Who’s happy now?

Damn straight, the latest SCOTUS ruling helps out the Democrats.

It helps them out in precisely the same way that Roe v. Wade helps out Republicans — it takes a hot-button issue off the table in the “you must vote this way or lose this right!” sense. (A third of Republican voters are pro-choice.)

Still rather have the ruling go my way. Heller vs. DC (re-)found the right (9-0 — what they disagree on is the scope of what is a reasonable restriction), and the latest case followed naturally — of course it should be incorporated, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights.

A friend asked me the other night whether I might not have preferred to see Kerry win in ’04, staving off this congress and this president — my answer, after some thought, was no. I love John Roberts and Sam Alito too much. I cannot spare them.

Orwellian, yes

Yeah, this amused me too.

I think people remember…

Me, I just say I’m in favour of defeating bad people in wars, and whatever gets us there quicker, I prefer.

Being a political ghoul

So, um, now that Robert Byrd has gone to the Great Klavern in the sky — or rather, down below — and has done it before the July 3rd deadline, there will be a special election to fill the seat come November.

Chances of the Senate flipping — though still very slim — just went up.

Update: Is a Klan crack in bad taste today? Probably a little. But hey, so too was the membership. Even once it has been recanted, the jokes remain.

It’ll be a strange Senate without Robert Byrd. End of an era.

Weigel out…

I’m of two minds about the Dave Weigel firing/resignation at the Washington Post.

See, it’s terrible that his private correspondence became the reason he had to go.

But.

The man was billed as sympathetic to the right — a registered Republican who identified as libertarian, albeit an Obama voter.

Instead, he was part of the Journolist, a listserv for leftwing journalists to coordinate their message, where he repeatedly showed contempt for his subject — the political right.

To me, that was misrepresentation, if not outright fraud.

He had to go. Let him become an openly leftwing blogger/pundit. He’ll have a bright future.

Don’t lie to us about who your people are.

Update: Who are his people?

Actually, I can see why Stacy McCain has sympathy for him…

(Strange thing — the more I see of McCain’s dealings with people, the more I think he’s a great big marshmallow and a really nice guy. Whereas from his writing alone, I thought he would hit people with a two-by-four. There may be cultural differences between North and South at play here.)

About those protests…

Burning police cars? Seriously?

I wouldn’t mind a little less restraint on the part of the police, actually…

Update: Here’s a different POV.

Seriously?

Well, if we blow it, here’s why.

Woman Worried About Fluoride in the Water: 48 percent, Harry Reid: 41 percent

Guy Who Wants to Eliminate the Department of Education: 49 percent, Jack Conway: 41 percent

Ayn Rand Fan: 45, Russ Feingold: 46

NBA Star Who Couldn’t Hit Free Throws: 47, Former Two-Term Governor of Oregon: 45

Guy Who Says He Learned Accountability From Wrestling: 51, Nine-Term Incumbent Earl Pomeroy: 44

But it’s kind of hilariously awesome, this list.

Update:  On the other hand, it shows how far we’ve fallen.

In the 1980s, we won more than 40 states three times, vowing to eliminate the Department of Education, and in 1994 we won Congress with a similar promise.

Instead, we got the drinking age raised to 21 when Reagan teamed up with a bunch of fun-hating Democrats during an election year.

We suck at getting our policies enacted.

Divisions continue

Gates wanted to keep McChrystal?  [via Hot Air]  Interesting.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates backed keeping Gen. Stanley McChrystal on the job because he was vital to the war effort in Afghanistan, but he was overruled, a senior Pentagon official told CNN’s Barbara Starr.

The official has direct knowledge of the events but declined to be identified because of the internal administration discussions.

Go figure.

***

On another subj., this is an interesting datapoint:

Even more about McChrystal: now it can be told. The story about him voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really. This puts to rest another false rumor: that McChrystal deliberately precipitated his firing because he wants to run for President.

I would guess that McChrystal is who General Petraeus had in mind when he told liberal senators, “There are more Democrats around here than you think.”

I’d thought at the time that that was Petraeus tipping them off that he was one of them.  (That was a wrong read — apparently Petraeus is a moderate Rockefeller/Eisenhower Republican.)

But whatever.  Still say that Obama had no choice in this, and he made the best of a bad situation.

Update:  About leaks, incidentally.

They’re not always bad — the Reagan administration leaked like a sieve, and they did all right.  The Bush (the Younger) administration never leaked, and that actually worked against them.  Had a few more internal debates leaked — like the ones over interrogation techniques, and over legal doctrine — it might actually have helped W’s image out, some.  People got the idea that he had surrounded himself with yes-men, and that simply wasn’t so.  (They just were very good at keeping their disagreements behind closed doors, as they were supposed to do.)

Still, when these things leak less than 24 hours after people are told to keep it zipped, that’s not good.

A fall election, northern version?

I would not be wholly surprised to see the 40th Parliament go the full four years, and for the next Canadian election to be in October 2012. It’s actually a pretty stable arrangement.

But if you don’t think that’s so, Greg Weston says we’re going to the polls this fall.

Recent public-opinion surveys suggest the Harper government has sustained remarkably little damage from the months of parliamentary mudslinging, head-butting, stonewalling and general Conservative contempt for the whole process.

That means Harper might even get away with claiming an election is necessary to make Parliament work.

So, why the rush? Why not wait for the opposition parties to make the move, say, in spring 2011 over the next budget?

The first reason is precisely that that budget is expected to be a deficit-cutting slash-and-burn exercise rarely popular with voters.

The second reason to rush the writ is the Harper government’s destiny with the hellfire of St. Sheila.

This fall, Auditor General Sheila Fraser is expected to release an audit of the government’s economic stimulus program — more precisely, what happened to all those billions of taxpayers’ dollars shovelled out the door in haste.

Can you spell boondoggle?

Harper’s end-game, of course, is trampling the Liberals and winning a majority.

While the polls have yet to show that as a likely outcome, Conservatives are convinced they can gain ground against the Grits in an election campaign. …

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but when the autumn leaves drop, so likely will the writ.

Maybe it’s so. Maybe it isn’t. If Harper were as merciless as his analysts in the press gallery say, he’d have gone to the polls in spring or fall 2007, and he would have gotten his majority.

But he didn’t, and so here we are today.

If he does go for it, though, here’s the case for him keeping his job:

Finally, the Liberals and NDP together might win more seats than the Conservatives, but not a majority. In that case, the advantage remains with Mr. Harper’s plurality. The red-orange coalition could form its own government only with the support of the BQ, and we saw how unpopular that was in 2008, when Canadians judged it a political non-starter.

The bottom line: Michael Ignatieff’s best chance to become prime minister is for the Liberals to win more seats than the Conservatives, and his second-best chance is for the Liberals and NDP together to win an absolute majority of seats. Otherwise, Mr. Harper will continue in office.

I’m not sure I agree.

I think we have hit the point that if we saw a re-run of the 39th Parliament — a Conservative plurality, but with the Liberals and the NDP able to combine for a larger seat count than the Tories — we very well might see a coalition government unite to topple the Tories.

On the other hand, Paul Wells seems to agree with him.

***

In any event, I don’t think we’re going till 2012.

Still, it’d be fun to see another election up here…

Update:  That being said, I like how things are in Canada.

Although I think the PM has a decent shot at a majority if we went to the polls now, why risk it?  There’s a non-trivial chance he could lose it all, and we need someone around with his principles on the global foreign policy stage till 2012, since the United States has abdicated its role as backstop against stupid international ideas (cf. global bank tax, global carbon scheme, UN Human Rights Council, UN Women’s Rights Commission).

Canada under Harper is all that’s standing between the world and a whole raft of stupid things.

So, no — I hope there’s no election this fall.  It’s too dangerous.

Sore winners?

People are now posting clips of President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton expressing doubts about or explicitly denouncing General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, along with screenshots of the infamous “General Betray Us” ads that have now been scrubbed from the MoveOn.Org website.

It’s fun because Petraeus is now the indispensable man — the hero on a white horse who may yet salvage our position in Afghanistan.

Is it in bad taste to bring up these past infelicities? Perhaps.

On the other hand, I wish we’d done a bit more of that after the 1980s. It might have helped forestall some of the worse domestic policy decisions of 2008 and 2009.

So please do spike the football a few times more over the surge.

That said, when President Obama sounds most like Bill Kristol, I have a hard time complaining.

I’m just happy he made what I think is the right call.

Update, next day: Is it wrong of me to enjoy this?

The earth shakes

No, not because McChrystal’s gone — I think demoting Petraeus to be theatre commander is a good idea.  Shows Obama’s serious about it.

But… yeah, there was just an earthquake here in Toronto.

Wacky.

Update:  Closer to Ottawa, apparently.