Patrick, I fear that you need either a much cheaper or a much more expensive grade of tinfoil. I'm not sure which would be more effective at screening out the rays. Count me among those who think that bin Laden is dead, and has been for some time. And count me in among those who doubt this administration's (any administration's) ability to pull off such a conspiracy these days.
Look at some of the thinking here in the comments: Bush not mentioning bin Laden? That means that. . .something's up! Bush mentions bin Laden? Aha! Something's definitely up! Y'all are becoming unglued.
But I forget: I'm talking about Satan and His Minions here, right? And it's what, about the year 1939 or so, you reckon?
Well, no, it actually isn't. Perhaps you still realize how crazy this sort of thing sounds. It gives off exactly the same geiger counter clicks as all that 1990s Mena-Vincent Foster stuff from the anti-Clinton fringe. They were wrong; this level of paranoia is wrong, too. People can find plenty of reasons to oppose Bush's re-election without sounding like they've mixed up their dosages.
The Geobytes people that Julia linked to also sell a relatively inexpensive service that will track geographic locations of visitors - a SiteMeter with cities and states attached.
That's how I found out that I have a semi-regular reader in Mauritius, for example.
Since I blog about pharmaceuticals and chemistry, the city names are often enough for me to tell what organizations the traffic is coming from. Although when I had a Google-search referral for "ricin+production", I have to say that it was unnerving to find that it was from a volatile ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia. That's still my only visitor from Bishkek.
Actually, Bush's poll numbers look decent. Here's the latest from Gallup. He's right at the average for the last ten presidents at this point in his term.
A closer look at the December polls (same link as above) suggests that Bush may be more in the position of Clinton in 1995 or Reagan in 1983. Of course, it's a long, long way until next November. But I notice that people have been arguing polling data, so I thought it was worth bringing this up.
I'll reiterate my earlier position: if the economy continues to improve, Bush will be very hard to beat. Whether you think that's good news or bad news is another question, of course.
"even the long-shot candidates could do it given the sort of improbable circumstances that would lead to their getting the nomination"
Hmm. If you're talking about Kucinich or Mosely-Braun, then the circumstances would have to include invasion by alien overlords with a twisted sense of humor. If you stipulate conditions that would lead to either one of them being nominated, you can assign a reasonable probability to almost anything else.
Dean will be a fiery campaigner, all right, and he probably won't be totally McGoverned. But looking at the electoral map, I have trouble seeing how he can win - especially if the economy continues to improve. It would take a major disaster in Iraq to counterbalance that. I fear that several commenters here are engaging in wishful thinking.
Bush's lead in Florida, for example, is rather large, and I would expect some other close states from 2000 have also widened. Couple that with the redistribution of electoral votes from the last census, and Bush is in a strong position.
But I'm not an unbiased observer. I work as a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry, so the prospect of a Dean victory, on a pay-the-mortgage level, gives me the shakes.
I'm pretty sure that I'm to the right, politically, of most everyone here, but I wanted to chime in regarding Patrick's warning-signs comment about the Greens. "Eliminationist rhetoric" should set off alarm bells, of course, and in most people it does. (I'd cross the street to avoid anyone who thinks it's tolerable. Crossing an ocean has been necessary in more severe cases from the literature.)
But don't discount the trouble that comes with "attachment to romantic views of landscape and wilderness", either. That's a sign of a worldview that can lead to truly harmful ideas about human nature and society. You end up with bad analyses of current problems, and horrific attempts at fixing them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has a lot to answer for, although perhaps I'm just trying to posthumously shoot the messenger.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 3 |
| 2003 | 4 |
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