Scott Adams continues to push his fantasy that Hamas will make peace with Israel.
Now that Hamas has some legitimate governing power, it can’t support terrorist attacks without inviting massive Israeli retaliation that would effectively eliminate their gains in the government, probably permanently. They can’t renounce their position about destroying Israel because their own members would turn on them. And they can’t govern effectively because most other governments have turned off their aid and refuse to talk to them.
The only path open to Hamas is to convince its followers that they are only going to pretend to be peaceful until they build up strength for an attack. Once the population believes it’s only a trick, they’ll support their officials in making disingenuous statements recognizing Israel’s right to exist and renouncing violence. While no one will trust their statements, it will satisfy the international requirements, and aid will start flowing again.
Here’s the cool part. According to my new favorite book, Influence, once someone commits a position to writing, even a position he doesn’t believe, and states it publicly, the person starts changing his actual position to what he said, even if the original statements were lies. The research shows this to be true. In other words, Hamas government officials could inadvertently lie themselves into becoming peaceful people.
While a nice idea, I have give it about a 0.0000001% chance of actually coming about. His theory relies on completely ignoring the history and situation. There are several key facts that Adams ignores:
1) This didn’t work with Fatah. Yasser Arafat signed numerous agreements to make peace with Israel and respect their right to exist, but that never stopped him and the Fatah organization from funding hate day camps for children, daily broadcasts in arabic calling for Israel’s destruction, and launching conventional and terrorist attacks on Israel. And while the Palestinian government agreed to officially stop calling for Israel’s destruction, the Fatah charter was never modified:
Article (12) Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.
2) Hamas has hardly moderated, when on Palestinian TV they call for genocide. And even in the article that Adams links to, what we have is a spokesman creatively interpreting the statements of the real Hamas officials in a way that would force the West to drop their boycott of Hamas. Spokesmen don’t matter — it is the people with the guns that matter.
3) Palestinian moderates end up dead. There is a long tradition of killing anyone that tries to make peace with Israel and better the lot of the Palestinians. If some Hamas officials tried to seriously moderate, they would be “replaced” by the more unfriendly factions.
4) Hamas is funded by Iran, whose government has a religious and political interest in Israel’s destruction. Iran will do everything they can to ensure that their puppets follow the appropriate script.
I’ll continue to read Adams’ blog because he is incredibly funny and can be very insightful about many topics on human nature. But on this one he is dead wrong.
Their are 14 “vulnerable” Senate seats that I’ll cover below. Removing those 14 seats leaves us with 47 Republicans, 38 Democrats, and 1 Independent. We’ll start with the seats with the most lean and finish with the toss-ups
- PA (R -> D): One of the Senate’s most annoying Republicans is finally going down to defeat. It has been clear for months that Rick Santorum was unlikely to return to the Senate. And while he’s narrowed things a bit he is still far behind. The US, the Senate, and the Republicans are better off without him.
- WA (D hold): Maria Cantwell will be returning to the Senate (unless King County loses all their ballots). I really don’t like her and will be voting against her primarily for spite rather than any interest in seeing Mike! win or the Republicans maintain their majority.
- MI (D hold): Debbie Stabenow also is way ahead and will be going back to the Senate. I don’t have much interest in the race…
- MN (D hold): This open seat could have been a Republican pickup if the season had been more favorable…DENIED!
- CT (D -> I): The completely retarded nutroots campaign to drive Joe Lieberman from office has backfired. Lieberman will coast to an easy win as an “Independent Democrat”. He will caucus with the Democrats so this isn’t a real loss but it just shows how completely ineffective the nutroots are.
- AZ (R hold): Jon Kyl will be back. This race is far closer than it should be — a testament to how badly the Republicans are doing.
- TN (R hold): The Corker(R)/Ford(D) race has been bouncing back and forth all year, but in the final weeks Corker seems to have built a solid lead. This is too bad because Ford really tries to be a balanced politician that can work across party lines.
- NJ (D hold): Another corrupt NJ politician seems to be on his way to victory. This is really a shame. We should be getting rid of corrupt Republican AND Democratic politicians.
- OH (R -> D): Speaking of corruption…the Ohio Republican implosion will take out Mike DeWine. Ohio Republicans have consistently broken their word and produced a corrupt and incompetent government and the people of Ohio are finally tired of it. Ohio Republicans are probably going to be brutalized tomorrow — and they absolutely deserve it.
- MT(R -> D): I suspect that Montana’s Conrad Burns will lose as well — or maybe I’m just being to hopeful. With the Abramoff scandal Burns had to return more than $150,000 in contributions, and he has been behind ever since. Burns has been closing recently with some brutal anti-tax commercials. Looking at the current polls on RCP, Tester has the advantage (though as usual I have no confidence in USA Today/Gallup or Zogby). If you only look at Rasmussen and Mason-Dixon it is a very close race. It could go either way, but I’m guessing that it won’t be enough.
- VA(R -> D): The Virginia Race has been a complete nightmare. Neither candidate deserves to be elected, after running races that had nothing to do with the issues of the day. Both candidates (and all of the press coverage) focused on trivialities. At least this campaign (no matter who wins) should squash any hope Allen has to be the Republican Candidate for President. Mason-Dixon and Rasmussen show the race to be dead even, but I’ll go with Webb.
- MO(R hold): This race has also been all over the place. Currently Rasmussen has Talent(R) up by one and Mason-Dixon the opposite. I suspect that Talent will pull it out. Just a hunch.
- RI (R hold): In the last couple weeks Linc Chafee (Mr. RINO) has come from very far behind to make this a horse race. He has lots of momentum, and he is well liked. Mason-Dixon has him up by one, so I think he’ll win.
- MD (D -> R): This is a total gut guess — none of the polls have him ahead — But I’m going to give this race to Steele (R). He has garnered some last minute endorsements from major local Black Democratic officials. I’m guessing that Steele is able to carry enough of the disaffected MD African-American community to win the election.
Honestly I don’t care too much which party has the majority, I’m rooting for a slim majority that results in gridlock.
A quick look at the RCP Battle for the House page shows that the Democrats are in what seems to be an excellent position. RCP considers only 6 seats currently held by Democrats to be potentially vulnerable — and only 2 of those are currently toss ups. On the other hand the Republicans have 48 potentially vulnerable seats, and only 21 are leaning Republican. I am going to rely solely on the RCP evaluation of the seats because I have neither the time nor inclination to research each seat. Combine the RCP evaluation of each race with my general impression of what will happen tomorrow night, and you get a Democratic Majority — but possibly an ungovernable one.
I suspect that the Democrats will sweep all of the “Leans Dem” seats, and the Republicans will get all (or almost all) of the “Leans Rep” seats — that leaves us with 213 Democrats, 205 Republicans, one Independent (that caucuses with the Dems). This puts the Dems (plus Ind) 4 seats short of a majority — with 16 toss-up seats. I’m just guessing (based of my impression of the election that they will split evenly: 8 Democrat, 8 Republican. This will give the Dems a 7 seat majority in the House.
A majority this small might end up being a pyhrric victory, for the Republicans had a hard time crontrolling the house with a 29 seat majority — and the Republicans are much more organized and ideologically coherent than the Democrats. It is even possible that with a majority of less than 10 seats that Nancy Pelosi might not be able to secure enough votes to become Speaker. The tiny majority would lead to one of two possible outcomes:
1) The moderates of both parties get together and forge a coalition and stuff gets done, or
2) (Far more likely,) The House degenerates and can not get anything done. The Democrats look just as incompetent as the Republicans, setting the 2008 election season with a very anti-Washington mood.
But, I’m getting a bit too speculative. We’ll find out tomorrow what the magnitude of the Democrats victory is.
The day before a major election is a good time for predictions. I’ll start posting some…
One question I am hearing more and more often about the distaster in New Orleans is, “Why weren’t the levees built to sustain a Category 5 huricane?” At first blush, this seems to be a reasonable question, since it has long been known that New Orleans could face a huricane of that size. But if you put just a tiny amount of thought into the problem, you find that building the levees to survive a Category 5 would have been moronic.
If Katrina’s full wrath had hit New Orleans instead of Mississipi, the strength of the levees would have been irrelevant. The storm surge of 15-28 feet would have easily topped any levee and would have flooded New Orleans to the high of the levee system (which would be higher than the standard water level that is in New Orleans now). If this were to happen then, the levee system would have be breached after the huricane to let water out. New Orleans would not have been in any better condition and the false sense of security that a Category 5 levee might promote would have been all the more fatal. Imagine if 75% of New Orleans population had been in the city when it flooded — the chaos, horror, and death would have been much, much worse.