Bush's great challenge

The Boston Globe makes a discovery:

Democrats, for their part, need to understand that many conservatives have beliefs about abortion, gay marriage, sex education in schools, and other issues that are deeply held and deserving of respect.

I guess if you just tell people things they don't always get it.  Sometimes you just have to hit them over the head with a two-by-four.

The Volunteer Sector vs the Commercial Sector

Sidelight from the Washington Post's wrapup of the Bush vs. Kerry ground game in Ohio:

Bush's organization may have been the more cohesive and coordinated. It included 85,000 volunteers -- nearly four times the number in 2000 -- that concentrated on what Paduchik called "volunteer to voter"...

Kerry's effort was large but balkanized. It included the Democratic Party's own campaign workers, plus labor union members and other nominally independent groups called 527s (named for the portion of the federal tax code they are organized under). One of the largest of these groups was America Coming Together, which organized thousands of paid workers to register voters and knock on doors. ACT, which was started with seed money from billionaire George Soros, spent more money in Ohio than any other state, according to campaign finance records.

I guess these capitalists just can't match the power of the voluntary sector.

Southern State?

Andrew Sullivan quotes the AP:

The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, ...

Since when was Arizona a "Southern" state?

Tax Cuts are not Payments

When discussing Alan Keyes' proposal to cut taxes for the descendants of
slaves or general proposals to reduce taxes, lefties have a tendency to
think of these tax cuts as a payment

Cutting the taxes of a group (descendants of slaves) is not a payment to
them but the forbearance of an exaction from them.

Since taxes are coercive and the ideal would be the elimination of all
taxes (all coercion) for everyone (though the ideal may not be
possible), any reduction of taxes on any basis should be a good thing as
it brings the polity closer to the ideal state.

Tactically, of course, it would also anger non-included groups and might
cause them to support broader tax cuts for everyone. At worst, such
feelings would merely result in a reversal of the slave descendant tax cut.

I realize that the clause "the ideal would be the elimination of all
taxes" obviously rings true to libertarians but it should logically be
true for all men save those who believe in the value of coercion for its
own sake (an inhumane position).