Honest elections, please, etc.

How is it that I can’t even sign up for a frequent shopper card at my local retailer without showing an ID, but I can vote without showing ID? A 2006 NBS/WSJ national poll showed that Americans support voters being required to show “a valid photo identification” by a margin of 80%-7%. It is the single biggest potential impediment to election fraud. So why isn’t it the law of the land for federal elections, and the law of every state and local jurisdiction for their elections?

The only possible legitimate complaint is voter expense, but every law that is proposed includes provisions for free ID’s to be made for whoever wants them. They’ll even come to your house to make them.

At this point, resistance to voter ID laws has only one possible motivation – a desire to keep it easier to cast fraudulent votes, and thus to make it easier for unscrupulous politicians and political machines to attempt to steal elections. There just cannot be any other explanation, it defies logic.

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Thomas Sowell gave the best explanation I’ve ever heard for why left liberal opinion dominates in the worlds of journalism and academics, and to some degree in politics. He said that liberals field their A team, while conservatives field their B team.

What he’s saying is that the best and brightest, as the saying goes, of liberals desire to enter politics or journalism, or strive for a tenure track professorship, in order to control other people’s minds and lives. While their conservative counterparts end up in the economy, starting businesses, inventing things.

As usual with Sowell, the point is so obviously true and so simple that you slap your head and wonder “why didn’t I think of that?”

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You think Bush has low approval ratings? Check out Congress’ record lows.

But they both have it good when compared to Islamic terrorist, who would kill (yeah, I said it) for approval ratings in the high single digits like Pelosi and the gang. A 2007 ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan showed support for jihadists there to be 1%. And in Pakistan’s northwestern province that is home to most of al Qaeda’s bases, support for bin Laden went from 70% in August 2007 to 4% in January 2008.

Hearts and minds? Yeah, we’re going pretty well there.

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Another inconvenient truth: if you really want to combat global warming, you need more pollution.

Wait, now pollution is preventing global warming? That’s the conclusion of a recent study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which says rising temperatures seen in Europe over the last few years result as much from the reduction of air pollution as from the creation of it. The research, which looked at the effects of aerosols on climate, confirms an older concept known as global dimming, and complicates our understanding of how mankind affects the climate.

[…] stricter pollution standards, adopted in part to slow global warming, may have sped it up.

The idea that pollution may be reflecting some of the sun’s energy is not new. The term global dimming is decades old, and some believed that the reduction in pollution was the cause global warming. But now, with the link between greenhouse gas pollution and global warming firmly established, papers like this one highlight how complex the situation is, and how solutions like simply cutting air pollution may have a range of unintended and counterintuitive consequences.

Wait, mankind’s effect on the climate is more complex to understand than previously thought? Wow, I’m shocked. But by all means, let’s destroy world economic growth anyway, who needs to understand the implications?