Poor Lurita Doan...

Oversight is a pain to put up with...actually being held accountable, imagine the nerve. But don't feel badly for her she probably won't remember any of this tomorrow! Watch it for a good laugh...

more on the oversight hearing here where you get to watch Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) walk Doan through basic interpretation of documents.

Voter Fraud...

Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt take on an annoying political hobgoblin of late, voter fraud...

Allegations of voter fraud -- someone sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote -- have been pushed in recent years by partisans seeking to justify proof-of-citizenship and other restrictive ID requirements as a condition of voting. Scare stories abound on the Internet and on editorial pages, and they quickly become accepted wisdom.

But the notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch. Where fraud exists, of course, it should be prosecuted and punished. (And politicians have been stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes since senators wore togas; Lyndon Johnson won a 1948 Senate race after his partisans famously "found" a box of votes well after the election.) Yet evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.

This particular hobgoblin has been used of late to try and reinstate the poll tax by way of voter ID...

Forbes endorsement...

Death Knell or act of desperation? Giuliani, more than likely due to his respectable views on abortion, gays, and immigration is making a sanity adjustment and is reaching into the economic landscape of flat tax world--you know flat tax world, the place where an economy is not a collective effort. He has now been given the nod by the flat tax maven himself.

Who would have thought?

Yesterday Bush cited two Iraqi bloggers as an example of how peachy things are in Iraq. He quoted them as saying

“Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed. We hope the governments in Baghdad and America do not lose their resolve.”

Well thats good news, right? I mean word "on the ground," the Iraqi "street" is upbeat! Then reporters do their "Liberal" job of asking not just what; but who, when, and why.

As for the writers’ identity, it remained a mystery — until the White House distributed a transcript of the briefing. In a footnote at the end, the administration disclosed that the bloggers were Omar and Mohammed Fadhil, two brothers who are both dentists and who write an English-language blog, IraqTheModel.com, from Baghdad. The White House said their writings had been cited in mainstream news outlets; on March 5, the Fadhil brothers wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Notes from Baghdad.”

Oh, yes, and on Dec. 9, 2004, they met in the Oval Office with Mr. Bush.

op-ed on Gays in Military....

My personal feelings is that the government shouldn't discriminate because of sexual preference. A lot of people want to bring God into the equation, which is fine for a theological debate; but when it comes to national security it should be a strict don't ask don't tell policy (theologically speaking, not sexually speaking). Everyone has a right to their own theological interpretation of morality, but one should not be allowed to needlessly (and in this case to the detriment of national security) discriminate against fellow citizens. Earlier this week there was a great op-ed in the Washington Post on this issue: Bigotry that hurts our Military

Four years later....

Four years ago today the Iraq war began. There are many lessons to be learned from the past 4(plus) years. One stunning lesson is the need for an educated populace, being educated and informed on politics is a never ending process. Like science it is a group effort, you take from experts in different specialties, you challenge ideas, you demand examples and proof. You build up, things fall apart, and you go back to the drawing board. You build a consensus over time. In the process one must be hyper vigilant to not allow ones own principles and bias to go unchallenged. Political assertions, beliefs, philosophy, are intellectual engineering feats of first measure. But they have stunning consequences, life and death consequences, which I feel are too often kept out of the equation. Its quaint for you to believe what you want to believe and I believe what I want to believe. In theory that works out great. But reality isn’t so neat and nice, people live, die, and are permanently maimed and devitalized as a repercussion of the way one votes, or the money one sends to this or that cause. If one can learn anything from four years is that we not only need systemic levels of interpretation but application of such analysis. We need intellectual algorithms to process information and then act on such information.