Cogitamus

This is what I'm talking about

I keep saying it:  when Sen. Clinton and her surrogates keep saying, "she's like her husband, only more so," that's not a feature, that's a bug.  The latest example:

Michael O'Hanlon, Media Analyst

I tend not to go in for all the Michael O'Hanlon-bashing (it's gotten so excessive and disproportionate to the man's actual influence that it's bordering on dull), but I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this, in a piece on the media's diminishing interest in Iraq:

There are no authoritative figures for most media coverage before 2007. But a check of several large and midsize newspapers’ archives shows a year-by-year decline in articles about Iraq, and an increase in the proportion supplied by wire services. Experts who follow the coverage say there is no doubt about the trend.

“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”

I love that his way of tracking the prevalence of Iraq coverage isn't by actually tracking the prevalence of Iraq coverage. It's by measuring how many interviews he does in a day.

Also, it's great that a meta-piece on the media's coverage of Iraq happens to display the same flaw that pervades the coverage itself. There are other Iraq analysts.

Decoding the Krugmanomicon

Paul Krugman's sounding the alarm on the current financial meltdown. He's got Brad DeLong backing him up, among others, saying "If we don't want to wind up in a deep depression or a big inflation, it is time to think what kind of government action we do want to see, and how quickly we can set in in motion." That much I can grasp.

What I don't understand is why this is worse than, say, the LTCM/Asian financial market crisis of the late '90s. One non-bank bank went under. Presumably a couple of other non-bank banks, were they to let the game of Jenga end, might go under. But how many banks are we talking about? And how far will the effects spread beyond finance and housing? Things are bad in the housing sector, but where's the evidence that this is going to have spillover effects into export-manufacturing, domestic manufacturing, services, etc.? People like Krugman and DeLong are much smarter than I am, but they must see evidence that I'm not seeing.

Yet More On Barack Obama, Class, and the Democratic Primaries

Let me flesh out something I mentioned before, that the electoral coalition for all Democratic insurgents starts from the top of the education/income scale and works its way down, but that Barack Obama has worked his further down than most challengers. Back in the halcyon days of the New Hampshire primary, Granite Prof computed the "elite score" of many prominent Democratic contenders by comparing their performance in working-class versus "elite" areas of the Granite State. Crudely, a candidate with an elite score above 1.0 is a "wine track" candidate, while one below 1.0 is a "beer track" candidate. Here's the chart:

As you can see, yes, Obama is the wine track candidate, as are all insurgent challengers. But he is less wine track-y than almost all other challengers. Only Gary Hart had a better balance of working-class and elite support, and of course he nearly won the nomination. Which, along with the increasing upper-middle-class presence in the party and Obama's tremendous support among African-Americans, explains why he's able to fare better than the Bill Bradleys and Paul Tsongases of the world.

Actually, if we wanted to help....

I don't mean to pick on Scott here -- he's just one person in a conversation -- but boycotting the Olympics would not be a sign of how much we care about the rights of the Tibetan people. It would be a very clear sign of how little we care, if that was all we were going to do.  And this is reality, that is the extreme frontier of what we're likely to do.

"China, wow, you can beat, imprison, and murder your citizens for demanding a measure of justice, but if you do we're not going to come to your coming-out ball. That'll show you!"

How To Be A Party Elder

Says an unnamed former Edwards operative about the possibility of an endorsement:

"My gut instinct, at this point: He’s probably going to remain neutral and sort of try to play on that Al Gore status as party elder."

The above-the-fray thing is a perfectly reasonable position for a party elder while the nomination is still in doubt.  But very soon (perhaps now) it won't be.  If one candidate's only plan for winning is to cause enough chaos to raise questions about the legitimacy of the nomination, it's proper for party elders to avert such a disastrous outcome.  If you care about the party, that's the proper thing to do.  And as many people have convincingly argued, that's what things look like for the Clinton campaign at this point. 

Easter Thoughts

I've posted a very short piece on Easter at my old digs, if you're interested.  Comments are of course welcome and appreciated, but please make them here; I don't check them at my old blog.

Olive Branches

Since the Democratic primary contest isn't technically over, Obamaniacs really ought to stop jumping down Bill Clinton's throat over stuff like this. A plain reading of Clinton's words does not, in and of itself, imply that Barack Obama doesn't love his country, or that if Obama were the nominee the campaign would be about something other than issues. But once again, Occam's razor applies: sometimes, Bill Clinton just misspeaks or makes political miscalculations.

Bring It To An End

I am generally not a fan of people in the media writing off candidates' chances of election.  One of the things that has fascinated me about this election so far is how journalists think it part of their job description to predict events, and to determine who is and isn't a "serious" candidate.  You would think the actual voters were beside the point. 

We've reached an interesting juncture, though, where the media's interest in maintaining the image of an extremely competitive race is probably obscuring rather than illuminating things.  This story does a good job of explaining some of the reasons why this is.  (One thing you never see mentioned, though: If you're covering a candidate for a national outlet and he/she wins, you have a good shot at a coveted White House correspondent gig when that person takes office.  I view this as an incentive most reporters manage to ignore, some so magnificently that they're practically knee-capping their candidates, but it exists.)

Still, declaring who will and won't win is tricky business.  So instead of buying into today's meme that everyone should declare the Clinton candidacy dead, I'm going to suggest folks who missed it take a look at Phil Bredesen's proposal in the Times two days ago to schedule a superdelegate primary that can hopefully bring this thing to a close.  He says it should happen in June; I don't see a problem with it happening earlier.  And I say this as someone who was hoping the media would stop treating the primary season as something that could be wrapped up in a few weeks.  (They never really did stop treating it this way, but through a mixture of their incompetence at predicting events, and those fickle voters, things didn't shape up very clearly.)  I don't buy the argument that a drawn out nomination process won't hurt the Democratic party, and all I see are the Democratic candidates -- almost always Clinton -- making extremely problematic arguments about each other that may not be cited in a general election but undoubtedly play into and sustain themes that the Republican party will be pushing this fall.  It really is time to wind this thing down.

P.S. I know Bredesen did this, which was awful. I still like the idea of a superdelegate primary. 

Endgame

The sound of inevitability seems to be rising out here on the blogosphere, driven by the Politico's admission that the Hillary Clinton campaign's only path to victory is to bang their fist on the table and demand that Clinton be nominated President of the Ohio River Valley, because Barack Obama's preacher scared a bunch of people in Youngstown and Johnstown and Charleston and so forth. Some, including our own commenter "Shock Mouse", have wondered why the superdelegates haven't risen up to end the nomination. There are a number of reasons that hasn't happened yet; Congress depends on the high-dollar donor base, which is loyal to Clinton; many of the remaining supers come from Blue Dog districts or the Mountain West and might not want to going on record endorsing either candidate; and it would look really really bad if they endorsed Obama en masse and Clinton proceeded to win seven of the ten remaining primaries. Now is not a convenient moment for the supers to end the race.

What they really need is an excuse to end it. There are basically two possible excuses left. An Obama win in Pennsylvania would end the big state/Ohio River Valley argument and suggest that Clinton can't get her delegate deficit close enough to force a "tie". Or, he could go two-for-two on the May 6th primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, ending Clinton's domination of Lower Midwest and likely leave Obama with a larger delegate lead than he has today, with only 211 delegates remaining. If neither of those things happen, we're almost certainly going all the way to the June 3 elections.

Friday Frank: Outrage at Valdez; 1992, Frankfurt

Frank Zappa originally wrote this beautiful neoclassical piece, entitled Outrage at Valdez, for the Cousteau Society's documentary Alaska: Outrage at Valdez, which appeared on TBS in 1990. Performed by Zappa and the Ensemble Modern, it is also featured on Zappa's album The Yellow Shark. Notice the wide variety of instruments Zappa employs for this composition, which includes a lute, a bassoon, and a harp.

In case anyone is paying attention to what the judiciary branch of our government is up to these days, Exxon has been arguing--forcefully arguing--against paying a $2.5 billion punitive award to Alaskans. The corporation have spent $3.4 billion in cleanup costs over the past 18+ years; however, the environmental and economic damage to Alaska were, and remain, catastrophic. At this point, though, Exxon do not feel they owe, or should have to pay, any punitive damages, long-respected tenets of maritime law notwithstanding. The case is now before the Supreme Court and a decision is not expected until July of this year.

I therefore dedicate this piece to the animals and citizens of Prince William Sound, Alaska.

(H/T bongolampo)

Also at litbrit.

A Very Serious, Thoughtful Museum That - Oh, Never Mind

Weston State Hospital in Weston, West Virginia, was once a mental health institution.  It's been vacant for some time, and was recently sold by the state to Joe Jordan and his family. The Jordans have been remodeling the building and have just started giving tours that "focus on issues such as the evolution of mental health care, the Civil War, the Great Depression, even architecture."  Part of the Jordans' focus on the history of mental health care is to rename the Weston State Hospital as the "Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum."

Another entirely appropriate and needed aspect of their very serious treatment of the history of mental health care is to have a dirt-bike race on the grounds called the "Psycho Path."  Oh, and next Halloween season you can visit their planned "Hospital of Horrors," which is probably going to be a very serious look at the history of mental health institution-themed commercial haunted houses.  On Christmas Eve you can attend their "Nightmare Before Christmas," sure to please both conservative Christians and Tim Burton fans.

And they'll have, um, mud bogs.  You know, where trucks try to drive across a large field of mud without getting stuck.  Because, and you must see this already, a mud bog memorializes the. . .history-yes, the history, er, historical significance in the field of mental health care of large trucks. . .driving through mud. . .

The Jordans certainly have an entrepeneurial spirit, you can't deny that.

Friday Kitsch Cover

Via "low-tech cyclist", Phil Collins does "You Can't Hurry Love" originally by Diana Ross:

Leave your kitsch cover nominations for next week in the comments.

Required Reading For Young Men

After reading about how clueless young men are about whether women are attracted to them, I realized how unfortunate it is that the gender that knows whether someone is attracted to them (women) is the gender that traditionally isn't supposed to make the first move. Centralizing these functions, either by overturning stupid traditions or by making men more clueful, would make life a lot better for all. In service of the latter aim, here is an old post from Megan that I strongly recommend to all clueless dudes, specifically including my past 19-year-old self (to whom it seems to be written) and my current 28-year-old self:

I am addressing this to sweet but clueless young men who want to approach someone nicely for sex, which is nearly all of them... To get between making eyes at someone in class and creating the possibility of sleeping with her, I want you to do three things.

You want to know what they are. (The comments are also good.)

Gaffe!

Barack Obama's bracket doesn't have a single mid-major getting into the Sweet Sixteen (unless the Atlantic-10 is technically a mid-major conference). Clearly we cannot trust a President Obama to look out for the little guy.

Use this as an open thread for that really large basketball tournament that supposedly drains a billion dollars from US productivity.

"A Good Idea Is One Thing. Resourcing Is Another."

... In which your intrepid blogger tries his hand at this "journalism" thing and realizes how important copy editors are ...

That was Colonel Daniel Roper today on a recently released inter-agency document on counterinsugerncy efforts. The document, along with General Caldwell's new Army Doctrine, is one of many that shows how much the military's tactical thinking has changed since the beginning of the Iraq war. Col. Roper emphasized the importance of inter-agency cooperation (particularly with the State Department and USAID) and low-intensity operations ("soft knock" searches as opposed to kicking down doors) in winning over the local population and isolating extremist elements. Still, challenges remain in marshaling resources towards this type of peacekeeping both inside and outside the Army.

That's Right, I Can't

It's rare that I see a news headline describing a study that so perfectly describes my experience over the last dozen or so years: "Clueless Guys Can't Read Women". And the problem isn't only that wishful-thinking horny guys are excessively predisposed to believe that women are interested in them:

the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys - they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

I'd be curious to see whether the reverse phenomenon is as common -- do women find it difficult to determine whether men are sexually interested in them?

What Bill Maher Said

Comedian Bill Maher appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday (you can watch the video clip here), discussing, among other things, his reaction to Barack Obama's speech about race:

"It was such a pleasure to hear a speech for adults, to adults, that didn't pander, that was eloquent.

You know, it's like reading a book nowadays, Chris, you know, so much writing...it's not really writing.  You read a John Grisham book and it's like you know it's just an outline for the script for the movie.

And then, once in a while you read great writing, and you go, Ohhh, what a pleasure.  And that's what it was like to listen to that speech, for me."

Also at litbrit.

It's OK as Long as Your Extremist Clergyman isn't Black

The continuing race to the bottom between the Washington Post and the New York times is reaching break neck speed -- fabulist William Kristol seemed to put the Times ahead earlier this week by using that most reputable of sources, Newsmax, to conclude, erroneously, that Obama had been at church in Chicago on a day when he was in fact campaigning in Miami. 

But now, self-satisfied and semi-doltish former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson joins the fray as the Post's entry in the sweepstakes, claiming that Obama's recent speech regarding the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the problems of race in America "fell short."  Gerson, who is a noted right wing evangelical and speech credit hog (pride is a sin Michael -- as is lying) flunks Obama's speech, because he chose to walk side by side with a hater like the Reverend Wright.  Hmmmmmmmm - A right wing evangelical and Republican Party apparatchik denouncing hatred from the pulpit -- well, hatred from the pulpit filled by an angry black man.  All those hateful white guys -- just not the same.

So I sent an email to our holier than thou friend:

Dear Mr. Gerson:

I am curious as to whether you have denounced all of the many hateful things said by the evangelical preachers with whom you have made common cause over the years? When can we expect to see the comprehensive column (or columns more likely) in which you do this?

Republicans routinely pay obeisance to hate mongers -- even people who say that we brought 9/11 on ourselves like Robertson and Falwell -- not to mention Bob Jones, John Hagee, Rod Parsley, Ted Haggard, and on and on.  When will you ask that the GOP shun such people? 

Have you denounced the President for whom you labored in the White House for his embracing of preemptive (and unjustified) war and torture?  Because, after all, who would Jesus waterboard?

I'm no expert, but I don't believe that smugness is a quality much valued in the gospels.  To mix my Biblical metaphors, I suggest that you remove the plank from your own eye before casting stones at Obama.

Yours in Christ,

Sir Charles

Shocked to say I haven't gotten a response.   

.   

The creeping menace of a global military threat

Oh God, I think I've gotten stupider just watching it.  Mr. Farley posted a youtube clip of this ridiculous Cold War "documentary" about the devious Soviet plan to win the Cold War with a pre-emptive nuclear strike. You can watch the whole thing (1, 2, 3, 4) but I seriously wouldn't recommend it -- the blood started leaking from my eyeballs about 20 minutes in.

What's striking is the logic at work -- no different from usual Cold War logic, but still: we know that the Soviets have a devious plan for world domination, because they spend more on their military than the rest of the free world combined. And what is their devious plan? To contain China, to split America from it's European allies, and to expand their power in the Persian Gulf to ensure energy supplies.

I may be a Liberal Fascist, but I'm beginning to think Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have been Soviet moles operating on autopilot for the last several decades.

The American People Hate this Idiotic War

I understand that this is not nearly as important as some delusional preacher running his yap, but yes folks, it's been five years since the beginning of the war in Iraq and there is no end in sight.  Until this anniversary, however, much of the mainstream media seems to have gotten bored with the story or, worse yet, has bought into the notion that the "surge" has worked so well that the land of milk and honey cannot be far behind.  Unless, of course, the U.S. pulls out its troops, in which case Armageddon follows as surely as night follows day.

It is extremely important for the Democratic nominee (and please may it be Obama) to remember this salient fact:  The American people do not like this war, they do not believe it was worth fighting, they are sickened at the human toll it has taken and appalled at its economic cost.  According to a recent CNN poll, 66% of Americans oppose the war, only 36% feel that the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, 71% believe that the expense of the war is harming the American economy, and 61% believe that the next president should remove all U.S. troops "within a few months of taking office."  The message to the ultimate nominee is this -- run against the war, ignore the elite media on this issue, and let McCain proclaim the virtues of staying in Iraq forever.  Rinse, repeat. 

The exorbitant cost of the war and what alternatively could have been done with those funds at home should be pounded home every day in the campaign.  The possible $3 trillion cost of this fiasco, as described by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz in their new book needs to be emphasized endlessly -- again with illustrations in terms of things like insuring the uninsured, resolving any shortfall in Social Security, restoring the nation's infrastructure, giving mortgage relief -- anything, in short, good and useful that could have been done with this money that we've put on the nation's credit card.  (I particularly enjoyed the Bush administration's response to Bilmes and Stiglitz, whom they accuse of throwing the kitchen sink into their calculations, because they've included the cost of interest on the national debt attributable to the war  -- as if it were inappropriate to do this when the entire war has been financed by deficit spending.)  Three trillion dollars is a difficult number to get one's head around, but a good communicator like Obama ought to be able to bring it home to the American people day after day with examples that resonate in people's lives.    

This is a winning issue for Democrats and one that they must not fear to raise in the most aggressive manner possible.    

Round Five

Out here on the second or third sigma of news consumption in America, it's sometimes hard to gauge how the median voter is experiencing the Presidential campaign. Here are some tidbits.

• One Million people have seen the Obama speech on Youtube. In twenty-four hours. Remember, roughly twenty-fivie million people have voted so far, and we're through about 83% of the voting, so roughly 13% of the primary voters (and 25% of Obama's voters) have now seen the video.
• Last night he did an interview on ABC News with Terry Moran. Here's thee transcript and partial video.
• Edtorial reviews have been predominately positive, with only a few papers (e.g. the wankerrific Washington Post ed-board) chiding him for not doing enough to distance himself from Wright specifically.

This is probably the most risk any candidate has taken on while running for President has done since ... well, since Howard Dean tried his Northeastern straight-talk schtick. Post links to more MSM coverage, especially broadcast TV (either morning or evening news shows), in the comments.

Jeremiah vs. Geraldine

I don't want to run this issue into the ground, but there is one thing that Obama said in his speech today that really frustrates me, in the sense that he should not have needed to say it.

We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. 

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.  We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

Equating Ferraro and Wright was politically the right thing to do.  In fact, it was utterly necessary, both in the way it brought Hillary's proxy problems into view as well as putting Wright into the context that White America has prepared for him:  racist.

But the reality is that what Ferraro and Wright said have nothing to do with one another.

A Moment of Uncertainty

It occurs to me that today's Barack Obama speech doesn't have very many precedents in political history. It's not clearly targeted at demographic X or Y; it's not addressing a subject that people talk about frequently; and it's much higher profile than most set-piece speeches. So it's almost impossible for any reporter to get a sense of what impact it did or didn't have, especially in such a short period of time.

But let's try using the blagotubes for a bit of information gathering. Do you have friends who don't follow politics very closely? Especially anyone who's at least a little unsure who they want to vote for in the primary or general? Have they heard about the speech? What are they saying? Put your observations in the comments; positive, negative, indifferent, aware, whatever.

Oh For Pete's Sake, Just Hold a re-vote in Michigan Already

Look, I know that conditions are less than optimal, since a certain number of dem-leaning independents may have crossed over to vote for McCain, but Obama's not going to lose a Michigan re-vote by more than fifteen points, which would move his margin in Michigan from net -80 to net -20 or so. He might even win it, which would help eliminate the Clinton Team's "big state" argument. There's a decent chance that Obama could end up with a delegate lead, but not a Florida-and-Michigan proof delegate lead. A re-vote in Michigan virtually forecloses that option under even the worst of circumstances. There's no downside here; just do it already!