Presidential debate scorecard (Day 1)

Hugh Hewitt keeps a scorecard on the debate. It appears that President Bush is doing quite well.

(UPDATE 08:20 01-Oct-04): So how exactly was the debate? Who was the winner? Well, it appears that the judgment is very subjective. Jay Nordlinger (a staunch supporter of Bush) thought that Kerry did a great job, and that, on the basis of the debate, he would vote for Kerry if he had been a political novice. Hugh Hewitt thinks “Overall: Bush gets a big win, by hitting all his messages over and over again. He wins on substance.” But then Hugh is a sharp observer and commentator; I wonder if the average voter who watched the debate could dissect the substance of the arguments. Dissociated Press says that three polls (for what it’s worth) showed that Kerry won the debate. Scott Ott has a unique perspective.

(UPDATE 09:00 01-Oct-04): The stock market rallies (Dow +100, Nasdaq +39) the day after the debate. I remember reading an article in Barron’s that argues that the market prefers for Bush to be re-elected. Draw your conclusions.

(UPDATE 09:06 01-Oct-04): I secretly hope that this time Bush is misunderestimated, again.

Last gasp of the CBS forgery defense team

Professor David E. Hailey, Jr., of Utah State University, has come to the defense of the forged documents that CBS infamously broadcast in its 60 Minutes II program on September 8, 2004. He’s been caught red-handed by Wizbang, having inadvertently left his own work-in-progress Photoshop forgery on his website. Wizbang mirrored his entire website and took screenshots as proof. The Boston Globe was about to run an article of Hailey’s “work,” but Charles at LGF has told Wizbang that the Glob is now backing off. Read the whole thing here. On its main page LGF keeps links to Charles’s own proof of forgery and Dr. Newcomer’s analysis.

Allahpundit notes that Professor Hailey is a contributor to John Kerry, via opensecrets.org.

Victor Davis Hanson: Perfect Storm

Victor Davis Hanson is among the cool-headed, logical, lucid, and erudite writers whom I enjoy reading. He writes regularly for the National Reivew, and has his own website as well. Currently he has a series called The Perfect Storm of Hating Bush, which explores the phenomenon of Bush-hatred so prevalent in the Angry Left.

What would Jesus spend?

Deirdre McCloskey writes about Christian virtues and the economy. This is an issue that I grapple with very often, and have not come to a conclusion that I can stick with. More studies required.

Terminology

I have consciously chosen to use the term leftist instead of the more common liberal. Also, I don’t particularly like the label conservative that most people would apply to my political views. Let me explain.

I consider my political views to be essentially classical liberalism. The qualifier classical is indispensable these days. Classical liberalism is the political philosophy that champions individual liberty (and therefore responsibility), free markets, and limited government. The term liberalism is a perfectly good one, but unfortunately it has been applied to ideologies that are completely antithetical to its classical definition. Modern and postmodern liberals are liberal only with other people’s money (what I call OPM-itis); they use the government’s coercive power to rob Peter to pay Paul and to buy Paul’s votes. This creates a vicious form of dependency on the government that is not easily broken, and ultimately and unfairly punishes the most productive members of society. And are not dependency and coercion the very essence of slavery?

Likewise, I dislike the label conservative because it does not say very much about what it is to be conserved. In the days of the Puritan Revolution, for example, a conservative would be a royalist. Or, during the Protestant Reformation, a conservative would be a papist. If I were to project my views back to those times, I would certainly be considered a progressive or a liberal! And if we look at the mess that is the political landscape in the U.S., it’s certainly not something that I want to conserve. Reform toward the end of classical liberalism is what I would look for. For me, the terms liberal and conservative are just too vague and imprecise, and too dependent on one’s position in history.

Be that as it may, I will not object too strongly if others call me conservative, as long as the context is clear. In my writings, however, I will continue to use leftist and its related terms to refer to the opposition.

(UPDATE 08:48 30-Sep-04): There’s a post in FreeRepublic about giving ‘liberal’ a definition.

CBS again

One would have thought that the recent Dan Rather scandal would teach CBS something about basic honesty in journalism. (Ratherbiased.com chronicles everything, not just the recent scandal, but a long history of Dan Rather’s bias.) But I think postmodernism is so ingrained in the mind (to the extent they have one) of the leftists that the idea of objectivity and honesty has become meaningless to them, perhaps subconsciously. Power is everything. When one controls the information that hoi polloi receive, one wields a lot of power. And the MSM (mainstream media) know this; their “journalism” is so blatantly driven by leftist agenda that they might as well admit it rather than pretending to be fair and balanced.

The interview by Bill at INDC Journal with the CBS people is illuminating: CBS is no longer interested in reporting news, but only spreading rumors, creating tensions and sensations, advancing political agenda, etc. Shameful.

Voter fraud

There have been many reports about vote fraud. Bill Hobbs has begun to collect such reports.

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) wrote briefly about vote fraud, and initially said that he tended to scoff at reports purporting to prove efforts at such. He posts a picture showing a Kerry-campaign sign at the entrance to a cemetary, and notes (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I guess) that he is “beginning to wonder if the dead-people-for-Kerry vote might not be bigger than I thought. . . .”

My initial reaction to the picture was: “Is this a pun adumbrating that the Kerry-campaign is going six feet under?”

(UPDATE 06:58 30-Sep-04): Michelle Malkin has a good summary of frauds in various states, noting that several groups are under investigation.

Emotional cars

The October 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM has an interesting pointer about Toyota’s new car that can show emotions: crying, laughing, winking, etc.

The leftists’ view of tax money

The leftists betray their belief in collectivism by what they say. In their view, the government owns the money, and tax cuts “cost” government. Here is an excerpt from the “Dezinformatsia” section of the September 29, 2004 (02-39) edition of Federalist Patriot:

From the Leftmedia Psychosis Files: "A 10-year remedy to the [Alternative Minimum Tax] problem could cost the government $602 billion, if all the Bush tax cuts are extended beyond their 2010 expiration date, according to the Congressional Budget Office." --Jonathan Weisman, The Washington Pest **Last time we checked, the money belongs to the taxpayers and it doesn't cost the government anything.

Kerry’s speech at Temple University

The noble Jim Geraghty has a good critique of Kerry’s speech at Temple University. It’s not too bad as far as Kerry’s speeches go, and in it Kerry (finally) showed some understanding of the threat the U.S. faces. Yet it is a lot of talk and few concrete plans. For example, Kerry wants to get tough with the Saudis and says that he will reduce our dependency on Mideast oil. Sounds good, but how? Cheap alternative energy won’t be widely available for a long time, and Kerry’s own party (and he himself too, I suppose) is opposed to more domestic drilling. Kerry runs into a similar problem with securing borders. He rightly points out that our borders are porous, yet it is his party’s ideology that is at odds with the actions required for securing them. Unless the Demos realize how much their beliefs are detached from reality, I don’t see any possibility of their doing a better job at anything than the Republicans (of whom I have many complaints, but that’s a story for another day).

Weakness of MD5 and SHA-1 - cause for worry?

It appears that a collision has been found for MD5. The MD5CRK Project has been closed down since the report from some researchers in China was published. There are unconfirmed rumors of results against SHA-1. But it is not the end of the world. Bruce Schneier has some perspectives on what the discovery of weaknesses of these hash functions means:

To a user of cryptographic systems -- as I assume most readers are -- this news is important, but not particularly worrisome. MD5 and SHA aren't suddenly insecure. No one is going to be breaking digital signatures or reading encrypted messages anytime soon with these techniques. The electronic world is no less secure after these announcements than it was before.

But there's an old saying inside the NSA: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse." These techniques will continue to improve, and probably someday there will be practical attacks based on these techniques.

It's time for us all to migrate away from SHA-1.

Newer schemes and protocols will certainly use stronger hash functions, with more bits and (hopefully) better security properties.

Scylla & Charybdis: CBS and the Growing Evidence Tampering Checklist

BummerDietz’s blog entry, Scylla & Charybdis: CBS and the Growing Evidence Tampering Checklist, shows strong evidence of criminal intent on CBS’s part both before and after the broadcast.

Political futures markets

I watch two markets that trade “political futures,” i.e., contracts whose values depend on the outcome of political events. (These markets trade other futures as well, but for the moment I am interested in the U.S. presidential election.)

TradeSports has W. currently at about 67.6, whereas the Iowa Electronic Markets has W. at 72.5. For a while the contracts on W. traded lower at TradeSports than IEM, but now it has reversed. In either case, there is an opportunity for arbitraging. But I suppose these markets are not big and efficient enough for people to bother doing this.

Health insurance — insuring whom?

There is no free lunch, but apparently many people don’t realize this (or refuse to) when it comes to “insurance.” Arnold Kling writes about how the way the health insurance system works drives up demand, and the real winners are the service providers. Either the “buck gets passed” or the “check is split,” but someone has to pay the bill! This is also why socialized medicine is bound for failure: it artificially prices services below market, creating demands that cannot be met by the supply. Witness the long queues Canadian people have to endure in order to get medical service. It is also becoming apparent that the Taiwanese system is headed for the same destiny. Sure, in the short term some needy people benefit from the system, but in the long run everyone suffers (except, of course, for the elite governing class). What’s the point of having universal health insurance coverage when it results in low-quality or no service? I’ll probably see God before I get to see a doctor.

UPDATE (16:06 28-Sep-2004): During my daily workout I saw a TV footage of the Kerry campaign with signs saying “affordable healthcare.” Whom are these people kidding? Trial lawyers such as John Edwards have tremendously added to the cost of healthcare (if not destroyed it) in this country. Read about how Edwards got his filthy lucres by flakey science and emotional appeals to juries (Thomas Sowell). Again: there is no free lunch. The doctors’ insurers paid the lawyers; the doctors’ premiums get raised; fewer doctors would choose risky specialties (such as OB/GYN); cost inevitably rises. These guys are idiots: there is no such thing as “affordable healthcare” if leftists such as John-John become in charge. Yeah, you get the affordable part (thanks to other hardworking taxpayers), but no healthcare.

Tribe’s plagiarism

Harvard law professor Larry Tribe stands accused of plagiarism, and he acknowledges it and says that he takes responsibility for it. But his colleagues are reacting less than responsibly, in ways reminiscent of Dan Rather’s recent disgraceful behavior. Power Line has a summary.

UPDATE (07:30 28-Sep-2004): David Frum, himself a Harvard Law School graduate, says that there is some truth to Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Tribe: there is a ‘cultural difference’ between sourcing in the legal profession and other academic disciplines. Frum also notes that Harvard Law School’s scholarship is rather thin compared to other disciplines:

Law schools – and Harvard perhaps more than any other - suffer from a deep identity problem. They regard themselves and hold themselves out to the public as scholarly institutions, just like the other graduate departments of the university. Yet most of the faculty of the Harvard law school when I was there were not scholars at all. They were extremely clever lawyers who had been hired young for their intellectual potential – and who were then valued by the school for their charisma, their teaching ability, and their activist outside legal work. The only scholarship that was usually required of them – scholarship meaning original academic research and writing – was a single substantial article for a law review. A bright young man or woman could get tenure at Harvard Law School with a publishing record that would not even qualify him for a job interview at the Harvard History Department.

There were exceptions to this rule, of course, and ironically enough Tribe was and is one of them. But Dershowitz is correct that most Harvard lawyers simply play by different rules than other academics do.

Yet this is not an excuse. It is a restatement of the problem.

Social Security

Ach! Every time I see this term, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. When I switched to a new job earlier this year, I had already paid in full this year’s social security taxes. But my paychecks from the new job still have social security taxes deducted, and I’ll have to go through the pain of claiming it back when I file my 2004 tax return.

Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite commentators, writes about why leftists are against privatization of social security. In a few words: they want control of your money. They don’t care if they break promises (the concept of a contract means nothing to them as long as they hold the power of coercion); they’ll just tax, tax, tax.

Beginning Hebrew

I’m now considering taking a beginner’s Hebrew class from a friend. He wants at least three people committed to taking the course, but so far only I and another are seriously thinking about it.

Recital preparation

I had a “dress rehearsal” with the pianist last weekend before a small audience who will not be able to attend the real recital. I was a little nervous (possibly because of the presence in the audience of a professional pianist), and played the long notes in the Bach sonata with a slightly shaking bow. The Franck was OK, but I was flat in some of the high notes -- need to work on these.

The program for the recital will be as follows: Bach’s Sonata for Violin and Cembalo No. 5 in F minor (BWV 1018), Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major, and Ponce’s Estrellita (arr. Heifetz). I plan to play my own Presto in D minor for the encore (if indeed there be).