Cogitamus

Monday Miscellany

Hey Friday what you gonna do now
When Monday comes around
Hey Friday what you gonna do now
When Monday comes around
When Monday comes around
Come around, when Monday comes around

Well, Monday came around, and Friday's nowhere to be seen.  Typical.  Nevertheless, we press on!

• Do you know what a thurifer is?  Yeah, I didn't think so.  (Update:  apparently, I don't know either.  It's a thurible.  H/t low-tech in comments.)  Thurifer Thurible is the name of the thing that priests swing around in high church settings to spread incense around.  While you may have seen a thurifer thurible or two, it's fairly unlikely you've seen anything like this:

Rudy's Plea Deal For Florida

Über-productive videomaster Lee Stranahan strikes again.  Come on, Florida, Rudy luuurves you!

Also at litbrit .

Keep Your Hands Off Governor Sebelius

Count me as another Kansan that doesn't see much reason for picking our own Gov. Sebelius as candidate for Vice-President.  However, my take on it is a bit different than Joel's at RedBlueAmerica.  His facts are all correct, but his analysis doesn't seem to give enough allowance for the fact that Sebelius is, indeed, a Democratic Governor of one of the reddest of red states.  He seems to think that she should govern more as a progressive Democrat, which would have guaranteed a one-term career as Governor.  Further, if Morisson had been able to win the AG's spot without Sebelius at the top of the ticket - not to mention Nancy Boyda - then when his utter idiocy was exposed and he resigned, it would have been a Republican Governor appointing his replacement.  They'd probably just put Phill Kline back in as AG out of spite, since spite seems to be the main fuel keeping the Kansas GOP going.

I don't want to see Sebelius as VP because the Kansas Democratic bench is just too shallow to lose her.  If the Democratic nominee wins in November, then we'll get a Democratic Vice President no matter who it is.  But if that person is Kathleen Sebelius, then we don't have a chance at taking Sam Brownback's Senate seat in 2010.  What's better for Kansas and the nation as a whole?  Obviously having one more Democratic Senator is much more important than whatever contribution Sebelius could make as VP.

Kennedyology and Institutional Jealousy

Lost in the discussion of Ted Kennedy's endorsement is the fact that a Barack Obama Presidency would be good for Ted Kennedy in ways that a Hillary Clinton Presidency would not. Kennedy already has eight years of exposure to the Clinton's operating style, and the Clinton's don't particularly owe the Kennedys any favors. Barack Obama, on the other hand, will owe a great deal of deference to Ted Kennedy, especially if his endorsement appears to make a difference in Massachusetts or among Latinos in the Southwest. Obama also seems less likely to indulge in it's-all-in-the-game-yo theories of executive power, but we don't have a lot of evidence on that score, one way or the other.

Monday Morning Wonderful: Michael Vick's Pit Bulls Thrive in Loving Homes

Kiss me, you gorgeous beast!
Two pit bulls formerly owned by Michael Vick enjoy their new lives. (AP)

As the Mama of a foundling pit bull--hell, as a human being who loves animals--this news made me so happy:

His back resting comfortably against her chest, Hector nestles his massive canine head into Leslie Nuccio's shoulder, high-fiving pit bull paws against human hands.

The big dog -- 52 pounds -- is social, people-focused, happy now, it seems, wearing a rhinestone collar in his new home in sunny California.

But as Hector sits up, deep scars stand out on his chest, and his eyes are imploring.

Hector ought to be dead, Nuccio knows -- killed in a staged fight, executed for not winning or euthanized by those who see pit bulls seized in busts as "kennel trash," unsuited to any kind of normal life.

Instead, Hector is learning how to be a pet.

Disaster Economics

Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, wrote an op-ed for yesterday's LA Times which should be required reading for every liberal, progressive, every Democratic politician and official, all economists and all Republicans who haven't yet drunk their fill of Bush economic Kool-Aid (all 3 of them).

Moody's, the credit-rating agency, claims the key to solving the United States' economic woes is slashing spending on Social Security. The National Assn. of Manufacturers says the fix is for the federal government to adopt the organization's wish-list of new tax cuts. For Investor's Business Daily, it is oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, "perhaps the most important stimulus of all."

But of all the cynical scrambles to package pro-business cash grabs as "economic stimulus," the prize has to go to Lawrence B. Lindsey, formerly President Bush's assistant for economic policy and his advisor during the 2001 recession. Lindsey's plan is to solve a crisis set off by bad lending by extending lots more questionable credit. "One of the easiest things to do would be to allow manufacturers and retailers" -- notably Wal-Mart -- "to open their own financial institutions, through which they could borrow and lend money," he wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.

I don't know which is worse:  that these people are using economic decline to cynically push their personal agendas and enrich themselves, or that people might seriously believe that opening ANWR to drilling and letting Wal-Mart become its own bank are good ideas.

My own Clinton Derangment Syndrome?

Saturday, while having a perfectly pleasant cup of coffee with a couple of Clinton supporters, I found myself really lashing out at the tone and tactics of their candidate's campaign, and in particular, the antics of the Big Dawg himself.  Each time I would mentally tell myself to tone it down, one of them would then invoke a classic Clintonian justification or rationalization to justify the campaign -- Obama needs to toughen up -- and besides, he wasn't so pure either, etc. -- and I would feel the anger rise again.  So why am I so irritated with the Clintons and why do so many people in the liberal community seem to share that anger?

I've been mulling this over for the last day or two, and I think it comes down to this -- the sense that with the Clintons, it's always about them, and with Bill, in particular, it's always about him.  No cause, no loyalty, no party or position supersedes their personal political needs.   And it's hardly time for this adolescent world view to come to the fore.

The Road to Super Tuesday

We don't yet know how big or small Obama's nationwide bounce will be. But at this point, the path forward for Barack Obama is pretty clear. Obama's base states are Illinois, plus the Deep South states of Georgia (29.9% African-American) Alabama (26.3%) ... he's making stops in both those states today. The next layer is probably the six seven caucus states of Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, and North Dakota. Beyond that, his best bets are probably the rest of the Midwest and Mountain West, where Hillary Clinton's favorables among Democrats tend to be lower, plus states with a decent number of African-Americans. That adds Utah, Missouri and Delaware to the mix. Beyond that, Obama might try to compete in Tennessee (16.9% African-American) and hope for an assist from John Edwards, work just a bit to keep the margins from getting too big in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and fight like hell in California. That will give him a shot at fourteen fifteen of twenty-three states, of which he probably needs to win nine to be close enough to close the gap in February.

2008 South Carolina Primary Map, Estimated White Vote

This is an attempt to figure out where Barack Obama fared best among white voters in South Carolina. What I've done is estimate the racial composition of the electorate in each county by assuming (a) more or less all African-Americans are Democrats, and (b) the percentage of white voters that vote in each county will be roughly the same. If we then hold African-American performance constant, we can produce a number that represents the combination of Obama's over/underperformance among black voters and the margin of victory among white voters.

The green areas represent counties where Obama either underperformed among African-Americans, or lost the white vote, or both; the purple areas the reverse. Of the major cities, Obama's best performance was in Charleston, followed by Greenville, Columbia, Spartanburg, Rock Hill, and Myrtle Beach. Outside the cities Obama fared vest in the heavily African-American counties between Columbia and Charleston, fought to a draw in some of the Northwestern counties, and tended to lose the rural counties that were still majority white. His poorest performance was in the "corridor of shame" south of Columbia: Orangeburg, Bamberg, and Allendale counties are also heavily African-American. The light-pink spot in the Northwest is Greenwood, home of the "Fired up! Ready to go!" lady.

Update: I just want to be very clear: this map does not necessarily show where white voters went for Barack Obama. Purple counties might represent a strong white vote for Obama; or they represent above-average turnout from black voters; or they might represent areas where Obama earned 100% of the black vote. Green counties might represent might represent white voters' antipathy towards voting for Obama; or they might be counties where African-American voters were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton; or they might represent counties where white voters make up a larger share of the Democratic electorate. We just don't know which is the case. Because South Carolina is required to track the race of its voters, we'll eventually have more accurate figures, but that's a month away.

Bill & Hillary: Experienced

Upon opening my e-mail this morning, I'm cheered to see a note from video virtuoso Lee Stranahan, since it undoubtedly means there's more parody goodness in the offing.  Lee writes: 

Yeah, a new video based on South Carolina.  It's called Bill And Hillary: Experienced and it's going to piss some people off...but you might not be one of them.  (Ed.--Heh heh, no, I'm not one of them.) Done on Saturday night in three hours.

Enjoy.

Also at litbrit.

On Jesse Jackson, Malcom X, Pookie, and Ray-Ray

The fact that Bill Clinton went in front of cameras and pointed out that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice has generated an awful lot of consternation.

Before the race issue gets out of hand yet again, I think this is a situation where everyone needs apply Occam's Razor. Bill Clinton, gifted politician as he is, is not some supernatural figure guaranteed to produce perfect political calculations at all times. With the constant presence of media, not everything he says in front of a camera is necessarily part of some Karl Rove-esque triple backflip twist Jedi mindtrick to spin the media in a pro-HRC direction and/or lower expectations. Sometimes he's just answering a question. And as much as I haven't been a fan of the way Bill Clinton's injected himself into the primaries over the past three weeks, I think we have to give him a pass on this one; after all, if he's not allowed to point out that other African-American candidates have won South Carolina (and at times, Jackson appeared to have a plausible path to the nomination), he's almost not allowed to handicap the race at all.

2008 South Carolina (SC) Primary Results Map

For the curious, my ancestors are from South Carolina; records suggest that a Joseph Beaudrot served in the American Revolution under Sir Francis Marion. So tonight's results have a bit of extra resonance for me.

On one level, these results are uninformative; Obama's win was so overwhelming that he earned a 20% or greater plurality (or majority) in most counties. Clinton won Horry County (Myrtle Beach) on the Eastern coastline, while John Edwards (!) won Oconee County in the Appalachian foothills by 16%, with Clinton coming in 3% ahead of Obama.

There's a three-fifths problem associated with this sort of analysis, but it would be worth examining the results among white voters only to see where he managed to fare best, if only to see what this suggests about Obama's future performance in other states. It's really not appropriate for me to speculate on what the results among white voters might have been, so I'll wait until I have more time.

South Carolina, Then Caroline: Winning Hearts With Hope

Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the beloved and inspiring American president who was assassinated when I was just a wee thing toddling around in England, endorses Senator Barack Obama in an editorial entitled A President Like My Father that will appear in tomorrow's New York Times. Via the magic of the Intertubes, though, I can bring it to you now (goosebumps alert):

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.

Wow...if, like me, you're still buzzing from Senator Obama's electrifying victory speech in South Carolina, you'll want to keep the warm feeling going and read the whole thing.

More SC Election Results

I'll have more on this tomorrow, but it's important to note that Obama's blowout win extended into counties that don't have large black populations. Obama won Pickens county (6.7% African American) by a nose, Greenville county (18.6%) by over 20 points, and affluent Beaufort County (21.5%) by 25%. I really wish that the exit polls broke down the results by both race and a second dimension, such as education or income, so we could see which white voters were voting for Obama.

Driving Mister Obama

Here's the racial breakdown from the exit polls:

African-Americans	Whites
Obama 81%	Edwards 39%
Clinton 17%	Clinton 36%
Edwards 1%	Obama 24%

Edwards' advantages elsewhere probably won't be as strong as in his native South Carolina, but these numbers show how it helps Obama to have a Southern white guy chauffering him through Southern primaries. With Edwards reducing Clinton's share of the white vote, Obama can win off of massive black turnout.

Paragraph of the Week

Writing about this week's report from the Center for Public Integrity about the decidedly unsavory Lies Flambée with Roasted Fabrications in Falsehood Sauce on a bed of Mashed Mendacity that Bush et. al. served (and continues to serve) the country on a baldfaced platter, The Rude Pundit says:

And what about the word "lies"? Shall we get meta here? Ari Fleischer, a man who, even if truth was an armless war orphan who had seen both her parents disemboweled and hung by their own intestines, would bend it over his lectern and rape it in front of the gathered press (who would dutifully report that truth was asking for it with her seductive tears), blustered in September 2002: "Iraq also accused President Bush of engaging in lies and falsehoods." Or George Bush, describing, one imagines, Saddam Hussein, in that same month: "This is a man who continually lies. This is a man who does not know the truth. This is a man who is a threat to peace."

Well, That Was Fast

It looks like it's going to be Obama in a blowout, a margin somewhat larger than expectations. If I'm doing my math right, and the exit polls are accurate, he'll end up with about 53% of the vote. Importantly, Obama earned a healthy 25% of the white vote (some polls had his share of the white vote as low as 10%) and had very little gender gap among whites. He almost certainly won every congressional district unless there are large disparities in the white vote in different districts.

To state the obvious, there's no reason to project Obama's performance among white voters in South Carolina onto the rest of the nation.

Update: somehow, John McCain has managed to turn tonight's election into good news for John McCain.

Delegate Counts: Florida & Michigan Edition

Since the Clinton Campaign is leading them there, the press has started to ask what the meaning of the Florida and Michigan delegations will be. There are basically four scenarios:

A Giuliani Supporter in Singapore

I've been absent from the blog for over a week now because of a job interview in Singapore. Thanks to John and Belle for showing me a good time on the other side of the world! There are some amazing things to eat there.

Over lunch one day, some folks and I got to chatting about American politics. (People were amused by my suggestion that Democrats vote strategically for Mitt Romney in order to guarantee victory in November.) An older Vietnamese man revealed that he wanted Giuliani to win the presidential election. I was astonished! Didn't he know that Giuliani was likely to make America's role in the world even more destructive than it had been under Bush?

As it turned out, that was exactly his point. He wanted to see the American empire driven into the ground, and thought that Giuliani was exactly the man to lead America to its destruction. He looked disappointed when I explained to him that that was unlikely to happen, with Giuliani's failure to finish in the top three in any primary.

Food Stamps

Megan McArdle valiantly defends her anti-food stamp position against the forces of Big Poverty. Whether she would support the program if we renamed food stamps "food vouchers" is left as an exercise to the reader.

Seriously, though, I don't think we can agree that "food stamps are a program whose time has gone". Importantly, to divorce the question of policy desirability from political reality is a fool's errand; while the votes exist to preserve and expand the food stamp program thanks to a coalition of most Democrats plus Farm State Republicans, the votes do not exist to expand most other forms of income assistance. For another, food stamp recpients are in fact quite poor, and food stamps represent a sizeable chunk of their income. While food stamp eligibility extends all the way to those living at 130% of the poverty level, the average monthly income of food stamp recipients is $648. With an average monthly benefit of $200, food stamps account for almost one quarter of their recipients' income. To replace the food stamp benefit with the Earned Income Tax Credit would require doubling the credit's rate for households with children and increasing it tenfold for those without. What's more, most EITC filers take their credit as one big check at filing time, rather than fill out form W-5 to get a monthly EITC advance, which is only useful if you have a steady low paying job [otherwise you have to keep re-filing your W-5s], which is something of an oxymoron. And of course all of this is overuse of the IRS as a welfare agency when it should be focused on using random terror to elicit voluntary compliance with the tax code on the part of relatively rich people. State- and local-level relief agencies are much better equipped to deal with this sort of redistribution than a bunch of accountants in Washington.

So while it's true that chronic hunger in America is a much smaller problem than, say, homelessness, eliminating the food stamp program would do significant damage to the poor. As soon as McArdle gets Mitt Romney and Roy Blunt to support a doubling of the EITC, drastically increasing its benefit to childless households, doubling funding for the IRS, and a pony, I'll be on board with killing the food stamp program.

South Carolina Meaningless Coffeehousing Thread

Read Mark Blumenthal on why the SC polls seem to vary so wildly.

I Love My Country (Part One Of What Is Sure To Be An Ongoing Series)

David Bowie's fabulous Alexander McQueen frock coat,
displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY in 2006.

The French have Liberté, égalité, fraternité.  Americans can choose from a broad selection of slogans, from the boisterous YOU-ESS-AAAY! to the beautiful and dignified The land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything in between.

But what do we Brits have to say about ourselves--what can we say about ourselves? Certainly we're one of the oldest countries (and cultures) on the planet--invaded, raped, and pillaged by just about everyone over the past couple of millenia--and there's no dearth of excellent writers whose veins are pulsing with "British blood" (whatever that means, since we have indeed been invaded and raped and pillaged by just about everyone and can thus be fairly termed the über-mutts of the world).

We've got no national motto, though, and we can't have that.

Prime Minister Brown and company were troubled by this tragic shortcoming. And so, concerned that Britain might be perceived as lacking when it came to the ability to put together clever sentences--particularly ones that accurately expressed the national identity--they set their sights on procuring one for us:

All Grown Up Now

Apologies for a bit of pundit fanboydom, but two Young Turks, Matthew Yglesias and Ross Douthat both have new books on the brink of publication. Matt's work, Quippy Title: Longer Sub-heading Explaining the Book's Thesis, is on foreign policy, while Ross has teamed up with Reihan Salam to write Quippy Title: Longer Sub-heading Explaining the Book's Thesis on path forward for the Sam's Club wing of the Republican party. Douthat is ahead of the game, considering his book has a ship date and Yglesias doesn't. I guess all those typos have taken their toll.

In "Yes Virginia, you're not getting old quite as fast as you think you are" news, it appears some campaign beat reporters don't recognize Usher. I guess the Twigg's of the world are too busy keeping track of who's who in the police department to glance at the iTunes top 100 every once in a while.

Via Chris Hayes.

The standards of Fox News

First Churchill, now Lincoln?

I tell you what — he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.

Uh, moron? There was never a time when Lincoln was "leaving office". There was the time a Confederate traitor suddenly and unexpectedly shot Lincoln in the head, and he died, but there was never a time when Lincoln was preparing to leave, or when the nation was anticipating his departure. What a tool.

And, by the way:  Lincoln's re-election share of the popular vote, 55%

Bush's re-election: 50.7%

Bush's current popularity: 30%.

And Lincoln had already issued the emancipation proclamation, and begun the enrollment of black troops in the Union Army -- actions that were profoundly unpopular even in the North. Oh, and the Union government had, until relatively late, been doing a crappy job of winning the war. And Lincoln still won the election handily.

And I'm Canadian, and was never taught this stuff in school.  I promise, Rupert, I'll work for half of whatever these morons are bilking you for.

Friday Frank: Solo from City of Tiny Lights; Koln, 1988

A sweet, guitar-y treat (with discord!) to kick off your Friday.  And Thank God for it, right?

Bon Weekend and stay warm, everyone.