In a Presidential election cycle with two candidates who are lukewarm at best, I wasn’t really feeling much excitement, until I heard John McCain’s pick for VP yesterday.

I first heard Sarah Palin’s name several months ago, when I saw a blogger suggest she’d make a good VP (Sorry, I don’t remember who, or I’d link). I did a little research, figured that she’d be a pretty good candidate, but dismissed the idea because I couldn’t imagine McCain making a pick that unusual. I figured he’d pick another one of his opponents in the primaries, or a Governor or Congressperson from a big battleground state. When I saw the first news notification that Palin was the choice, I thought it was either a joke, or another Palin. Discovering that it was actually Sarah Palin, I actually felt a twinge of pleasure at the idea of voting for the Republican ticket this year.

I can’t say that I know enough about Sarah Palin to say she definitely outweighs the weaknesses of the McCain candidacy. It’s possible that she’ll turn out to actually cause me to decide against voting for McCain (though it’s not like I was solidly in his camp before this pick) after I’ve seen more of her. Still, I know enough to answer some of the criticisms about her.

• She’s inexperienced (in general), and will be only a heartbeat away from the presidency. If she were running for the actual Presidency, I’d be a lot more concerned about this, but I don’t worry about it so much when she’s running for the VP slot. Still, it is a fairly valid criticism from conservatives who would rather have seen a different pick.

  From Obama supporters, though, it’s fairly nonsensical — the Vice Presidential candidate on the Republican ticket has arguably more experience than their Presidential candidate. Raising the issue won’t help them. Two years in office as Governor compares pretty well to Obama’s time in Congress, I think. Especially since Congress actually works, what, a hundred or so out of the year, and Obama has spent most of his time in office campaigning for the Presidency. Governors might take vacations of a few weeks a year, but I suspect that such vacations are much like the vacations of a President — they may go elsewhere, but they’re still “on the job.” Plus, a governorship is actual executive experience, which is something that no one else on either ticket has.

• She’s inexperienced (in foreign policy matters), and will be only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Again, not running for the actual presidency, just the VP slot, which is more than we can say about Obama. Besides, we’ve already seen from Obama’s campaign that a quick whirlwind vacattion/campaign tour of foreign countries counts as “foreign policy experience”^[a]. So, if she honestly can’t say she’s never been to a foreign country, send her to visit the troops in Iraq real quick. Then when Obama protests, run a few ads reminding everyone that he claimed that a speech in Germany counted as “Foreign Policy Experience”, and ask if he’s going back on that now.

  I particularly liked Sonny Bunch’s comments on this issue:
  

  Andrew has this exactly backwards. The McCain campaign is hoping and praying that someone will say that Palin is unready for the job. “Please,” John McCain is praying right now AS I TYPE, “Let a Democrat say that an executive with 2 years of experience and no foreign policy expertise isn’t ready for the presidency. Oh pretty please. Because you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take that soundbite, put it in an ad, slap Obama’s mug up there, and run it over and over and over again.”

  Because Palin has exactly as much experience as Obama–arguably more, since she’s an executive. The only difference is that she isn’t running for president.

  Now that I think about, I wonder if that’s part of the purpose of nominating Palin. Many of the non-policy issues Obama can criticize her for will open him up to some potential gaffes that can be turned around on him.

• She’s anti-choice, she supports drilling, she supports [insert generic conservative opinion here]. This seems to be the oddest criticism coming from the left. They act as though the fact that she’s conservative is somehow going to hurt her. She’s running as a Republican. Generally, they’re helped by being Conservative. At the very least, she won’t hurt by it any more than any of McCain’s other potential VP choices would have been.

• She’s a celebrity! Obama supporters seem to be latching onto the fact that Palin once appeared on a Vogue magazine cover and was in the running for the Miss Alaska title to indicate that her celebrity should somehow counter McCain’s “criticism” of Obama’s celebrity status. The problem is that the McCain campaign hasn’t criticized Obama for being a celebrity. The McCain campaign has criticized Obama for being just a celebrity with little else going for him, a man with little-to-no experience that would qualify him to be President (see above).

• She’s a woman. I’ve seen some disgusting sexist comments about her from some people already (particularly in the WV Gazette comment section, where I can’t really look at the commenters’ histories to tell you if they’re leftist or not). I have no more concern about her gender than I have about Obama’s race, but there are (relatively) reasonable people who have questions about whether the nation is ready for a female VP, but I don’t think that’s a huge issue.

• Biden will tear her apart in a debate. She’s won a couple of elections, so she’s probably not a stranger to debates, and she seems to handle herself well in front of people. Make sure she’s really got the issues and facts down, and she may be able to handle herself just fine. It’s not like Biden is completely reliable when speaking off the cuff. Remember that this is the man who told an Indian-American supporter that, in Delaware, “you CANNOT go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent … I’m not joking.”

I think, overall, that Palin’s reputation for fighting corruption even in her own party and her conservatism is a boon for the McCain campaign, and I’m looking forward to seeing her in campaign events and debates. Maybe her performance will be as poor as Obama supporters hope, but this is the first time the McCain campaign has really gotten my attention this cycle, and I think it’s a good move.

1. Really. Supporters of Obama have claimed that his trip to foreign countries “countered” McCain’s criticism of his lack of experience, which I discussed in my final paragraph of this post. [↩]

Megan McArdle writes, in her post “Of online debate and hidden agendas,” that she’s probably going to vote for Obama, but she’s not happy about it:

Both Obama and McCain supporters seem convinced that my every utterance on the topic is part of my not-so-hidden agenda to undermine their candidate. I have no hidden agenda. My agenda is out-front and open; I’ll probably vote for Obama, but not with any expectation that I’ll like the result very much. I am not excited about this election. I do not believe that my vote is going to immanentize the eschaton. I do not think that I am engaged in a titanic battle, in which the forces of good must beat back the cosmic evil that threatens to engulf us all. I think I’m deciding which of two politicians to hand a lot of power I don’t want either of them to have.

Emphasis mine.

I was, quite honestly, prepared to vote for whomever the Democratic party nominated this year, assuming it wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Not because I expected to like them much, but because I can’t bear the thought of “President McCain.” As I’ve mentioned before, I thought a Clinton/McCain race would be a Worst Case Scenario.

The more I learn about Barack Obama, though, I’m not sure that Clinton would’ve been a worse choice. I’m getting less and less excited about this election as it approaches, because both candidates are atrocious. I don’t want either of them to win, but, come election day, I may have to break my own promise, hold my nose, and vote for McCain. He is, after all, the least repulsive Democrat running.

The smoking ban here in Kanawha County is now about six weeks old, and some bar owners are thumbing their noses at the law. Good for them. Their complaints center around the facts that they’ve lost business due to the new regulations, and that the regulations are being inconsistently enforced, which gives some competitors an unfair advantage.

Those are both valid arguments, but I have a different one. Besides the violations of property rights (which I discussed here), the ban is completely inconsistent with its stated purpose.

Allegedly, the ban was put in place to protect non-smokers in these establishments from the dangers of second-hand smoke. This is an extremely ineffectual way to do that. Bar patrons are a self-selecting group of people^[a]. They choose to enter these bars, and could just as easily choose not to do so (or to go to a bar that didn’t allow smoking, for that matter). Therefore, it is a fact that anyone exposed to smoke inside a bar chose to put themselves in a situation where they would likely be exposed to second hand smoke.

Where do smokers who are now banned from smoking in bars go? To the streets, where they are no longer in the presence of their self-selected group of alcohol-imbibing compatriots, but instead they now expose individuals who didn’t choose to enter a bar, but simply to walk down the street. We’ve protected the bar patrons at the expense of everyone else.

This is like protecting workers in a nuclear power plant from radiation by removing all the radioactive material from the plant and placing it in the middle of Central Park. Sure, the workers are safer, but everyone else is screwed.

Obviously, the Health Department’s policy is not consistent with their philosophy. Assuming I agree with their philosophy^[b]. I would like to propose a philosophically consistent smoking policy. Instead of banning smoking in private businesses that are open to the public, we ban smoking in the following places:

• Public^[c] buildings
• Private buildings whose owners choose not to allow smoking
• Outdoors on public^[c] property.

Under my proposal, any business that serves the public and chooses to allow smokers must make that fact known, preventing any non-smokers from being inadvertently exposed by entering unaware that the business is non-smoking. Private home and land owners are perfectly welcome to smoke to their hearts content on their own land.

My policy would actually do what the health department claims it’s trying to do. But, of course, the Health Department isn’t interested in actually helping protect non-smokers. It is a branch of the government, and is therefore devoted solely to controlling the nation’s citizens and turning them into its Subjects.

1. I would guess that they’re a self-selecting group of people with a higher percentage of smokers than the group that doesn’t patronize bars, but I have no statistics to back that up. [↩]
2. Actually, I do sort of agree with the basic philosophy. Non-smokers should be able to avoid being exposed to second-hand smoke by taking reasonable precautions, such as avoiding bars where smoking is permitted [↩]
3. “Public”, in this case, is intended to mean “owned or maintained by the people” (that is, the government). [↩] [↩]

The other forty-seven percent are idiots.

I’m not much of a people-person. I generally like people when I get to know them individually, but when I’m out in public, it just seems like most people exercise so much selfish stupidity on a regular basis that I catch myself saying that I hate people pretty much every time I leave the house^[a]. This is something that I know runs counter to Christ’s teachings, and is something that I’ve been actively praying about recently.

This doesn’t help.

Nearly half of all Americans support the “Fairness” Doctrine, which would require television & radio stations to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints on the air. That’s bad enough, but even worse is the fact that 31% believe that the same thing should be true of websites.

Forty-seven percent of Americans believe that radio stations should be forced to air opposing commentary out of some bizarre sense of “fairness”. That means that 47% of Americans believe that anyone who owns a radio station should not be allowed to choose what their radio station airs. Suppose you own a radio station, and you have a talk show whose host spends a half an hour proclaiming that Jeffrey Dahmer was a bad guy. Assuming the “Fairness” Doctrine was put into place again, you would then have to devote a half an hour of broadcast time extolling Mr. Dahmer’s virtues, no matter how disgusted you might be at expressing those opinions (or how much advertising money you might lose while airing the unpalatable opinions).

As for the nonsense about requiring websites to obey the fairness doctrine, I pay for this website, and I make absolutely no bones about the fact that, while I usually do give some data in defense of my opinions, the purpose of this website is for me to express my opinions. I will not pay to allow someone else to express an opinion opposite to mine simply to obey some moron’s bizarre philosophy of “fairness”^[b].

1. My usual line is, “I like persons, but hate people,” kind of like Tommy Lee Jones’s line in Men In Black: “A person is smart. People are stupid.” [↩]
2. I might, however, allow someone else to express opinions opposite to mine on this site for other reasons. There are a good number of people whose political opinions differ from mine who would be more than welcome to write a post here should they ever wish to do so, but that has more to do with my personal respect for those individuals than out of any desire to be “fair.” [↩]

As you may recall, I was once informed that I am a horrible excuse for a human being because I opposed the minimum wage. Apparently, the fact that I would prefer people to actually have jobs made me a bad person.

Who’d've thunk it?