Like Victory

The Poughkeepsie Journal has found an underutilized asset for the Democrats (But just try to get someone to drive that bus to the polls):

The new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

You would think they’d get at least 10,000-15,000 votes out of that many living-impaired.

Motorway Copropraxia

An important style-setter has been nabbed:

A Swede who delights in giving speeding cameras the finger while driving past at high velocity in a car without license plates has been caught.

The man, who has been recorded three times while giving the camera the finger at a speed high enough to qualify for automatic loss of license was taken by police on the E6 highway near Sarpsborg on Sunday night.

If he does any time for this, the terrorists have won.

Scary Stuff

In A Look at What Happens if Democrats Win Congress Deroy Murdock warns, "Hypothetically, if Democrats win Congress, don't expect a mild left turn. Watch the U.S. Capitol building spin nearly 180 degrees."

He’s not kidding. An excerpt:

Foreign Affairs Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, with an 88 ACU rating, could yield to Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, with an eight.

On Intelligence, Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, who earned zeros from the ADA and AFL-CIO, might swap with West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, who received 100 and 79 from those groups.

Today's GOP House speaker, majority leader, and the chairmen of Ways and Means, Budget, Appropriations, Judiciary, International Relations and Intelligence average a 91 ACU rating. Their Democratic counterparts score seven. Conversely, compare the GOP's average ADA rating of four with a 95 for these Democrats.

Read the whole thing. And vote.

Values Make Conservatives More Generous

Anyone surprised by this should get out more:

Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is about to become the darling of the religious right wing in America — and it’s making him nervous.

The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in the liberal arts, Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income.

In the book, to be released next month, he cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives — from church attendance to two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services — make conservatives more generous than liberals.

Liberals who only give when hassled by that annoying race-for-a-cause guy at work will reflexively denounce the extensive data analysis. Still, those with any generosity of spirit you have to feel for Brooks. He will be altogether banished from his friends’ wine and brie parties and may even be asked to turn in his Barbra Streisand tickets.

Does Diebold Make Radios?

Today’s bankruptcy filing by Air America Radio comes in the same week that Google’s announced acquisition of YouTube has pundits waking up to the left’s Web 2.0 strategy. The temptation to play this as the passing of the torch from old medium to new, however, misses the bigger picture.

Make no mistake: The left’s radio strategy failed long ago. The demand for humorless, defeatist propaganda never materialized, and today’s bankruptcy filing is simply an echo of its earlier implosion in the marketplace.

Obituaries may be premature, however. Like Fidel Castro or some horror film zombie, we may not have seen or heard the last of this coffin-dodging network. Watch for it to stagger on another day.

[Read the rest at The Right Angle at Human Events Online]

Real enough

I keep hearing pundits dismiss radical Islam by arguing that, well, it is nothing compared to the threat of global nuclear war. The latest pundit, however, is none other than Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who transmits the meme thusly: “I don't mean to understate the threat, which is real enough. But it's not on the order of the Cold War, you know, and we won that one.”

Stephen Green disagrees: “It’s not often I disagree with Glenn Reynolds on an issue of substance, but in this case, the Instapundit couldn’t be more wrong.” You can read his argument here.

I’d like to disagree with Reynolds on a different point, without getting into the relative costs to society (however expressed) of high-probability, low-consequence events versus low-probability, high-consequence events (e.g., smallpox attacks, sea level rise).

Simply put, as long as terrorists keep feeling for the threshold at which one or a series of low-consequence level events can go all-consequential for a civilization with a high division of labor (long supply chains, everything JIT, critical interdependencies all over), we have no more business dismissing “low-consequence” threats from radical Islam than a man six stories up a ladder has laughing at a one-legged terrorist on the ground trying to kick the ladder out from under him.