Keeping score, politically

Two places to keep track of polling for the November election are Electoral-vote.com and Slate's Election Scorecard. It looks like the Democrats will pick up seats, but I have a hard time believing they'll pick up enough to control either the House or the Senate.

Slate reports on several conservatives hedging their bets by actually hoping the Republicans lose. They note that "At the moment, there are no Democrats calling for anything other than a resounding victory," which causes me to wonder if the writer of the article has been reading Slate's own Mickey Kaus, who has crossed the line from predicting the Democrats' defeat to openly hoping for it. The really distateful thing about Kaus is that the main issue he's fighting for these days is the continued scapegoating of illegal immigrants, making vague but ominous predictions of "irrevocably changing the nature of the Republic" if we were to actually treat the people who fill the lower rungs of the labor market as human beings with rights rather than keeping them as a permanent, legal underclass. For a Venice Democrat, he sure sounds as nativist as any Orange County Republican. Hey, Mickey, maybe "free trade" ought to include the free trade of labor, too.

Meanwhile, nominally libertarian Bush apologist Glenn Reynolds continues his farce of pretending not to be conservative while Andrew Sullivan continues to insist that he is conservative. I guess there's a lot of leeway in what labels can mean; remember that Milton Friedman described himself as a liberal, which isn't as loony as it sounds once one realizes that "classical liberal" and "classical conservative" mean more or less the same thing.