Friday, May 9, 2008

09 May 2008 01:16 pm

An Award Glossary

If you're a new reader and are confused by these Von Hoffman Awards and Yglesias Awards, etc, a glossary is here. And, welcome.

09 May 2008 01:09 pm

Quote For The Day

"I saw a Gallup poll today -- I saw the results of it, anyway -- that said that Barack Obama, at this very moment, is exactly where [John] Kerry was at this point with white voters as well as with black voters. Now, what does that mean? That means, if he maintains that, and he does it in a state like Colorado, that's the difference between winning and losing. Any one of those states -- Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona -- that had been carried by Kerry would have delivered the presidency. Not to mention these other states -- Virginia, for instance. If you look at the white vote that Obama got in Virginia -- it was extraordinary. And the same thing, over 40 percent, in Indiana -- extraordinary. And so I think that we all really ought to just dial back some of this rhetoric, and let's start talking about what makes us all good Democrats," - House Majority Whip, James Clyburn.

09 May 2008 12:57 pm

Contra Krugman

This sentence is carefully parsed:

There was little in Tuesday’s results to suggest that [Obama]'s problems with working-class whites have significantly diminished.

Well there's this: Obama won only 27 percent of white voters without college degrees in Ohio; he won 29 percent in Pennsylvania, and 34 percent of them in Indiana. Krugman seems to miss the fact that Obama is still relatively unknown, especially among people without college degrees, and that he has been up against the most famous and beloved brand in recent Democratic party politics, playing as crudely and as brutally as she can. When a former Democratic president tells white voters that Obama doesn't care about "people like you," it's difficult to make headway. Oh: and he's, er. bi-racial. To have gone from 27 percent to 34 percent in a few weeks is not transformational, but it is progress. To have done so through a blizzard of racially-tinged guilt-by-association attempts to paint him as a commie alien, is not insignificant. To have made any progress while facing the wood-chipper of the Clinton-Rove axis is remarkable.

He has a long way to go. But it's May. And the force of his current coalition remains something to behold.

09 May 2008 12:52 pm

Burma's Crisis

The regime's impounding of some vital aid and its resistance to allowing foreign nations to save tens and even hundreds of thousands of lives seems to me to alter things. If there were ever a moment when the international community, led as it must be, by the U.S. and the U.N., should use force to prevent what now looks like mass murder, this is it. No dictatorship should prevent thousands of innocents from getting basic food relief, or some medical care in the face of the diseases that now threaten to kill more than the cyclone did. It is also a rare opportunity to open up the beleaguered, isolated repressed population to the outside world, and to show a face for the US and the West that is humane. When aid is being stolen or hoarded in front of our eyes, we have a duty to face down the junta.

09 May 2008 12:46 pm

Did McCain Vote For Bush In 2000?

Why, one wonders, is McCain afraid of the truth? If Arianna and two other eye-witnesses are correct, it's the best news for McCain's campaign in a while. But doesn't this sound a little, er, elitist:

Now two other guests at the same dinner, given by the actress Candice Bergen, at her home in Beverly Hills, say they heard much the same thing as Ms. Huffington. Both of them, the former “West Wing” actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, were asked by Ms. Huffington to speak to The New York Times. Mr. Whitford said he would be supporting the Democratic nominee and had donated to Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama; Mr. Schiff is supporting Mr. Obama.

The Republican candidate is used to having Beverly Hills fundraisers with Candice Bergen, Arianna Huffington and West Wing actors? Don't you think if Obama had been hanging with these people quite so often, the Rove machine would make it an issue?

The dirty secret is that McCain is rarely more at home than with the liberal cultural elite. But shhhh. Don't tell anyone, will you?

09 May 2008 12:36 pm

The View From Your Window

Brevard, North Carolina, 11.20 am.

09 May 2008 11:51 am

Now He's Not Running

Mitt Romney defends the rights of non-believers:

"Upon reflection, I came to understand that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity ... an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty... If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God."

Of course, this isn't religious freedom as such. It is political freedom - to be free of religion if that is your choice. And it is freedom of speech and thought and association. Still I wonder if this tiny concession is part of a gambit to be McCain's heir.

09 May 2008 11:39 am

Obama Now Leads Among Supers

So he has the popular vote, the majority of states, the majority of pledged delegates, the majority of super-delegates - and none of this can change to give Clinton the edge in the next month. And still she won't do the decent thing and concede. At this point, every day is a Clinton insult to the Democratic party nominee. And every day makes her future career more tenuous.

But maybe this is the only way the Clintons can end: in a slow, gruesome, political murder-suicide. And they will use the wounds they inflict on their nominee as a reason to vote for them in 2012 if he loses in the fall.

Samantha Power was right.

09 May 2008 11:18 am

Catholics vs Theocons

The push for a merger of church and party on the right appears to have backfired:

In a recent survey of 19 states that have held a presidential primary this year, 63% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 37% for Republicans, a sharp increase from 2005 when 42% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats. One of every four voters in the U.S. is Catholic.

And Obama's share of the Catholic vote keeps inching upward.

09 May 2008 11:11 am

Regional Personalities

Richard Florida tries to map the country's psychogeography:

Interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.

The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first - was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? - the overlay is clear.

09 May 2008 10:58 am

The Poblano Model

Mickey mocked it as an electoral tool. Wrong again.

09 May 2008 10:48 am

Will Their Psychodrama Never End?

Another beaut from Peggy:

Some insight from a superdelegate I spoke to Thursday:

It's not math anymore, it's psychodrama. If she can't have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.

One request at least: can we retire from the dicourse the notion that there is anything even faintly admirable about the Clintons' refusal to accept that they have lost the nomination. This isn't tenacity or pluck or spunk. It's vindictive, sore-loser narcissism. And someone senior in the party needs to call it like it is.

09 May 2008 10:40 am

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Jeremiah Wright goes to church looking for Jesus. And that's why evangelicals should pay attention to him. This is not to say they should agree with him. But Jeremiah Wright is a serious Christian. He didn't have to be — many gifted black intellectuals have gotten off the bus with the church for having been, as it inarguably has, a slave religion. (Wright has argued with Muslim friends that its track record is no better on slavery.) ...

Therefore charity requires that evangelicals do business with Wright. He, like them, is part of the body of Christ. Not less than John Hagee or Rod Parsley — extremist ministers aligned with John McCain —Wright's churchmanship means he is more brother than enemy," - Jason Byassee, Christianity Today.

09 May 2008 10:29 am

Israel At 60

Norm Geras offers six reasons to celebrate.

09 May 2008 10:22 am

McCain At The NRA

Arianna-bait.

09 May 2008 10:02 am

Why Black Votes Don't Matter

"Senator Clinton continues to demonstrate that she has what it takes to win the Presidency ... while Senator Obama does well in areas and demographic groups that the Democratic nominee will win anyway," - [Rep. Debbie] Wasserman-Schultz.

09 May 2008 09:47 am

She's Serious

Robert A. George on what he sees as the Clintons' bid to forge a Democratic coalition without African-Americans. It does seem to me at this point that the Clintons are on a mission to destroy any Democratic coalition that will not kowtow to them (egged on, of course, by Rove). If that means abandoning African-Americans, why would the Clintons hesitate? Loyalty only works one way with the Clintons.

09 May 2008 09:27 am

Bed-Bound

NASA offers anyone $17,000 to stay prone for three months straight. Can they schedule it for immediately after the election, please?

09 May 2008 08:55 am

Uh-Oh

Ambers:

On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC.

Obama and Paul are the result of the unfolding Dean revolution in internet politics. But what Obama has done is use the power of the web to organize on the ground more effectively than any candidate in history. So far, the non-Paul right has been pretty clueless.

09 May 2008 08:26 am

Mitt Veep

K-Lo daydreams.

09 May 2008 08:22 am

Gay Rights After Clinton

Kevin at Chris Crain's blog describes what the Clintons did to gay rights:

A lot of tripe is thrown around about gay Republicans in the gay media, and has been for over a decade.  But not enough has been written about the toxic impact that Clintonism has wrought on the gay community and its political leadership.  The cravenness of it, the poisonous combination of raising hopes with glistening promises, and dashing them at the first sign of political risk -- all the while shifting the blame to others -- has done more to destroy what was once a potentially powerful movement than anything a small band of hapless, closeted gay Republicans on Capitol Hill (now "cleansed" for the most part) could ever have done. [...]

And speaks to gay Clinton supporters:

...breathe easy, gay Democrats.  Hillary is finally being shoved out the door by the length and breadth of the selfishness she represents.  Whether it's soon, or after the inevitable rejection of her 900th attempt at game-changing party rules on May 31st...it's been in the cards since February.

Whether you realize it or not, it's good for you.  Embrace it.  And get back to work in making your party something other than a gigantic waste of money, hope and effort.

09 May 2008 08:02 am

Elephants To The Slaughter?

Pruning Shears examines the Republican future. Which is not the same as the conservative future.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

08 May 2008 08:35 pm

The Facts And Parsley

A major McCain supporter, Rod Parsley, has opined that the United States was founded to destroy Islam. Regardless of the damage this does to an effective war against Islamism, he is empirically wrong. From The Conservative Soul:

In 1797, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved the "Treaty of Tripoli," an attempt to deal with Muslim piracy and terrorism in the Mediterranean. One of its clauses read:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

It is hard to think of a leading contemporary Republican insisting that American government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." In the early republic, not a single senator dissented.

08 May 2008 08:05 pm

Petite Vanilla Scones

Man, they're good. A reader writes:

I have to say, as an upper-middle class liberal who has been known to enjoy the occasional latte or, even worse, cafe au lait, I'm a little sick of the abuse.  No, I don't watch NASCAR.  No, I am not a soccer mom/dad.  I just like my damn coffee with milk in it.  Is that so wrong?  Yes, my morning is made a little brighter by having some nice barista at the local coffee shop make that coffee for me.  I'm sorry that this makes me hate America.  But if you think I'm out of touch now, just try me WITHOUT my coffee.

Another:

I don't know if it makes you an elite snooty pansy-ass un-American commie terrorist-lover, but three vanilla petite scones?  Totally gay.

Not that there's anything wrong that. And another:

I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, and I live in Cleveland, Ohio. Most of my family is blue collar, my dad was the president of his local union.

Every time I go to Starbucks, I've had my eye on those damn petite vanilla scones.  Please, how were they?  My elite snooty pansy-ass Obama-lovin' side of me wants to know.  The blue collar roots in me noticed there was a price break on three.

They're totally awesome: moist, sweet, crusty, the best pastry Starbucks has come up with. And I include the toffee almond bar.

08 May 2008 07:01 pm

The Web vs Tyranny

If you do not know of Cuban Yoani Sanchez's blog, Generacion Y, you should. The Castros loathe her of course and have prevented her from traveling abroad. And still she blogs. Her latest (translated from the Spanish):

On top of everything, yesterday I got a new award. This one has the title of a Saturday night movie: “The Captive Blogger” and it consists of not letting me travel to Madrid for the Ortega & Gasset Awards Ceremony. Those who honored me with the Captive Blogger prize refuse to provide their names and surnames, although we have referred to them in this blog as “them”. Those are the ones who, with a military uniform, administer our rights as citizens and do not grant explanations, but deliver orders.

I never thought I deserved so many attentions, but if the officers insist, ok, I accept this new distinction. They forget that in cyberspace my voice can travel with no limits, come and go without asking for permission… It does not matter they have retained my passport. I have another one that, in the nationality section, bears one brief word: “blogger”.

The best passport there is.

08 May 2008 06:13 pm

What American Power Can't Do

Judah Grunstein's two cents on Obama's emphasis on soft power:

The danger of Obama's overly ambitious and unrealistic rhetoric, like all overly ambitious and unrealistic rhetoric, is in raising expectations, both domestically and abroad, about the transformative capacity of American power, at a time when a smart foreign policy would attempt to downsize those expectations. And as Hampton implied, increased expectations tend to lead to hubris and mission creep. The fact that there's a collective longing for the kind of shift to soft power that Obama emphasizes, both domestically and abroad, only makes the temptation to overestimate its capacities even greater.

08 May 2008 05:37 pm

Clinton Channels Bush

A reader writes:

Hillary's hanging on to the contest dramatically proves to me that she is unfit to be our president. It is so Bush-like, is it not? It's her Iraq. She has obviously failed, yet she keeps on just to prove she's not a quitter. Where have we heard that lately? How can we depend on her? Like Bush, she cannot admit a mistake. She can't admit failure. She is not rational. She'll take us down with her.

We need a rational president so badly. One who makes decisions based on careful consideration of all the facts and understands the real risks and likelihood of success. Hillary is running her campaign into the ground financially. Is that what we want in a president? Someone who uses fear and divisiveness to appeal to people?

Her campaign alone is a reason to vote against her.

08 May 2008 05:10 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

In discussing McCain’s relationship with Rod Parsley, you wrote:

Of course, a twenty-year relationship with a preacher counts for more than a public political endorsement and embrace of a religious nut-job.

I suppose this now qualifies as the conventional wisdom, but from where I’m sitting, it seems exactly backwards.  I speak from some experience. I am a minister (in the United Church of Christ, no less) and I can tell you that my politics have very little to do with my pastoral relationships.  The Republican elected officials who sit in the pews of my church know that I am a lefty; they don’t particularly care because they don’t come to me for political advice, any more than I would hit up my accountant for tips on lowering my cholesterol. There is more to life than politics – even (especially?) in the relationship between a politician and her pastor.

Senator Obama had a pastoral relationship with Jeremiah Wright; Senator McCain has a political relationship with Rod Parsley –the only thing bringing them together is a shared political agenda.  That, I think, should make Rod Parsley’s odious political rantings far more relevant to the presidential campaign than those of Jeremiah Wright.

But what do I know?

08 May 2008 05:07 pm

In The Bunker

I'll probably regret this, it breaks Godwin's law, and there are lots of very naughty words, but it made me laugh:

08 May 2008 05:00 pm

Tumulty vs Penn

A snippet from Karen Tumulty's article:

As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all.

Penn denies it.

08 May 2008 04:46 pm

Buried Prejudice

Siri Carpenter reports on subconscious bias.

08 May 2008 04:28 pm

Guilt By Association

Matt makes an obvious point about the imbalance between the Wright-Obama conflation and the Parsley-Hagee-McCain nexus:

A certain number of clueless liberals are going to wonder why this isn't nearly as big a deal as Reverend Wright, so in case you don't get it the difference is that anti-Muslim bigotry is a fairly mainstream and popular sentiment in the United States so associating with the Daniel Pipes' and Rod Parsley's of the world is only a problem in the actual, substantive sense of indicating that McCain's foreign policy views are bad and dangerous, not in the freak show "this'll hurt in November in Pennsylvania" sense.

The same goes for the anti-gay stuff. Beating up on minorities is always less politically toxic than beating up on majorities. In democracies, anyway. Atwater, Morris and Rove just did the math.

08 May 2008 04:15 pm

The View From Your Window

Lawrence, Kansas, 10.52 am.

08 May 2008 04:03 pm

No To Obama-Clinton

Poulos argues against the unity ticket:

Though the polls do reflect a possibility (because of her negative campaigning) that at least some current Clinton supporters are likely to consider McCain in the general election, Democrats have a clear choice to make. Either they can reward the woman who chased voters from her own party in the ironic hope of retaining them, or they can grant their nominee the full use of his natural power to make another winning decision - this time, the decision about the person best suited to join him on the ticket. What new fabricated formality must Obama satisfy to earn their trust? What hoop is left to jump through? That Clinton has even caused these questions to be raised reflects the profundity of damage she has already done to her party and its assured nominee. On the campaign trail or in office, what more might come from this calculating aggrandiser, long accustomed to thinking of herself in co-presidential terms, should be left to Democrats' most fertile imaginations.

08 May 2008 03:45 pm

The Last Hope For Neoconservatism?

Lawrence Kaplan on John McCain.

08 May 2008 03:30 pm

Quote For The Day

"Pennsylvania was an election of people thinking about yesterday, North Carolina was sort of a future vote, that that is a vote for the future, you know a tomorrow type vote, a tomorrow type electorate," - Chuck Todd.

08 May 2008 03:12 pm

You Know It's A Beagle When ...

You catch them doing this.

08 May 2008 02:57 pm

Soldier Sabbaticals Ctd

A reader writes:

Officers already pretty much have sabbaticals. If you want to make Field Grade rank, you pretty much have to get a Master's Degree and the military is already VERY generous with letting their officers go and get them. I know officers that have gone to Ivy League schools for their Master's in pretty much any subject they want. My boss went to Columbia and lived with his family at Fort Hamilton while he did it. Another officer I worked with went to the Kennedy School of Government. I ran into another officer friend of mine who went to the Naval Post Grad school for his Master's in Electrical Engineering and was only required to pay two years back.

No, the people that this is really aimed at are the enlisted folk. Now that I have 19 years, 11 months in the military and am getting ready to retire in a month, its too late for me, but I am glad they are thinking about it. It was very difficult to get into a degree program while on active duty, and I would have loved to get into one, but as a linguist, I was way too busy. I really could have used two years off to finish my Bachelor's and been that much better a sailor.

08 May 2008 02:52 pm

Bert And Ernie And The Election

Priceless:

08 May 2008 02:40 pm

Running On Fumes

From 538:

[The Clintons] have 17 field offices open in the six remaining primary states: seven in Oregon, five in Kentucky, four in West Virginia, one in Montana, and none in South Dakota or Puerto Rico. Obama, by contrast, has 44 field offices open: 17 in Oregon, 10 in West Virginia, seven in each of Kentucky and Montana, three in South Dakota, and none in Puerto Rico.

08 May 2008 02:37 pm

Whites Like Clinton

Jen Rubin:

All those suspicions about her preference for a potential one-term McCain presidency rather than a two-term Obama one are only going to increase with comments like this.

08 May 2008 02:35 pm

Now The "Small States" Matter

Well, how conveenient.

08 May 2008 02:33 pm

Why I Could Never Run For President

Forget the small fact of my place of birth. I just ordered three vanilla petite scones at Starbucks. If that doesn't make me an elite snooty pansy-ass un-American commie terrorist-lover, what would?

08 May 2008 02:33 pm

The Death Toll Rises

George Packer on the situation in Burma:

Burma used to be the world’s largest exporter of rice; after decades of military misrule, it now has trouble feeding itself. When I was there in February, I heard that some peasants were surviving on one meal a day, and a knowledgeable woman spoke of the conditions that might lead to famine. Now the danger is far more real—thousands of villagers have no food or water, and reports of hunger are widespread. So the already unimaginable death toll could increase considerably with starvation and disease.

More here.

08 May 2008 02:25 pm

Hanging On

Laura McClure sorts through dispatches from Burma, while Robert Kaplan wonders if the disaster makes overthrowing Burma's military regime any more likely.

08 May 2008 02:04 pm

Moon Struck

A legal argument supporting lunar property rights.

08 May 2008 01:17 pm

Unfriendly Territories

Larison argues that Obama can't make inroads in either West Virginia or Kentucky and says Obama should act like those primaries aren't happening. I don't agree. The last thing Obama needs now is overconfidence or arrogance. The Clintons are always at their most dangerous when on the ropes.

08 May 2008 12:57 pm

Home, Sweet Home

The bluebells are blooming in the Sussex woodlands around my home-town in England. I grew up in this dank beauty, and my dad took some photos today to remind me of what was my childhood playground:

08 May 2008 12:46 pm

Enjoying Failure

How to run a doomed campaign.

08 May 2008 12:41 pm

Drip, Drip

"The race is close to over. If Mrs Clinton chooses to drag it out, it is hard to see how she could continue later than May 20th. By then, three more states will have voted: Kentucky, West Virginia and Oregon. The first two are strong for her, the last for him, but they are all too small to matter now," - The Economist.