Lying in Ponds

Wednesday night I watched the painful ending to a painful World Series. I listened to a little of the Stylistics, felt better and went to bed. So what happened Thursday morning? I read what seemed at first to be an ordinary George Will column — an Oliver Wendell Holmes quotation, criticism of liberals and liberalism, a sprinkling of vocabulary words. And then at the very end Mr. Will sneakily twisted the knife. He actually quoted former Cardinal pitcher Joaquin Andujar (”There is one word in America that says it all: you never know”), thereby bringing back the very bad memories of the last Cardinals World Series disaster (1985). Thanks George!

If you are in the habit of checking the current pundit boxscore once a day, you may not be aware that some columnists’ creations are not posted on the web until later in the day. My usual practice is to evaluate those columns in the evening, and then add them to the previous day’s boxscore when I post the new set of columns the next morning. All three Lying in Ponds columnists on WorkingForChange are late: Joe Conason, Molly Ivins and Robert Scheer. Clarence Page at The Chicago Tribune is late, and Cal Thomas at TownHall.com is often very late. For example, yesterday’s boxscore was updated with columns from Mr. Conason and Mr. Page, and I had missed a “web exclusive” Jeff Jacoby column from Tuesday.

I wish that Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler would just come out and tell us what he really thinks of Maureen Dowd (scroll down):

Try to believe that a person as empty as Maureen Dowd plays the role she does in your political culture. Fatuous, vacuous, inept and inane, she’s currently counting up Kerry’s contractions. Everything changed on September 11. Everything changed except that.

Mr. Somerby’s ire is directed at Ms. Dowd’s recent column on John Kerry’s duck hunting. Here at Lying in Ponds, I often defend Maureen Dowd against charges of partisanship, but not against being fatuous, vacuous, inept or inane.

Here’s a strange coincidence. The Cardinals have complained about their Boston accomodations at the Quincy Mariott this year. In my hero Bob Gibson’s autobiography, he said that poor treatment at the Sheraton Motor Inn of Quincy helped to motivate him before his Game 7 triumph in 1967.

Last week it was John Fund; this week it’s the editors of the National Review Online:

The nub of the likely Democratic strategy is the so-called “provisional ballot.” The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that any voter whose registration is uncertain, or who is unregistered, can still cast a ballot “provisionally.” Once the polls close, the voter’s name is checked against public records to ensure its eligibility, and then his vote is added to the relevant candidate’s tally. In theory, it is a sensible idea, giving a voter who is the victim of some bureaucratic snafu the chance to vote. But the Democrats hope to turn the intention of the law on its head. Provisional ballots are presumed unlawful unless demonstrated otherwise. Remember: These “provisional” votes wouldn’t have been considered valid in 2000. Many of them surely should be excluded this year, but Democrats will create pressure to count them all no matter what.

As I said last week, my North Carolina county has been using provisional ballots successfully for several years. No one wants to vote a provisional ballot — everyone wants to use a regular ballot and insert it into the tabulator to be certain that it will be counted. A provisional ballot may be rejected; it’s only a last resort.

I don’t see how provisional ballots could be an effective method of fraudulent voting. Filling out a provisional ballot must be done in person, it’s time-consuming and it requires a signature. Where would one get an army of people willing to travel from precinct to precinct on election day, committing felonies and signing their names at each stop?

Provisional ballots are a good thing, but they’re subject to human error and confusion like anything else. Since many jurisdictions will be using them for the first time, there will no doubt be difficulties somewhere. Problems with provisional ballots could of course be critical in an election as close as Florida in 2000, but everything becomes critical in an election like that. The paranoia is unjustified.

Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity has started his own weblog. There seems to be a mix of Spinsanity-type material and commentary on a wider range of issues. For example, Mr. Nyhan comments on a provocative cover at our local alternative weekly newspaper.

The four top slots in the Lying in Ponds Top Ten have become very familiar over the past couple of years — Coulter, Krugman, Scheer, Ivins. That’s how last year finished up, and this year looked the same until this week, when Harold Meyerson edged past Molly Ivins into 4th place.

Mr. Meyerson certainly appears to deserve his high partisanship score. He has been simultaneously more pro-Kerry than Joe Conason and more anti-Bush than Paul Krugman — the most extreme of all 33 rated pundits. Unlike many Democratic columnists who graciously praised Ronald Reagan after his death, Mr. Meyerson ripped Reagan and Reaganomics and Reaganites and Reaganauts. Mr. Meyerson’s record this year is of course unmarred by any columns which favor Republicans, but there was one crossover column critical of Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean. We’ll see whether he can eventually challenge the two titans of partisanship in our rankings.

In April I noted that Bill O’Reilly had been very non-partisan to that point, going so far as to say that “I suspect that Mr. O’Reilly has an independent streak which will continue to keep him out of the Lying in Ponds Top Ten.” Oops. With a series of one-sided Republican columns in the last month, Mr. O’Reilly is knocking at the door, only a point behind Cal Thomas for 10th place in the current partisanship rankings. His weekly column comes out today — we’ll see if he can be a factor in the Top Ten.

The subject of last Thursday’s post was the increase in partisanship of Thomas Oliphant’s pre-election columns. This Thursday’s topic is a similar ramping up of partisan punditry by William Safire of The New York Times. In his October columns, he has made 106 Republican-leaning references against only two in the other direction. Like Thomas Oliphant, Mr. Safire has generally been only modestly partisan in comparison with his peers — even this year he ranks only 23rd out of our 33 pundits.

Mr. Safire has particularly come under fire for his two most recent columns. Ben Fritz of Spinsanity criticizes him for his column on the John Kerry-Mary Cheney controversy:

Safire went even further, alleging to have specific information that the accusation was part of Kerry’s debate preparation. “Members of Kerry’s debate preparation team made Mary Cheney’s private life the centerpiece of their answer to the question, especially worrisome to them, about same-sex marriage,” he wrote. “Kerry was prepped to insert her sexuality into his rehearsed answer.” But the pundit provides no evidence to back up this claim, which contradicts facts reported in the New York Times and elsewhere. Safire is conflating speculation about political motives with definitive fact.

Of course, Safire is free to speculate that the campaign is lying. But he should not present this speculation as fact, just as pundits should be honest about what they mean then they say someone “outed” a well-known figure in the gay community.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has taken issue with Mr. Safire on both the Kerry-Mary and fearmongering columns.

In response to a Taegan Goddard post asking “Are Voters Stupid?”, Andrew Cline suggests instead that apathetic voters are “fat and happy”:

I do not believe that citizens are lazy or stupid. The problems of the electorate are multiple and complex. But let me suggest one possibility among many why Americans appear to know so little about their own government and fail to participate in its running: We are fat and happy.

It has been the case for a very long time that it doesn’t really matter who holds any particular political position–including the presidency. Both parties have operated within an acceptable normal political range. Both parties have supported the free enterprise system. Both parties have supported the classically liberal notions of individual self-actualization and political participation. Both political parties have supported the opposition’s right to exist, to contend for power, and to run the show when in the majority.

While some may argue that these common values are breaking down now, the average American just doesn’t see–largely because the status quo bias of journalism keeps such talk out of serious discussion. As long as the economy works and no one is taking political power by force, we the people are happy to spend our time worrying about making money and buying things. As long as these pursuits remain uninterrupted by more than a recession from time to time, we the people just cannot be bothered with politics. Everything appears to work just fine.

In yesterday’s WSJ OpinionJournal, John Fund did a reasonable job of surveying some of the issues related to provisional ballots, which are now required as a result of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). But I think his attempt to compare provisional ballots to the problems in Florida is a real stretch:

It’s a safe bet you will hear more about provisional ballots before Election Day–and a lot more if the election goes into overtime again. The provisional ballot could become this year’s equivalent of Florida’s infamous punch-card ballot, and it could decide who wins the presidency.

This is the ninth year I’ve worked at the polls in my precinct; one of my jobs has been to determine when a provisional ballot is called for and to help the voter use it. In our county, we’ve used provisional ballots for several years before HAVA required them.

For butterfly ballots and hanging chads, discerning the voter’s intent was very difficult. But the main issue with provisional ballots is whether the voter is legally registered or not, which should not be that complicated for the great majority of voters. The question of whether provisional votes in the wrong precinct should count will no doubt vary from one jurisdiction to another, but that also doesn’t seem very complicated. In Mr. Fund’s article, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell “says that allowing voters to cast ballots outside their precincts would lead to chaos and invite ’stop and shop’ multiple voting.” That doesn’t make any sense — filling out and signing provisional ballots in multiple locations would be committing an easily-proven felony.

Provisional voting is merely an attempt to deal with the inevitable election day snafus and provide a mechanism for legitimately-registered voters to vote successfully. Provisional ballots could indeed be decisive in a close election — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I spent the weekend chaperoning a church youth trip to a camp near New Bern, NC (original home of a certain well-known soft drink), so I’m behind on columns. I’ll try to catch up on Monday.

Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant is now on the brink of breaking into the partisan Top Ten, as a result of a string of one-sided October columns. For last year and the first part of this year, Mr. Oliphant has been only moderately partisan. For example, in June, he generously praised the late Ronald Reagan, and in July he criticized John Kerry’s Democratic Convention acceptance speech.

But his seven October columns so far have contained a whopping 163 Democratic-leaning references against only 2 individual references in the other direction. The titles suggest pre-election mode: Bush’s costly gaffe, Bush errs in ceding the future, ‘Global test’ tactic turns against Bush, Cheney proves his irrelevance, Cheney’s fading credibility, Personal hedge and Bush’s dodge and duck.

Of course, Mr. Oliphant goes way back with John Kerry, and his daughter is a member of Mr. Kerry’s staff. Given all of that, it’s remarkable that three pundits have been even more positive toward John Kerry — Harold Meyerson, Joe Conason, and Paul Krugman.

There is now a second website devoted to collecting North Carolina-related weblogs together in one place. First there was North State Blogs; now there is NCBlogs.com. Lots of interesting stuff.