Leaving

Last fall, I wrote a post expressing derision towards liberals who talk about leaving for Canada when elections don't go their way. I pointed out that conservatives never talk this way.

Allow me to revise and extend these remarks. Conservatives do talk about leaving, only in a different way. They talk about seceding. In a recent Daily Kos poll, 27% of Georgians said that their state would be better as an independent nation than as part of the U.S. A majority of Georgia Republicans felt this way. Another poll got similar numbers out of Texas. And Oklahoma has sought to reassert its sovereignty.

Strange to hear talk of secession from the former Confederate states. But I'm sure it has nothing to do with race.

Anyway, why do conservatives choose secession? Well, liberals at least have some place to go. Conservatives have to create their version of paradise where they already live.

Torture can help you win the war...

...if it's your side being tortured:

Whatever role the bombings played in hastening Japan’s unconditional surrender, it was probably enhanced by the testimony of captured Air Force First Lieutenant Marcus McDilda. Though he initially professed to know nothing about the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima—because he didn’t—under torture he “confessed” that, contrary to Japanese hopes that the Americans could not possibly have produced more than a few, the United States had hundreds ready for deployment, with Tokyo and Kyoto next on the list of targets. In this case, of course, that was best for all concerned but it’s one more reminder that information obtained under duress is not always the most reliable.

(via Yglesias)

Specter stuck in the middle

Arlen Specter's continued travails are surely doing him no good, but they're delicious for party scholars. To review:

-He left the Republican Party because he's too liberal and couldn't survive a Club for Growth-backed primary challenger.

-He may be denied the Democratic nomination because he doesn't support card check legislation, making him anathema to labor unions.

So he's too liberal for Republicans and too conservative for Democrats. If he gets denied the Democratic nomination, that strikes me as a win all around. The GOP is happy that he pays a big price for leaving the party, the Dems are happy because they can get a real liberal elected to the seat, and political scientists are happy because we've got some great ethnographic evidence about polarization. The only real loser here would be Specter, and I can live with that.

Luckily for him, though, Specter has always been ideologically flexible enough to win office under pretty much any circumstances, and he'll probably figure something out here. (He did come up with the single bullet theory, after all.) Either he'll change his mind on card check, some other senator will pull the Employee Free Choice Act off the Senate calendar for the year, or he'll pull a Lieberman and run under the "Pennsylvanians for Specter" party.

I said share, not scare

On Sunday, the Denver Post led with a story about a Denver man who was allegedly paralyzed for several years by the 1976 swine flu vaccine that the federal government urged everyone to take. The front page included a huge picture of the man. Sounds pretty scary.

Oh, tucked deep down in the story, waaaay off the front page, was this graf:

Today, many scientists believe links between the 1976 vaccine and neurological disorders were exaggerated, at best. Even if there were adverse reactions, vaccines today have fewer proteins and additives with the potential to cause problems.

And this one:

Many of those severely sickened after getting the vaccine had Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder. But studies since then have shown the incidence of the syndrome was no higher among people who had the swine-flu vaccine. [...]

The 1976 inoculation campaign proved unnecessary, said Dr. Edward Janoff, director of the Mucosal and Vaccine Research Program at UC Denver. But he called the notion that the vaccine was dangerous a "persisting urban legend."

Given that there will likely be a vaccine developed for the current swine flu in the next few months and that people will be encouraged to take it to avoid a deadly pandemic, is it really responsible to be scaring the hell out of people about vaccines and burying the caveats deep down in the story?

Condi grilled by student

It would be nice to see an administration official face this sort of scrutiny a) while she's in office; and b) by a reporter or member of Congress rather than a Stanford undergrad.

The times they are a-changin'

Two men being married by a female rabbi, in Iowa.

Along with the Berlin Wall coming down and a president being impeached for lying about oral sex, this is one of those things I didn't think I'd live to see.

(via TPM)

Innovative campaign stance

A friend send me this story about Neal Horsley, a candidate for governor in Georgia. You should really read the whole thing. The highlights are that he wants Georgia to secede, he wants to break up the United States to stop legalized abortion, and he's willing to sacrifice his son for this effort, a la Abraham. Yes, he's willing to kill his child to stop abortion. Oh, and his first girlfriend was a mule.