Content by skey
Posted at 6:42pm on Jun. 26, 2008 OK. That's it. As much as I dislike it I have to vote for McCain.
By skey
What's done it for me? The combination of the death penalty case yesterday, and the Heller decision today. The Heller decision was very narrow, and Scalia practically begs more cases to be filed, to fill in the details, because unlike some judges he won't make a more sweeping ruling than is required by the case.
I still think we're far more likely to get a Kennedy or a Souter from McCain than a Scalia or a Thomas, but Kennedy was at least right on one of the two cases. So that 25% chance is far better than none.
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Posted at 9:18pm on Feb. 9, 2008 A promise, and a plea
By skey
I am about as anti-McCain as they come. I could have voted for every single other Republican candidate, with more or less (some quite a bit less) happiness, but I decided a long time ago that McCain was a line that I would not cross. I don't need to get into the reasons for that here, everyone should be familiar enough with them.
Nothing has made me change my mind on that, including his recent contradictory pandering at CPAC. I understand that other people feel differently, but at this point there is nothing he could do before the election which would change my mind.
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Posted at 11:29am on Feb. 5, 2008 The more things change
By skey
In contemplating this train-wreck that the Republican party seems destined to be hurtling towards, I've been doing a lot of thinking about Conservatism, and party politics. And I ran across this quote, from the editorial that WFB wrote in the inaugural edition of National Review.
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Posted at 12:32am on Feb. 2, 2008 Reagan's Eleventh Commandment is not a Suicide Pact
By skey
Reagan's Eleventh is commonly written as "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." And this is a good commandment that serves the party well. However, there is an implied clause to this rule that must be there, or the rule fails. With this clause, it would be written as "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican (who follows this commandment)".
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Posted at 9:27pm on Jan. 26, 2008 About that McCain ACU rating
By skey
A number of people have brought up McCain's lifetime ACU rating, saying that he's with conservatives 83% of the time. So I was curious and went back and looked at it. Note, while I'm absolutely opposed to McCain in the primaries, and will most likely not vote for him in the general, this is NOT intended to be a McCain-bashing post. It's simply that the ACU website doesn't make it easy to collate all this information together, and I thought others would be interested in it. No doubt many people will find this reassuring. I didn't find anything in it that changed my mind.
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Posted at 3:31pm on Dec. 9, 2007 A Plea, and Some History
By skey
I am a Fred Thompson supporter. I got on the Thompson bandwagon a long time before he declared that he was running. Probably a year before he declared, I looked at the Republican field and realized that there were zero actual conservative candidates who seemed to have a chance. So I was, at the time, very discouraged. I read an article or a blog posting shortly after that, mentioning that people were trying to talk Thompson into running. I remembered him fondly, but not clearly, so I did some research on what he stood for. And while he certainly has his warts, in Thompson I saw an authentic conservative who didn't need to run a poll to figure out what position to take on an issue. So I jumped on the bandwagon of people who were hoping that he'd run.
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Posted at 12:24pm on Nov. 19, 2007 State Election Result Volatility
By skey
After posting my previous entry, I became curious just how valid its basic assumptions were. So I went back and looked at how the state results changed from election to election.
All numbers came from http://uselectionatlas.org/. I looked at results back to 1980. Perot complicates things for a couple of elections, but I still think the numbers are interesting. Here are the number of states whose margins of victory changed by more than 10% from 1984 to 2004.
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Posted at 11:10am on Nov. 19, 2007 The national heads-up polls are meaningless.
By skey
Watching these national polls on who fares better in a heads-up match with Clinton are silly, especially at this stage.