One Man's Vote

I just ran a search for "worst president ever" and at the bottom of the page Google helpfully added:

Searches related to: worst president ever

worst president ever sticker   impeach bush

How "impeach bush" is related to "worst president ever" as opposed to, say "carter national malaise thermostat police gas lines 444 days of hostages hamas and hezbollah apologist", I have no idea.

BTW, that Carter search doesn't suggest trying "worst president ever".

MORE: Ooh! Ooh! Add "voter disenfranchisement" to that Carter search string. The guy is a peanut farmer -- he really ought to know when to stop digging...

We used to vote in precinct 38. Then they consolidated our precinct and we vote in precinct 28 now. Of course, we got NOTHING from DEMOCRATIC County Clerk Beth White's office informing us of the precinct number change -- as apparently was the case with most of the other people in line for precinct 28. Looks like yet another fucked up election day courtesy of the Marion County Democratic Party and the incompetent Beth White.

Get inside and some poll worker was trying to blame this on the Mayor. I said, excuse me, the Mayor is not responsible for setting up the polls. She tried to recover by saying that the Mayor approved the Clerk's plan. I said, look, the Mayor is an executive. He signs off on things that are other people's responsibility to plan and vet. The responsibility for cluster-fucks at the polls (although I was polite and did not use that terminology) is the Clerk's. She said, well, that's why I've been telling people to call the Clerk. I left it at that, but hopefully I convinced her that she can't blame the Mayor for something that isn't his responsibility.

Anyway, the reason people in line were pissed off was because there was only one poll book, and a very slow poll worker digging through trying to find people's names. In the old days, every poll got two books. Which would have been a good thing here, because a bunch of people didn't appear to be registered, and it would have made things a lot faster to have two books so that people who actually WERE registered could move along faster. I heard someone actually try to blame this on the ID requirement, in terms of "well, we actually have to look people up and compare the ID." Give me a break. You ALWAYS had to look people up. At least now you don't have to ask them how they spell their names, because you have their ID in your hands.

The poll Inspector was on the phone taking care of his day job, which really frosted me. When my Dad was inspector in 38, that shit would NEVER have been countenanced.

The only real catharsis involved was voting for Mitt Romney just to stick my finger in McCain's eye, and scratching all the school board candidates. I think by definition school board members are among the biggest assholes ever to hold political office. Fuck 'em all.

Oh, in other news: I was the 167th voter in the precinct at 9:45 AM. This may be a really big turnout. I pity the people who haven't voted yet in 28.

The phone calls have stopped.

It must be election primary day.

Need to go cast my ballot for Jon Elrod and Ken Morgan.

(We did get one last call last night -- somebody from the Obama campaign looking for me. Sally answered and when they told them who they were calling for, she laughed, and said "It's a good thing you didn't get him." I had been giving his TV ads hell all night.)

(Barack Obama is the most dangerous man in America. Why do so few other people see that?)

Texas Cops Bust Man Trying to Cash $360 Billion Check

They have a picture of the check.

Stupid just keeps digging, doesn't it?

Direct Mail, Robocalls Don't Work

The revised edition of Get Out The Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout by Yale political science professors Donald Green and Alan Gerber concludes that using direct mail and robocalls for GOTV purposes are generally ineffective.

Gee. Ya think? Since I don't answer the phone unless I know who's calling? CallerID must be a curse to these people. Which is a good thing. But here's my proposal to make that work again: Any solicitation call (of any kind: GOTV, political pollsters, charities moneygrubbing, and so forth) to my phone number should be treated like a 900 call, and accrue $50 per call to my account. Good idea?

Bueller?

"Direct mail is expensive, and its capacity to mobilize voters is typically rather limited." As for robocalls, the authors say they "might help you to stretch your resources in ways that allow you to contact the maximum number of people, but don't expect to move them very much, if at all."

I dunno...for $50 per call I might be moved. As far as direct mail is concerned, the only part of "direct" that applies in this house is "direct to the trash".

What works? Door-to-door canvassing is by far the most effective form of getting voters to the polls. There is also some evidence that newspaper ads might be effective.

Door to door doesn't work with me. I'm as likely to answer the door with a gun in my hand as I am to answer it at all. Stay the hell off my property unless you're prepared to pay cash for my time.

As far as newspaper ads are concerned, I have trained myself not to see them.

If you work on campaigns, this book is a must-read.

Not that the types who come up with this crap actually read.

Via.

Now this is very, very cool.

'Pixie Dust' From Pig's Bladder Regrows Man's Finger

With the help of an experimental powder, a man’s severed finger has regrown to its original length in just four weeks, reports London’s Daily Mail.

Lee Spievack, of Cincinnati, who sliced almost half an inch off the top of one of his fingers, described the powder as "pixie dust," according to the newspaper.

The "pixie dust" is actually extra-cellular matrix, bursting with collagen and is made from a dried pig's bladder, the newspaper reports.

The dust was designed to regenerate damaged ligaments in horses, the Daily Mail said.

Collagen is known to give skin strength and elasticity. It is thought that the dust kick-starts the body's natural healing process by sending out signals that mobilize the body's own cells into repairing the damaged tissue, according to the newspaper.

Spievack said his finger even has a fingernail and fingerprint.

"The second time I put it (the dust) on, I could already see the growth," Spievack said. "Each day it was up further. Finally, it closed up and was a finger. It took about four weeks before it was sealed."

Read the whole thing.

A suspended middle school teacher out on bail for allegedly having sex with two students will be back in court Tuesday after police say they caught her having sex with one of them again.

Stephanie Ragusa, 29, was arrested for the third time in about six weeks on charges of sex with a minor, MyFOXTampa reported. She was being held without bond at the Orient Road Jail.

"I can assure you that we are doing everything we can right now to make sure that she’s not out at liberty to do this again," said Hillsborough County Sheriff's Lt. Fred Asteasuainzarra.

Officers discovered Ragusa and the now-16-year-old boy at his house about 12:20 p.m. Monday, the arrest affidavit states. Ragusa had gone to the teen's house to discuss the criminal case but wound up in bed with him, police said.

There is something seriously wrong with this young woman. I hope she gets some help along with an extended prison sentence.

Supreme Court upholds Indiana Real ID law:

Supreme Court upholds photo ID law for voters in Indiana
By MARK SHERMAN – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has ruled that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights. The decision validates Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

The court vote 6-3 to uphold Indiana's strict photo ID requirement. Democrats and civil rights groups say the law would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots.

Rush just noted this on his program as well.

"Republican-inspired?" Fuck off. Democrats and civil rights groups would give citizenship rights to non-citizens in a heartbeat just to get their votes. Their arguments are ridiculous. Moreso because Justice Stevens wrote the opinion. I wasn't aware he was a conservative...

(Via.)

UPDATE: The opinion.

JUSTICE STEVENS, joined by THE CHIEF JUSTICE and JUSTICE KENNEDY, concluded that the evidence in the record does not support a facial attack on SEA 483’s validity. Pp. 5–20.

and

JUSTICE SCALIA, joined by JUSTICE THOMAS and JUSTICE ALITO, was of the view that petitioners’ premise that the voter-identification lawmight have imposed a special burden on some voters is irrelevant.The law should be upheld because its overall burden is minimal and justified.

Comforting to know that you do indeed have to prove you're who you say you are at the voting booth...just like you do everywhere else in life.

And nice to see the Dumbs lose again...like they do everywhere else in life.

See Iain Murray on the Corner.

If you're determined to both decarbonize and stop sending money to the Middle East then there is but one plausible answer and it isn't a flex fuel mandate (although allowing sugar ethanol imports could be a smal factor). It's improved hybrid/electric technology for automobiles combined with nuclear-generated electricity. The auto manfacturers are moving very quickly on their end, and it would not surprise me if all the storage problems were solved and long-range mostly electric vehicles were the norm by 2020. The technology isn't there yet, though, so mandates are useless. As for nuclear, there's a chance that lawmakers will see its value and override environmentalists like they're doing in Europe. The enviros will, however, put up one heck of a fight on that.

Read the whole thing.

I have his book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You To Know About -- Because They Helped Cause Them, but haven't read it yet.

There's an article at FoxNews talking about the plans to bury the Cherynobyl reactor under a new "coffin" that should last 100 years, yada yada yada.

At the very end we get a money quote:

"Nuclear energy has shown how expensive it is," said Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia.

Money quote for us, that is. The actual fact is that UNSAFELY IMPLEMENTED nuclear energy has shown how expensive it is. No other nuke plant in the world (as far as I know), not even the old Hanford plant, and certainly not Three Mile Island -- the site of the U.S.'s only nuclear accident that released radioactivity into the air -- was built as unsafely as Chernobyl.

So Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia and the rest of the Luddite anti-nuke jackasses can stick that in their pipe and smoke it.

Mm-kay.

Is there really need for a debate? Seems to me that the cause of rising oil prices is a complete and utter disregard since 1973 of the need to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of petroleum. A willful blindness that has allowed automakers to decide that, sure, 20MPG in the city and 30 on the highway is sufficient, and there's no need to try to make engines more efficient. And although it's tied more to natural gas (which we also import) rather than oil, the idiotic and cowardly refusal of people in this country to accept the fact that nuclear power generation is safe and could end up being quite economical (even the French have figured this out).

Frankly, if I got 60MPG in the city and a hundred on the highway, and there were nuke plants going up all over the place, I wouldn't give a damn about $100 oil.

Alternately, Indianapolis, build me a fucking subway so I don't have to waste gas driving downtown every other day. Now that I'd willingly pay higher taxes to get.

Friend of mine posted this on a private forum to which I belong (no guarantees of provenance):

We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.

On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.

On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.

Is there a contest here?

The only thing I see that they forgot was the war hero's hawt daughter.

Scientist: Forget Global Warming, Prepare for New Ice Age

Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

Hmm.

[Critics quickly pointed out that Chapman may have been "cherry-picking" the data. A strong La Nina formation in the Pacific pushed down January temperatures over much of the Northern Hemisphere from where they had been a year earlier, but average global temperatures are still much higher than the 20th-century average, and the NOAA said last week that last month was the warmest March on record.]

Well, yeah, sure they'd say that; it goes against the accepted orthodoxy. My gas bill for March would tend to argue that they're full of shit. And I was never one to accept orthodoxy; shoot, I've been eating leavened bread all week, and I had bacon for breakfast yesterday.

Thing is, he's not the only scientist who's been pointing out that we appear to be heading into a solar minimum. But then there are these idiots:

An alternative theory of global warming is that a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the Earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak — during low sunspot activity — the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

But scientists from the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, and that that was far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

Brightness is not the issue. The solar constant (which isn't, very) is the issue. The sun appears to be cooling; we have evidence that it's done that before (ever heard of the Maunder Minimum? The Little Ice Age?), and there's no reason to pooh-pooh the idea that it might be doing it again.

But the orthodoxy is that it's warming, and all the grant money is pouring into warming studies...and the real orthodoxy in today's politicized world of science is found where the money is.

UPDATE: Here's the original Chapman article.

I was just talking to somebody about this theory the other day.

Dad (who was a chemical engineer by trade) thought this theory was brilliant, and was a much better explanation for oil than dead dinosaurs and biomass compression/decomposition.

(Via.)

This is sweet, even though nobody is going to follow through.

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Rep. Sue Myrick (NC-9) called on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to revoke former President Jimmy Carter’s passport. This is in response to the former President traveling to Syria to meet with Hamas, an organization officially designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

"Former President Carter has acted in contradiction of international agreements to isolate Hamas. He has acted in defiance of both United States policy and international policy. His actions reward terrorists, lend support, and provide legitimacy to their belief that violence will eventually get them what they want," said Rep. Myrick.

After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections the Quartet (US, UN, EU and Russia) called on Hamas to renounce terror, recognize Israel and recognize the previous agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel as they seek an agreement to make peace. Hamas has categorically rejected these three conditions for more than two years.

Congress granted the Secretary of State the power to grant and verify passports. In 1981, the United States Supreme Court held in the case of Haig v. Agee that the Secretary of State has the implied power to revoke passports as well (453 U.S. 280).

H/T.

(Sad thing is, the UN would probably grant him a passport if this happened.)