Simon's blog

Jeffrey Toobin says (my emphases and comments added):

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is fond of pointing out the original reason that judges came to wear black robes. It's to make them look alike, to minimize the differences between the individuals who occupy the role and to suggest that the law will be applied even-handedly, no matter who happens to be dressed in black. Well, that may be the theory, but the events of the last few weeks show that the Supreme Court is riven by the same partisan divisions as the rest of Washington -- and it's likely to get even more heated sooner rather than later.

The latest round started January 21, when a bitterly divided court issued its decision in the Citizens United case. The 5-4 ruling decreed that corporations enjoy the same rights as individuals to free speech under the First Amendment, and it gave corporations (and labor unions) the right to spend unlimited funds on political advertising right up until Election Day.

The political effect of, if not motivation for, the decision was clear: Citizens United looks to be a big win for Republicans, who are the likely beneficiaries of the newly lubricated corporate largesse. [No, they aren't. It remains to be seen which party will actually benefit more, but the likely beneficiaries are Democrats.]

President Obama struck back just six days later, during his State of the Union address, which he used to make an unusually pointed attack on the court's decision. [He used the court's decision as a piñata to distract attention from the humiliation dealt him by bay state voters just eight days sooner.] With a majority of the court seated right in front of him, Obama said the ruling opened the door even to foreign companies meddling in the American political system. [Which was a lie.]

With the cameras rolling, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. grimaced and [inaudibly] muttered "not true" in response to the president. [I'm not party to Justice Alito's thinking, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that was probably because what the President said was not true.] In fact, Citizens United is intentionally ambiguous on its effect on foreign corporations -- so it's not clear whether Obama or Alito is right [It's perfectly clear who is right, and it isn't the President. Nor is Toobin accurate in saying that Citizens United is "intentionally ambiguous"; it expressly declines to tackle the issue, which wasn't implicated in the case. I excerpted the relevant portion of the opinion here. Toobin is correct that Citizens United is "ambiguous" about foreign corporations only to the same extent that it is "ambiguous" about Sarah Michelle Gellar's favorite toenail polish, to wit, it holds and purports to hold nothing about either.] -- but the open confrontation between the two men suggests the intensity of their split. (That then-Sen. Obama voted against Alito's confirmation suggests the origin of the animosity.) [The President's choice to lie on national television about a decision Alito voted for, right in front of him, might have honked him off a little, too.]

Last week, Roberts himself weighed in, denouncing the State of the Union as a "political pep rally" and weighing a future boycott of the proceedings by the justices. [Roberts was asked a question. He answered it in his usual mild-mannered good humor. You can watch the whole exchange on C-SPAN, and its tenor is not even remotely close to the kind of image summoned by Toobin's deliberately misleading choice of verb.]

In fact, several justices (including Roberts' predecessor, William H. Rehnquist) have avoided the State of the Union for years, for just the reason Roberts suggested: that it's too bound up in contemporary politics. But the fact that Roberts only came to object now -- and not during the presidency of George W. Bush, who appointed him -- suggests that it's Democrats, not noisy democracy, that's really bothering the chief justice. [Did President Bush ever stand in front of the court on live national television and lie about a recent decision it had made? No? Then it's not really comparable.]

There's no doubt what's bothering Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. A veteran Republican activist, she just announced plans to start an online Tea Party advocacy group, which may be funded, in part, by the corporate donations newly freed up by the Citizens United decision. [This random line—totally disconnected to the material on either side—seems thrown in merely to insinuate a whiff of impropriety. See Volokh's comments here.]

All of this controversy may come to a head soon, because Justice John Paul Stevens, the court's senior associate justice and the leader of its liberal wing, is likely to resign this spring. In an interview for The New Yorker, Stevens told me that he will probably decide in less than a month whether he will retire. With his 90th birthday looming in April, Stevens gave me every indication that he will leave the court, which will set up a confirmation battle over Obama's appointment of his successor. [A battle in which Obama's enablers and partisans will predictably and vigorously denounce any Republican who does what Obama did in the two nominations he participated in.]

Appointed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, Stevens represented a moderate Republican tradition that has had deep roots on the court and in broader American life. But just as Stevens represents the last of his political breed on the court, so, too, have moderates largely disappeared from the contemporary GOP as a whole.

In all likelihood, Obama will name a Democrat to replace him. (Solicitor General Elena Kagan appears to be the leading candidate.) [That's true, but Judge Diane Wood ought to be.] So without Stevens, the court will look like the Capitol, across First Street, from its own marble palace; both will be places where Democrats and Republicans fight.

In a way, all of this controversy at the court provides a bracing civics lesson. The justices deal with the most volatile issues in American life, from abortion to the war on terror. It is folly to pretend that the court could figure out a way to deal with these issues in an objective or nonpolitical way. [No it isn't. You simply have to ask the right questions. The problems almost invariably stem from the insistence of legal liberals on having the court answer the wrong questions. There is no non-political way of answering the question of whether abortion should be legal, for instance, but that isn't the question the court should be asking, and there are certainly objective ways to answer the question it should be answering: whether the Constitution forbids the political branches from answering that quintessentially political question.] The justices reach answers to the questions before them based on their judicial philosophies, which are nearly indistinguishable from their political views. [On one side of the court, the side that Justice Stevens has been propping up, maybe so.] This is not new. The divisions in the court have always reflected the political divisions in the country, but never more so than today.

I get terribly grumpy reading this kind of stuff. Toobin is a much more appealing talker than he is a writer.

One of the most stubborn lies about Citizens United is the idea that its overruling of Austin v. Michigan COC was entirely sua sponte, that "no party asked the court to do it." One sees it in blog posts and in comments. We even saw it in the dissenting opinion, in which Justice Stevens claimed that "no one has argued to us that Austin’s rule has proved impracticable, and not a single for-profit corporation, union, or State has asked us to overrule it."

That meme is false, and it ends here. The appellants in Citizens United did ask the court to overrule Austin. Before going on to assess the case assuming "the continuing vitality of Austin," the appellant's original brief—filed January 9th, 2009, months before the court asked for further briefing on the issue—argued that:

Austin was wrongly decided and should be overruled. Austin’s assertion that the government has a compelling interest in forestalling “corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas” (494 U.S. at 660) is sharply at odds with the more venerated principle, articulated in Buckley [v. Valeo] and recently reaffirmed in Davis v. FEC, 128 S. Ct. 2759, 2773 (2008), that “[t]he First Amendment’s protection against governmental abridgment of free expression cannot properly be made to depend on a person’s financial ability to engage in public discussion.” Buckley, 424 U.S. at 49. Nor can it be reconciled with [First Nat'l Bank of Boston v.] Bellotti’s recognition that political speech is no less valuable “because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.” 435 U.S. at 776-77; see also id. (“[t]he inherent worth of the speech . . . does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual”). Indeed, Austin’s assertion that the government must police the “distorting effects” of corporate wealth on the marketplace of ideas (494 U.S. at 660) was rejected almost verbatim in Bellotti, which held that the fear that “corporations are wealthy and powerful and their views may drown out other points of view” could not justify suppression of corporations’ political speech. 435 U.S. at 789. Moreover, the “immense aggregations of wealth” of which Austin complained are accumulated as often by individuals as by corporations. And there is absolutely no reason to think that an advocacy group funded predominantly by one or two individuals—such as George Soros’s Fund for America or the Wyly brothers’ Republicans for Clean Air—is any more reflective of the public’s support for the group’s ideals than a group funded exclusively by for-profit corporations. The for-profit corporations, at least, must respond to their shareholders through their boards of directors.

Ap. Br. 30-31 (emphasis added); see also id., at 13-14 (Austin "was wrongly decided and should be overruled because it is flatly at odds with the well-established principle that First Amendment protection does not depend upon the identity of the speaker"). Even Justice Stevens' dissent undercut its own later contrary claim, tacitly recognizing that "Citizens United injected its request to overrule Austin" into its brief.

Whether or not this is a good argument is irrelevant; the issue is whether the court was asked to overrule Austin. It was. The next time you hear someone say different, you will know that they are either a liar or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

MJ says:

In December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was struggling to convince all 60 members of the Democratic caucus to vote to break a filibuster of the bill. … In a rush to appease [liberals], moderate Democrats agreed to back … expan[sion of] the reach of community health centers, which have provided low-cost health care to people in underserved areas since the 1960s. And they wanted the health care bill to commit $7 billion for these health centers. The moderates agreed, and new language was hurriedly added to the Senate bill.

"This is all stuff that was inserted late at night and they were trying to reach a final agreement" on the bill, says Timothy Jost, a professor and health law expert at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. Unfortunately, no one remembered to write in an explicit provision explaining that this $7 billion in spending for the health care centers would be subject to all the usual restrictions on how federal money is spent. One of those restrictions, the so-called Hyde Amendment, prohibits most federal funding for abortions. (Abortion has been a key point of contention in the health care reform debate on another front: whether consumers who purchase private insurance plans with the help of government subsidies can obtain plans that cover abortion.)

Other, similar parts of the Senate bill do include the explicit restriction. A provision providing funding for the Indian Health Service, for instance, notes: "Any limitation pursuant to other Federal laws on the use of Federal funds appropriated to the Service shall apply with respect to the performance or coverage of abortions." A section appropriating money for school-based health centers says the funds "may not be used to provide abortions." That's the sort of sentence that should have been added to the community health center section—but it wasn't.

Yes, and what happens when such laws are litigated? "'[W]here Congress includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another section of the same Act, it is generally presumed that Congress acts intentionally and purposely in the disparate inclusion or exclusion.'" Russello v. United States, 464 U.S. 16, 23 (1983) (alteration in original) (quoting United States v. Wong Kim Bo, 472 F.2d 720, 722 (5th Cir. 1972)). If it was a goof, fix it. Otherwise own up to the consequences. And either way, stop with the disingenuous bleating that the bill is "neutral" on abortion; if that were true, you would have no objection to putting in language that explicitly made it what you claim it implicitly already is.

If the science is settled, why did they have to rely on so much that has been found to be junk?

...And which domino will fall next?

Depending on how it was done, I think this tactic would severely test the limits of the enrolled bill rule.

If you've got a better-quality video of this, let me know!

I've been down for the count with stomach flu for four days; what did I miss? (I know I missed the Ninth Circuit's rejection of Michael Asshole's latest litigation, and we'll get to that later.)

While any procedural roadblock that makes HCR harder to enact would seem beneficial, I can't help but feel some skepticism about this alleged ruling by the Senate parliamentarian that the President "must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package…." I want to see this one reasoned out in writing. Why would the Senate be unable to act on one bill until the President has signed another bill?

My best guess, without more detail, is that the reconciliation bill is assumed to be phrased in terms of revisions to Pub. L. __ (i.e. the original HCR bill), and since you can't amend a law that doesn't yet exist, you can't pass a bill that explicitly purports to do so. But that's a guess, and there are workarounds.

The practical effect, as Steve Benen notes, may be more psychological than parliamentary, fostering distrust among House dems. The strategy of having wavering House dems agree to pass the Senate bill in exchange for subsequently passing a "mop up" bill in reconciliation depends on those House dems' gullibility willingness to believe that the Senate can and will pass such a bill. Not for nothing is the math in the House somewhat fraught.

Either way, Rep. Ryan sets out a likely timeline.

Added: On the question of House math, Michael Barone has this. The Speaker has to hit an incredibly narrow target.

Says Ken MacLeod, and I agree. You want to get to a place where you can comfortably put conversation like this in your characters' mouths:

WASH: [You're saying that she's] Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction!

ZOE: You live in a spaceship, dear.

WASH (looking confused): ... So?

Characters don't live in SciFi. They live in their world, getting on with whatever it is they do in life. The world you spin for them can't possibly seem real to me as a reader if it doesn't seem real to them.

Julien Temple visits Detroit and paints a vivid picture of what he kindly calls urban decline, but which really sounds more like urban failure. Read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

The drive along eerily empty ghost freeways into the ruins of inner-city Detroit is an Alice-like journey into a severely dystopian future. Passing the giant rubber tyre that dwarfs the nonexistent traffic in ironic testament to the busted hubris of Motown's auto-makers, the city's ripped backside begins to glide past outside the windows.

Like [Iggy Pop's] The Passenger, it's hard to believe what we're seeing. The vast, rusting hulks of abandoned car plants, (some of the largest structures ever built and far too expensive to pull down), beached amid a shining sea of grass. The blackened corpses of hundreds of burned-out houses, pulled back to earth by the green tentacles of nature. Only the drunken rows of telegraph poles marching away across acres of wildflowers and prairie give any clue as to where teeming city streets might once have been.

Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. … Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city have already been reclaimed by nature.

It is not a relentlessly bleak picture, but the silver lining Temple identifies—"[u]nable to buy fresh food for their children, people are now growing their own, turning the demolished neighbourhood blocks into urban farms"—recalls nothing so much as the Trantor of Asimov's Second Foundation:

Time had been when the insubstantial ribbons of control had stretched out from its metal coating to the very edges of stardom…; the mightiest capital that had ever been.

Until the decay of the Empire eventually reached it, and in the Great Sack of a century ago, its drooping powers had been bent back upon themselves and broken forever. In the blasting ruin of death, the metal shell that circled the planet wrinkled and crumpled into an aching mock of its own grandeur.

The survivors tore up the metal plating and sold it to other planets for seed and cattle. The soil was uncovered once more and the planet returned to its beginnings. In the spreading areas of primitive agriculture, it forgot its intricate and colossal past.

Or would have, but for the still mighty shards that heaped their massive ruins toward the sky in bitter and dignified silence.

(I came to it independently, but should note that the simile has been thought of by others.) Now, I've never been to Detroit, and found this picture hard to believe, so I asked some Michigander friends; they thought the portrait too flattering if anything. One cited this, which has some before-and-after pictures, and interesting (if radical) thoughts on moving forward.

One gloss that I want to add to Temple's report is that Detroit, so far as I can tell, didn't decline because the Big Three had a "blind belief … in the automobile as an inexhaustible golden goose, guaranteeing endless streams of cash…." Nor was its "destiny fatally entwined with that of the car." Cars remain a trendy consumer item. It would be more precise to say that Detroit's destiny was fatally entwined with the Big Three, and perhaps fairer to say that its destiny was fatally entwined with the deadweight of trade unionism.

Granted, if the big three didn't loose the arrow, they held the bow. I don't have any expertise in the automotive industry, but friends who do tell me that the big three exacerbated their situation by clinging to moribund paradigms for far too long. Cf. John O'Sullivan & Edward Keuchel, American Economic History: From Abundance to Constraint 241 (2d ed. 1989). Simply if exaggeratedly put, they kept building cars that America didn't want to buy. Even if they had wised up sooner, however, the structural problems would have remained. Locked into an ossified labor structure, with its attendant costs and work rules, there was no way for the big three to be as agile as their foreign competitors. This provides an illuminating excursus on this point. Had a supremely competent management team arrived, I imagine that they would have echoed Jim Lovell's frustrated panic: "It's like flying with a dead elephant on our back."

All of which makes me think of Pripyat. Detroit, "the Motor City, was once the symbol of our national industrial prowess." Reynolds Farley et al, Detroit Divided 1 (2002). Similarly, until the wee small hours of April 26, 1986, Chernobyl "was a symbol of the [Soviet] nuclear industry; by 1988, it would have been the largest nuclear plant in the USSR, and it was visible proof that the industry could provide a short-cut to success…." David Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR 32 (1986). The disaster turned Chernobyl into "a symbol of Soviet managerial and technical incompetency," Stephen Cimbala, The Politics of Warfare 170 (2004), an emblem of the shortcomings of the system that built it, and I would venture that the abandoned city of Pripyat is its visible memorial. Built within eyeshot of the Chernobyl plants (as shown by the picture above, which depicts the view of the Chernobyl plant from a Pripyat apartment complex) to house their staff, its 50,000 residents were evacuated after the disaster and it is today an abandoned city in the process of being reclaimed by nature.

Given the publication he writes in, Temple can't say it even if he recognizes it, but Pripyat and Detroit (at least as portrayed by Temple) appear as twin cities, victims of failed, malingering ideologies and their attendant worldviews.

So reported ABC's Jonathan Karl, from Washington. Bunning could have said, in the third person, that the elevator in question was the only elevator of which he could avail himself. But I think it is more likely that he told Karl that "this is a Senators-only elevator."

What is lamer than the professional writer who cannot write?

It's not a very pastoral response, but in view of the brazen hypocrisy at issue, I have to agree with Patrick Madrid. He makes (more bluntly) a point I raised (more obliquely) in my previous comments on this subject: it is difficult to take complaints that the patient development and rollout of the revised translation is moving too fast when those complaints are made by people who fully supported actual haste in rolling out a revolutionary new missal at point-blank range in 1969.

You're mad because… uh… Why? Because it's harder to get away with running red lights? Is that it?

One way in which SF distinguishes itself, I think, is that more than most blogs, we try to articulate and apply general principles in writing about the subject of the day, and to then apply those principles consistently to later situations that implicate them. One of the most consistently-stated principles from my corner has been my view that when an elected official wishes to switch parties, he must resign and seek reelection under that party's banner. I applied it most recently to Rep. Griffin.

When Sen. Specter defected, I applied it to him—and added a corollary, joining those who called for him to refund campaign contributions, an idea that was new to me:

Specter owes a refund to the people who gave him money for the last and forthcoming election unless they specifically decline it. (He "had raised nearly $1.3 million since January and has $6.7 million in the bank for the 2010 race." Those who were simply buying influence or genuinely donating to Specter rather than Specter qua the GOP candidate, can re-donate.)

In the comments, I added that since there is no way to distinguish between money donated to Specter qua Specter and money donated to than Specter qua the GOP nominee,

he should return it all and let those who really did mean the money to go to him personally redonate as they see fit. It isn't just the individual donors who should get refunds: entities like NRSC without any doubt gave money to Specter because he was the GOP candidate, not because they liked him personally, and that money must be given back too.

With these principles in mind, I read this afternoon that Gov. Crist may pull a Lieberman, and run as an independent should he fail to obtain the GOP nomination for the Florida Senate seat. Crist has raised serious money for his primary and in anticipation of his Senate run—north of seven million dollars, the St. Petersburg Times reports.

While Crist's situation differs somewhat from Specter's in detail, there is no significant distinction available. The timing in the election sequence is somewhat different, but not materially so, and unlike Specter, Crist need not resign since he is not proposing to switch parties in office.

A stronger argument is that whereas Specter was an incumbent who was almost certain to be reelected, Crist is in a primary fight whose outcome is uncertain, so there should be a stronger presumption that money given to Crist is intended as a contribution to Crist qua Crist, rather than qua the GOP candidate. Nevertheless, three points seem cut against it.

First, it rests on a faulty assumption: that Specter was differently-situated. It was by no means apparent that Specter would not face a primary fight, nor that he would win it should it happen. Specter's last reelection came only after a squeaker of a primary against Pat Toomey, see Kevin McMahon, Winning the White House, 2004 116 (2005); Toomey had already indicated that he would run against Specter again, and this time around, Specter would lack the Bush coattails which dragged him over the top in 2004. See McMahon, at 116.

Second, albeit more tenuously, it should be noted that the St. Petersburg Times story linked above says that "not all of th[e] money [that Crist has raised] can be used in the primary." I don't know Florida election law, but this phrasing tells me that some contributions—somehow delineated—are ringfenced for the general election. It seems to me that only money raised for the primary alone must be attributed to Crist qua Crist; money raised for the general fund could be either.

Finally, the bolognaise problem. Once made, you have a bognaise sauce; you can't disassemble it back into its ingredients. The meat, the tomato, and the herbs are inextricably blended together. Likewise, it seems impossible—or at very least hopelessly impractical—for us to determine which donations were given to Crist qua Crist and Crist qua potential GOP nominee.

That last point was conclusive in Specter's case, and without any meaningful way to distinguish this case from that one, I find it conclusive. Accordingly, I adhere to the principle stated above: Should Crist run as an independent, he must honor all requests for refunds, and should offer all donors a refund of his own volition.

Google's obsession with SSO ("single sign-on") was presumably one of the drivers pushing its disastrous "Buzz" product rollout over the cliff (Pat wrote about it here, among other places). SSO is kind of like playing monopoly with a new rule that whenever you land on another player's property, they get to charge you the rent for all their properties. The concept of SSO is aggregation: Instead of having a username and password pair for your email, another pair for your social networking platform (indeed, perhaps several), a pair for your Youtube account, a pair for your Picassa account, a pair for "Google Checkout" (a credit card information-retaining platform that you have probably used without even realizing it), and so on, you would log on to all these services using a single Google account. And any others that Google later buys.

Among the many, many follies of this approach (aggregation, for instance, is a risk that I mentioned here; cf. this from 2008), the foolishness of applying a skeleton key model to disparate services on the open ocean of the web—i.e. outside of the safe inlets of campus networks—is aptly illustrated by the latest phishing attack. "It's bad enough if hackers gain control of your Twitter account, but if you also use that same password on other websites (and our research shows that 33% of people do that all of the time) then they could access your Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, eBay, Paypal, and so forth," warns Sophos AV's Graham Cluley.

Right he is. It is true that if you break someone's username/password pair for one account or service, it isn't a bad bet that you may be able to gain access to other services for which they may have used the same credentials. If you obtain my ebay credentials, for instance, maybe I used the same credentials for my Amazon account. Maybe. But you can see where this is going. With multiple sign-on, user credential apathy may lead to a wider security breach. With SSO, however, if hackers gain control of your Google account, and you have chosen to opt in to (or been dragged unawares into) Google's interlinking of its various services, that is, in and of itself, a comprehensive security breach. An attacker has unfettered access to everything you do within Google's ever-growing ambit.

I sure hope no one signs on to their Gmail account from a public library. Be very careful about logging out, not merely closing a browser window.

The West Wing Report tells us that President Obama remarked that the federal government "can't afford to extend Bush tax cuts on investment income." The President says that the de facto tax increase entailed is "not meant to be punitive - we just can't afford it."

This argument makes no sense unless the tax cuts at issue are net revenue drains. As Pat noted four years ago, however, and as the Washington Times reminded us less than a month ago, the Bush tax cuts increased tax revenues. So to the extent Obama meant to analyze what has gone before, his statement parses out to an improbable claim that we can't afford more revenue.

To the extent that the President meant to put misread fiscal history behind him, and oriented his remarks toward future policy, he is making the classic and pervasive blunder of assuming that you can change one aspect of fiscal policy with all else held equal. But it doesn't work that way. You can't just change the tax rate on a given activity and expect that activity to continue unaffected. To the extent there's elasticity in the market and actors' options, when it's cheaper to do it because it's taxed less, people will do more of it, and if it's more expensive because it's taxed more, they'll do less of it. And the more/less a taxed activity happens, the higher/lower the resulting tax revenues. I realize that this sounds obvious to the point of platitude, but if we credit him with honesty, our President doesn't seem to understand this.

When a politician tells you that the government should accept lower tax revenues to increase the taxes on a given activity, you'd better believe that it's ideologically-driven and punitive rather than about economics or sound public policy.

This is just too good to be true. After all the howls about the last administration's supposed transgressions, the possibility that someone in the Obama administration actually broke the law—specifically 18 U.S.C. § 211—by trying to bribe Admiral Sestak is so delicious that it has to be fattening. I'd like to see some authority, however, for the threshold proposition that withdrawal from a primary election is a "thing of value" for purposes of section 211. Perhaps United States v. Croft, 750 F.2d 1354 (7th Cir. 1984), and United States v. Sheker, 618 F.2d 607 (9th Cir. 1980), which construed similar language in 18 U.S.C. sections 641 and 912 respectively to include intangibles, will do?

It's my birthday, so I take more license than usual in picking the music. :)

I entirely agree with Patterico. Terrorism is violence done in furtherance of a cause; what Stack did was violent ex visceribus rei, and in furtherence of a cause in light of his "testament." That it was more akin to Oklahoma City than 9/11 is irrelevant. That it is difficult to place Stack on the political spectrum—parts of the letter sound like tea party boilerplate, while others sound like they was lifted from a Daily Kos diarist—is irrelevant.

We're seeing an interesting figure brandished on the web today: from as far afield as George Will and TPM, and phrased in slightly different ways, we hear that only about 30% of poll respondents think Sarah Palin is qualified to be President.

These numbers may be right, but they suffer from the same defect as the numbers that I discussed here. To see the problem, consider a national poll taken about whether Brad Ellsworth—the heir apparent to Evan Bayh's Senate campaign—is qualified to be a Senator. Is the poll a valid metric for evaluating whether he's a good choice for the nomination? The answer is obviously "no." Even if 100% of non-hoosiers think he's a tool, they don't get to vote. The relevant sample group is voters in a position to affect the outcome, i.e. Indiana voters.

Similarly, voters in blue states that won't vote for any conceivable GOP ticket in 2012 cannot be contained in a valid sample group in assessing Palin. If you live in New York, your opinion of Palin doesn't matter, because your state's vote for the Democratic ticket can already be assumed and counted. The voters whose opinion about Palin matter are those who live in red or swing states, because only those perceptions are likely to have any effect on the outcome.

In assessing election strategies, numbers are only valid and interesting to the extent they do real work. These don't. Polls about Presidential elections that fail to account for geographic distribution of respondents may grab headlines, but they are not to be taken seriously.

Lastly: Interesting enough, TPM crunches the numbers and admits that "there are 13% of Americans who either do not think Palin is qualified to be president, or are undecided on the matter, and would nevertheless vote for her" in a matchup against Obama—a damning indictment of the President.

Yep: "The real source of this mess is the agenda that Democrats have tried to ram through the political system. Far from offering new ideas to reform the welfare state or compete better against rising global powers, Democrats have with rare exception tried to impose the same spending, tax and regulatory agenda that failed in the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s. Mr. Obama was a new face promising new hope, but his ideas are as old as the average Congressional Chairman."