Category: Politics

So THAT’s what he meant.

Apparantly, the Dred Scott reference wasn’t just a gaffe. I’ve seen or heard a couple of times now, including this morning’s “Al Franken Show” that the Dred Scott reference was a not-terribly subtle coded reference to the Pro-Life crowd, who’ve been equating abortion with slavery.

Ah well! Not quite so funny, in that context, although I still think it was a lame and poorly thought on statement.

In any case, if you needed another reason to dislike Bush, just remember the Supreme Court. Anyone want a pool on how many Supreme Court justices retire in the next four years?

Update/6:36pm : I know I’d seen this in a Blog as well — it was mentioned in Daily Kos over the weekend.

From the Onion, last May:

In case you missed it then, just like I did: Fed-UP Cheney Enters Presidential Race Himself

WASHINGTON, DC—As President Bush’s public-approval ratings hit an all-time low, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced Monday that he has been “forced” to throw his hat into the ring for the 2004 presidential race.

“Enough is enough,'” the visibly annoyed Cheney said at a morning press conference. “George blew the whole Iraqi prison-abuse speech, and he barely did better with his Nicholas Berg reaction. Now he’s below 50 percent in the polls. I’m sorry, but I can’t allow him to drag me down with him in November.”

“Do I have to do everything around here?” Cheney asked, pausing to gesture angrily around the White House. “I guess I do.”

(Found via Daily KOS)

Saturday Night Live…

…is rather lampooning the debate. It’s the very first thing, no less. Seems to be parodying both candidates pretty effectively, although they’ve just got so much more to work for with Bush. They got in the “Internets” line and “Needs some wood”, and if everyone else saw Bush as being as whiny as the parody on there, the election’s already won.

(… a few minutes pass …)

Ok, it’s over. Sadly, I can’t say that some of the parody of Kerry didn’t have some grains of truth, although I really can’t see what some of the Kerry lines had to do with anything he said.

This just in: “Bush opposes slavery …”

Apparantly, Bush opposes slavery and he brought up he brought up two little words: “Dread Scott” as an example of a bad judicial decision.

Damn, I nearly fell out of my seat laughing. Especially since he very nearly confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution a moment after that, and completely ignored the need for the 13th/14th/15th ammendments.

Call me a pessimist if you’d like…

There was an interesting challenge on Matthew Gross’s blog asking bloggers to predict the outcome of the election. Since he didn’t put any qualifications on it, here are my totally unqualified brand-new-blogger guesses on it:

My gut feeling is that it’s going to be very, very close. But put me down for 275 Kerry, 263 Bush, with Colorado split.

Since there was a request for a popular vote split, I’m going to guess that neither side has a majority, but that there will be a slightly bigger edge for Kerry than Bush had in 2000, so to again guess wildly: 49.3% Kerry, 49% Bush, leaving 1.7% for Nader and other.

OK, there’s my guess, and I do think Kerry’s going to win.

Let me give one other pessimistic guess, though: that we’re not going to have a definite President-Elect on the morning of November 3rd. I sincerely hope that we don’t get another Florida-like situation, and don’t expect another mess of that magnitude. But I’ll be very surprised if it’s not close enough that something contentious will delay a definite answer until at least sometime during the day on the 3rd.