File under “With friends like these…”

In his last statement before being executed, death row inmate Dale Bishop urged opponents of the death penalty to vote for Barack Obama:

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080724/NEWS/807240387/1001

Apparently, Mr. Bishop’s deep-seated philosophical opposition to capital punishment had not yet fully formed when he helped his buddy beat their victim to death with a claw hammer, or when he requested the death penalty at his sentencing. The article indicated that Mr. Bishop was mentally ill, but all the quotes attributed to him sound pretty lucid to me.

In any case, I will wager you won’t be finding this endorsement on Senator Obama’s web site anytime soon.

Respected astronaut says aliens are real

Apollo 14 veteran astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who shares the record for the longest walk on the Moon in 1971, said in a  radio interview that Earth has been visited by aliens multiple times and that the governments of the world have been covering up this information for decades.

I’m willing to leave room for the possibility that aliens exist and may have visited Earth. But doesn’t it seem odd that Dr. Mitchell would have waited until now to speak out, and chosen an entertainment radio program as the forum to reveal this great truth to the world? Furthermore, after zealously guarding this great secret for 60 years, does it seem likely that the great government conspiracy would let itself be so easily brought down by a 77-year old retired astronaut?

How about the interesting “coincidence” that this comes out just as the new “X-Files” movie is about to open? Now *there’s* a conspiracy for you…Calling Agents Mulder and Scully!

If you want to see a great movie about an alien visitation and a government cover-up, go rent Close Encounters of the Third Kind– the film that established writer/director Steven Spielberg as more than just a one-hit wonder horror specialist. The reason this film still works 30 years later is that the movie is less about the aliens and more about the various ways in which people deal with the possibility that we are not alone.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24070088-13762,00.html

Where is the outrage about *this* type of voter suppression?

After the 2000 and 2004 elections, we heard a lot of whining about alleged voter suppression and disenfranchisement. The big bad racist Republicans, we were told by the earnest media, had conspired to keep minorities from voting by insisting on discriminatory restrictions like having your name actually present on the roll of registered voters. However, attention to these claims inevitably faded, because while every election involves some isolated shenanigans (ask Chicago Mayor Daley), there has never been any credible evidence of organized, widespread vote suppression.

Bob Novak points out, however, that there *is* a population whose votes are routinely undercounted, and that population is America’s military men and women serving overseas. The problem is not a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise the military, but rather the inability or unwillingness of the Pentagon to devote the necessary resources to ensure that soldiers receive their ballots and are able to have them returned in time to be counted. As Novak points out, “A combat officer has enough to do without handling the votes of troopers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The good news is that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) have agreed in principle to try to work together to find a solution. Let us hope that this effort is not impeded by one party or the other’s concern about who the military votes are likely to go to (So far I have read interviews with military personnel planning to support both Obama and McCain), because that would indeed be voter suppression. I fear, though, that any legislation will come too late to impact the 2008 election which is only four months away.

The full column is not too long and is worth the read: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/the_soldier_voting_scandal.html

The Democratic Party – Who are they and where are they going?

Joel Kotkin has a brilliant piece out in The American describing the changed demographic of the Democrats’ base voters, and what that change means for the future of the party:

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/july-august-magazine-contents/the-democrats2019-dilemma

I found the article very insightful and containing little in the way of partisan sniping in either direction.