sensitivity of such issues.

My esteemed Keloland colleague Cory Heidelberger still clings to the dream.  He informs us that an NPR series makes socialized medicine look pretty good.  No! Ya think?  I have to say that I am skeptical of any national health care plan at this point, free market or othewise.  And maybe they will take away my conservative card, but I am not convinced that a decent national health service can't work.  A lot of reasonable folks say that the systems in France and the Netherlands is pretty good.  Of course, these were the same reasonable people who told us that Castro's Cuba was a model for Latin America.  But a stopped clock is right twice a day, so maybe socialism in health care can work. 

But if you are going to make it work, you will have to make sure it doesn't work like socialism.  The latter surely ranks as the most frequently tested idea in modern politics.  The results have ranged from bad to disastrous.  Just look at France, which is said to have this great medical care system.  I wrote a lot about France back when mobs of immigrant youth were burning thousands of cars every day, instead of a few hundred on Saturday night (which is what passes for normal).  Jurgen Reinhoudt at Real Clear Politics has this:

To say that France's social model is far from perfect is an understatement: in spite of the state absorbing more than 50% of GDP, France has suffered, since the 1980s, from rising child poverty rates, persistently high unemployment, a chronic sense of economic malaise, and the continual enrichment of the system's "insiders" at the expense of the system's "outsiders." More importantly, France's social model fails to deliver precisely what it proclaims to: economic justice, inter-generational fairness, economic opportunity and social protection, particularly to young workers entering the labor market, minorities, immigrants, middle-aged women and other vulnerable groups.

The American Government seems all but dysfunctional in the face of the current energy crisis.  Part of the problem is that there isn't really a crisis, just yet.  Gas prices in the U.S. seem frighteningly high, but in constant dollars, they are about where they were in the early eighties.  But unlike earlier energy bottlenecks, this one seems unlikely to go away.  The reason is that China and India are unlikely to go away.  If energy pressures are likely to increase in the near future, and I think they are, we ought to be doing what we can before the real crisis happens. 

The problem is simple: demand is increasing faster than supply.  For that, there are only two solutions, and both would better than either or none: increase supply and lower demand.  Almost every pious politician on either side of the room likes to talk about alternative energy and energy independence.  But the one is vain and the other is utter nonsense.  Neither biofuels nor wind power are yet contributing anything to our energy supply.  Rather, both cost more than they produce.  But even if cost effective technologies come on line, neither wind nor corn will ever produce more than a marginal bounty in energy.  There just isn't enough energy in a years sunshine or a year of blustery days to matter. In the foreseeable future, the world economy will run on oil.

So what is left.  Reducing demand by increasing energy efficiency offers real dividends.  A lot of this will be taken care of by the market.  Americans are already shifting to smaller cars as the numbers go up over gas stations.  But if you like big government solutions, it's probably a good time to increase fuel efficiency standards for vehicles across the board.  Mortimer Zuckerman has a piece, "Stop the Energy Insanity," in U.S. News. 

The first fuel economy standard law, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or cafe, was passed in 1975—a mandate that doubled the fuel efficiency of the typical car sold in the United States between 1974 and 1985 from 13.8 mpg to 27.5 mpg (even though these measurements took place in favorable controlled conditions rather than on actual highways). It has flattened out since then, in contrast to Europe, which now demands 44 mpg. An effort here in 1990 to lift the fuel standard to 40 mpg for cars aroused furious opposition led by Democrats from automaking states, like Michigan's Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. John Dingell. Had that bill been passed, we would be using 3 million fewer barrels a day.

We can get past the lame repetition of the decades-old argument over the virtues of offshore drilling. Simply put: To refuse to exploit our vast oil reserves is insane. The United States is one of the few countries in the world that choose to lock up their natural resources by dramatically restricting production and exploration...  In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we're talking about a tiny corner of 2,200 acres (an area the size of a small airport) out of 19 million acres. The proposed drilling promises to yield an estimated 10.4 billion barrels, representing well over 20 years of imports from Saudi Arabia. Drilling in ANWR would take place on the coastal plain, a mosquito-plagued tundra and bog in the summer, not in the snowcapped mountains of ANWR that television pictures would have you believe are at stake. In the winter, the area would also be traversed on ice roads that melt in the spring. This would do no permanent damage to an environment in one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent—except to inconvenience some caribou that might have to find a different place to mate. We cannot lose over $40 billion a year to serve the caribou.

While I am solidly prolife with regard to abortion, I have never been opposed to birth control as such.  But it is one thing to believe, as I do, that individuals should have access to a wide range of birth control technologies, and another to form judgments about the effects of such technologies across whole societies.  The dramatic decline in births per woman has had very unfortunate consequences for places like South Dakota, and poses similarly serious demographic problems for Europe and Japan.  These societies all have lavish retirement policies, but those policies depend upon younger workers funding them.  The supply of the latter is drying up rapidly.  I do not know what to do about this, but it seems worth noting.

China represents a rather different problem, one that may be of concern not only for her government and her neighbors but for the rest of the world.  In The New Republic, Mara Hvistendahl has an article entitled "No Country for Young Men."  In China, two powerful forces have amplified each other: one is the one child policy, brutally enforced by party officials all over the country, and the other is the strong preference for male children.  The result of this has been that millions of China's daughters were never allowed to celebrate their first birthday.  You might suppose that the world's feminists would find something wrong with that, and maybe they have.  I have not noticed it.  It may be that feminists are largely incapable of seeing anything wrong with birth control, however it is employed. 

But there is a much more serious problem coming to term in China.  Hvistendahl begins with the enormous popularity of war games among China's young men.  Then she points out what this might mean:

The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country's three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.

By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.

"Flip flopping" or "waffling" is a political necessity. Being uncompromising and adhering dogmatically to an issue is usually not good policy.

Not a bad post Dr. Blanchard. Although Lincoln would have done anything to preserve the Union including allowing slavery (and also suspending habeus corpus). How would you rank W with him? Would he have been president of the CSA? Texas and privilege...I bet after First Bull Run he would have declared "mission accomplished!" Just think how many lives could have been saved! Anyway here is an interesting link for you: http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx Check it out and see how you do! Sorry there is no listing in the rankings for DSU but considering that Harvard seniors only got 69% it is perhaps better not to know. Enjoy and happy Independence day!

Gee Ken, I thought you of all people would appreciate ethanol. Not only does it cost you less to fill up your SUV but also has the added benefit of helping to alleviate the fundamental cause of the earth's problems--overpopulation!

In the Bush administration the kid would not even have gotten a job unless he passed such crucial questions as: "Who did you vote for?; and "What is your stance on Roe?" Obviously key prerequisites to getting a job reconstructing Iraq. This is past being "antithetical to freedom of thought." This is political nepotism of the worst sort resulting in negligence bordering on criminal.

By Anne E. Kornblut
POWDER SPRINGS, Ga. -- Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday broadly dismissed recent stories that he is moving toward the political center, saying he has always held certain centrist views -- on encouraging faith, on the right of individuals to own guns -- and that attempts to portray him otherwise are the work of cynics.

Obama, egged on by a raucous audience, said he would like to address "this whole notion that I am shifting to the center, or that I am flip-flopping."  "The people who say this apparently haven't been listening to me," Obama said.

In the past few weeks, Obama has broken two pledges (to take public financing in the general election and to filibuster legal immunity for telecoms that cooperated with the government in terrorist surveillance); has belittled his own rhetoric during the primary campaign (saying it could get "overheated and amplified" on the issue of trade); redefined his promise to meet without preconditions with the leaders of hostile states until it's basically meaningless; endorsed a Supreme Court decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun ban his campaign had previously said he supported; and made muddy, centrist-sounding statements about his positions on Iraq and abortion that he had to go back and try to clarify.

One issue or another might not have made much difference. Tacking toward the center in a general election is as common as kissing babies in a campaign, and lord knows the Democrats need to expand their coalition.

But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.

So there he was in Zanesville, Ohio, pandering to evangelicals by promising not just to maintain the Bush program of investing taxpayer dollars in religious-based initiatives, but to expand it. Separation of church and state? Forget about it.

And there he was, in the midst of an election campaign in which the makeup of the Supreme Court is as important as it has ever been, agreeing with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas that the death penalty could be imposed for crimes other than murder. What was the man thinking?

Only an idiot would think or hope that a politician going through the crucible of a presidential campaign could hold fast to every position, steer clear of the stumbling blocks of nuance and never make a mistake. But Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader — more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most.

You would be able to listen to him without worrying about what the meaning of “is” is.

This is why so many of Senator Obama’s strongest supporters are uneasy, upset, dismayed and even angry at the candidate who is now emerging in the bright light of summer.

The story began prosaically enough. Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his way toward a degree, was in the habit of reading during work breaks. Last October he was immersed in "Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan."

Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired. Taking the book to the campus, Mr. Sampson says he was told, was "like bringing pornography to work." That it was a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s in no way impressed the union rep.

The assistant affirmative action officer who next summoned the student was similarly unimpressed. Indeed she was, Mr. Sampson says, irate at his explanation that he was, after all, reading a scholarly book. "The Klan still rules Indiana," Marguerite Watkins told him – didn't he know that? Mr. Sampson, by now dazed, pointed out that this book was carried in the university library. Yes, she retorted, you can get Klan propaganda in the library.

The university has allowed no interviews with Ms. Watkins or any other university official involved in the case. Still, there can be no disputing the contents of the official letter that set forth the university's case.

Mr. Sampson stood accused of "openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers." The statement, signed by chief affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston, asserted that her office had completed its investigation of the charges brought by Ms. Nakea William, his co-worker – that Mr. Sampson had continued, despite complaints, to read a book on this "inflammatory topic." "We conclude," the letter informed him, "that your conduct constitutes racial harassment. . . ." A very serious matter, with serious consequences, it went on to point out.