Negative Space: presidential elections
- Big lizards give advice to John McCain
- The lizard brain is trying to help John McCain, and I think he’d do well to listen.
- Big Lizards stomp media misdirection
- Dafydd over at Big Lizards is really on a roll. If you haven’t added them to your RSS feed, you should.
- Blaming the financial crisis on the reformers
- Change, hope, and unmitigated gall. McCain, Bush, and Palin were right about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Now can we start listening to them on social security?
- Branchflower’s misleading headlines
- The Branchflower investigation appears deliberately misleading so as to provide salacious headlines. It’s a data dump in a non-searchable format pushing conclusions that don’t make sense.
- Don’t wait—capitulate
- The ACLU’s doomed campaign against telecom immunity is a classic example of why you have to be willing to vote for Nobody if you want to be taken seriously in politics.
- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
- This is a powerful look at the 1972 presidential campaigns, well worth reading, and recommended for anyone interested in a turning point in the Democratic Party.
- Fighting for the American Dream
- Joe the Plumber writes about his experiences at the center of one of the most vicious smear campaigns in recent memory.
- Fred Thompson vs. Barack Obama
- What would a good election campaign be like? Is it possible to have an election season focussed on issues and principles? I think it is, and I think it will depend on which candidates we support during the primaries.
- Fred Thompson’s decision to withdraw
- If we continue to treat presidential elections as horseraces, we’re going to create a system that selects sociopaths for president.
- The Helter Skelter Media
- Joe the Plumber and the vengeance of the media.
- Hillary Clinton’s qualifications for president
- Charisma, experience, and principle: Two out of three ain’t bad, but zero out of three requires a lot of money and organization to overcome.
- A horse chestnut or a newspaper or a news show?
- Abraham Lincoln once famously asked whether a horse chestnut or a chestnut horse are the same thing. The mainstream media have started dropping a whole lot of horse chestnuts over Sarah Palin. It’s hard to imagine this is anything but bias, but it could be abject stupidity.
- Lord, thy will is hard
- We all fulfill God’s will. From the mightiest to the lowliest, we all are a part in God’s plan. Ask any Christian, and they’ll tell you that they believe this. Get down to the specifics, however, and you’ve touched on a central, and difficult, part of Christian faith.
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- McCain’s success is not surprising
- Is McCain’s success really a surprise given the available candidates? I don’t think so. Ditto for Huckabee. Their success may be simply that voters are still paying attention to the issues. Objectively speaking, McCain is a stronger conservative candidate than Giuliani and Romney.
- Moving on to John McCain
- The more I learn about John McCain the more I want to vote for him.
- Nobody for President Anti-Apathy Movement
- Feel like you got nobody to vote for? Fine: vote for Nobody.
- Nobody in 2000
- If you want to win in this election, vote for Nobody.
- Nobody Likes the Electoral System
- The “winner-takes-all” electoral system is an integral part of the United States system of checks and balances, balancing the rights of regional minorities against the power of national majorities.
- Obama campaign skirts campaign finance law
- I expected the New York Times to be silent on the illegal donations that the Obama 2008 campaign encourages. I should have known better: they’re trying to cover for the campaign. But the bigger issue is that laws that don’t get enforced are counterproductive; they encourage dishonesty and lawlessness.
- A proven reformer
- If one thing exemplifies the difference between the two main campaigns, it’s their encouragement of anonymous donors.
- Substantive answers cause misquotes
- Newspapers really just don’t like substantive answers. If you try to give one, they’ll just rewrite the question and attribute it to you.
- Super-president
- The best president we can have is not a cartoon character.
- Televised debates discourage intelligent discussion
- Debates are a spectacle designed to trivialize the issues facing the community. And they are counter-productive because they specifically select for candidates who bullshit their way through the decision-making process rather than act deliberately and responsibly.
- These are the lessons that we learn
- Some people want to serve, some just want to be president. It’s somewhat pointless to complain about the latter given the way we treat the former.
- Vote on performance, not promises
- If you’re disappointed that President Obama is the same wheeler-dealer he was when he was a Senator, take it as a lesson for future elections: vote performance and record, not promises.
- What voters want
- An around-the-blog summary of reactions to Fred Thompson’s type-A president remarks. Are we designing the presidential elections to select kooks?
