In my own little corner...

We interrupt my life, to talk about the country

Yahoo! News - Bush Chooses Rice to Replace Powell.

Bush Chooses Rice to Replace Powell

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) has selected Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), his national security adviser and trusted confidant, to replace Colin Powell (news - web sites) as secretary of state, officials said Monday, in a major shakeup of the president's national security team.

Was it really moral values?

James Q. Wilson doesn't think so.  In the Sunday (11/14) edition of the OpinionJournal online (reg required), he states:

If the Democrats could not appeal to the moral values of people, that fact must have been lost on the 48% of the voters who supported Sen. Kerry. It is true that moral values were important to some: based on exit polls, to about one-fifth of all voters. And of these, the overwhelming majority supported President Bush. But almost exactly the same fraction said that jobs and the economy were the most important issues, and of these the overwhelming majority supported Sen. Kerry. And if you add together terrorism and the war in Iraq, 34% found these to be the most important issues (Mr. Bush carried those worried about terrorism, Sen. Kerry those critical of the Iraq war). Given these facts, why does a Times reporter write that moral values were the "defining issue"? I have read her essay three times and cannot discover an answer.

Read the article.

"To Have Girls is Glorious"

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005510

Looks like China is finally realizing that decades of infanticide can have a negative effect.

excerpt:
China's one-child policy has many odious dimensions, but the most gruesome aspect of this type of "family planning" is the murder of millions of infant girls.

As a result, the ratio of males to females in China is unnaturally high, hovering between 117 to 119 boys for every 100 girls in 2000, according to China Daily and People's Daily. There are one-fifth more boys than girls because girls are so often aborted or killed after delivery.
(snip)
These will include cash payments for couples who have a daughter and let her live, as well as privileges in housing, employment and job training. The payments will be doled out to families at different stages of the girl's life, apparently in an effort to prevent families from gaming the system. Some families with girls will also be exempted from paying school fees. People's Daily said another experiment will involve enhancing the political status of the girl and her family.

Want my vote? Answer this question

Here's a question that every presidential/gubernatorial/congressional candidate should be forced to answer, frequently.

Why do you want this job? What do you expect to do, if you win this office, that your opponent cannot/will not do?

Don't tell me what you hate about your opponent, tell me what YOU plan to do, and how you plan to do it. Not in paragraphs of bureaucrat-speak, but in short, simple, easy to understand sentences.

Mr Kerry - why do you want to be president?

Mr Bush - why do you want to be re-elected?

Ah-nold -- why do you want to be gov?

Mr Davis - why do you want to keep this job, when your clients apparently hate you?

Don't waste my time telling me why the other person needs to go. Tell me why you should be allowed in, or allowed to stay.

And if you don't have a plan, or a goal, for your time in office... if you're just running for office because you like the thought of being "somebody," then get the hell out of the way and let someone else have it. Someone who might make a difference. Someone who isn't just out for "fame and fortune," but who truly cares about the country or the state or the school district that they're campaigning for.

Let me give you a nice, easily-understandable example of what I mean.

Back in 1987, I was in the market for a new vehicle. I was highly enamored of Hondas, because a good friend of mine swore by them, but I liked Mazda's too. I had narrowed my choices down to a Honda Civic hatchback or a Mazda 323 hatchback. The Civic was a couple thousand dollars more.

So I went to the Honda dealer, and I asked the salesman why his car was more expensive than the Mazda. Instead of telling me what was right with his car, he tried to tell me what was wrong with the Mazda, but everything he said was a feature that I liked about that car. The Mazda dealer didn't run down the Honda.

I went home and thought some more about it... this was a big decision, after all. I examined the specs some more, thought about what I wanted, and one weekend I drove back up to Boise to talk to the Mazda dealership, and they were closed (not for good).

So I bopped over to the Honda dealership to talk to them some more, and mentioned to the guy (same guy) that I had thought about talking to Mazda that day, but they were closed. Did he have any idea where they might be?

He said (and I can almost quote this verbatim, even though it happened 18 years ago) that "they spent all the money creating that big new dealership/lot, and they can't sell any cars there, so they're over at the Fairgrounds having a sale." or words to that effect.

I wound up buying a Mazda (but a B2000, not a 323).

If you can't tell me what's *right* about your product, but only disparage your competition, regardless of what that product may be, why should I spend my money on it? That holds true for me regardless of what your product might be ... merchandise, school, candidate, whatever. And whether I'm spending my money or my vote, I'm planning to spend it where it and I will be respected, not talked down to, not manipulated, not sneered at.

What if Kerry Wins? Then What?

Insomnomaniac is daring to envision what I can't bring myself to contemplate, and devising what sounds to me like a very viable contingency plan.

A quick excerpt:

We wake up on November 3rd (or sometime in January, who knows) and discover that John Flip-Flop Kerry has become our 44th President...
It's a horrible dream, the kind you wake up from screaming and in a cold sweat, but just like Freddy Kruger, Kerry could convince enough people to believe the nightmare is real and inevitable, and in so doing "kill" their desire to fight what he's describing as a losing battle for the "life" of the Bush administration.

And if that happens kids, what are we gonna do about it? Are we going to sit here for four years crying? Are we going to bitch and moan and dig up dirt on Kerry, or blame him for everything that goes wrong in the world including our own ingrown toenails? Or are we going to love our country enough to do the only thing we really can do to help her: give Mr. Kerry enough rope to hang himself, and thus hasten America's realization that we are in deep shit and sinking fast unless we wake up and recognize that we ARE at war and we can't win if we keep pretending otherwise.