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It’s become clear that there are millions of scary religous wackos that hate the very idea of religious freedom. They believe a woman’s place is in the home, and that she should be kept there by force of law. They believe that abortion should be illegal, and so should homosexuality, adultery, and premarital sex. Any influence they gain over the laws under which we live is thus a threat to our liberties and our rights, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they believe it is their duty to deprive us of our liberties and our rights and force everyone to live under their religious code by any means necessary.

Fortunately, George W. Bush will be in a position to continue to oppose these religious wackos with deadly force, thanks to his support from millions of Christian evangelicals and tens of millions of other people.

Obviously, Bush’s supporters out here in “Jesusland” are the real threat to American liberties…

Now that Bush is in for another four years, it’s time to consider the likely results, and how we may encourage the positive and minimize the negative.

One of the big domestic impacts will be the upcoming Supreme Court vacancies. Lots of Bush supporters have big objections to an “activist court”, and see it as interfering with questions that should be left solely up to legislatures.

I don’t see that as self-evident. The 14th Amendment says that states may not deprive people of the “privileges and immunities” of the United States, and most people have taken that as a strong hint that the Bill of Rights is supposed to apply to state governments as well as to the Federal Government. Unfortunately, this includes the 9th Amendment, which states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”, without offering any clue as to what those “others retained by the people” might be.

So how are these rights to be determined? By the standards of the time? Those standards are already expressed – by people voting for representatives to make laws, which incidentally makes any notion of other rights that are to be kept safe from legislatures meaningless. So, for that statement to have any meaning at all, there has to be some set of rights, not mentioned in the Constitution, that are supposed to be kept safe even from voting majorities or the transient standards of the time.

Is “privacy” one such right? It has the advantage of being buyneurontinonlinehere hinted at in the statement that people have the right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”. Of course “unreasonable” can be taken to be relative to existing law, and not to be an impediment to laws that might necessitate more extensive searches and seizures which then become “reasonable”.

But at any rate, the text of the Amendment explicitly denies the possibility that the text of the Constitution can be applied in every case where the question of whether something is or isn’t a right must be decided. Which means that we’re left with an arbitrary veto on Federal and State law in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Is this a bad thing?

As far as I can tell, the power to arbitrarily strike down law is better than the power to arbitrarily write law. And this power is not unlimited, since Supreme Court members can be removed by the Congress via the impeachment process. It’s just that the power to strike down laws is subject to less oversight than the power to write laws, which seems a good balance to me. And the Supreme Court has erred far more often in the direction of failing to strike down laws whose authorization cannot be inferred by any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution (i.e., one where a small section isn’t taken to render the rest of the document meaningless) than in striking down state laws that can reasonably be interpreted to be constitutionally kosher.

Kerry concedes.

If he means it, the lawyers won’t be dragging it out, and we can finally say it’s over.

Short or reproducing it, how can one judge the likely accuracy of a study?

Statistics won’t help. Statistics only tell one the odds the results spring from sheer chance, not whether your original measurements were valid in the first place. You get the same statistics from the same data set whether the data represent colored ping-pong balls, car wrecks or the lengths of salamander penises.

About the only way to calibrate the study is to see how it measures the same phenomenon that other studies measured. If the study’s methodology returns results consistent with other studies for one measurement, then we can be more confident that its other measurements are accurate.

The Johns Hopkins funded study of Iraqi mortality before and after the war (published with much media attention in The Lancet) has many critics and defenders. Is there any means of judging the study’s likely accuracy without reproducing it?

I think there is.

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Oh, Hell, I lost count years ago.

Now we are told that Bush should be turned out of office because his “incompetence” caused us to lose (maybe) a couple of hundred tons of explosives from a warehouse in Iraq. Now keep in mind that these aren’t the dreaded WMD (which didn’t exist, remember?), and these aren’t plain old regular explosives, either (or else this wouldn’t be such a big deal), but a nifty new category of munition, not powerful enough to justify an invasion but just powerful enough for their disappearance to justify Bush’s ouster.

So let’s take the worst case, and see where it leads us.

The absolutely most damning case that could be made is that some soldiers arrived while the stuff was still there, but didn’t stick around to guard it, since they were still rather busy invading Iraq at the time; some time later, our forces went back to the site, found these munitions missing, and the Administration failed to advertise our loss of these munitions to the entire world.

Even granting all that, where’s Bush’s incompetence?

Ah, he didn’t commit enough troops to the operation, so there weren’t enough people on hand to guard this super-critical site, so we left it unguarded and somebody took the stuff away. But if you’ll recall, there was a significantly larger force committed to the operation – half of that force hadn’t shown up yet, being in the process of taking the long way around to Iraq. And that wasn’t due to Bush’s “incompetence” but Turkey’s lack of cooperation. And no, that wasn’t a “failure of diplomacy” either – if Kerry had gone to Turkey and said “pretty please with a cherry on top”, he wouldn’t have gotten any better results, not from Turkey, and not from France or Germany either.

So what we’re left with is that the noncooperation of Turkey, and the general chaos that always accompanies wartime operations, allowed these explosives to fall into the hands of our enemies?

Not quite. That stuff had been in the hands of our enemies for years.

Yes, I’m speaking of none other than Saddam Hussein. And, need I remind you that he was a declared enemy of the United States, not to mention technically still at war with us. And consistently violating the cease fire agreement, by shooting at American planes that had every right to be there under the terms of that agreement. Do you remember the last time a defeated enemy was allowed to violate the terms of a peace treaty with impunity? You know, the nation led by that Austrian corporal with the funny mustache that was just like George W Bush in every way, according to some of our friends on the left?

But Saddam wasn’t much of a threat!

Well, neither was Hitler the first few years he was violating his peace treaty. And if Britain and France invaded when he first moved troops into that part of Germany where they were supposed to be off-limits, and knocked him off his throne, most people would have written it off as a wasteful misadventure and then forgotten the whole thing within a few years, never dreaming of the trouble he’d have caused down the road.

Now we all have a tendency to sort evil whackos into two categories – those that are a threat to us and those that aren’t. And for many years, the jihadis all seemed to be in the second category. They’d set off bombs and hijack planes on the other side of the world, and some of the things they blew up had American flags on them, and of course they’d been calling us The Great Satan all along, but even the crazy jihadis weren’t crazy enough to try that crap over here. Until one day, one terrorist network was crazy enough to try it. They crossed the line, jumped the ocean, and made a determined and nearly successful effort to murder 50,000 people on American soil.

If Al-Queda could cross that line, why not some other group? Why not some Islamic conspiracy, or state, or kinda-sorta-state-sponsored group that had nothing to do with bin-Laden? Obviously, whatever it was that had caused them all to stay in their sandbox and avoid doing something that The Great Satan itself couldn’t possibly ignore doesn’t apply anymore, and any one of those guys could decide to score a big one like bin Laden tried to, impress his fellow jihadis, and scare up a lot of recruits. So when someone over there openly declares his enmity against the United States, we can’t assume it’s all just talk anymore, and if every intelligence service on the planet is unable to figure out whether he’s working on nukes or biding his time until containment collapses, we certainly can’t take any of them at their word that he’s fully contained and absolutely harmless.

Not to mention that he was in the way of us forcibly shutting down Iran’s nuclear program, should that become necessary (and I’ve got a strong feeling it will be necessary, in the not-too-distant future). And he was in a perfect spot for us to launch several other operations as they become necessary, gather better intel, and generally stay on the offensive against all sorts of characters that we can’t trust to blow things up only on their side of the world anymore.

Now the one thing that strikes me about the military efforts to date is just how incredibly successful they’ve been, and how masterfully planned and executed they turned out to be. Not perfect, of course (You mean there’s terrorists setting off explosives? Against Americans and their supporters? In the Middle East, no less? Say it isn’t so!). But a lot of the toys that John Kerry voted against turned out to be damned useful in the War on Terror. I don’t want to even think about how an Afghanistan operation with Vietnam-era technology and tactics would have gone for us – I think in that case we’d have been wishing for another Vietnam. And if you’ve ever cracked a history book, you’ll realize that only 1200 deaths in a year and a half of invading a dictatorship, overthrowing its dictator, and fighting a chronic insurgency is astoundingly good news, especially when added to the fact that the long-predicted flood of refugees never materialized, the terrorists that Saddam’s regime had nothing whatsoever to do with suddenly got extremely interested in the fate of Iraq (and no, we’re not turning peaceful, simple folk into bloodthirsty terrorists – at worst, we’re forcing them to choose their side a little sooner than they would have on their own, and denying them the option of biding their time until the Great Satan looks sufficiently weak to try their hand at terrorism on their chosen terms), and Iraqis are still signing up to take on the battle for their country against these thugs and getting set to vote in their first-ever real election in a couple of months.

And the Commander-in-Chief at the helm during these amazing accomplishments is called incompetent? You’ve got to be kidding me.