Jinchi

Many senior Democrats are apparently idiots.

2011-01-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post, claiming that filibuster reform is dead:

Many senior Democrats, who have watched the majority flip back and forth a half-dozen times in the past 20 years, balked at taking away minority rights, out of fear that Democrats could soon find themselves in the minority.

I have to wonder why those senior Democrats believe that this Congress can constrain a future Republican majority anymore than the current Congress is constrained by the rules written in 1975.

The filibuster is going away. The only question is whether it will go away in time for the Democrats to accomplish anything worthwhile.

Facebook: anonymity is for trolls

2010-11-30T05:51:00.000-08:00

Julie Zhou of Facebook would like to rid the internet of anonymity:

Some may argue that denying Internet users the ability to post anonymously is a breach of their privacy and freedom of expression. But until the age of the Internet, anonymity was a rare thing. When someone spoke in public, his audience would naturally be able to see who was talking.
Others point out that there’s no way to truly rid the Internet of anonymity. After all, names and e-mail addresses can be faked. And in any case many commenters write things that are rude or inflammatory under their real names.

It's hardly a surprise that a product design manager from Facebook thinks anonymity is something we might all want to get rid of. After all, the company makes money selling personal information and has been notorious for it's lack of concern about it's member's privacy.

Still, it's hard to believe she hasn't heard that even today there are very real reasons for people to write anonymously. And she'll be happy to know that her concerns about anonymous trolls are shared by the governments of Iran, Egypt and China.

But anonymity was rare thing until recently? Has she never heard of Poor Richard? Or Publius?

Of course Democrats should end the filibuster

2010-07-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein are worried that the Democrats shouldn't be too hasty about getting rid of the filibuster.

Here's Matt:

The concern I have is that the political timing is wrong.

and here's Ezra:

You can't return from an election in which the public decisively voted for the Republicans and then say that in the interests of democratic governance, you're taking away the tools Senate Republicans use to exert control over legislation.

Of course you can.

Did Mitch McConnell wonder about political timing after he’d lost 14 Senate seats over 2 consecutive elections? No. He decided the new rule was “Every bill needs 60 votes”. And just as quickly, the whole political world agreed with him. He had Tea Parties organized in protest of Obama barely a month after he took the oath of office. Nobody told him his political timing was lousy. And, likewise, nobody but the Republicans will care about the demise of the filibuster a month after it happens.

Here's Ezra again:

my favored option -- is for Democrats to join with Republicans to set rules that will go into place six or eight years from now.

I hate to break it to Ezra, but the Republicans aren't about to join Democrats to make the world a better place. They'll simply wait until they regain the majority and repeal the filibuster all by themselves. If the Democrats don't work every angle to figure out how to govern with 50+ votes then Republicans will get that majority, along with the presidency, in 2012.

Political timing? Seriously? We’re at the edge of another Great Depression. If Democrats are in the majority next January they need to get rid of the filibuster or the government will cease to function. If they hope to keep the majority and the presidency past 2012 they’ll need to solve real problems. That’s political reality.

I don’t know why Matt and Ezra constantly feel the need to be part of the liberal cold water brigade, but if they want to be part of a progressive solution, they'd be better off spending their time dreaming up ways to pass legislation with a mere majority instead of explaining to the rest of us why nothing can be done.

unknown unknowns

2010-06-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

From the NYT:

DAVID DUNNING: Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Just to keep the record straight, people were laughing at Rumsfeld, because he only discovered "unknown unknowns" when it was completely self-serving to do so. There was nothing he didn't know before the Iraq war became an obvious disaster. Before the war, he told us that we knew Saddam had WMD, we knew he was a real threat to the U.S., we knew he was assisting Al Qaeda, and we knew that the war would be easy and over in a matter of weeks.

Rumsfeld dismissed anyone who doubted the wisdom of starting a second war while we were still fighting in Afghanistan. Not only did he ridicule them, he typically accused them of treason for giving 'aid and comfort' to the enemy.

Rumsfeld was neither smart nor modest in his answer. He was just attempting to deflect responsibility for his failures.

Getting Democrats back under 60?

2009-04-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

This is the Republican party setting high standards:

“In 2012, their goal is to get Democrats back under 60,” said Jennifer Duffy of The Cook Political Report. “With 24 seats, the mathematical odds are pretty good.”

Democrats currently hold 56 seats in the Senate and the likely victory of Al Franken would put them at 57. Even giving them credit for the 2 independents (Lieberman and Sanders) only gets them to 59.

So isn't getting them "back under 60", two elections from now, quite a bit less than the bare minimum that the Republicans should be hoping for?

"Something called volcano monitoring"

2009-02-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, complains about "wasteful spending".

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called volcano monitoring.

Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

Note to Bobby Jindal. Volcano monitoring is something like this, only for the people on the West Coast:

Hurricane Rita off the coast of Louisiana, 2005.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

Forbes defines "liberal"

2009-01-23T14:52:00.000-08:00

Lots of bloggers are puzzled by the fact that Forbes magazine's list of the 25 most influential liberals includes several self-described conservatives, moderates and advocates of George Bush's Iraq war. How did they get on the list?

Here's a summary of Forbes' reasoning:

Andrew Sullivan - gay, gay, so very, very gay.
Christopher Hitchens - atheist, thinks Sarah Palin is an idiot.
Chris Matthews - likes Obama and it's been years since he thought only wackos hated W.
Fareed Zakaria - really smart. looks foreign.
Tom Friedman - come on, we all know Friedman is a liberal
Fred Hiatt - mostly moderate and the left hates him, but Obama will probably read his column.

I guess we're a center-left nation after all

2009-01-23T14:43:00.000-08:00

According to Forbes magazine, you're a liberal if you subscribe to "some or all of the following":

progressive income taxation
universal health care of some kind
opposition to the war in Iraq, and a certain queasiness about the war on terror
an instinctive preference for international diplomacy
the right to gay marriage
a woman's right to an abortion
environmentalism in some Kyoto Protocol-friendly form
and a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket

I love the "certain queasiness about the war on terror" line. I suppose that's a euphemism for "opposes torture". And "rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket" alone puts 53% of all voters in the liberal category.

Republican women and the Lilly Ledbetter Act

2009-01-23T12:45:00.000-08:00

Republican women Senators broke with their party to help pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but Republican women in the House didn’t.

Ledbetter had sued her employer when she discovered that she was making far less than her male collegues, but (in a 5-4 decision) the Supreme Court decided that she hadn't discovered it quickly enough:

Although Ledbetter did the same job as her colleagues, and had more seniority than some of them, they were all being paid considerably more than she was. Ledbetter sued, under the Civil Rights Act, and proved that her lower pay was the result of discrimination early in her career, the effects of which had never been remedied. But victory was short-lived; the verdict was overturned on appeal, and then the Supreme Court ruled against her. The Court did not deny that Ledbetter had been discriminated against. However, according to the Civil Rights Act, Ledbetter’s lawsuit had to be filed within a hundred and eighty days, and the Court ruled that the clock started ticking with the first act of discrimination, almost two decades before Ledbetter found out what was going on.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act overturns that decision, clarifying that the clock starts ticking with the most recent discriminatory paycheck. Last year, Republicans successfully filibustered the bill and George Bush had threatened to veto it if it got to his desk. Yesterday's bill passed the Senate 61-36, enough to stop another threatened filibuster. Without the support of Republicans Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) it would have fallen short.

Arlen Specter (R-PA) was the only Republican man in the Senate who joined them.

But before you conclude that Republican women and Republican men are hopelessly divided on this issue, realize that only 3 House Republicans supported the bill; Ed Whitfield (KY), Don Young (AK) and Christopher Smith (NJ) - all men.

White support for Obama in the States

2008-11-14T14:37:00.000-08:00

Here's an example of a pollster overanalyzing his data:

There is considerable variation in the percentage of whites who voted for Obama. Where African Americans made up less than 20% of the vote (according to exit polls), whites varied from 30% to 60% in their support for Obama but with no relationship to the size of the African American vote. As the African American electorate rose above 20%, white support for Obama fell sharply to barely 10%.

So whites are less likely to vote for a black man if there are "too many" blacks living in the state? I don't think so. Look closely at his chart and you'll realize that the entire basis of his inference relies on data from 3 states - Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama - which just happen to border one another.

White support for Obama varied by region, not by the number of blacks in each state. Obama did most poorly among whites in the deep south and in Mormon country. He did best in the northeast and on the west coast. White New Yorkers don't have the same values as white Mississippians. Voters in Vermont disagree with voters in Utah on just about everything. People in different places want different things and it shows up at the polls.

Simply plotting the data on a map shows a very precise pattern - slightly different in the western US than in the east, but with clear regional trends.

White support for Obama by state relative to the U.S. average (42%). White voters in states colored red voted disproportionately for McCain. White voters in states colored blue voted disproportionately for Obama. The intensity of the colors indicates the margin for the preferred candidate. (Data from NY Times exit polls.)

Take a trip from Alabama north to Maine, Michigan or Minnesota and you'll find yourself in states that are progressively friendlier to Barack Obama, irrespective of the percentage of blacks in each state. Even West Virginia, which many were suggesting was filled with white racists, fits the pattern perfectly (more supportive of Obama than Virginia and Kentucky, less supportive than Ohio and Pennsylvania).

Obama's support among whites in states along a path from Alabama to Maine. Does this look random to anybody?

Suddenly, the "considerable variation in the percentage of whites who voted for Obama" becomes very predictable.

John Kyl: just kidding about the nuclear option

2008-11-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

Wait! You mean all that talk about the need for an "up or down vote" was just a bunch of partisan B.S.?

November 2008

“He believes in justices that have empathy,” said Kyl, speaking at a Federalist Society meeting in Phoenix. The attorneys group promotes conservative legal principles.

Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.

That didn't take long.

It seems like just yesterday Senator Kyl was wringing his hands over the thought that Democrats were destroying 214 years of "wise, carefully thought out" Senate tradition.

April 18, 2005

KWAME HOLMAN: But Sen. Kyl says the advise and consent role should include an up-or-down vote as well and changing the Senate rules may be the only way to guarantee it.

SEN. JON KYL: There may well come a Supreme Court vacancy soon. I just don't think the people of the country are going to stand by and let a minority dictate whether or not we're even going take a vote on a nominee.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER: My strategy is to use every ounce of my energy to try to confirm President Bush's judges without going to the so-called "constitutional" or "nuclear option."

KWAME HOLMAN: But Sen. Kyl says Democrats may give Republicans no choice.

SEN. JON KYL: Our Democratic colleagues have to make a decision. Will they continue their filibuster or not? If they do, and they're not willing to discuss any kind of a compromise, then I don't see any alternative but to reestablish the tradition of the majority vote.

April 25, 2005

SEN. JOHN KYL: This is strictly about whether or not a minority of senators is going to prevent the president from being able to name and get confirmed judges that he chooses after he's been elected by the American people. And it's never been the case until the last two years that a minority could dictate to the majority what they could do.

...

SEN. JOHN KYL: Well, I'll tell you what is shutting down the judiciary is not filling vacancies. We have according to the commission on the courts several emergency judicial emergencies, situations in which we need to put judges in to vacant positions. They're not -- we're not being able to act on them. It really is true that justice delayed is justice denied. So we need to give these judges an up or down vote. That's all we're asking for, and if some of my colleagues think that they're too conservative or in some other way unqualified then vote against them.

May 19, 2005

SEN. JOHN KYL: The reality is that the Senate is now engaged in an historic effort to protect constitutional prerogatives and the proper checks and balances between the branches of government. Republicans seek to right a wrong that has undermined 214 years of tradition – wise, carefully thought-out tradition. The fact that the Senate rules theoretically allowed the filibuster of judicial nominations but were never used to that end is an important indicator of what is right, and why the precedent of allowing up-or-down votes is so well established. It is that precedent that has been attacked and which we seek to restore.

Fortunately, the Senate is not powerless to prevent a minority from running roughshod over its traditions. It has the power – and the obligation – to govern itself. As I will demonstrate today, that power to govern itself easily extends to that device that has come to be known as the “constitutional option.”

David Frum: its already Obama's fault

2008-11-06T22:24:00.001-08:00

Who says conservatives have to wait until January to start blaming Obama for the country's problems?

Here's David "axis of evil" Frum, on the day after the election, claiming that FDR deliberately delayed an economic recovery until his inauguration and hinting that Obama will do the same:

[M]any suspected that Roosevelt understood that the worse things were on the day before he took office, the better he would look on his first day in.
Deliberately or not, Roosevelt maximized political and economic uncertainty for almost half a year at unknowable cost to the American people, but to his own ultimate political benefit.
Might such a temptation be repeated? There are signs that the worst of the Wall Street financial crisis lies behind us. Credit conditions are thawing, huge liquidity has been injected into markets and stock indexes seem to have apparently stabilized. A recession has begun, but its severity remains uncertain.

From the point of view of the new president, this bottoming out is premature. He needs the recovery to begin in January and will benefit if it can be made to look that way.

That would be understandable politics. It could be very dangerous economics.

Got that? The economy is already turning around. But if it isn't, it's Obama's fault.

Feingold as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee?

2008-11-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

The Hill worries about the possibility that Russ Feingold could become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

That leaves Feingold, an unapologetic champion of civil liberties and a staunch opponent of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, next in line. Feingold opposed the war from the start and was the first senator to call for a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable.

You'd think the results of the last two elections would make that a no-brainer. But not everyone agrees:

Democrats could bypass the Wisconsin senator and choose a more centrist member, such as Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla.), who initially supported the war and could be more open to compromise.

Yes. Why would anyone want a chairman who's an unapologetic defender of civil liberties and opposed an unpopular war, when we could have a man who reached across the aisle to vote for the biggest foreign policy blunder of the last 40 years?

I suppose in a bipartisan paradise Joe Lieberman would keep his committee chairmanship despite attacking the Democratic majority, and Russ Feingold would be expelled from the caucus for not playing nice with Republicans.

Bob Barr's insurgent campaign costs John McCain two states

2008-11-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

He didn't exactly cost John McCain the election, but if the current numbers hold, it looks like Bob Barr, the conservative Republican who famously broke from his party on the issues of the rule of law and torture, may have cost John McCain victories in North Carolina and Indiana.

North Carolina

Barack Obama(D) 2,098,401
John McCain(R) 2,084,344
Bob Barr(L) 25,031

Indiana

Barack Obama(D) 1,330,959
John McCain(R) 1,315,916
Bob Barr(L) 28,692

Update: Too early to be sure, but Ron Paul may cost him Montana for the same reason.

Numbers via TPM at 12:30 Eastern time.
Image via Bob Barr for President under a Creative Commons license.

Congratulations President-elect Barack Obama!

2008-11-04T19:47:00.000-08:00

Ohio plus all the Kerry States puts him over the top.

Just vote already

2008-11-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

"Vote" Image originally uploaded by Dean Terry under a Creative Commons license.

Sarah Palin earned $107,987 as governor in 2007

2008-10-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

A Republican donor, defending the $150,000 expense of outfitting Sarah Palin had this as a defense:

Given the short notice and the Palins’ relatively modest means, “she could probably not go into her closet at home in Alaska to come up with a wardrobe appropriate for her status as a vice presidential candidate," he said.

Together with her husband, Palin earned over $166,000 in 2007. That's not on par with McCain or even Obama (and nowhere near the fictional income of Joe the Plumber), but it's hardly "modest means".

It's more than double what the typical 2-earner family in the U.S. or Alaska brings home.

McCain: "I am not President Bush"

2008-10-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

If McCain wants us to think he's different from George Bush then he should stop stealing W's lines.

Here's John McCain last month:

"What what we'd be doing is nominating justices who strictly interpret the Constitution," McCain said during an appearance on the ABC daytime talk show "The View." "We would not impose litmus test."

and here's George W. Bush in 2000 during the debate against Gore:

Q: Should a voter assume that all judicial appointments you make to the Supreme Court will be pro-life?
BUSH: Voters should assume that I have no litmus test on that issue or any other issue. The voters will know I’ll put competent judges on the bench, people who will strictly interpret the Constitution and will not use the bench to write social policy. I believe in strict constructionists.

Obama: Human rights must be a part of trade agreements

2008-10-15T21:51:00.000-07:00

McCAIN: Free trade with Colombia is something that's a no-brainer. But maybe you ought to travel down there and visit them and maybe you could understand it a lot better.

OBAMA: Let me respond. Actually, I understand it pretty well. The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions.

And what I have said, because the trade agreement itself does have labor and environmental protections, but we have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights, which is why, for example, I supported the Peruvian Free Trade Agreement which was a well-structured agreement.

April, 2008:

More than 2,500 union members in Colombia have been killed since 1985, and fewer than 100 cases have a conviction, according to the National Labor School, a labor research group in Medellín.

Now these killings are emerging as a pressing issue in Washington as Democrats and Republicans battle over a trade deal with Colombia, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America. The Colombian government is already struggling to recover from the latest salvo in the fight, a vote by U.S. House Democrats on Thursday to snub President George W. Bush and indefinitely delay voting on the deal.

Since President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002, there has been a marked decline in union killings, accompanying a broader decline in overall murders and kidnappings. Still, 400 union members have been killed since then, and dozens of his supporters in the Colombian Congress and his former intelligence chief are under investigation for ties to rightist paramilitary death squads, which are classified as terrorists by the United States and responsible for some of the union killings.

Here's Amnesty International's report :

Killings, arbitrary detentions, and death threats -- the reality of trade unionism in Colombia

McCain: the challenge is to know when to go to war

2008-10-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

McCain: [T]he challenge is to know when the United States of American can beneficially effect the outcome of a crisis, when to go in and when not, when American military power is worth the expenditure of our most precious treasure.
And that question can only be answered by someone with the knowledge and experience and the judgment, the judgment to know when our national security is not only at risk, but where the United States of America can make a difference in preventing genocide, in preventing the spread of terrorism, in doing the things that the United States has done, not always well, but we've done because we're a nation of good.
And I am convinced that my record, going back to my opposition from sending the Marines to Lebanon, to supporting our efforts in Kosovo and Bosnia and the first Gulf War, and my judgment, I think, is something that I'm -- a record that I'm willing to stand on.
Sen. Obama was wrong about Iraq and the surge. He was wrong about Russia when they committed aggression against Georgia. And in his short career, he does not understand our national security challenges.

Kosovo, Bosnia, the first Gulf war..... Isn't he forgetting something here?

For anyone keeping score - John McCain lobbied for a trillion dollar war that's turned into a quagmire. Barack Obama opposed it.

Obama: health care should be a right for every American

2008-10-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

Obama: Well, I think [health care] should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills -- for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that.

...

And when Sen. McCain says that he wants to provide children health care, what he doesn't mention is he voted against the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program that is responsible for making sure that so many children who didn't have previously health insurance have it now.

Senator Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.

2008-10-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

McCAIN: Now, how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. Sen. Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.

Look, I -- I was on Navy ships that had nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it's clean, and it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs.

And what could be safer than life on a nuclear military vessel?

Naval nuclear accidents

United States

* USS Thresher (SSN-593) (sank, 129 killed)
* USS Scorpion (SSN-589) (sank, 99 killed)

Both sank for reasons unrelated to their reactor plants and still lie on the Atlantic sea floor.

Russian or Soviet

* Komsomolets K-278 (sank, 42 killed)
* Kursk K-141 (sank recently, 118 killed)
* K-8 (loss of coolant) (sank, 42 killed)
* K-11 (refueling criticality)
* K-19 (loss of coolant)
* K-27 (scuttled)
* K-116 (reactor accident)
* K-122 (reactor accident)
* K-123 (loss of coolant)
* K-140 (power excursion)
* K-159 (radioactive discharge) (sank recently, 9 killed)
* K-192 (loss of coolant)
* K-219 (sank after collision, 4 killed)
* K-222 (uncontrolled startup)
* K-314 (refueling criticality, 10 killed)
* K-320 (uncontrolled startup)
* K-429 (sank twice, 16 killed)
* K-431 (reactor accident)

John McCain and the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005*

2008-10-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

*Or why even the Democratic Senator from MBNA is a better bet for consumers than the Republican maverick from Arizona.

In 2005, John McCain was an enthusiastic backer of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (S. 256) which ultimately became law on a 75-24 vote. This is the bill that stripped away many of the protections individuals used to have when falling into bankruptcy. Amendments to protect victims of identity theft, those who fell into debt due to medical or natural catastrophes, and to provide homestead exemptions were all rejected. Attempts to place restrictions and regulations on creditors, such as disclosure obligations, restrictions on predatory lending practices and limits on the interest rate that could be charged also failed (the figure above shows how each Senator voted on consumer protection amendments to the bill; red are Republicans, blue are Democrats and green is the Independent Jeffords).

As the name implies Republicans were concerned with what they considered abuses of the bankruptcy laws and McCain was no exception. As this letter to a constituent shows he believed that too many people were gaming the system at a time of prosperity:

The number of Americans filing for bankruptcy has increased dramatically in recent years. What is surprising is that this increase is coming at a time of low unemployment and high wages, when debt problems should be at their lowest. Significant numbers of people who can pay some of what they owe are opting to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which permits them to erase almost all of their debt.

Despite being written explicitly to the desires of the credit card industry, in McCain's view the bill created a "fair and balanced approach" which restored personal responsibility to the system. And while "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention" was the essence of the bill, there was little that could be called "Consumer Protection" in it.

With the exception of an amendment to protect disabled veterans (which passed 99-0), all attempts to add consumer rights to the bill failed. John McCain was one of 50 Republican Senators who voted against adding consumer protections to the bill every single time. McCain even voted against an amendment that would have protected active service members in Iraq from means testing and usury.

S.256 passed the Senate 74-25.

The Republicans were unanimous in their support for the final bill. 18 Democrats and Independent Jim Jeffords voted with the majority.

25 Democrats, including Barack Obama, voted against the bill.

Joe Biden voted for it. In fact he championed it in the Senate, and his defense of the bill bordered on absurdity. Still he voted for the consumer protection amendments over 40% of the time.

McCain still defends his vote on the bill. His spokesman cites the bill as an example of McCain's bipartisan worldview and believes it compares favorably against Barack Obama.

"Eighteen Democrats and John McCain worked together on the bipartisan Senate bankruptcy bill, and Barack Obama's rigid partisanship and self-promoting political attacks show that he's a typical politician — which is the problem in Washington, not the solution." - McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds

Does John McCain support the overthrow of "failed" democracies?

2008-09-27T00:57:00.000-07:00

OBAMA: And the problem, John, with the strategy that's been pursued was that, for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, "Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he's our dictator."

And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan. We spent $10 billion. And in the meantime, they weren't going after Al Qaida, and they are more powerful now than at any time since we began the war in Afghanistan.

That's going to change when I'm president of the United States.

MCCAIN: I -- I don't think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power. Everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state.

Musharraf didn't "come to power". He overthrew the Prime Minister in a coup, suspended the constitution, imprisoned Supreme Court justices when they ruled against his wishes and spent as much effort jailing the opposition as targeting al Qaeda (while receiving the open support of the U.S. government).

And while Pakistan is often dysfunctional, it's biggest problem is that the military isn't subject to the civilian government and constantly threatens the elected leadership when it doesn't get it's way.

20 civilians a day are dying in Iraq

2008-09-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

Documented civilian deaths due to violence in Iraq over the last 2 months. (Data from Iraq Body Count)

MCCAIN: This strategy has succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq. And we will come home with victory and with honor. And that withdrawal is the result of every counterinsurgency that succeeds.

And I want to tell you that now that we will succeed and our troops will come home, and not in defeat, that we will see a stable ally in the region and a fledgling democracy.

The consequences of defeat would have been increased Iranian influence. It would have been increase in sectarian violence. It would have been a wider war, which the United States of America might have had to come back.

So there was a lot at stake there. And thanks to this great general, David Petraeus, and the troops who serve under him, they have succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq, and we will come home. And we will come home as we have when we have won other wars and not in defeat.

Just to clarify; when John McCain insists that we are winning in Iraq, his definition of victory includes the fact that the capital city has been ethnically cleansed, neighborhoods are literally walled off from one another, one-fifth of the population of the country have fled their homes, corruption is rampant, Iran has extended it's influence into the highest levels of the government and, on average, only 20 people are being murdered every day.

"We're going to take over these bad loans"

2008-09-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Now if that that isn't a winning campaign slogan, I don't know what is.

"We're going to take over these bad loans," McCain said. "And we're going to have the taxpayer help you out. But when the time comes and the economy recovers, then anything that's gained back is going to go to the taxpayers first.

It'd be great if, as a U.S. Senator, he made sure that was actually written in the legislation. I hear he has until Friday.

Of course there is a way to be confident that taxpayers will get paid back if the government bailout works. Instead of buying toxic debt, buy a stake in the corporations themselves.

[T]he financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

I don't suppose anyone on Capitol Hill reads the New York Times.

"Banking lobbyists cheered"

2008-09-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

Flashback to April, when Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) attempted to add an amendment to the housing bill which would have protected homeowners facing foreclosure.

The 58-36 vote to table the amendment allowed senators to move on to less contentious amendments to the housing measure forged Wednesday by Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

Durbin’s amendment would allow judges to revise the terms of mortgages on primary residences. It is opposed by the banking lobby and most Republicans. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for example, said earlier Thursday that he would have insisted on a 60-vote threshold for the amendment’s adoption. That all but doomed the bill’s chances in a Senate split 51-49.

...

But banking lobbyists cheered the tabling vote.

"This has been at the very top of our members' priority list,” [Francis] Creighton [of the Mortgage Bankers Association] said, adding that the change would have been a "terrible thing for the housing market, our customers and, yes, our members."

Francis Creighton, quoted above, has recently been promoted to Chief Lobbyist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, so I guess the industry's collapse hasn't been bad for everyone.

Joe Biden voted with Dick Durbin to keep the amendment.

Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton were all absent on the campaign trail.

And P.S. to Democrats in the Senate. You don't get to complain about Mitch McConnell filibustering your bills until you can get at least 51 votes to back the legislation

Image originally uploaded by bbcworldservice's photostream under a Creative Commons license.

McCain - Palin 2008

2008-09-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

My guess is that this is the sort of thing that will bite McCain in the end:

As for the introductory speeches, I listened for what was not said as much as what was. The big missing element: John McCain. Almost nobody talked about him. Rep. Dean Heller, who represents basically every part of Nevada that isn’t Vegas, did not mention McCain once in his speech. “They want to take your taxes!” he said, of the Democrats. And, of course, “she’s one of us.”

- Sean Quinn of fivethirtyeight at a Sarah Palin campaign stop in Nevada.

If Palin keeps drawing the large, enthusiastic crowds while McCain struggles to fill his venues, that will eventually become the story of the day. And I doubt anyone can survive as the unwanted guest in his own campaign.

"I'm John McCain and I approve this message"

2008-09-11T16:38:00.001-07:00

CARVILLE: And John McCain, deep down inside my heart, you know, as you know, I've said before I admire McCain. I don't believe he knew about it. I hope somebody asked him. But I refuse to believe that John McCain agreed to airing this spot. I know he says I'm John McCain, I paid for it but they have that in the can and they do it. It I don't think he knew about it. I really don't.

Of course he knows about it. The whole point of forcing candidates to say "I approve this message" is so they'll take responsibility for what gets done in their name. Carville is actually arguing that McCain is an honorable idiot.

The party of Big Brother?

2008-09-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

From Mitt Romney's RNC speech:

It's time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother!

No he wasn't talking about the president spying on all our phone calls, he was talking about Medicaid and unions. Apparently, when Mitt worries about Big Brother, he's thinking about the charity organization, not the dictator in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sarah Palin's got a bridge to sell you!

2008-08-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin campaigns for governor. 99901 is the zip code of Ketchikan, Alaska.

"I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere," Palin told the cheering McCain crowd, referring to Ketchikan's Gravina Island bridge.

She did take the money, though.

An uneasy compromise was reached. Congress took away the money for the Gravina Island bridge and another Alaskan bridge which was almost as controversial. Instead, Congress gave the money to the state with the understanding that it was not required to use the funds specifically for bridges.

Friday, the state of Alaska officially sank the Bridge to Nowhere. Governor Sarah Palin, also a Republican, said "Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport." "But," she said, the bridge "is not the answer." Palin has told state transportation officials to look for the most "fiscally responsible" alternative.

In other words, Congress replaced an earmark with a blank check and Palin happily accepted.

Now, I wouldn't expect the governor of any state to reject a quarter-billion dollars in free money from the fed. But don't try to pretend that you scolded Congress against fiscal recklessness. A simple thanks would suffice.

(Image from Andrew Halco via John Cole)

Some of Palin's good friends are gay

2008-08-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

Not that that means she supports their vile behavior.

Palin said she's not out to judge anyone and has good friends who are gay, but that she supported the 1998 constitutional amendment [banning gay marriage].

Elected officials can't defy the court when it comes to how rights are applied, she said, but she would support a ballot question that would deny benefits to homosexual couples.

Sarah Palin "didn't like" marijuana

2008-08-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

August 2006:

Palin doesn't support legalizing marijuana, worrying about the message it would send to her four kids. But when it comes to cracking down on drugs, she says methamphetamines are the greater threat and should have a higher priority.

Palin said she has smoked marijuana -- remember, it was legal under state law, she said, even if illegal under U.S. law -- but says she didn't like it and doesn't smoke it now.

"I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled."

Interesting that she thinks state law trumps federal law. I wonder what she thinks about medical marijuana.

Republicans pray for rain in Denver, miss target

2008-08-28T22:35:00.001-07:00

On learning that next week's Republican convention might be postponed because of Hurricane Gustav, my first thought was

"What about all the people who've already booked their flights to St. Paul?"

and my second thought was

"Oh... Never mind."

I accept your nomination for presidency of the United States.

2008-08-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

"We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe.
The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, have built, and we are here to restore that legacy."

It’s not a guarantee – it's only an opportunity.

2008-08-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

"Eight years ago, some said there was not much difference between the nominees of the two major parties and it didn’t really matter who became President."

- Al Gore, August 28, 2008

I can't believe they struck out that line

2008-08-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

“They’re asking for another four years — in a just world, they’d get 10 to 20.”

- The single line struck from Dennis Kucinich's speech according to The Hill.

We don't need 4 more years of the last 8 years

2008-08-26T21:12:00.000-07:00

"Most of all, I ran to stand up for all those who have been invisible to their government for eight long years. Those are the reasons I ran for president, and those are the reasons I support Barack Obama for president.

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him?

Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids?

Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage?

Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

We need leaders once again who can tap into that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges, leaders who can help us show ourselves and the world that with our ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit, there are no limits to what is possible in America."

- HRC August 26th, 2008

Don't you support my right to call you a leftist wacko?

2008-08-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

What's more pathetic than watching a FOX news reporter wander into a group of protesters he's just finished describing as a gang of rowdy leftists and then begin complaining that nobody will talk to him?

via michael calderone

It's been a state for almost 50 years, Cokie

2008-08-10T22:01:00.000-07:00

Photo of the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery in Honolulu. Image by JPhilipson

I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii, and I know Hawaii is a state. But …

- Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs (aka "Cokie") Roberts, explaining why Barack Obama looks like an elitist for visiting an American state during an American election.

Cokie apparently believes that there are “real” Americans, and then there are a lot of other people who somehow ended up with the right to vote for our president.

Hawaii is a state. It’s people are Americans. Just because they don’t live like Cokie doesn’t make them some sort of exotic, foreign tribe.

Why won't Obama admit that the surge is working?

2008-07-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

This may have something to do with it:

Female bombers struck Kurdish political protesters in Kirkuk and Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad on Monday morning, leaving at least 48 people dead and 249 wounded in one of the bloodiest sequences of attacks in Iraq this year.

One and a half years after the surge was implemented, Iraq remains one of the most violent places in the world. The surge only been a success compared to the bloodiest days of the conflict.

I know standards have been lowered lately

2008-06-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

...but I didn't think they'd fallen this far.

Schieffer: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean...

Clark: Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Schieffer: Really!

Uh.... Yes. Really.

Mitt Romney wants every nation to have nuclear weapons?

2008-06-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

How else can you interpret his statement that non-proliferation is a liberal issue?

Romney: ... you’re talking about two liberal positions: non-proliferation as well as gasoline mileage. They are very much down the mainstream of what the left wing of the democratic party has been pushing for a long time…

non-proliferation: n. the prevention of an increase or spread of something, especially the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons

One of the worst decisions in history

2008-06-24T06:48:00.000-07:00

It's strange that John McCain thinks that a world in which Osama bin Laden is tried by an American court would somehow be more dangerous than the actual world - where we just let him run free.

In John McCain's world, the Iraq war began in May 2007

2008-05-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

“Senator Obama has consistently offered his judgment on Iraq, and he has been consistently wrong. He said that General Petraeus’ new strategy would not reduce sectarian violence, but would worsen it. He was wrong. He said the dynamics in Iraq would not change as a result of the ’surge.’ He was wrong. One year ago, he voted to cut off all funds for our forces fighting extremists in Iraq. He was wrong…

...Why, if it had been up to Obama, we never would have gone to Iraq in the first place!

h/t Steve Benen

Sorry, he needs you to fight his forever-war

2008-05-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

In John McCain's dream world, by 2013 the Iraq war has been won, bin Laden will be captured, and the soldiers who signed up after 9/11 still won't be eligible for benefits under his GI bill:

[Webb's bill] would increase education aid to all military members who've served on active duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The House version has 294 co-sponsors; the Senate bill has 58.

McCain countered that the bill is misguided because it doesn't encourage soldiers to re-enlist.

Under the proposal, all veterans, including those who served in the National Guard or Reserve for at least 36 months since the attacks — not necessarily consecutively — could get full in-state tuition, regardless of cost, as well as some money for books, fees and a stipend for living expenses. Certain grants also could be provided for those who attend private colleges.

McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam POW, has joined Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and others to push an alternative that would make it easier to transfer education benefits to spouses and children and to provide more generous education benefits to personnel who serve for 12 years or more.

"This is not World War II we're fighting. This is not Vietnam," Graham said. "This is a global struggle with an all-volunteer force. And anything we can do to help retain people, I think, would be great."

True. This isn't World War II. World War II would have been over by now.

$4.00 a gallon

2008-05-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

From the CATO Institute, 2003:

One last word on the rising cost of gasoline. American motorists should be mighty pleased that the United States does not adopt the economically dysfunctional high-energy tax policies that are commonplace in Europe. In the Euro nations gasoline often reaches $4 a gallon with more than half the price collected in taxes. Perhaps $2 a gallon gasoline is a bargain after all

$4 a gallon! Boy those Europeans sure were a bunch of suckers.

This election is all about the Iraq war

2008-05-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

Fresh insight from a man who once suggested the Democratic race could end after the Iowa caucus:

DAN BALZ: I think the degree to which that it is a reminder that, in a long election, the terrain shifts. And, so, the ability to say, well, who is the best candidate in November when are you not entirely sure what that terrain may look like.
Eight or 10 months ago, there was so much talk about how the Iraq war would define, not only the general election, but also the outcome of the primary fight between Obama and Clinton. And now we have -- you know, it is not that Iraq is not unimportant. But, clearly, the economy and gasoline prices have risen considerably in terms of people's significance.

Newsflash: Barack Obama is winning the Democratic nomination because of the Iraq war. The Republican party is collapsing for the same reason.

Momentum!

2008-05-02T11:33:00.001-07:00

Gallup's daily tracking poll January 3 - May 1

Reinforcing my point that this race has been over since February, take a look a Gallup's daily poll numbers since January. Clinton started with a 10-20 point lead nationwide, which Obama erased on Super Tuesday. Since then, they've been essentially tied. There is no momentum, we're just coasting to the finish line.

Others disagree however. Here's a short list of articles describing the momentum of the race - in reverse chronological order.

4/28/2008

Trailing in Money, Votes, Clinton Gains Momentum

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary Tuesday night with a 10 percent victory margin. The win gives her momentum as the race moves to North Carolina and Indiana.

3/19/2008

Poll: Obama Speech Doesn't Slow Clinton Momentum

The Gallup Daily Tracking poll shows that for the first time in a month, Sen. Hillary Clinton has opened up a statistically significant lead over Sen. Barack Obama in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Today's poll shows Clinton with a 49% to 42% lead over Obama in national Democratic voters' presidential nomination preference.

3/6/2008

Clinton Picks Up Momentum Post-Ohio And Texas

Monday's polls hinted at a Clinton comeback in Ohio and in Texas, which prepared us for what came yesterday night. Now, surveys are registering Clinton's rise outside of Ohio and Texas, suggesting that her improved stance was not just related to her campaigning in those two states and that Democratic voters might have some buyer's remorse naturally.

1/10/2008

Florida voters retain clout

Tampa-based Democratic consultant Ana Cruz, who has been organizing Democrats for Clinton, says Florida stands to catapult Clinton into the Feb. 5 contests. Florida is the first mega state to weigh in on the Democratic nomination, after all, and it's the first primary where only Democrats can vote. Obama benefits when unaffiliated voters are eligible.

"Six months ago, people were upset and angry and saying our votes won't count," she said. "Boy the tables have turned. ... The biggest swing state in the country is going to give the Clinton campaign momentum to continue on with the marathon."

1/9/2008

Clinton Momentum Sweeps Across the Country

Fresh off its stunning come from behind victory in New Hampshire, the Hillary Clinton for President campaign today kicked-off its post-New Hampshire efforts with a series of events across the country.

1/4/2008

Iowa Winners Count on Momentum

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is still the front-runner, though fallout from the Obama win could upend those estimates. She's leading by some 21 points nationwide, according to averages of polling data gathered by Real Clear Politics. There is little historic precedent for a candidate with a lead that large to lose a party nomination.

In Nevada, Clinton leads Obama by more than 20 points, ditto for California, Florida, and Michigan (where Obama and Edwards are not on the ballot). In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, it's closer to a 30-point lead.

1/1/2008

Two New Polls Show Clinton Momentum

Two new polls released this morning show Hillary Clinton holding a lead in the Hawkeye State, continuing to build on her momentum in the final days before the Iowa caucuses.

Clinton sure has had a lot of momentum this race. However, that wasn't always true:

11/20/2007

Clinton Slips As Richardson Gains Momentum

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Hillary Clinton has lost some ground but still maintains a lead in the Democratic primary race in New Hampshire, and opponent Bill Richardson has made the biggest jump.

The next president can't save us from Bush's power grab

2008-05-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note suggests that anyone at an Q&A for McCain, Obama or Clinton should ask the following question:

Question One: Specifically, which powers of the Presidency that the Bush administration has acquired for itself would you roll back and give up?

That's a great question. Unfortunately, it falls into the same category as asking the son of a jewel thief which of his father's gems he'd give back. It implies that the decision is his, not the law's.

This election has been over since February

2008-05-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Map of the county-by-county primary and caucus results by dreaminonempty

There's the media's view of the current election:

Victory gives Clinton fresh momentum
Barack Obama faced renewed questions yesterday about his ability to deliver a Democratic victory in November after his failure to knock out Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary.
With the protracted campaign entering its final phase, Clinton won the primary with 55% of the vote against 45% for Obama, a majority achieved by decisive wins among white voters, Catholics and low-income households.
The result did not significantly dent Obama's lead in delegates, popular vote or fundraising, neither did it fundamentally alter his status as the Democratic frontrunner. But Clinton cast it as a turning point. "The tide is turning," she said in an email to supporters yesterday morning.

And then there's reality.

This election has been over since February, even if we didn't realize it at the time. Clinton has won all the states that she was expected to win the day after Super Tuesday (and by similar margins). Obama has won all the states he was expected to win. The Reverend Wright, NAFTA, Tuzla and "bitter" controversies haven't affected the race at all.

Take a look at the map above and you'll see that Hillary's greatest support follows the Appalachian mountains from northern New York state down through Tennessee then slides into Arkansas and Texas. Obama's strength has been in the south and northwest. A bright 7 year-old could tell you where the next blue and green pieces of that puzzle will go.

What looks like momentum is simply a fluke of the primary calendar. Despite reports of voters who haven't made up their minds - they basically have.

Barack will win in North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, and Montana. Hillary will win in Kentucky, Puerto Rico and West Virginia. Indiana is a tossup. He'll end up with about a 150 pledged delegate lead.

And the superdelegates aren't going to overturn that result.

McCain is decidedly middle-class?

2008-04-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

Compared with his wife, McCain is decidedly middle-class. Based on his tax return, he collects his Senate salary ($161,708), a Navy pension ($58,358), and some Social Security income ($23,157). The money he's earned over the years writing books ($176,508 in 2007 and about $1.8 million since 1998), he gives to charity.

Add it up ( ignoring the book residuals ) and John McCain makes $243,223 a year. That's not middle class. That would put McCain and his wife in the top 2% of American households, even if she had no money at all.

I suppose compared to Bill Gates, John McCain is in a class with Somali refugees and subsistence farmers in Chad.

Is the gas tax holiday an April Fools Day joke?

2008-04-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

The price of gas since January 2007. Data via randomuseless.info

Hillary Clinton and John McCain have decided that the cost of gas has become so oppressive they'd repeal the federal tax on it.

Clinton outlined a series of steps to address the issue [of high gas prices] at the beginning of the show, reflecting the growing importance of pocketbook concerns among voters. “I would also consider a gas tax holiday, if we could make up the lost revenues from the Highway Trust Fund,” she said, without specifying how to make up those lost revenues.

...

McCain, the likely Republican nominee, called for Congress to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor day last week. Economists have warned that the benefits of such a holiday are short lived.

If we repealed the tax today, we would return to a golden era of cheap prices not seen since .... April 1st 2008.

Speaking of disenfranchisement...

2008-04-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

Who else remembered that there was a Republican primary in Pennsylvania today?

The bitter truth

2008-04-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Pennsylvania's blue collar workers aren't as delicate as the political media hoped they would be.

[T]hey find it hard to get worked up about the comments -- as do other Pennsylvanians, judging by polls that so far show little damage from an episode Clinton has worked hard to exploit. Years of watching the decline of the town they have lived in since their family arrived from France in the 1920s has, they suggested, provided perspective that keeps them from getting caught up in 24-hour cable and Internet outrage.

I don't suppose we could get back to discussing issues people actually care about now.

Skin in the game?

2008-04-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

via The Nation,

"We've put about $45 billion into Iraq's reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources...They have got to have some skin in the game." - Rahm Emmanuel

When are people in D.C. going to realize that this isn't the Iraqis game?

"Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them."

2008-04-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

- Hillary Clinton (April 11, 2008)

Strangely enough, she wasn't giving a concession speech.

So let's check the record.

Barack Obama thinks some people are bitter at being unemployed or after losing their homes.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton's team has a problem with:

"[L]atte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies"

Voters

Black voters

Voters from insignificant states

Voters in caucus states

Voters who won't "get real"

Independent, undeclared, moderate, Republican and newly registered voters

Democratic activists

Delegates elected by voters in caucus states

Other than that, she's got no problems at all.

Joe Lieberman: Still missing the point on the Iraq fiasco

2008-04-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

Among all the other nonsense written by Iraq war cheerleaders Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham this jumped out at me:

In recent months, the Iraqi government, encouraged by our Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has passed benchmark legislation on such politically difficult issues as de-Baathification, amnesty, the budget and provincial elections.

See that's the funny thing, de-Baathification is what Paul Bremer did. Later, when even the Bush administration realized what a boneheaded move that was, they demanded that the supposedly sovereign Iraqis fix it. The "difficult issue" Lieberman is praising was de-de-Baathification.

But that would sound ridiculous.

So that's what he did with all that money

2008-04-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

House Minority Leader John Boehner explaining why Republicans are going to win big this year.

“[Rep.] Ron Paul [R-Texas] wrote us a check for the first time ever,”

Paul's a pretty good sport considering the number of times Republicans accused him of working with al Qaeda during the campaign.

Serial adulterer willing to run for NY governor

2008-03-28T20:51:00.000-07:00

So the New York Post hints (without any apparent sense of irony) that Rudy Giuliani believes he's the perfect fit for the NY governor's office, now the latest occupant has become embroiled in scandal:

New York's new governor has spent his brief time in office dropping one bombshell announcement after another. He admitted that both he and his wife had affairs during a rough patch in their marriage and that he abused drugs decades ago.

Rudy, you may remember, was driven from the NYC mayor's mansion after a judge barred his mistress from the grounds.

Specifically, the judge reprimanded the mayor and his divorce lawyer, Raoul L. Felder, for three days of verbal attacks on Donna Hanover, the mayor's estranged wife, over Mother's Day weekend. Mr. Felder, who called Ms. Hanover ''an uncaring mother'' who was ''howling like a stuck pig,'' made the attacks with the mayor's support after Justice Gische sided with Ms. Hanover and lifted an order of silence she had briefly imposed on the case.

The judge ordered that for now, Ms. Nathan was never to be in the presence of the children, or ''at any event attended by the children.'' She was also barred from the Gracie Mansion grounds.

And that's not exactly the worst scandal surrounding the former mayor.

Maybe he thinks it's a job requirement.

h/t ThinkProgress

This is what a disintegrating ice shelf looks like

2008-03-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

In late February 2008, an ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula disintegrated into a floating pile of massive ice bergs, smaller ice fragments, and slush that was trapped in place by freezing sea water over subsequent weeks. The dramatic event was first spotted in NASA satellite imagery by Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Over the following days, international collaborators used images from satellites and aircraft to track the event.

This highly detailed image from the Taiwanese Formosat-2 satellite shows the different sizes, shapes, and textures of the ice fragments on March 8, 2008. Several large icebergs float amid a mosaic of smaller pieces of ice. The level of detail in the image is so great that it can seem as though you are standing over a scale model made out of papier-mâché and foam blocks. The detail can make the bergs seem deceptively small. In reality, some of the large bergs are several hundred meters (yards) long.

NASA's Earth Observatory reports on the disintegration of the Wilkins ice shelf here.

John McCain defines success in Iraq

2008-03-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

Give him some credit, it's more than George Bush has ever done:

Many people ask, how should we define success? Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is the establishment of peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic states that pose no threat to neighbors and contribute to the defeat of terrorists. It is the triumph of religious tolerance over violent radicalism.

Of course the war in Iraq is currently a failure by all those standards.

Those who argue that our goals in Iraq are unachievable are wrong, just as they were wrong a year ago when they declared the war in Iraq already lost. Since June 2007 sectarian and ethnic violence in Iraq has been reduced by 90 percent. Overall civilian deaths have been reduced by more than 70 percent. Deaths of coalition forces have fallen by 70 percent. The dramatic reduction in violence has opened the way for a return to something approaching normal political and economic life for the average Iraqi.

Yes, compared to the worst days of the civil war - when death squads roamed the streets of Baghdad just miles from the Green Zone and millions fled their homes - things are now better in Iraq. This is about the only standard by which we're currently succeeding in Iraq.

John McCain doesn't compare Iraq today to Iraq 5 years ago because his war has made life worse in all respects. The progress he applauds is only relative to our previous failures and he insists the situation is so fragile that if we leave, there will be a genocide.

And as for life approaching normal, over 1000 Iraqis have died in political violence this March, which is up from February, which was up from January.

Update: make it about 1400 in March - nearly double January's toll.

Don't fight me in that there briar patch!

2008-03-25T23:28:00.000-07:00

Br'er bin Laden suckers Farmer John, yet again...

"As you probably know, an audiotape ... was released where bin Laden said, and I have to quote bin Laden: 'The nearest field of jihad today to support our people in Palestine ... is the Iraqi field.' He urged Palestinians and people of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to 'help in support of their mujahideen brothers in Iraq which is the greatest opportunity and the biggest task.'"

McCain followed that with, "For the first time, I have seen Osama bin Laden and Gen. Petraeus in agreement, and that is, the central battleground in the battle against al-Qaeda is in Iraq today! That's what bin Laden is saying, and that's what Gen. Petraeus is saying, and that's what I'm saying, my friends."

Meanwhile, Osama is living a thousand miles away in Pakistan.

Why did they get it right?*

2008-03-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Jim Henley explains why it was blindingly obvious that the Iraq war was a bad idea from the start:

You didn’t have to be all that bright to oppose the Iraq War in advance. Heck, polls suggest that most Americans were dubious about the idea until the war became obviously inevitable. Real enthusiasm was confined to the elite media, the bipartisan defense-policy establishment and a bunch of Republican quasi-intellectuals who had spent ten years casting about for different countries to have a war - any war - with. I mean, for crying out loud, at one point our rulers declared that Saddam Hussein might attack America with remote-controlled model planes. You didn’t have to wait to bounce that one off the folks at your next MENSA meeting to judge its likelihood. Nor did you have to puzzle overlong, if someone tried to put that one by you, how much stock you should put in anything else that came out of their mouths.

Typically, there is a single overriding reason to go to war. We went to war in Afghanistan because Al Qaeda had destroyed the World Trade Center and they were effectively the military arm of the Taliban. Everybody understood that and Americans overwhelmingly supported the decision to attack Afghanistan because of it. Freeing afghani women from oppression, bringing democracy to the country, ending their own brutal decades long civil war - those were all incidental to the cause and nobody argued they were casus belli in themselves.

On the other hand, we were given dozens of reasons to go to war against Iraq, some of them contradictory, some of them silly and some of them patently false. And when you know for a fact that any of the arguments for war are absurd, you don't need access to secret intelligence to realize that the rest of them are probably bogus too.

Of course, it wasn't easy to hear voices speaking against the Iraq war in 2002. Here's the Washington Post (in 2006), illustrating why.

The day after the House vote, The Washington Post recorded that 126 House Democrats voted against the final resolution. None was quoted giving a reason for his or her vote except for Rep. Joe Baca (Calif.), who said a military briefing had disclosed that U.S. soldiers did not have adequate protection against biological weapons.
"As a veteran, that's what hit me the hardest," he said.
Lee was described as giving a "fiery denunciation" of the administration's "rush to war," with only 14 colleagues in the House chamber to hear her. None of the reasons she gave to justify her concerns, nor those voiced by other Democratic opponents, was reported in the two Post stories about passage of the resolution that day.

So to acknowledge some of those who got it right from the start:

Scott Ritter (July 20, 2002):

I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.

While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.

In direct contrast to these findings, the Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continued possession of or ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. To date no one has held the Bush administration accountable for its unwillingness - or inability - to provide such evidence.

Al Gore (Sept 23, 2002)

I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.

The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another.

Russ Feingold (Sept 25, 2002):

I remain extremely troubled by the Administration's shifting justifications for going to war in Iraq. I remain skeptical about the need to take unilateral action now and to accept all of the associated costs of that decision. I remain unconvinced that the Administration has thought through the potential costs and challenges of post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq, or even thought through how to address the issue of weapons of mass destruction once an engagement begins.

Shibley Telhami (Oct 7,2002):

One of the most appealing thoughts about a possible war with Iraq is that it could help spread democracy, transforming a rotten political order in the Middle East. But more likely, such a war would render the Middle East more repressive and unstable than it is today. Democracy cannot be imposed through military force, even if force is used successfully to oust antidemocratic dictators. And our vital aims in fighting terrorism, securing oil supplies and protecting the lives of American soldiers will, in the context of the Middle East, almost certainly ensure that the spread of democracy will again take a back seat to our national priorities.

Nancy Pelosi (Oct 10, 2002):

There is no political solution on the ground in Iraq. Let us not be fooled by that. So when we go in the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited - $100 -$200 billion, we can only guess.

Barack Obama (Nov. 25, 2002):

If (the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam) has happened, what the debate's really going to be about is; what's our long term commitment there? How much is it going to cost? What does it mean for us to rebuild Iraq? How do we stabilize and make sure that this country doesn't splinter into factions between the Shias and the Kurds and the Sunnis?

What I would have been concerned about was a carte blanche to the administration for a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes that I'm not sure sets a good precedent.

David Obey (Dec. 12, 2002):

The decision to prepare for military action against Iraq forces us to make difficult choices about the use of our assets, choices that further complicate our offensive against al Qaeda. Good military strategists and planners, for instance, are always in short supply, and when we do two things at once, they are very badly stretched. Our capacity to observe and listen for enemy activity through the skies and over the airways is finite. Our skilled Arabic translators are extremely limited in number. We have shortages in a number of specific types of equipment that are needed in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In short, our growing focus on Iraq will unquestionably degrade our efforts against al Qaeda and even official sources are already acknowledging those efforts are faltering. And if you doubt that one has an impact on the other, I invite you to talk to some of the people deep in the agencies who I've talked to.

*in response to Slate's series of a similar title

Advice for desperate homeowners

2008-03-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

Compare this homeowner:

The lawyer, now divorced, calculated that the mortgage payments, now $6,200 a month, plus taxes consume 96 percent of his net income, which includes occasional rent from vacationers who use the house. He lives with relatives and sleeps on the floor.

“I don’t regret what I did,” he said. But a foreclosure would hurt his career and finances, he said. “And I was raised to pay back what I borrow.”

With this one:

Mr. Geller said he had heard of just one loan balance reduction won by a borrower.

That borrower, a real estate consultant in California who did not want to be identified because he feared angering his lender, said he used his understanding of state law to negotiate the refinancing. He bought a condominium two years ago for $450,000 and invested another $50,000 for improvements. His ARM had a 5.5 percent initial rate that was soon resetting to 7.25 percent. But his condo is now worth only about $350,000.

His lender agreed to give him a 6 percent fixed-rate mortgage and, he said, to knock $135,000 off the principal.

The agreement came only after he stopped paying his mortgage for two months. “I am very happy and grateful to the lender because what I owe on my condo now is in line with its worth,” he said. “I’m ecstatic.”

It's a sad fact that the banks are perfectly willing to squeeze every last penny from the first borrower and still foreclose on him. This is why people walk away from their upside-down mortgages even when they still have the ability to pay.

Lenders have to at least think you might stop paying before they'll work with you.

Was putting Muqtada al Sadr in control of Basra worth $600 billion?

2008-03-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

5 years later:

"The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable, yet some in Washington still call for retreat." - George W. Bush - explaining why Iraq "was worth it"

"Thirty years from now, when historians look back, where are they going to come out? If at the end of the day the U.S. screwed things up for four years and then in the end left Iraq a better place than they found it under Saddam, it may have still been worth it." - Iraq war advocate Ken Pollack

It is a great American myth, voiced by John Kerry last year, that the nation goes to war only when there is no question about the necessity of going to war. There's always a question. Even if the Iraqi insurgency disappeared tomorrow, George Ibrahim al Washington became president of Iraq and every liter of Saddam Hussein's onetime stockpile of chemical and biological weapons suddenly appeared in the desert, historians would still spend the next century debating whether the war was "worth it." - Robert Kagan (2005), arguing that not going in would have been even worse.

War is an expensive thing, but not the most expensive of things. A man unwilling to pay any price for the well-being of others is a sad creature indeed. - Tim Kane (2006) of the Heritage Foundation arguing "that the active American security umbrella enhances investment."

"If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor ... and it has been well worth the effort" - Dick Cheney, describing the phenomenal success that is Iraq

I'm not entirely sure which successes George Bush is talking about, but the number of times I've heard the the phrase "Iraq was worth it" going unchallenged is absurd. Bush and Cheney talk about fighting an enemy that didn't exist 5 years ago. People like Kagan, Pollack and Kane talk about a hypothetical Iraqi utopia, while the current standard of success is having fewer than 20 dead Iraqis a day.

Was redirecting American forces worth losing Osama bin Laden in the hills of Tora Bora?

Was crippling our military worth ethnically cleansing Baghdad?

Was chasing non-existent threats worth establishing Abu Ghraib?

Was defeating Iran's biggest rival worth putting ourselves in a 100-year quagmire?

Those of us against this war can rattle these questions off the top of our heads. But I've yet to see a pro-war advocate explain just what was worth it?

Barack Obama just won the election

2008-03-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The biggest threat to Obama winning the nomination was that Clinton could convince superdelegates that he was unelectable, unable to win enough votes as a black man in the general election or incapable of defending himself against the Republican attack machine.

Barack was able to turn a potentially crippling scandal into an opportunity to define himself to the country and he did it by directly addressing the fears of the black and white communities.

Text of the speech here:

The Southwest is about to get very thirsty

2008-03-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

Image originally uploaded by Daniel Y. Go under Creative Commons license.

Lake Mead could be dry by 2021

There is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern U.S., will be dry by 2021

The research team concludes that human demand, natural forces such as evaporation, and human-induced climate change are creating a net deficit of nearly 1 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River system that includes Lake Mead and Lake Powell. This amount of water can supply roughly 8 million people. The team's analysis of Federal Bureau of Reclamation records of past water demand and calculations of scheduled water allocations and climate conditions indicate that the system could run dry even if mitigation measures now being proposed are implemented.

“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system. The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region,”

Presumably, only Americans are invited

2008-03-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

John McCain has decided that there aren't enough donors in the United States to support his campaign, so he's headed across the pond.

WASHINGTON—Senator John McCain has been averaging a fund-raiser a day in America’s pockets of affluence – hotel ballrooms in New York, Atlanta, Chicago – but now he will expand his pursuit of campaign donations at a $1,000-a-plate lunch at the 18th century Spencer House in London.

That's London, England. And if you look at the invitation above, you'll see that tickets actually range from $1000 to $2300 which is the limit an individual can contribute to any candidate (McCain will remember that because it was part of the McCain-Feingold law). However, he's forgotten to also mention this provision of U.S. federal election law:

The Prohibition

The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment.

Which is strange since he uses the British expression "lounge suits" instead of the American equivalent "business attire". It'd be a shame if some unfortunate Lord accepted the invitation.

Oddly, this event doesn't show up on his list of fundraising events for March, 2008.

Quit whining and just pay for the damn election

2008-03-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Spare Change. Image originally uploaded by bullywhippet. (under creative commons license)

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Clinton supporter, told the Detroit Free Press that Clinton's victory in Ohio changes "the landscape a bit." She said it could open the door to a caucus, if it can be privately funded and both candidates agree.
[Florida Gov. Charlie] Crist told reporters at a news conference Tuesday that he does not support having another primary at taxpayer expense. He said he discussed the option with Sen. Bill Nelson, the state's senior Democrat. "He said the only way to consider the possibility of that is to have the Democratic National Committee pay for it," Crist said. The Florida Democratic Party said the state estimates the cost would be $25 million.

A revote in Michigan and Florida would be ideal, but for God's sake the states should find public funds for the election.

This isn't a charity raffle. Running elections is a government obligation and the only reason we're in this situation is that the elected leaders of Florida and Michigan flouted party rules and scheduled their elections ahead of the Super Tuesday contest. Crist and Granholm were active participants in that process. They gambled that putting their states ahead of other delegate rich contests would allow them to be kingmakers. They wouldn't have given a damn if the election had ended on January 29th - robbing voters in over 40 other states of having any say at all in the nomination. Now they're upset that they don't count.

And when you get down to it even $20-$30 million is a drop in the bucket compared to everything else they spend money on.

Here's Florida governor Crist's budget request for 2008 - which if I'm reading correctly comes out to about $69 billion.

And here's Michigan governor Granholm's request for 2009 - which totals almost $45 billion.

If it's worth being part of the process it's worth paying for. Stop acting pathetic.

Updated: Here's the inevitable outcome of the states being cheap:

As Rendell and Corzine modestly put it, "In the interest of providing assurance that the private funds necessary to finance a publicly administered election will indeed be available should the Michigan Legislature choose to proceed in this direction, we have taken the liberty of soliciting guarantors for such an effort."
Handled deftly, this might have been seen as an act of political altruism. Instead it smacks of an inside job. Rendell is a Clinton supporter. Corzine is a Clinton supporter. Granholm is a Clinton supporter. Perhaps coincidentally, the letter guaranteeing the money arrived on the day Clinton flew into the Michigan to ratchet up pressure on Obama and the legislature to support a new primary.

He who pays the piper calls the tune and you simply can't have backers of one campaign sponsoring an election.

The elections in Florida and Michigan are off and it's their own damn fault.

I suppose this means that Texas doesn't count, either

2008-03-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

Chatwick Matlin of Slate explains why the results of the vote in Wyoming don't matter.

I thought this point was particularly puzzling:

The delegate margin will be small. Even if Obama blows Clinton out of the water in Wyoming, his delegate haul will be minimal. To come out with a six-delegate advantage, he’s going to have to win with a margin of 41 percent...

coupled with this:

Clinton will say Ohio and Texas are a lot bigger than Wyoming

That would be this Texas win:

Clinton won the primary with 51 percent of the popular vote to Obama's 47 percent, according to the Associated Press. Those results earned her 65 delegates to Obama's 61 delegates.

So Clinton netted +4 delegates in the primaries of the great state of Texas, which by Slate standards is apparently small.

And what about the results of the Texas caucuses?

The state Democratic Party estimates that Obama will come out ahead: 37 pledged delegated to Clinton's 30 delegates. But the official tally of the Texas caucus won't be ready for months.

So apparently, Obama will win Texas +3.

Guess who's insignificant now

2008-03-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

"Pennsylvania is the new Iowa," - Clinton spokesman Doug Hattaway.

Voters of Wyoming and Mississippi. Sorry, you didn't make the cut.

BTW there are at least 267 "second class" superdelegates representing the states Clinton has relegated to insignificance.

Just so long as I'm the dictator.

2008-03-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

Robert Farley from LGM compares Obama's call for unity with those of W in 2000:

Bush is an outstanding example of a candidate whose centrist direction (at least in 2000; I think Bowers is right about 2004) had no noticeable impact on governing strategy.

Centrist direction?

Contrary to popular opinion, George Bush never ran as a moderate and anybody who bothered to listen to the man during the 2000 election knew that he wasn't a centrist. He was running as a compassionate conservative and if the term "compassionate" confused you, well he told you exactly what he meant by that, too. Here's how Myron Magnet explained it in the WSJ in 1999:

The poor need the larger society's moral support; they need to hear the message of personal responsibility and self-reliance, the optimistic assurance that if they try – as they must – they will make it. They need to know, too, that they can't blame "the system" for their own wrongdoing.

In short, poor people need a pep squad, not a handout. Quit complaining about racism or children being born into poverty. Re-stigmatize illegitimacy, shame unwed mothers, get tough on public school teachers and show the poor how irresponsible they're being by not getting off their lazy asses.

This definition of compassionate conservatism wasn't kept secret. It was repeated again and again during the run-up to the election. Where the government was going to be involved was in "faith based" initiatives - tearing down the wall between church and state.

And if that involved tearing up anti-discrimination laws? Well whatever works:

Some religious groups do, however, follow exclusionary policies, and these point up the inherent -- and constitutional -- difficulties of church-state partnerships. A week ago Friday, Governor Bush toured the Haven of Rest Ministries, a homeless shelter in Akron, Ohio. Two years ago, ministry officials told a Jewish businessman that he couldn't join the board, citing their rule of employing only born-again Christians.

During his visit, Mr. Bush maintained that under his plan Haven of Rest's programs would be eligible for Government funds -- even though groups that accept Federal money must comply with anti-discrimination laws.

The only reason this seemed "centrist" was because the Democrats felt the need to jump on the faith-based bandwagon themselves.

Bush and Gore have enthusiastically endorsed a provision of the 1996 welfare-reform bill called charitable choice, which allows faith-based organizations to administer welfare programs with public funds, as long as there are secular alternatives. And then there is the explosive issue of publicly financed vouchers for parochial and secular private schools, which all of the Republican candidates have embraced. Although Gore opposes vouchers, his Democratic opponent, Bill Bradley, provisionally supports them.

No, George Bush was all about "tax cuts so help me God!", eliminating the right of consumers to sue corporations, and deregulation of industry (back when Enron's Ken Lay was considered the smartest kid on the block).

His solution to environmental problems? Self-policing:

Although state regulators had been considering mandatory restrictions on polluters, state documents indicate that Mr. Bush thought the approach should be voluntary and essentially asked industry leaders to draft such a proposal, which they did in private meetings with state officials two years ago. No environmental groups or other public interest groups were invited, and they only learned about the meetings early this year.

His plan to get health care to the uninsured? Tax credits.

Under the plan he introduced here, Americans who have no health care coverage and are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid could receive a tax credit of up to $1,000 an individual or $2,000 a family to cover 90 percent of the cost of insurance.

Good luck paying for insurance with that. Especially if you're one of those lazy welfare queens.

As for his views on civil liberties, "there ought to be limits to freedom" was provoked by a web site making fun of his campaign. Bush's campaign threatened legal action.

And if we hadn't been so busy chuckling that Bush failed a reporter's pop quiz, we might have worried that the one person he did recognize had just overthrown a democratically elected Prime Minister - and George Bush approved wholeheartedly.

Mr. Bush also offered an assessment of the situation in Pakistan, where Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized power in a coup d'etat last month.

Mr. Bush, failing to name the general, said, "It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country, and I think that's good news for the subcontinent."

So you can fault George Bush for a lot of things, but lying about his goals as president isn't one of them. He told us of his plans to privatize Social Security, to nominate Scalia type justices, to gut social services, to increase military spending and tear up pesky treaties. He was running on unity, not compromise. He intended to get Democrats to agree to his plans, not to find common ground. (And he has been quite successful getting them to sign on to every harebrained idea he had).

Hell, if you believed what the man was telling you at the time, you'd have gotten a pretty good preview of the next 8 years. He even dropped hints about the second Gulf war.

At the Republican debate here on Thursday and at a news conference in nearby Bedford this morning, George W. Bush said that if he was commander in chief, any discovery that Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, was building weapons of mass destruction would touch off a swift and punishing response.

Mr. Bush seemed to say he would "take him out," indicating that he would forcibly remove Mr. Hussein from power or worse. But Mr. Bush said in a telephone interview this afternoon that the phrase, easily misinterpreted because of his Texas drawl, was "take 'em out," meaning the weapons.

As for his idea of bipartisanship, his most famous quote:

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

...He said that to a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders, one month before taking the oath of office.

Maybe they blame you for getting them into this mess

2008-02-28T21:36:00.000-08:00

With the House Democrats’ refusal to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies — stalling the rewrite of the warrantless wiretapping program — GOP leadership aides are grumbling that their party isn’t getting more political money from the telecommunications industry.

h/t The Carpetbagger Report

If the president tells you to do it, that means it is not illegal

2008-02-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

Or at least, that's the thinking of George Bush (channeling the ghost of Richard Nixon).

The government said to those who have alleged to have helped us that it is in our national interests and it’s legal. It’s in our national interests because we want to know who’s calling who from overseas into America. We need to know in order to protect the people.

It was legal.

Of course, they could have simply had their attorneys do a quick check of the law to see that it was illegal.

So on the one hand the civil liberties of our citizens are guaranteed by a lot of checks in the system, scrutinized by the United States Congress.

Right. Those checks are called laws. Like the FISA law. The one you violated. And you didn't bother informing Congress until you were worried they wouldn't rubber stamp your retroactive immunity bill.

As for whether the phone companies will help you monitor terrorist's phone calls -- Well, you could always get a warrant.

Image credit: Bell System Telephone by seychelles88

Did Catholic voters hate John Kerry in 2004?

2008-02-26T21:41:00.000-08:00

Here's another article pushing the conventional wisdom that religious voters hate Democrats (although fortunately not Barack Obama).

From Newsweek's "On Faith" column:

Catholics and evangelicals don't hate Obama. In other words, he's no Kerry or Dukakis.

Wait a minute. Catholic voters hated John Kerry? Let's check those numbers again:

Bush 52% Kerry 47% - Catholic voters
Bush 51% Kerry 48% - All voters

So Catholic voters broke along virtually the same numbers as the country as a whole did. Where's the hatred in that?

What's the sound of the Clinton campaign imploding?

2008-02-25T20:37:00.000-08:00

Yet another Clinton surrogate flips primary voters the bird:

[C]learly both candidates have excited and engaged the party’s membership — but, even so, turnout for primaries and caucuses is notoriously low. It would be shocking if 30 percent of registered Democrats have participated.If that is the case, we could end up with a nominee who has been actively supported by, at most, 15 percent of registered Democrats. That’s hardly a grassroots mandate.

More important, although many states like New York have closed primaries in which only enrolled Democrats are allowed to vote, in many other states Republicans and independents can make the difference by voting in Democratic primaries or caucuses.

He won his delegates fair and square, but those delegates represent the wishes not only of grassroots Democrats, but also Republicans and independents. If rank-and-file Democrats should decide who the party’s nominee is, each state should pass a rule allowing only people who have been registered in the Democratic Party for a given time — not nonmembers or day-of registrants — to vote for the party’s nominee.

Do they really consider this a winning strategy? Who are they trying to convince? The 20+ million Democratic primary voters who've broken turnout records across the country? The only thing crazier than believing this nonsense is that they think it's smart politics to argue it openly while voters in a dozen states are still preparing to go to the polls.

Candidates can throw mud at their opponent and be forgiven. But they cannot continually and publicly show contempt for the voters they'll need in the general election and survive.

Before Super Tuesday, it's safe to say most Obama supporters believed that Hillary would be the party's nominee and they were ready to come over and vote for her in the general election. But you can only smack people so many times and expect them to show up for you in November. If Obama wins the popular vote and the committed delegates, but party insiders overrule them, the Democrats will lose the presidency.

In the past few weeks the Clinton team have insulted party activists, African Americans, young people, small state Democrats, moderates, conservatives and liberals, together with Republicans and independents who've recently moved into the Democratic camp. They've even branded some superdelegates "second-class delegates". Combine that with her recent Abandon All Hope talking points and you've got an election platform to rival Walter Mondale's.

Bill Clinton might be forgiven his condescension to the black voters of South Carolina, Hillary excused for her clumsy comments after her Super Tuesday losses. Mark Penn can be condemned as a fool and a lousy strategist. But a campaign simply can't be caught publishing this kind of idiocy in the New York Times.

Clinton's team starts to attack Democratic voters directly

2008-02-20T21:43:00.000-08:00

Speaking of plagiarism. Guess which of these is a line from a recent Hillary Clinton rally, and which is from the script of an RNC attack ad from the 2004 election:

Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.

"[He] should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ...body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to [his home state], where it belongs."

I'm not entirely sure who's going to be left to vote for Hillary if her superdelegate gambit pays off. After writing off the general election in more than a dozen states and having insulted Republicans, independents, and moderates ... now they're attacking liberal Democrats?

What's your hurry?

2008-02-19T22:06:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post's Dan Balz, describes the mess that is the Democratic presidential election:

The rules of proportionality, which distribute delegates based on the percentage of vote won in a state or legislative district, make it more difficult for winners to gain a significant edge early in the process, or for trailing candidates to catch up late in the process. Winning, in other words, carries no special rewards unless the margins are more than 25 percentage points.

At the time that was written Hillary Clinton had won about 46% of the popular vote and 49% of the elected delegates. Obama had won 50% of the popular vote and 51% of the delegates.

Why is this considered a flaw in the system?

Apparently Dan is upset that the number of delegates you get is connected to the number of people who vote for you.

On the Democratic side there are two very popular candidates competing in a tight race for the nomination. We still haven't heard from the voters in 14 states. It's not a big surprise that we don't know the winner yet.

On the other side, John McCain was able to quickly dominate in a winner-take-all system despite deep hostility from members of his own party. He still has a hard time getting a majority of the vote against token opposition and has to worry about whether the base will show up in November. The Republican system is hardly more democratic, but it's faster, which I guess is what Dan Balz is looking for.

Unfortunately, he may actually have to wait until everyone gets a chance to vote.

Clinton advocate comes out in favor of smoke filled rooms

2008-02-15T19:32:00.000-08:00

Lanny Davis (former special counsel and spokesman for Bill and strong supporter of Hillary's) repeats the assertion that states Obama wins simply don't count.

DAVIS: She has a majority of the United States senators who have endorsed her. She won in California and in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry's backyard. And the states that you add up that Barack Obama won and give him credit, Idaho, Utah and North Dakota are not exactly states that are ever going to vote Democratic as opposed to California and we have the two senators in Washington.

You really need to kill this meme now, Hillary, before a smart Obama strategist starts running an ad with titles like this:

Hillary Clinton thinks some states are insignificant. Is yours one of them?

Worse yet, Davis, writing for The Hill, now literally argues that smoke-filled rooms are better at choosing candidates than Democratic voters are.

That data showed that in primary elections, the turnout among Democrats was often well below 50 percent. And in caucus states, where voters had to show up at a particular time and place and wait up to several hours before voting, the turn out was often as small as 10%-20% or often much less.

We were also reminded that before these reforms, the "smoke-filled rooms" of Democratic Party leaders had led to the nomination and election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Not bad.

It's no surprise that this man, who once sat on DNC Executive Committee, authored the WSJ editorial entitled Liberal McCarthyism (attacking Democrats for voting against his favorite in a primary).

The Democratic base already believes that the 2000 election was stolen and would be furious if they believed their own party cheated to deny them their pick for the nomination.

If her people keep making these arguments, Senator Clinton risks being labeled as the candidate who says to hell with the voters, I'll win anyway possible. (The fact that Obama is currently winning the popular vote as well doesn't help her case.)

Update: Here we go again. These people really aren't helping you Hillary.

A top strategist to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) on Saturday countered the recent claims of some prominent Democrats that party elders would be wrong to override the will of their constituents in their choice for the Democratic presidential nominee.
In a phone call with reporters, Harold M. Ickes, argued that the 796 so-called superdelegates who could decide the party’s White House nominee were as much or “potentially more in touch” with the issues important to voters than the delegates amassed by the candidates through state primaries and caucuses.

In other words, party insiders understand the desires of voters better than the voters themselves. (Really, why do we bother to vote at all?)

Is Hillary Clinton running a 20-state strategy?

2008-02-11T20:56:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about the Democrat's proportional nomination system is that it's worth fighting to come in a close second. It's far better to lose a state by 3% instead of by 30%. Every state is worth campaigning in, even if it's the opposition's home turf. Yet Senator Clinton has been taking states off the table ever since South Carolina - allowing Obama to defeat her by 20,30, even 50%. The only place Clinton has done as well is in her former home of Arkansas and neighboring Oklahoma.

And now we've got a collection of races that Hillary literally says are not worth winning. (I guess she's not an advocate of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy).

[Hillary Clinton] also downplayed many of Obama's Super Tuesday victories, describing them as states that Democrats should not expect to win in November.

"It is highly unlikely we will win Alaska or North Dakota or Idaho or Nebraska," she said, naming several of Obama's red state wins. "But we have to win Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Michigan … And we've got to be competitive in places like Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma."

Hillary apparently believes that there are solid Democratic states and solid Republican states that aren't even worth competing for during the general election. Instead she'll focus on a few "swing" states (don't ask me how Massachusetts and Texas got on that list).

The electoral vote map from 1964. Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the states in red (see if you can find Alaska, North Dakota, Idaho and Nebraska).

The map above is typical for American presidential elections. In 15 of the 25 elections since 1908, the winner of the presidency won over 75% of the states and over 75% of the delegates. The races in 2000 and 2004 weren't normal; they were aberrations.

This is what the map looked like 8 years before Johnson's win. 43 of 48 states switched sides. The country isn't nearly as polarized as strategists like to believe. "Democratic" states will vote for a Republican and vice versa, but you have to work for it.

The electoral vote map from 1956. Republican Dwight Eisenhower won the states in blue.

I would have given Hillary credit for making a clumsy remark, except her team keeps repeating the theme:

“Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois?” Chief Strategist Mark Penn said. “That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.”

Insignificant states apparently include Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Washington. Since the Clinton team has already run off to Texas, I'll assume Wisconsin and Hawaii make the list too. And considering what's already on the list, you can make a pretty good case that they believe Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming aren't worth their trouble either.

That's 30 insignificant states.

Is this how she's going to campaign in the general election? Ceding large swaths of "red" America before even starting. This should be a blowout year for the Democratic nominee yet she seems to be dreaming of a 271 electoral vote squeaker.

And to paraphrase the Clinton team, the last time anybody won the presidency with fewer than 20 states was 1888 - and there were only 36 states in the Union at the time.

Some voters count more than others

2008-01-30T07:07:00.002-08:00

The number of Democrats (in thousands) who voted in each caucus or primary, so far. Voters in the red columns don't count according to DNC rules.

Clinton accuses Obama of working with a slumlord

2008-01-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

This seems like an incredibly stupid accusation for the junior Senator from New York to throw around:

CLINTON: ... I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Resco, in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.
....
OBAMA: ... I was an associate at a law firm that represented a church group that had partnered with this individual to do a project and I did about five hours worth of work on this joint project. That's what she's referring to.

That's a pretty cheap shot from Hillary, who should know from personal experience that a candidate can't always vet every contributor that supports a campaign. After all, this was pretty big news a few months back:

A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted Norman Hsu, a top Democratic fundraiser accused of cheating investors of at least $20 million and using some of the money to make illegal donations to political campaigns.

There's also this:

A Pakistani immigrant who hosted fundraisers in Southern California for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is being sought by the FBI on charges that he funneled illegal contributions to Clinton’s political action committee and Sen. Barbara Boxer’s 2004 reelection campaign. Authorities say Northridge businessman Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, fled the country after an indictment accused him of engineering more than $50,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic committees. A business associate charged as a co-conspirator has entered a guilty plea and is scheduled to be sentenced in Los Angeles next week.

And some people might think she should have had better control over her own staff:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's former finance director has been indicted on charges of filing fictitious reports that misstated contributions for a Hollywood fund-raising gala for the senator, the Justice Department said Friday.

Of course, her husband's administration was occasionally associated with unsavory characters as well:

A Federal grand jury today indicted a Thai businesswoman who worked as a Washington lobbyist on charges that she and her family funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign money to the Democratic Party to gain access for her clients to President Clinton and members of the Administration.

She's bound to remember this:

President Clinton's eleventh-hour pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich has sparked a firestorm of controversy, launching investigations in both houses of Congress and igniting fierce protest from both Democrats and Republicans.

[F]ederal prosecutors in New York officially opened a criminal investigation into whether Rich did indeed buy his pardon with his ex-wife Denise's pointed largesse to the First Couple and the Democratic party.

As for actually working for clients who were later indicted, Hillary fought off these accusations for the entire 8 years her husband was in the Oval Office:

Ms. Clinton and her attorney have stated publicly that the billing records confirm that, as an attorney at the Rose Firm in the mid-80's, she was not significantly involved in the representation of Jim McDougal's savings and loan, Madison Guaranty.

According to the Rose records, Hillary Clinton billed Madison for 60 hours of work over a 15 month period. Ms. Clinton's attorney argues that this represents a de minimus amount of work and includes billings for work performed by Rose Finn lawyers working for Hillary Clinton at the time.

That was the trigger for the investigation that led to Bill's impeachment in 1998.

Hillary may be gambling that Barack won't retaliate with dirt of his own. But Republicans will definitely remember during the general election. It'd be better if she didn't legitimize their attacks herself.

Messenger at Mercury

2008-01-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

NASA's Messenger spacecraft passes over the horizon of Mercury (January 2008).
Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Three Mercury flybys, each followed about two months later by a course correction maneuver, put MESSENGER in position to enter Mercury orbit in March 2011. During the flybys – set for January 2008, October 2008 and September 2009 – MESSENGER will map nearly the entire planet in color, image most of the areas unseen by Mariner 10, and measure the composition of the surface, atmosphere and magnetosphere. It will be the first new data from Mercury in more than 30 years – and invaluable for planning MESSENGER’s yearlong orbital mission.

Barack Obama and the bankruptcy bill of 2005

2008-01-15T21:04:00.000-08:00

Denver, August 28th, 2008:

"Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses, and the time to protect Social Security for future generations."

From Senator Obama's floor statement on the Bankruptcy Abuse and Prevention Act of 2005 (S.256):

[T]his bill would take us from a system where judges weed out the abusers from the honest to a system where all the honest are presumed to be abusers. Where declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy is made prohibitively expensive for people who already have suffered financial devastation. With this bill, it doesn't matter if you ran up your debt on a trip to Vegas or a trip to the Emergency Room, you're still treated the same under the law and you still face the possibility that you'll never get the chance to start over.

Now, it would be one thing if most people were abusing the system and falling into bankruptcy because they were irresponsible with their finances. But we know that's not the case. We know that most people fall into bankruptcy as a result of bad luck. And we know that a recent Harvard study showed that nearly half of all bankruptcies occur because of an illness that ends up sticking families with medical bills they just can't keep up with.

Take the case of Suzanne Gibbons. A few years back, Suzanne had a good job as a nurse and a home on Chicago's Northwest Side. Then she suffered a stroke that left her hospitalized for five-days. And even though she had health insurance through her job, it only covered $4,000 of her $53,000 hospital bill.

Because of her illness, she was soon forced to leave her full-time nursing job and take a temp job that paid less and didn't offer health insurance. Then the collection agencies started coming after her for hospital bills that she just couldn't keep up with. She lost her retirement savings, she lost her house, and eventually, she was forced to declare bankruptcy.

If this bill passes as written, Suzanne would be treated by the law the same as any scam artist who cheats the system. The decision about whether or not she can file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy would never take into account the fact that she fell into financial despair because of her illness. With all that debt, she would have had to hire a lawyer and pay hundreds of dollars more in increased paperwork. And after all that, she still may have been told that she was ineligible for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

And so, as much as we'd like to believe that the face of this bankruptcy crisis is credit card addicts who spend their way into debt, the truth is that it's the face of people like Suzanne Gibbons. It's the face of middle-class America.

S.256 passed the Senate 74-25.

The Republicans (including John McCain) were unanimous in their support for the bill. 18 Democrats and Independent Jim Jeffords voted with the majority. (Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter voted for the House version).

25 Democrats, including Barack Obama, voted against the bill.

Hillary Clinton was absent (on the day of Bill Clinton's heart surgery). However, she fought against it's passage in the days before the final vote.

"Success" in Iraq: de-de-Baathification

2008-01-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

The Iraqi Parliament has finally done something that the Bush administration, and many others, considered essential to political progress in Iraq: it passed a law intended to open government jobs to former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. What should have been heralded as an accomplishment, however, may only serve to further reinforce the bumbling nature of President Bush’s ill-conceived adventure in Iraq.

Let's remember that the only reason the Iraqis have to pass an anti-anti-Baathification law in the first place is to undo the anti-Baathification law originally passed by Paul Bremer with the blessing of the Bush administration.

In an act that many saw as the original sin that led to Iraq's current turmoil, Bremer crippled Iraq's institutions of governance and security and created half a million angry and jobless people in the process. He has since said that there were legitimate grievances about the order but that it was necessary to bring oppressed Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds into the government.

Bremer's order affected 400,000 members of the armed forces and all civil servants and officials above the Baath Party's lowest rank-and-file level, a number estimated at 32,000 to 85,000.

Bremer now blames the Iraqis for screwing up his brilliant plan.

We then turned over the implementation of this carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians. I was wrong here. The Iraqi leaders, many of them resentful of the old Sunni regime, broadened the decree's impact far beyond our original design. That led to such unintended results as the firing of several thousand teachers for being Baath Party members. We eventually fixed those excesses, but I should have made implementation the job of a judicial body, not a political one.

If at first you don't succeed...

2008-01-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

... Just change the names.

Washington Post reporter Dan Balz proves that just because you're perpetually wrong, you don't have to stop speculating.

January 3, 2008: Obama may have to quit after Iowa

The only race that could (end in Iowa) is in the Democratic Party and only if Hillary Clinton wins a big victory. Iowa has proved resistant to the Clinton brand, and she has struggled there throughout the year. But her final days of campaigning have been solid, and a victory, no matter how narrow, would be a big boost for her.

January 7, 2008: Clinton may have to quit after New Hampshire

Obama's freight train for change has overrun the Clinton campaign. Top officials inside her campaign and alarmed allies outside are braced for a defeat on Tuesday. Five days is not enough, they have argued, to slow and reverse the momentum Obama has developed since Iowa.

For these Clinton loyalists, the hope is that the real campaign turnaround can begin after New Hampshire. "Whatever happens tomorrow, we're going on," Clinton told CBS's Harry Smith Monday morning. "And we're going to keep going until the end of the process on February 5th. But I've always felt that this is going to be a very tough, hard-fought election, and I'm ready for that."

But like Penn's memo from Saturday, that may be more wish than reality.

January 12, 2008: Edwards may have to quit after South Carolina

"I want to be absolutely clear to all of you who have been devoted to this cause," he said Tuesday night, "and I want to be clear to the 99 percent of Americans who have not yet had the chance to have their voices heard, that I am in this race to the convention, that I intend to be the nominee of my party."

That pledge notwithstanding, Edwards has two weeks to think about the future. He is certainly in the race through Nevada and South Carolina

I'm not suggesting you should put your money on Edwards in S.C., but so far betting against this guy's gut instinct is a better gamble than betting on the favorite in the election markets.

Voinovich accuses Obama of being inexperienced - like Bush

2008-01-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

This is a funny criticism coming from a man who's rubber stamped every foreign policy initiative of the current president.

Ohio Sen. George Voinovich, a key moderate Republican in the Senate chamber and influential member of the Foreign Relations Committee, scoffed Tuesday when asked if Sen. Barack Obama has the foreign policy chops to be the next president.

It was bad management that got President Bush into trouble, said the Ohio senator, who at one point blocked confirmation of John Bolton, Bush's choice to become ambassador to the United Nations .

"People thought he'd be a much better manager than he was," Voinovich said of the president. "Even though he's dedicated himself to management, I think some of the screw-ups that have occurred have really hurt him. A lot of Republicans are disappointed because they frankly thought he'd be a better manager."

For all his complaints about George Bush's Iraq war strategy, and his fleeting opposition to John Bolton, Senator Voinovich apparently never took the president aside, explained just how he was jeopardizing the nation's defense and used his experience as a distinguished Republican Senator to keep us on the right path. In fact, Bush probably took Voinovich's repeated votes protecting him from oversight as a big thumbs up.

Note to the Senator: You're not a spectator. You helped get us into the mess we're in today. Put up, or shut up.

The polls were just wrong

2008-01-09T00:02:00.000-08:00

Before everybody gets carried away trying to explain Barack Obama's loss to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, just remember, there's a rule in science that says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. And the simplest explanation is this:

There was no Iowa bounce for Obama and Clinton never rallied. The polls were just wrong.

Forget the Wilder effect. Forget the Bradley effect. Forget trying to explain the results as a women's revolt after Chris Matthews' condescending comments. The polls taken in the lead-up to the New Hampshire vote were all over the place. Zogby had Obama at 42. Fox had him at 32. And 20 other polls filled every point in between.

People scratching their heads questioning how Hillary won are basically asserting that all of those polls were correct. That Obama literally had a double-digit post Iowa surge and then Clinton rallied from behind - all in 5 days. The only way to believe that argument is to believe that the polls were measuring dynamic changes in support over a very short time period. Despite the fact that many of the polls were taken concurrently over several days, yet still didn't agree with one another.

This was true in the lead-up to the Iowa vote as well, though nobody seemed to notice. On election day, Zogby predicted Obama would win Iowa by 7, while ARG predicted he'd lose to Clinton by 9.

I guess some groups are more important than others

2008-01-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

From CNN's political ticker:

Obama leads Clinton among key groups as returns come in

Mind you, this wasn't one of the pre-election polls that predicted a double-digit victory for Obama in NH. This was an exit poll. And it predicted a tie.

2008-01-07T22:28:00.001-08:00

Hubble Captures Full View of Uranus's Rings on Edge.
Image courtesy NASA, ESA, SETI (M. Showalter)

Until Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in January 1986, the rings were only known from the way they temporarily blocked the light of stars passing behind the planet. Hubble provided some of the first images of the ring system as viewed from Earth's distance of approximately 2 billion miles. The advent of adaptive optics gave ground-based observers using large telescopes comparatively sharp views.

But they keep telling me Ron Paul is a bigot

2008-01-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

From the January 5th debate:

Ron Paul's comments challenging the idea that we're in a war against the Muslim world - (and particularly Rudy Giuliani's inability to utter the word terrorist without the prefix Islamic.)

REP. PAUL: ...I'm as concerned about the nature of the threat of terrorism as anybody, if not more so. But they don't attack us because we're free and prosperous. And there are radicals in all elements in all religions that will resort to violence.

REP. PAUL: You paint all Islamics the same way.

REP. PAUL: What you're doing is damaging our relationship by destroying our relationship with all Muslims. That's what you're doing.

Great news about the real estate market!

2007-12-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

Housing prices drop more than 6%.

I know it's hard for business journalists to believe, but for a lot of us, news of plummeting housing prices is fantastic news.

Reports of falling prices are always accompanied by words like grim, dire, anxiety, woe and meltdown (and it's unquestionably Bad News). In this fantasy world, everybody who's anybody already owns a house and that house is supposed to be their ticket to riches.

Take this article for instance:

Until recently, Seattle-area homeowners could bask in the knowledge that their houses would appreciate handsomely. Median home prices rose 16 percent in 2005 and 21 percent in 2006, a Seattle Times analysis found.

When this year's final numbers are tallied, the median annual increase will probably be more like 2 or 3 percent, Seattle real-estate economist Matthew Gardner says. That puts Seattle ahead of many cities; still, it's the lowest appreciation rate in roughly a decade.

So a person who bought a house in Seattle at the start of 2005 saw his home's "value" increase by over 40% in 2 years and can look forward to only another 2-3% increase this year. The title of that article? Real-estate anxiety: What's next in '08?

Keep that in mind that when you hear that home prices could fall 30% - in that nightmare scenario that Seattle homeowner would simply break even.

Still, it's true, the half of the market that are looking to buy want to buy low - or at least buy something affordable. This may seem greedy to people who expected double-digit markups year after year - but anybody who thought that prices could climb several times faster than wages forever needs a lesson in basic economics.

Which brings me to a comment from this article:

Housing Optimism - Why the year in real estate wasn't all bad news

[I]t's always wise to treat broker happy-talk skeptically, and that includes the NAR's prediction of a housing market rebound in 2008. But amid their blarney, the realtors do make some valid points about how much is right with the economics that support the buying and selling of homes. Unemployment remains low. Interest rates remain very attractive by historic standards. It may be a less-than-stellar time to sell a house, due to extraordinarily high inventory levels, but it sure is a great time to buy one. Since many homes are bought by first-timers, who needn't worry about selling a current house before they buy one, there is a pool of buyers who should stand ready to make offers.

It will be a great time to buy a house when the monthly mortgage is well under half your monthly income and it isn't cheaper to simply rent it. That time hasn't arrived - and no, getting an interest-only or adjustable rate mortgage doesn't cut it. Those contrivances are what helped drive up housing prices in the first place and are a big reason people are facing foreclosure today.

Everybody hates Ron Paul

2007-12-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

At least all the partisans do.

It wasn't too surprising to see FOX news question Ron Paul's Republican credentials during the debates and later suggest he's taking orders from al Qaeda . Nor was it surprising to see any mention of him banned from the rightwing Redstate blog. Ron Paul is, after all, a staunch opponent of the Iraq war, of torture, of suspension of habeas corpus and expansion of presidential powers. In today's Republican party, that's pretty much heresy. The only thing that keeps John McCain out of the doghouse is his unwavering support for expanding the current war.

Ron Paul's supporters are regularly described as trolls, shills, Ronbots, and dysfunctional hacks who live in their mothers basements (regardless of the evidence that they exist in large numbers - and have jobs.)

It's more surprising to see the sheer vitriol leveled at Paul from the left. He and his supporters are generally regarded as a fringe extremists, and those are the nicer descriptions.

Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald took fire from the left after Andrew endorsed Paul for the Republican nomination and Glenn defended his record as a conservative defender of civil liberties:

In a speech last month, [Naomi] Wolf cited Paul's sponsorship of The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 -- which would restore habeas corpus, prohibit torture and rendition, bar warrantless surveillance, protect journalists from prosecution for reporting on classifed matters, outlaw the use of secret evidence, and compel Congress to sue to challenge the validity of signing statements -- as a measure necessary to "stabilize democracy long enough to take a breath."

Glenn was responding to Dana Goldstein's assault on Andrew. She claimed that Ron Paul's anti-abortion stance proved he was a hypocrite when it comes to civil liberties.

What is "freedom and toleration" without a woman's right to control her reproductive destiny? What is an "ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble" without the acknowledgment that unplanned pregnancy, and the havoc it brings, are features of human life that can not be eradicated? What candidate who stands against "Christian meddling" would strengthen the theocratic movement by allowing states, in the name of religion, to repeal women's rights over their own bodies? Sure, Paul's assessment of the Iraq war is correct. But his libertarianism is in name only when it comes to half of the population. That isn't so principled, and it isn't so exciting. Paul doesn't deserve the endorsement of any thinking person committed to individual rights.

But Paul doesn't become a hypocrite for failing to live up to a progressive caricature of libertarianism. He believes that human life starts at conception and to him arguing that a woman has a right to terminate a fetus is like arguing that a mother has the right to smother her newborn child. Disagreeing with Dana doesn't make him an unprincipled misogynist.

Greenwald's defense of Ron Paul earned him a rebuttal by Goldstein, in which she essentially claimed that Ron Paul's base was made up of little more than anti-semitic skinheads. Ezra Klein, Jeff Feck, and the Sideshow piled on, slamming Greenwald for his comments.

Here's Ezra's case against Paul:

[L]et's be clear: Paul wants to destroy the minimum wage, dissolve Medicare, end the Constitutional right to choice, prevent gay adoptions, preserve "Don't Ask/Don't Tell," undermine Social Security, dismantle public education, etc, etc.

Good point. You've just described the entire Republican field.

In fact all the attacks on Paul could easily be leveled at any of the Republicans running. Why Rudy Giuliani is typically described as a pro-choice social moderate after insisting that he'll nominate judges who'll abolish abortion rights is beyond me.

This goes double for Romney - declared by many of these same bloggers to be the least bad Republican despite his intention to push for constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and abortion and to wage war on Iran (not to mention his support for torture, suspension of civil liberties and his own regressive tax proposals). The belief apparently is that he couldn't possibly be serious.

Ron Paul is simply the only Republican in the race who agrees with progressives on anything. And for that he and his supporters are branded anti-semitic, misogynistic, racist wackos - by the very people who should be relieved that there are still some conservatives who believe in fundamental human rights.

Good luck with that, guys.

2007-12-20T04:19:00.000-08:00

Senior Senate Republicans finessing their election-year message are emphasizing that their conference will need to take a more prominent role on healthcare to win sorely needed independent voters in their uphill bid to retake the majority in 2008.

This is the same group of Republicans that twice upheld the president's veto of children's health insurance and specifically attacked two children whose families lobbied for the bill.

Republicans were worried that too many middle class kids might get covered.

Chris Dodd: man of the hour

2007-12-18T00:09:00.000-08:00

The 4th amendment. Image originally uploaded by wemeantdemocracy.

At least one of the Democrats running for president remembers that he already has a platform to fight back against President Bush's power grab.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) -- a presidential candidate who returned from Iowa Sunday night to fight the measure -- quickly claimed victory after the bill's withdrawal, and he again vowed to "utilize all the tools available" to block passage once Reid calls it up in January.

Reid, unfortunately, has done all he could to undermine his fellow Democrat and Dodd got little support from his colleagues. Only 10 Senators joined him in voting against moving the FISA bill forward. 35 of his fellow Democrats voted against him (those who think we simply need more Democrats in the Senate should keep that in mind).

Dodd took a significant risk against long odds in what has been one of the few victories against George Bush's assault on the rule of law.

Dodd has been an outspoken opponent of any measure that would offer retroactive immunity to telecom companies that participated with the Bush Administration in violating the civil liberties of millions of American. He announced in October he would put a hold on any bill that included retroactive immunity language. Although his hold was disregarded, he has remained a strong opponent to the bill. Dodd was prepared to offer an amendment that would strip the retroactive immunity provision of the bill and announced he would filibuster the bill if his amendment failed.

I consider it very strange that none of the other Democratic Senators running for president have taken advantage of their positions to prove their ability to lead on controversial issues. Bush's claims of presidential power cannot be defeated by the next president from within the White House. If Congress continues to capitulate to his whims, they no longer are a co-equal branch of government.

You're kidding right?

2007-12-15T09:40:00.000-08:00

President Thompson discusses the Indian problem with Senator McConnell.

The previous great Republican hope takes on the new one.

We apologize for telling reporters that a BA in Biblical Studies from Ouachita Baptist University doesn’t, in fact, make Huckabee more qualified to fight the war on terror than say…Fred Thompson.

After all Fred is the only candidate who has been a Major General and an Admiral and director of the CIA. (He even has executive experience).

h/t James Joyner

The solution to all problems

2007-12-07T19:34:00.000-08:00

Bill Would Give Tax Break to Exonerated Prisoners

Nice timing Pinnochio

2007-12-06T08:20:00.001-08:00

Arlen Specter (right) has a chance encounter with Karl Rove on his way to the Senate. Image originally uploaded by nanotron.

12/05/07: Arlen Specter is furious at Harry Reid for calling him a puppet of George Bush

Specter, R-Pa., cried foul and declared that Reid had not only violated Senate Rule XIX, which prohibits the questioning of a senator’s integrity, but was just flat wrong.

12/06/07: Arlen Specter acts to protect Karl Rove from a Congressional subpoena

A Senate Judiciary Committee vote on contempt resolutions against Karl Rove and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten were postponed following an objection by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

h/t ThinkProgress

Why Michigan and Florida don't care about DNC threats

2007-12-06T06:28:00.000-08:00

Vote Here. Image originally uploaded by cursedthing.

So the DNC attempted to halt the competition over who gets to vote first and ended up potentially alienating the voters in two must-win states in the process.

In August, the Democratic National Committee responded by stripping Florida of its convention delegates after the state scheduled its primary for Jan. 29. Yesterday in Vienna, the DNC's rules and bylaws committee issued the same penalty to Michigan for its Jan. 15 primary date.

If you're wondering why the DNC didn't short-circuit the problem by cracking down on Iowa and New Hampshire (whose insistence on being first is driving the race to the bottom), it's because Iowa and New Hampshire don't care about losing their delegates, they want to be kingmakers. These states not only demand that they go first, they demand that everyone else wait a week before voting. This way they are able to dictate the debate and compel the candidates to focus on local issues (like farm subsidies and small town "values") instead of federal ones.

Of course, every state thinks its own interests are the most important and the larger, more urban ones have been chafing at the idea that the list of candidates available to them has been culled by voters who have very different priorities.

So Michigan and Florida have taken the gamble. And does anyone believe that if Hillary Clinton wins those primaries by a 20-30 point margin the rest of us will even have Obama or Edwards to vote for come February 5th?

If they can decide the victor, they don't need any delegates.