John, Edwards, Trial Lawyer and Buffoon

This, from msnbc (see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6351667/)

About the missing conventional high explosives missing in Iraq, which Kerry/Edwards say were "lost" by coalition forces, but U.S. military says were not there when they first arrived:

Sen. John Edwards: We know that these explosives were
there. We know that the Bush administration was notified they were there … they needed to be secured. We know that they weren't secured and we know that they're now missing. So, those are the facts and the facts are pretty powerful in this case.

Campbell Brown: But they could have disappeared before coalition forces got to that location. [see recent links on www.belmontclub.blogspot.com -- wrecktafire]

Sen. Edwards: But the answer is … we knew about it. We
knew we were supposed to do something about it. We didn't do
it. But there's a chance they were gone before we got there? I mean, that's basically what they're saying. They had a responsibility to secure this material. It was important for securing Iraq. It was important for the safety of our troops. It was important to keep that material out of the hands of terrorists and what we know is they didn't do it. We know that.

Beautiful. In my auditing days, this is what we called a "non-responsive response." I suppose we should have asked Saddam to secure it. Oops, it looks like that's what he did.

Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time?

What happened?

makes ya think...

Prez Debate #3, Canada drugs

Kerry said we should allow people to bring in American prescription drugs from Canada. What moron advised him to say that?

If he thought about this for two minutes (OK, maybe ten minutes), he would realize that the Canadiens' deal is contingent on the drugs not coming back into the U.S. The language is in the purchasing contracts signed by the Canadians. Major U.S. drug manufacturers have announced that they will withdraw their low price deals if their drugs find their way back here.

From Harvard Econ professor Robert J. Barro:

Another point is that drug companies sell at 50% off in Canada only
because they can reasonably well isolate the Canadian market
from the U.S. one. Policies that facilitate reimportation of drugs make it harder to separate those markets. If the leakage to the U.S. became large, as it would if
reimportation were fully legal and convenient, drug companies would be unwilling
to sell in Canada at 50% off. The companies would insist on 100% prices or
else would not sell there. Thus, Canada has the greatest self-interest
in preventing massive reimportation of drugs to the U.S.

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/barro/bw/bw_04_0830.pdf

Kerry (and others) are asleep at the switch on this one.

David Broder's recent column excusing Dan Rather's unprofessionalism in the Killian memogate scandal got me to asking myself what sort of standards I held myself to in the handful of articles I wrote for my college newspaper at USF. One in particular was a detailed, point-by-point review of an abortion debate. One of my professors took the anti-abortion side, one from UC Berkeley took the other side.

The debate was at least an hour, so the article was pretty long and took a long time to write. I had taken pretty good notes scoring the debate, and I was quite familiar with the arguments of both sides. I thought I was being fair when I gave all but one of the roughly 20 points to the anti- side, and one for the "choicer". In short, it was a complete rout of the pro-choice arguments presented that evening, and I said so in the article. What was interesting (and why I am writing this) was the reaction of various students and faculty.

Some of my staunch pro-life activist friends criticized me sharply for the one point I gave the other side. "The rest of the article was good, but you really blew that part", was a typical reaction of my most conservative friends.

A few people said I was biased towards the pro-lifer, as the debate was not really as one-sided as I had made it sound. They pointed to my pro-life work and the fact that the pro-life guy was my professor. They ridiculed the idea that I could be objective. One young woman said to me, "of course you would say the pro-choice person lost!", and she rolled her eyes.

A small handful of people said that they had read the article very carefully, and that they agreed with me on everything, and thought it was brave of me to write that "our guy" (who was easily one of the most popular professors on campus) had stumbled on that one point in the debate which I gave to the lady from Berkeley.

There were some who said that they had seen the article, read the first few paragraphs on page one and decided not to read the rest when they saw that the rest of the article was about a half a page. A friend of mine told me, with a smile, that my article was "way too long", and asked me if I couldn't have made it a lot shorter. Then she winked, and said, "lighten up!"

Maybe it is true that if you get blasted from both sides that it's an indicator that you're not too far off the mark.

It's really pretty easy, isn't it, Alan?

Last night on Fox's Alan Colmes show, Colmes said approximately this about Iraq and WMD: the WMD's were not found, somebody has to be accountable. The administration deserves to be fired.

Wow. And I thought this stuff was complicated!