Gridiron Politics

So Obama has firmly seized ownership of the Afghanistan conflict, with yesterday’s news that he is deploying 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. This comes as no great shock - while Obama always spoke negatively about Iraq, he used Afghanistan as a pivot point to illustrate where the United States might use its military might more sensibly.

I suppose the surprising thing for me is how well people are taking it (breathless USA Today tone aside.) For instance, the folks on the left who think Obama is too conservative seem to like his latest move. Take this post by Riverdaughter, one of those charming people who still maintains, 9 months later, that Obama stole the nomination from Hillary and should give back the presidency. You’d think she and her fellow PUMAs would harp on this “warmongering” by our commander in chief. Instead, this is the first post I’ve read on that blog where the author hasn’t slandered Obama within the first sentence. (Perhaps this is simply because Hillary has generally been more of a hawk than Obama, and now that she’s Secretary of State the PUMAs will support most of Obama’s foreign policy.)

Now I think there are still legitimate worries about committing more troops to Afghanistan. Namely, are we just bogging down in the conflict the way the Soviet Union did in the 1980s? Is there really a good solution? How do you turn a nation of terrorists and poppy farmers into a democracy? And how do you do this when Afghanistan’s leader is corrupt? It’s not that I think the United States is incapable of pacifying the country, it’s just that I’d like a definition of what “victory” is before we send more troops there. Goalposts, please.

Two interesting news items I read today that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. First: In the fairly-certain event that Obama is our next president, Sarah Palin will not simply disappear. She will, instead, remain a standard bearer for the hard right crowd and a possible candidate for 2012. Don’t believe me? Explain this quote, then, as Palin dissect’s McCain’s anti-Obama robocalls:

“If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand, I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more Americans, talking to them about our plan to get the economy back on track and winning the war and not having to rely on the old conventional ways of campaigning that includes those robocalls and includes spending so much money on the television ads that, I think, is kind of draining out there in terms of Americans’ attention span. They get a bit irritated with just being inundated…”

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Observe Palin’s reaction two weeks ago when the McCain camp pulled its campaign staff out of Michigan [polls released a few days later showed up to a 15 point gap between Obama and McCain.” Via Fox News:

Palin said the decision to pull out of Michigan, which was announced Thursday, was “not a surprise” to her since polls show McCain slipping in the state. But Palin said that when she read the news, she “fired off a quick e-mail and said, ‘Oh come on, do we have to?’”

“Todd and I, we’d be happy to get to Michigan … I wanna get back to Michigan and I want to try.”

It’s unclear whether the McCain campaign will heed Palin’s request.

Now there are certainly alternate explanations to Palin’s comments. Maybe she’s actually been authorized by the McCain camp to speak off-the-cuff, and give a down-to-earth perspective while the campaign makes the hard decisions. Think of it as a “gee, I’d love to come over to your house Billy, but dad, you know how he is, I guess I just can’t do it.” More likely, however, Palin is creating distance between herself and McCain, giving her an exit strategy in November to blame McCain for the loss. If only he’d listened to Palin, he’d be in the White House, you betcha!

In other news, plants are poised to take over the world. Via Andrew Sullivan, Japanese techno-botanists have created a blogging houseplant. Really. The plant blogs in Japanese, obviously, so check out this site here for an explanation. Then, to see the plant in all its glory, go to http://plant.bowls-cafe.jp/. Hopefully the plant will start blogging in English soon, and maybe set up its own Twitter feed so I can skip all the boring chlorophyll stuff and figure out who he’s picking to win the presidential race.

Well, I’m happy to say the country has suffered through its final presidential debate this year, which means all those poor people chained to a desk and forced to twist dials up and down can finally return to their homes.

I think both candidates did well in the final debate. McCain was at his strongest when he flatly stated he wasn’t George Bush. I thought his anti-abortion content was strong, too. Obama’s best moments came when he strongly refuted McCain’s character attacks, and when he detailed his health care plan. Most non-partisan bloggers seem to think Obama ran away with it, and the aforementioned focus groups definitely favored Obama by 60 to 35 type margins. It was McCain’s best performance so far, but on balance Obama probably was a bit stronger, and with his lead in the polls all he really had to do was play prevent and hope McCain wouldn’t make it to the end zone.

There’s been talk of ACORN the evil vote-fraud monster as of late. If you haven’t heard, ACORN, a community organization who enjoys favored-child status with mainstream Democratic groups, pays people to get voter registrations. Sometimes, the people they pay make up names, like Mickey Mouse, because they’re getting paid either way and it’s hard to verify all the voters they register. This is nothing new to Oregon, where the law used to allow people to get paid for collecting signatures for ballot measure petitions. Then they couldn’t get paid, the courts said, then they could, then they couldn’t and I lost interest in the whole thing. The thing about fake registrations, though, is who does it really harm? The poor election workers who have to process extra registrations, maybe, but who else? If you register Mickey Mouse to vote, how do you actually plan to get him to vote? Are you going to pay someone to wear a Mickey costume and go down to county elections? Does anyone honestly believe that the few people turning in fraudulent registrations actually bother to go through with voting multiple times and risking federal or state jail time?

Real voter fraud, on the other hand, usually occurs when candidates actually pay people for voting one way or the other. Per Rick Hasen, law professor and election-law poobah, here’s an example of voter fraud from 1999, back before the Y2K bug destroyed us all.

Highlight: Incredibly, each of the two camps–McCranie and Mullis-actually set up tables inside the courthouse at opposite ends of the hall, where supporters on both sides openly bid against each other to buy absentee votes. At trial, a Dodge County magistrate described the rowdy courthouse atmosphere during the absentee voting period as “a successful flea market.” (R3-446). One of the vote buyers in the Mullis camp also testified that the open bidding for votes was “[l]ike an auction.” Vote buyers for both sides paid the voter $20 to $40 after the voter cast his or her absentee ballot. Sometimes, the cash payment occurred in the courthouse bathroom. More frequently, the voters received their payment while the “haulers” drove them home after they voted. McCranie’s haulers generally drove the absentee voters to the courthouse to see Bryant Williams (”Williams”) whose primary role was to physically mark the voters’ absentee ballots for McCranie and Jones, no matter what the voters’ preferences were. Williams was not a county employee but a volunteer campaign worker for McCranie. Williams’ wife, however, was McCranie’s clerk at the Dodge County Courthouse. Approximately 40 absentee voters also testified at trial that they were paid by one side or the other to vote for either Mullis and Jones or McCranie and Jones.

We’ve come a long way from 1999. Now, instead of making secret voting payments in bathrooms, we follow in the footsteps of the great Larry Craig and make secret advances toward undercover police officers.

Welcome to the 2008 season for college football! I can’t wait to watch games this year, and, as usual, I’ll make a series of wildly inaccurate guesses of how I might bet these games if I lived in Nevada, where sportsbetting is legal. A reminder of terms: the line is + or -. If I pick a team that’s + 5, for instance, that means that if I actually drove down to Las Vegas and put 10 bucks on that team, I would win that bet if the team won, or if the team lost by fewer than 5 points. If I pick a team that’s -5, that means that I win my bet if the team wins the game by more than 5 points, otherwise I lose the bet. If my favored team wins by exactly 5 points, or my underdog loses by exactly 5 points, it’s a tie and the bet is canceled. Sometimes I’ll speculate about a moneyline bet. This is a bet that simply picks one team to win, no matter how good or bad they are compared to their opponent. A moneyline of +400 means that if I bet $10 on that team, if they win I am paid $40 on my bet. A moneyline of -400 means that I must risk $40 to win $10. Next to the bets, I will list how confident I am by rating the number of units I would wager on the game, if I were able to place such a wager. Make sense? Now to the games.

Please note: Games I would hold off this week: Washington @ Oregon and Oklahoma State @ Washington State. The spread on Oregon is around 13, and I think that’s too many points for a team whose quarterback was just injured. Plus it’s a rivalry game and you never know how those will turn out. I’d stay away from the Cowboys because they’re playing in Pullman, which is a really unfriendly place for visiting teams. And Wazzu might be bad, but they can be unpredictable. Obviously if I had to bet it I’d take OSU but I think it’s smarter simply to stay away.