Charles Paul Freund has an interesting analysis of that Chalabi article I linked to a few days ago here.

I wonder if the people who have been upset over John Kerry’s support from foreign leaders will bat an eye over Putin’s endorsement of Bush.

Yes, that sounds perilously close to an Andrew Sullivan impression. And no, I don’t really care if they bat an eye or not. Foreign leaders should say whatever the hell they want, and we should give it as much weight as we want.

This overwrought piece by Adam Cohen on The New York Times’ editorial page amused me to no end. In it, the author basically works himself into a lather about the post-apocalyptic hellscape America would become if the Supreme Court were populated by five or more Scalias and Thomases. This, of course, is my wildest dream — yet I digress.

My favorite passage was this one:

If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution’s final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs.

Let me get this straight: Affirmative action is not just a policy — deemed permissible under the Constitution — it is now actually a right? Well, if Cohen believes that special preferences are rights, then, yes, Scalia and Thomas would roll back a number of “rights.”

God, that crazy black Supreme Court justice — always trying to take rights away from himself and people like him.

In not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, someone suggested today that workers in Iraq — helping the coalition — be given GPS tracking devices. Maybe even be implanted with them on a voluntary basis.

It would certainly make finding them easier if they were kidnapped. And possibly lead us to the terrorists’ bases. Though I suspect the terrorists could adapt quickly if they knew we were doing this — either violently removing the devices or using them for other devious purposes.

Interesting, though.

I haven’t really followed global-warming politics since my first gigs interning, circa 1997. But this seems significant:

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” the famous plot, published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

…

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick.

Basically, you can put completely random data through the program, and it finds a trend there, too.

This has typically been the problem with all computer modeling of global warming, to the best of my understanding. The models are created with predetermined outcomes, and then tweaked until they give the desired results.

Luckily, even though Kyoto is a European obsession (mainly because they know we’ll never sign it), neither party seems to see global warming — or “the environment” in general — as a winning issue anymore.

Three cheers for selfish capitalism!

This article (actually, cover story) from The New Republic, by my editorial page colleague Robert A. George, comes the closest yet to convincing me to vote for Kerry:

It would be wonderful to believe the president’s promise that the war in Iraq will lead to democracy in a troubled region. An immigrant–I was born in the West Indies–tends to absorb the earnest, spiritual myths of his adopted nation even more than those native-born. Democracy is indeed a human value. But initiating a war to “liberate” an entire region far from our shores can hardly be called a conservative cause. It will be impossible to restrain a government kept on a permanent war footing. And, in liberty’s name abroad, liberty at home will inevitably be compromised. It already has been.

There’s much, much more. If you can’t read it through TNR online, run out and buy a copy today. Or, you could walk. You’d get their slower. But it probably wouldn’t be sold out.

I guess you could also drive. But you’d still have to walk from the car to the store. Or maybe you have a subscription.

I’m going to go bang my head into a wall for the next four years (or two weeks) until George Dubya is a bad memory.

OK, this whole Mary Cheney debate is getting ridiculous, so this will probably be the last thing I have to say on it.

But, as a pro-gay, Bush-leaning observer, there’s just no question in my mind what Kerry was trying to do. He was mentioning Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter because he thought there would be at least some voters out there who would be less likely to show up and vote for Bush-Cheney if they knew about her.

*He wasn’t making the “Republicans are hypocrites” argument. Maybe he should have made that argument, but, if he was going to, he would have had to be more explicit. Probably not many voters — especially swing voters — would make that connection on their own.

*He wasn’t being kind or generous to the Cheneys. Let’s be real, here.

*It wasn’t without purpose. Edwards and Kerry both brought it up when Cheney and Bush did not, making it clear that it was a strategy.

Andrew Sullivan has been defending Kerry on the ground that saying someone is gay is not a smear, in and of itself. But the question isn’t Sullivan’s views on this matter or mine (since I would obviously agree it’s not a smear). The question is what was Kerry’s intention.

As stated above, he could only really have had two intentions: 1) making homophobes (even mild ones) uncomfortable; 2) making the “hypocrisy” case.

If people want to make the case for 2), that’s reasonable, but I don’t believe it. That leaves me with intention 1), which, I think, is rightly called “smearing.”

One last point: If Sullivan and others think that the Republican “overreaction” to this is borne out of their own homophobia — or fear that their base is homophobic — why would they have kept this issue alive for a week?

I’ll tell you why: At base, Kerry committed a gaffe that doesn’t sit right with most people, and they’re milking it for every drop.

If they were worried about homophobes in their own party, the Republicans would let the issue drop. After all, the words “lesbian daughter” have been uttered more times this week than in the last four years combined — because of the Republican reaction, not because of the initial remark.

PS: Day-to-day polls obviously come with all the usual caveats. But since Bush may have retaken a small lead after this Kerry-Mary backlash, I’d like to note what a wonderful way this would be for Kerry to lose.

Well, I blogged too soon, giving Kerry credit for not exploiting Christopher Reeve’s death:

Sen. John Kerry said he would reverse President Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem cell research as he remembered the late actor Christopher Reeve, a quadriplegic, as a hero and a friend in the Democrats’ radio address Saturday.

…

[Kerry] said Reeve left him a telephone message the day before he died thanking him for campaigning on the possibilities for cures found through stem cell research.

And probably the only reason he didn’t mention it in the third debate is that Bush could have nailed him for that stupid faith-healer crap Edwards said about how John Kerry can bring hamsters back from the dead and make the lame walk (as Bob Novak points out in a column today).

I was wrong about Kerry and Reeve. Kerry showed great restraint and made no mention of Reeve. Impressive. Kind of.

Well, I could waste a lot of pixels on this, but the fact is that Bush would have needed to beat the bejeezus out Kerry for this debate to have counted for anything — and he didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. Bush did very well, especially at the end, when the debate turned to cultural and family issues. He closed strong.

But on the economic/giveaway/programmatic stuff, Kerry — like any Democrat facing any Republican — had the better goody bag. Bush isn’t going to promise to give everyone health care, he’s not going to say he can fix Social Security without lifting a finger and he’s not going to announce a doubling of the education budget. So, he ends up looking like a monster. And these are the issue the most gullible voters in the swing states will be looking at.

All three debates, taken together, were very damaging to Bush. And they leave him with a terrible storyline going forward to the election.