Thomas Sowell occasionally starts a column with the phrase, "Random thoughts on the passing scene." One I particularly liked the other day: "As a result of "evolving standards" and "nuanced" judicial decisions, we no longer have clear-cut rights. We have a ticket to a crapshoot in a courtroom. That ticket is worth a lot more to those with slick lawyers than to ordinary citizens."
Some of mine for tonight, since I caught up on my gopusa.com news roundups:
Here's a shocker headline - Report: More Democrat than Republican Operatives Involved in Voter Fraud. This story details electoral fraud in a number of states and cited the five worst cities: Philadelphia, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Seattle, and Cleveland.
Just from my memory, Philadelphia had some irregularities in its last mayoral election based on an FBI investigation of the incumbent mayor John Street (some claimed it was a smear by the Bush administration,) Milwaukee was the home of the Democrat operatives that slashed the tires on GOP-hired vans Election Day eve, St. Louis (polls held open for extra time in 2000, perhaps costing John Ashcroft a Senate seat and placing in his place a dead guy,) Seattle was the epicenter of the Rossi v. Gregoire "found votes" snafu, and Cleveland is in Ohio. Enough said.
Notice all of these counties are "blue"? If they can't steal it at the ballot box, they get judges who will let them I guess.
Speaking of blue voting, there was a statement by Robert Novak where he claimed the GOP is in trouble, shown by the close vote in Ohio's 2nd Congressional District. Novak's clain was that the struggles we're having in the War on Terror will come back to hurt the GOP in 2006. My beef with that opinion is twofold. Number one, Novak is known to be against our Iraqi involvement, whereas I'm a supporter of the mission; and secondly, the Ohio GOP is in a world of hurt right now because of the Coingate scandal and the horrid approval numbers of the three main Republicans: Gov. Bob Taft and Sens. Mike DeWine and George Voinovich.
The problem in Ohio, then, has nothing to do with the War on Terror, but more to do with the moderate state government. They have no problem with giving us back money when there's a surplus (a good idea) but the problem is that they don't know how not to spend money. So, when the economy got tough, they had to raise taxes to cover the spending they thought was affordable a couple years before. They even raised the sales tax for a couple years - surprisingly it wasn't made permanent, like my old hometown Toledo's "temporary" 3/4% income tax that has been in effect since 1982.
There's a full blog post someplace in my brain regarding how the GOP has lost its way on fiscal conservatism, so I'd rather do that as a full post and not go into it now.
Well, we don't have to worry about Chinese controlling one of our oil companies, the CNOOC bid to take over Unocal was rejected. There's a free-trader argument that can be made that objections to the takeover based on national security were outweighed by the true capitalism of highest bidder wins, but I'm not into letting a company unencumbered by competition at home and propped up by a totalitarian government have a piece of our free industrial society.
Finally, this article last Wednesday regarding our border security. I can't say I'm surprised, heaven knows I disagree with President Bush on his handling of the borders. But I'm more disappointed that this was withheld as secret. I suppose the excuse would be that it would be used in the election against Bush, but Kerry was already the master of the flip-flop. I'm doubtful Kerry's border solution would have been any better.
It does beg the question whether the border problem will hurt the GOP in 2006. While I can still argue for now that there's a big difference between the parties, it's unfortunate that the powers-that-be in the GOP sometimes seem to want to drift the party leftward when the mood of the electorate is moving right. It's almost like that once they got power in D.C. (or Columbus) they saw that providing goodies was the key to staying in power, rather than following the principles that enticed voters to put them there in the first place.
So the electorate becomes more frustrated and loses interest in voting. This gives the extremists a disproportionate hold on power, and there's more extremists who want government to have a bigger role (after all, they know voting for larger government keeps their bread buttered) than there are extremists who want government to be checked back to the Founders' intent.
Hopefully we will learn from the history that shows that governments tend to become more totalitarian as they go on.
