Random, occasionally rambling thoughts with links to interesting, scandalous, or partisan news of the day.

Fair and Balanced

Dead Heroes
• Thomas Paine
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Living Heroes
We owe the liberty and freedom we take for granted to the enlisted men and women in the armed forces. They sacrifice family, ease, and even life laboring in service to all of us. The least we can do for them is honor their devotion with dignified pay scales, decent education for themselves and their children, and reasonable compensation for service away from their families and death on the battlefield. Flag waving politicians who praise the troops on one hand and cut their pay and benefits with the other should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Blogs I Read Often
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• The Volokh Conspiracy
  

Chafee's win an expensive proposition.

The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza today talked about the get out the vote effort in Rhode Island. Instead of taking Rove's "we always kill the Democrats" dictation, they should have followed Deep Throat's advice and followed the money more closely. Their article reports that a total of $2.1 million on the turnout operation. Digging into some RI reporting from CQ, we find

The turnout of more than 64,000 voters in Tuesday’s Republican primary not only shattered the party’s record of 45,000, which occurred in 1994 — it was just less than the total of 69,000 registered Republican voters in the state.

A little arithmetic and we're looking at $32 per vote. Obviously some of them are going to turn out anyway, but that would just make the marginal vote even more expensive. Using the same CQ numbers and their previous record turnout in 1994, the extra 20,000 voters they turned out this year cost them more than $100 each. Even with $50 million on hand, that's only 500,000 purchased voters to spread around a whole bunch of contested House and Senate seats. MoveOn alone has 3,000,000 members and I would imagine ALL of them are going to be voting.

I'm not counseling complacency, but a little realism is always necessary when consuming the WaPo Kool Aid.
posted by Dave on 10:55 PM | 0 comments link

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