• Mike Smith of the Dave Clark 5 died. My thoughts, if you're interested, are here.
  
  
• Sustainable energy solutions: apparently the best prospects for wind energy are a broad swath of red states in the middle of the country, which might lead to a bipartisan embrace of clean energy as jobs are created in the building and maintaining of wind farms. Also in the works are genetically modified bacteria that ingest CO2 and secrete clean-burning fuel.
  
  
• Obama: Yes, I am liberal. Yes, that's a good thing. What's the big deal?
• Andrew Sullivan lays into Clinton on her request to be taken on her record and not just faith:
  

  The record is that the senator's one single attempt at policy implementation - healthcare reform - was an enormous failure in which her own arrogance, secrecy and paranoia derailed universal healthcare for a decade. On the most critical foreign policy decision of her career, Iraq, she was disastrously wrong. And in terms of management experience, she clearly can't run even a campaign half-way competently. I think she'd be better off asking people to take a leap of faith, don't you?

  
  Ouch. More vitriol from Sullivan here.
  
  
• Apparently young Jenna & Barbara asked their dad recently what irony is, so he decided to give them examples. Here he is explaining that the Turks, who have just invaded Iraq, need to accomplish their mission and get out quickly. Here he is explaining that we should not meet with leaders of hostile countries that commit horrible crimes against their people, except for Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia.
  
  
• Hillary was considered for months and months and months to be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Now she is getting her ass handed to her by Barack Obama, who is the new frontrunner. According to her spin guys, if Obama does not kick her ass even worse in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island, it means that (despite him having resoundingly won the last 11 straight contests) Democrats are getting cold feet and Hillary Clinton is the real winner. I think the only people really qualified to discuss logic that backwards are Kriss Kross.
  
  
• In February, the shortest month of the year, Hillary Clinton is expecting to have pulled in around $35 million. That is seriously impressive. However, according to some projections, Barack Obama may pull in over $50 million. But man, wait until you see the numbers posted by John McCain, who no longer has any substantive competition and whose party has one of the best fundraising establishments in recent memory. Man, his fundraising totals are going to BLOW YOU AWAY! According to TPM, McCain's campaign projects income at over TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS this month. Man, that's impressive. I mean, seriously, that's like . . . a whole seventh of what the Democrats raised. I don't know how Clinton and Obama are willing to go toe to toe with that political juggernaut.
  
  
• And my favorite news of the day: of the $370 million pulled in by the RIAA in lawsuits against Napster and other filesharing services, after all of those ads running about intellectual property rights and how the people that are getting screwed are the artists, the artists are getting nothing more than a middle finger from their labels and self-proclaimed advocates. If the Rolling Stones sue the RIAA, I'm having a party. If you don't believe Mick and Keith can bring them to their knees, you were obviously never a fan of The Verve.
  

The Prince and the Jackass

For years, the media lambasted Prince Harry for being a drunken layabout and not living up to the honor and dignity his title has historically implied. Then he joined the military, hoping to regain his respectability, and volunteered to go on combat duty in a warzone, but when it was too heavily covered in the news, they pulled his deployment out of fear that he'd become a magnet for ambitious enemy fighters trying to snag a high profile hostage. Finally, Harry gets his wish to be deployed into a hostile environment, wanting not to take unfair advantage of the circumstances of his lineage (whether it was eventually to become a PR stunt or not, it's still a very bold PR stunt), and they sent him to Afghanistan. The entire British news media, globally notorious for their hounding of celebrities, agreed to keep their mouths shut about it, despite the fact that it would be a huge story. And then after ten weeks of doing his job just like any other guy, Matt Drudge breaks the story and now they've got to get him out again, because now he and everyone around him have bullseyes on their backs. Thank you, Matt Drudge, for showing the world (once again) that there really is a level of short-sighted, narcissistic showboating and dishonorable gutter journalism lower than that of the British tabloids. You've really made your mark.

This is, of course, not even getting into the Obama photo. Drudge generally flies under my radar: I ignore him at all costs, because I think he's a sleaze. But the Obama photo got my attention and annoyed me. It was obnoxious, to be sure, but when you run for president, you have to expect that the morally vacuous among us will be throwing cheap shots. So he was in the back of my mind more than usual, and I was a little on edge about him. Right after that, he puts soldiers in more danger than they need to be in, just because it will throw him a few extra bucks and drive up his hit counter. It's not that this is any worse than anything else he runs on his site, it's just that this time I actually paid attention.

A friend who also loathes Drudge (and referred to him as a "fat, smarmy weasel" and later a "jerkoff stain") suggested in private conversation about this that for once, I was actually coming down on the side of censoring the press, but I honestly don't think that's it. There is a difference between suppression and discretion. This is a story that has no appreciable value to anyone, other than to make Drudge richer and indulge the public celebrity fetish. There is an appreciable detriment in announcing to the world the whereabouts of the highest profile rich kids in the Western world and making him a target for the enemy fighters all around him. There is an appreciable detriment in forcing the British Army to take a soldier out of his unit, when they had gone to great trouble already to keep his presence there quiet. This isn't just a reputation at stake, these are human lives. In talking with the military, the press came to a gentleman's agreement that this wasn't vital public information and there was no pressing need to report it, so they didn't. Matt Drudge decided that he wanted to go out for a nice dinner, so he blew the story without a second thought about the consequences.

Diplomacy

Bush: How dare Barack Obama suggest that the President of the United States should meet with leaders of nations hostile to the US in hopes of improving diplomatic relations between our countries! Why, it flies in the face of everything the US has stood for in the last seven years!

Turkey

In all the campaign hubbub, it's easy to have missed the fact that Turkey invaded Iraqi Kurdistan a few days ago. To be fair to the Turks, Kurdish separatists have been using that region as a springboard for attacks within Turkey. In response, there's a chance Turkey might use this as an excuse to annex that part of Iraq for itself, in order to contain the situation. Much like the U.S. mission in Iraq, one Turkish official has announced that "there is no timetable."

I'm sure this will all work out well, of course. The Turks have a long history of dealing calmly and sensibly with the needs of their ethnic minorities. After all, when was the last time you heard about the Armenians making a fuss?

Stories like this are why this blog is called "dammit."

Quick Points of Interest

I know it's been a long time since the event, but as promised, here's a full table of contents to Leonard Pierce's dance with the devils at CPAC. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.

• Hillary can't get her act together in Pennsylvania: she's 10 delegates short of a full slate. (No, that is not a euphemism for insanity.)
  
  
• Your tax dollars at work, explaining your tax dollars to you. But this time, briefly and concisely, unlike the tax code itself.
  
  
• Sadly, No reacts to the idea that candidates should be down-to-earth: "I honestly don’t give two shits if either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama wants to have a beer with me. I just want them to do their best to not destroy the universe. Needless to say, George W. Bush has failed in this regard."
  
  
• Curious George and the 19% approval rating. It looks like The Man in the Yellow Hat has some 'splainin' to do.
  
  
• Sadly, No again, this time juxtaposing Barack Obama's lack of foreign policy experience with the "foreign policy dream team" that came into the White House . . . in 2001.
  
  
• George W. Bush went to Rwanda to talk about having learned the lessons of ignoring a genocide. Meanwhile . . .
  
  
• Andrew Sullivan's crush on Barack Obama comes in handy, since he can actually list Obama's accomplishments.
  
  
• If Barack Obama wants to be more lenient on meeting with foreign dignitaries we may not like as much, it's because he acknowledges that we've got a lot of PR to do as far as fixing our image abroad.
  
  
• Barack Obama isn't beating Hillary Clinton because he's more hopeful than she is, it's because he's got one of the best political organizations you could, well, hope for.
  
  
• God help the GOP when Dick Armey is the one calling for moderation on the immigration issue.
  
  
• Apparently the fastest growing religious group in America are those who don't have, want, or need a religious group. My take on this is that the Christian Right is stigmatizing Christianity as a whole for a lot of people, but that's just speculation. Personally, I know three people in Chicago who attend a church -- a couple and their infant daughter -- and they're Unitarians.
  
  
• Barack Obama being reasonable about Israel and Palestine. It is not, nor has it ever been, an all-or-nothing scenario. It is possible for both groups to be run by racist warmongers blinded to reason by their own nationalism.
  
  
• John McCain explains that the war will basically be over soon, despite the fact that we'll still have a troop presence in the six figures and insurgents will still be blowing things up. It's all a part his plan for building a global American empire. It's seeming more and more to me like McCain is a single-issue candidate (that issue being war), and it's seeming to me more and more that he's one of the people I would least like responsible for dealing with that issue.
  
  
• Your paycheck is getting worse every time, you just don't know it.
  

Shooting your future in the foot

You know, for all the hype about the McCain/Iseman sex rumor (I'm not even going to call it a scandal because right now it's just hype) and the likelihood that Captain Maverick J. Reform was giving favors to lobbyists (I find this story of lobbyist and McCain adviser Charlie Black doing his consulting from the Straight Talk Express bus is particularly entertaining, the story that's slowly creeping up that might actually end up hurting John McCain most is . . . McCain-Feingold. He agreed to accept public financing when he was so far behind in the polls that he thought he might drown, and now that he's the last man (realistically) standing, he's trying desperately to get out of a system that he himself designed.

The upside (other than the thought of the Republican presidential nominee facing felony charges before he even gets into office) is that this may force the Republicans' hand on the FEC commissioners. Right now there are four nominees to be commissioners at the FEC, one of whom is Hans von Spakovsky, who has been known to specialize in vote-suppression (and possibly tying helpless damsels to train tracks for fun). Democrats are trying to vote on each nominee separately, so they can torpedo Spakovsky. Republicans want to tie him to more acceptable candidates and vote on all four at the same time. The FEC can't let McCain opt out until it has a quorum of four commissioners (there are currently two) and he can't spend much until they let him opt out. So in order to get their candidate some direly needed cash, it's not entirely unlikely that Spakovsky may get sacrificed for the good of the party.

Deicide says, "God Bless America."

Mother Jones has a list of 20 songs used in US Military prisons to help break down prisoners' mental defense mechanisms before interrogation, as well as to drown out their screams as we, y'know, torture them. Let it be known that the Meow Mix song and the Barney theme song, often referred to in passing as "torture," are now being used for that express purpose.

William F. Buckley is dead.

It's kind of fitting, I suppose, that Buckley should die just before the conservative movement he helped father is resoundingly booted from office. George W. Bush prepares to leave office in ignominy, having co-opted the name of conservatism, perverted its principles and put an end to a long (and exceedingly successful, politically) tradition of of conservatives who, like Buckley, actually thought things through, who believed in a philosophy of moving forward cautiously and not rushing into every plan that seems like a good idea at the time without consideration of the long-term consequences. For obvious reasons, I was never a big Buckley fan, but unlike many of his followers, the man was no fool, and it's always a shame to say goodbye to a worthy political adversary.

I'm watching the Academy Awards, and I'm seeing practically every award being won by someone from another country (it's still fairly early), and all I can think is, "what does Tom Tancredo think of this?"

Nitty Gritty

A friend (thanks, Rob!) just linked me to this very interesting article on one of the Daily Kos blogs: someone sits down to the very tedious task of digging through the Library of Congress site and and comparing the legislative records of Senators Obama and Clinton. The author's conclusions, in a nutshell:

Senator Clinton is in fact not the cold, heartless liberal robot of doom that some would have you believe. She has authored a great deal of legislation on health care, issues related to children, and things that would generally have a benefit to the nation as a whole. Even Barack Obama has signed on to a number of her bills and amendments as a cosponsor. That said, Obama has also authored a great deal of legislation that is more ambitious and targets problems more directly than Clinton's, and he is more successful at getting those initiatives passed and bringing in bipartisan support.

McCain and Military Dictatorship

John McCain, unsurprisingly, won the Wisconsin primaries tonight. That doesn't interest me. What does interest me is something that he said in his speech. Pakistan had an election today as well, and voted to remove Pervez Musharraf from the office of the president, where he has held power as a military dictator since 1999. McCain actually chastised the Pakistani people for peacefully, democratically removing a dictator from power.

1) There's no better way to plug your foreign policy than to demonstrate that you're unprepared and resistant to change in other countries where we may have strategic interests.

2) There's no better way to say "I am qualified to conduct a war designed to bring democracy to the Middle East" than to denounce a country in the Middle East for democratically unseating a military dictatorship.

3) He just came on record as opposing a political movement which will soon be taking control of a country which McCain himself acknowledged is a crucial ally in our defense strategy. He wants Pakistan to remain an ally, so instead of extending an olive branch to the new leaders, he made a point of sticking with their old one.

Come on, man. Look before you leap.

[Update: full text of McCain's speech here. The Pakistan reference is in the 5th paragraph.]

Good news

dammit.

I'm not even going to get into the NIU shootings, because it's unbelievably screwed up, and people who I've been very close to for the better half of my life were put in mortal danger because some guy can't deal. I'm cranky about a good many things today that I'm not going to mention, but knowing that less than a few days ago bullets were flying through a classroom does not make things any better.

In brief:

• Just because Obama gives good speeches doesn't mean he's not capable when it comes down to the nitty gritty of governing, and it doesn't mean he doesn't have serious talent on his team.
• Remember how the GOP in Washington decided to stop counting votes when the chair of the state party didn't think his guy was going to win? John "Straight Talk" McCain tells Huckleberry to shut up and deal.
• Obama on why his campaign bodes well for his presidency.
• Hillary knows she has to win in Texas and Ohio to stay in the race, but thanks to some awful strategic decisions by Mark Penn, she may not even be able to pull that off. Oops!
• I know it's been said a million times, but the Iraq war has made America less safe. Why are we still there?
• The Governor of Pennsylvania wants you not to vote for Barack Obama. Because, y'know, he is black.
• Natalie Cole, a former drug addict who was once recognized favorably for making dull music and has since faded into artistic irrelevance, explains that we should only listen to music made by good people.
• If at first you don't succeed . . . blame the rules and try again somewhere else.
• Puerto Rico may be startlingly influential in choosing the Democratic nominee.
• Obama scores a RINO endorsement and may already be whittling down McCain's support from his own staff.
• Obama has been lining the pockets of some superdelegates' campaigns. I wonder if this will help him win . . . (Hint: there are still about 400 superdelegates who haven't endorsed).
• Iraq is learning from the nuances of the American legal system.
• Hillary Clinton's strategy of waiting it out until the delegate-rich states like Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania vote has been endorsed by someone who had a similar strategy: Rudy Giuliani's campaign manager.
  

Hilarious Publicity Stunt of the Week:
Indignant that the Democrats were going to pass an update to the Protect America Act that didn't include retroactive immunity for telecom companies who illegally surrendered information to intelligence agencies, House Republicans staged a walk-out that subsequently interrupted the memorial service for the recently deceased Representative Tom Lantos. So convinced were they that this bill was vital to our protection from the terrorist threat and our continued survival as a nation that they . . . let the bill lapse. Because it didn't protect large corporations who broke the law on behalf of the President. The nation is still standing, ladies and Gentleman. Democracy prevails.

John McCain and the Bullshit Express:
Despite my numerous disagreements with John McCain on a wide variety of issues, I had given him credit for at least being an honorable man, and for being less insane than a lot of Republicans. This week, I've written him off completely. Why?

• After a recent (four years ago) discussion of possibly switching parties in hopes of becoming a Democratic Vice President, McCain is now rated as the second most conservative member of the Senate, since he now has aspirations to be a Republican president.
• His vision of a 100-year-war to bring peace to Iraq is the exact vision that the Iraqis are fighting us to prevent.
• And the last straw: after his numerous statements saying that waterboarding is torture, and that the United States should never be torturing anyone, he voted not to prevent the CIA from waterboarding people. Screw that guy.
  

Important Quote of the Day #1:
"Rather than punish Solis Doyle or raise questions about her fitness to lead, Clinton chose her to manage the presidential campaign for reasons that should now be obvious: above all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else. This suggests to me that for all the emphasis Clinton has placed on executive leadership in this campaign, her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit." -- Josh Green

Important Quote of the Day #2:
"In the go-go world, where we eat standing up and are always on the run, looking to save time and do more, more, more in less time, can we agree to this: Let's start saying FEMA instead of SNAFU or FUBAR. We save a letter in each case, and it's clear that the one acronym will do the work of the two other words." -- Nick Gillespie, closing an article about toxic formaldehyde fumes in 35,000 FEMA trailers in the gulf coast.

Important Quote of the Day #3:
"On Monday, General Petraeus -- the unfailing font of wisdom who Must Be Listened To At All Times -- praised Syria for its enhanced cooperation with our forces in Iraq. Naturally, yesterday Bush issued some new anti-Syrian sanctions tied to Syria's lack of cooperation with our efforts in Iraq." -- Matthew Yglesias

Unsolicited Prediction:
After Barack Obama wins Wisconsin tomorrow, Hillary's margins in the remaining states will slowly start fading when Democrats around the country decide that while they do like both candidates, they just want this thing to be over. Election fever has passed, and now it's just election chest congestion. Texas and Ohio will serve as a political expectorant, and Hillary can return to being a rich, influential, and powerful Senator.

The Downward Spiral

The way today is shaping up, there's a very good chance I may not be able to write as much as I'd like to, so I want to get a few thoughts out as fast as I can.

• In the wake of Mitt Romney's toxic concession speech last week, it was said flat-out by a "senior member of his inner circle" that he'll be running for president again in 2012. Given the begrudging nature of Romney's speech and his implicit but none-too-happy endorsement of John McCain, this strikes me as a slap in the face of Republican voters everywhere: it either means that he has no confidence in McCain's ability to beat Obama or Clinton, or that he thinks McCain will be such a disaster as President that the GOP will have no choice but to replace him in four years.
  
  
• Hillary Clinton is not in a good place right now. She lost four states to Obama this weekend, most by overwhelming margins, and she's almost certainly going to lose Virginia and Maryland tomorrow. She just booted her campaign manager for not telling her that the campaign was essentially broke until after the New Hampshire primary. And it looks as though Obama will have taken the lead in both pledged delegates and total delegates within the next 36 hours. I won't count Hillary Clinton out of this until Barack Obama is handed the keys to the White House, but she's not having her best week.
  
  
• What's going on with the Republican party in Washington is a travesty. Luke Esser should be fired, and John McCain, if he wants to keep his seat on the Straight Talk Express, should be demanding an investigation and a full recount. Take a look at this piece he wrote about why "loudmouth leftists" should be kept away from the polls at all costs. With guys like him running the Washington GOP, it's no wonder Ron Paul got 21% of the vote (thus far).
  

Grammy Hangover

Before I get into politics for the day, I just want to make a few quick notes on the Grammys.

• I think everyone was a little surprised by Herbie Hancock winning Best Album.
• Amy Winehouse looked a little dazed during her performance, but Ringo was definitely drunker, and I'm amazed Quincy Jones could walk. He sounded like Mark E. Smith up there.
  
• I want Kanye West's glow-in-the-dark glasses.
• I'm trying to follow the logic here: You've got Tina Turner and you want her to sing "Proud Mary" as a duet with someone. You've got John Fogerty, who wrote "Proud Mary," on the bill and you want him to sing with someone else as well. So you have Tina sing with . . . Beyonce? And you shove Fogerty off in the corner to provide out-of-place segue between Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard?
• Can we do away with this whole "duets with dead people" thing? I really didn't want to see Alicia Keys sing with Frank Sinatra.
• MORRIS DAY AND THE TIME! Who is Rihanna and who the hell does she think she is that she can cut off "Jungle Love?"
  
• I know he's been playing with Wilco for a few years, but Nels Cline (the creator of some of the best indescribable noise I've ever heard) now has a Grammy nomination on his resume.
  
• Jason Bateman is a really snarky son of a bitch.
• Maybe there's some nuance to a song about checking your special lady for ticks, but to me it just sounds like Brad Paisley is a hick.

Special honors:

1. The WTF award: We have a tie. On one hand, you would think Keely Smith doing a duet with Kid Rock in the place of Louis Prima would be an obvious winner. But then some weird little blonde thing referred to Andy Williams (who many of you will remember as Nelson Muntz' favorite saccharine crooner) as "the O.G.," which I was informed is short for "original gangsta." Both moments were perverse, simultaneously upsetting and laughable.
2. The Mute Button award: Alicia Keys and John Mayer are bad, but Josh Groban and Andrea Bocelli got me to change the channel before they even finished announcing the names.
3. The Spectacular Cockiness Well Rewarded award: they turn up the "finish your speech" music on Kanye, who in turn launches into a dedication to his dead mother, and announces annoyedly that "it would be in good taste to stop the music now.” The music stops and the audience cheers.
   

One more late addition: Politico lists five very convincing reasons why Hillary could very well be in trouble.

C-RAP . . . Oh wait, no, I meant CPAC.

Leonard Pierce, a fine writer, a long-standing friend of mine, an expatriate Chicagoan, and a liberal so dedicated he makes me look like Sean Hannity, is attending the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend in Washington DC. He's keeping a running log of it over at Sadly, No which is really essential reading for any liberal who wonders what it's like in the lion's den. I'll post the complete table of contents when the weekend is over, but here's the first six chapters of "The Beast is Red:"
1: An American God
2: Invisible Asia
3: You Shan't Go Home Again
4: In a Mad Frenzy, Stinging Themselves to Eternal Death
5: Soy un Perdidor
6: She Don't Like, She Don't Like, She Don't Like... McCain

Headline News

• The news of the day is that Willard "Mittens" Romney is dropping out of the race. In lieu of an explanation of why I will miss him (mainly that I don't have a candidate to call "Mittens" anymore), I will simply link you to an article entitled "Romney Resigns, Blames Porn for Black Babies," which really sums up quite nicely how much of a twit Mittens really is. I encourage you to read the full speech, where he rails against liberals for being French black hedonist terrorist Teamster gay surrender-monkeys on welfare.
  
  
• I read a good chunk of McCain's speech too, but it was very long and it seemed like most of it was just an apology for not being as crazy as the audience wanted him to be, so I got bored and gave up.
  


• What's the sound of one man giving the finger to the national news media? You wouldn't think it would make a sound, but it turns out that it sounds an awful lot like an Al Gore spokesman saying that Al has made his choice for who he supports for the nomination, but isn't going to tell anyone who it is.
  


• Nothing the president does is illegal if the Department of Justice says it isn't.
  


• Delegate stuff: Obama and Clinton will likely finish the primaries with just about the same number of delegates. That means the superdelegates would decide the nomination. A list of superdelegates and who they are supporting can be found here. Yglesias suggests two things. The first: Hillary's campaign is claiming to have stopped Obama's momentum, and is quietly going about trying to get the Michigan and Florida delegates reseated: both of which indicate that she's on the defensive (remember that she was conveniently the only Democrat on ballots in those states because she didn't bother to withdraw her name, even though both states were stripped of their delegates for holding their primaries too early). Second: if she goes into the convention with the lead on combined super- and regular delegates but is behind on pledged delegates from primaries, she could use the majority to get Florida and Michigan delegates seated to push her over the top.
  
  
• Completely irrelevant news story but another magnificent headline for the day, brought to you by Fox News. "Police: Crack Found in Man's Buttocks."

Rebound

News!

• With all the election news, it's easy to forget about the day to day drudgery of actually, you know, being at war. Needless to say, our troops in Iraq are not forgetting, so they're either donating money from their scant paychecks to anti-war candidates or committing suicide in record numbers. Just to keep things in perspective.
  
  
• A correction from my post from this morning, it looks like Barack Obama not only won more states than Hillary Clinton, but he won more delegates as well (just barely). This doesn't especially bode well for Senator Clinton, who is so low on funds and so skeptical about her ability to raise more that she's loaning her own campaign $5 million dollars, in anticipation of a week with seven primaries where she's only expecting to win in two. Meanwhile, Obama is once again on pace to have another $30 million month.
  
  
• Somehow, and I don't know how but somehow, amidst all of these right-wing cranks getting their knickers in a knot about how the evil (i.e. slightly more moderate on one or two issues) John McCain might get the Republican nomination, Jonah freakin' Goldberg has to be the voice of reason. No, really.
  
  
• Just in case you didn't hear, the final bit of schadenfreude for the Giuliani campaign is this: on a dollars-to-delegates ratio, "America's Mayor" ran the worst campaign in American History, with $50 million dollars spent for a single delegate.
  
  
• In a lot of ways, a brokered convention would be a bad thing for the Democrats. The biggest concern is that the candidates would be dealing with each other up through the end of August, leaving two months for the eventual winner to take their campaign to the GOP, while McCain will have been taking his potshots for months. Nonetheless, reading this breakdown of what exactly an unscripted convention would look like, I AM SO DELIRIOUS WITH EXCITEMENT FOR THE DRAMA OF IT that I almost don't care. I want what's best for the party, and I don't think a brokered convention would be in everyone's best interest, but if it happens, I won't exactly be disappointed.
  
  
• It would be easy, with the Democratic race so close right now, to start breaking down numbers and try to figure out who's stronger with demographics that will matter more, to get the edge on the GOP in November. But Yglesias makes two very strong points against that sort of anticipatory panic.
  
  1. Nearly every poll has indicated that the vast majority of Democrats are happy with both of their options, and that one candidate will have little trouble picking up the voters who went for the other.
     
  2. Voters in Democratic primaries are vastly outnumbering voters in Republican primaries. In the Super Tuesday primaries, Democratic ballots cast outnumbered Republican ballots cast by about 2:1. McCain, Romney and Huckabee combined only drew in about a million more votes than either Obama or Clinton on their own.
     
     
• Rumors that Mittens Romney will be dropping out appear to be inaccurate. Instead, he plans to win the nomination by subverting the electoral process. Go Mittens!
  

Lent!

In religious news, today marks the beginning of the Christian season of Lent, when the Church encourages its followers to give in to the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder and plan on being depressed for about the next 40 days. This willful depression is in anticipation of the day when Jesus, like bears and squirrels, will decide it's warm enough to come out of hibernation. In honor of religious depression, here is a list of ten moderately to severely depressing albums which appear from their titles, to have some sort of religious connotation:

1. Depeche Mode - Songs of Faith & Devotion
2. Swans - Children of God
3. William Elliott Whitmore - Ashes to Dust
4. Kronos Quartet - Black Angels
5. Carla Bozulich - Evangelista
6. The Residents - God in Three Persons
7. Cocorosie - Noah's Ark
8. Various Artists - Plague Songs (It's a concept album compilation about the 10 plagues. Really.)
9. The Birthday Party - Prayers on Fire
10. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Good Son (The title track is written from the perspective the brother of the Prodigal Son, who stayed home dutifully and didn't get treated any better than his ingrate brother.)

Enjoy! (solemnly.)

The Walk of Shame

So, for all of the excitement going into yesterday, for all the supers and the dupers getting bandied about, for all the preposterous euphoria I felt coming into the office having just cast my vote, nothing much really happened. The dust has settled, only for us to realize that it was never really stirred up much in the first place.

Obama won more states, but Clinton took the higher profile ones and will take more delegates. As of this writing, both the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times are reporting national delegate totals with Hillary Clinton at 845 and Barack Obama at 765. Out of a total 1610 there, there's 80 delegates and just under 5% difference in their delegate counts. Josh Marshall thinks that this is really a win for Obama because he managed to squeak a tie when a few weeks ago, he was trailing severely, but I don't think that matters much when he's dealing with an opponent of Hillary Clinton's caliber. She's not going to fall off the wagon just because of a tie. I stand by my assertion from the other day that he'll continue to gain, but he's going to have to work for it. We've still got big delegate states like Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania coming up, so this is still going to remain a fight.

For the Republicans, not only did Super Tuesday not decide anything, it actually made things more unclear. McCain was, as predicted the biggest winner, but not by the margins everyone was expecting. Huckabee did better than expected, keeping his campaign alive, and Romney won just enough (I suspect) for him to justify dropping another $20 million of his own cash to get him to the convention. He's got plenty more delegates than Huckleberry, so if he's in, so is Mittens.

So yeah. Whole lot of nothing.

About once a week,* Dan Froomkin writes a column on the Washington Post site detailing undeniable factual evidence of incompetence or misconduct in the White House which could make a valid case for chasing George W. Bush out of the White House with torches and pitchforks, and yet he rarely gets name-dropped and George W. Bush is still president.

For instance, today's article about how Condi Rice went out of her way to ignore repeated and vehement warnings about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden early in 2001, and how the administration managed to influence the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report. It's sort of a load of crap, in my opinion.

*His column is daily, but he averages to get a jaw-dropper about once a week.

Super Tuesday

Good morning, all. I spent last weekend having (predictably) a thoroughly surreal weekend in Los Angeles. In between improv, Amoeba, and being asked by a bouncer if I was "one of those scientists who blows up buildings," I did manage to catch the news that Barack Obama kicked the shit out of Billary in South Carolina, and picked up the endorsement of every living Kennedy. But I missed pretty much everything else. I've been keeping up this week, but not as well as I'd like. So I'm going to skip my usual deluge of links and just go into what I see happening on Super Tuesday, because it's going to be interesting at the very least.

The Republicans

The Republican race is a little easier for me to predict than the Democrats, which is ironic because it's going to be sloppy. John McCain clearly has the national momentum going right now, and it would appear that unless he makes any serious blunders, he's going to coast right into the nomination. Right? Sort of. Pollster.com (which is a magnificent tool, by the way, and if you're interested in following poll numbers at all, you should be checking it daily) has a very interesting chart up right now showing poll numbers for 14 of the 21 states voting for the GOP on Super Tuesday. As of the time of this writing, it looks like this:


National Poll numbers look like this:



As you can see, John McCain is clearly kicking ass and taking names. This works more in his favor because the Republican system is designed to craft a mandate for the winner. About half of the states voting on Super Tuesday are winner-take-all, so whoever wins gets the whole package. Some have proportional representation, and some have a blend where it's WTA in the individual districts, and then the winners get bonus delegates for being winners. A lot of the state rules for apportioning delegates are really complicated and I won't pretend to understand them. But the point is that while McCain is clearly going to win big, Romney and Huckabee are going to take a chunk out of his ass that's only going to get more painful until the convention. Combined right now, they're polling at about the same place nationally as McCain is. Huck is going to take delegates in the South: in proportional (or semiproportional) states like Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, and his home state of Arkansas, as well as Colorado (the land that gives us Ted Haggard and James Dobson and all of those assholes). Similarly Willard "Mittens" Romney is going to pick up delegates among stick-up-the-ass conservatives in proportional (or semi-proportional) states where McCain might be leading: Illinois and California come to mind. He'll also take Utah and their 36 delegates.

In sum: McCain is going to stay on top, and he's going to keep increasing his lead. But Romney and Huckabee are going to keep racking up enough delegates to be a pain in the ass when it comes to getting his 1,191 delegates at the convention. I suspect that Huckabee will be marginalized fairly quickly, but I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that McCain might pull Romney in as his running mate to solidify support of the GOP establishment in Washington and to add solid business credentials to his existing pork-busting platform. I'm not saying it'll happen for sure, I'm just throwing it out there.

The Democrats

This one is oh, so much more fun, because Barack Obama isn't going to take the lead but he's going to keep it reasonably close. Let's look at the two charts from pollster.com:




What this says: Hillary will win more states, but this isn't nearly as meaningful as it is in the Republican primary, because by Democratic Party rules, all states award delegates proportionally. The momentum is clearly with Obama: those big dots in New York and California are getting closer and closer to that center line as the polls get more recent (a couple of more recent polls actually have Obama taking the lead in California). The second graph is a composite of all the national polls they can get their hands on, and charted on a best fit curve: Obama is very clearly on the upswing and Hillary is sitting there waiting to get overtaken. On the averages, Obama is about 3.5 points behind nationally. While Edwards isn't likely to endorsetoday, everything about him and his campaign suggests that his supporters will likely drift towards Obama. Let's say Obama gets 2/3 of the Edwards support and Hillary gets the other third: Obama picks up 8 points and Hillary picks up four, which puts Obama at 4.5 points ahead.

The Clinton campaign is hoping for a blowout as much as possible: they want Obama good and sunk, even if his losses are only as far as momentum and not on the numbers. Clinton has built herself a campaign built around words like "inevitable," "incumbent," and "juggernaut." That image is best served by steamrolling Obama in as many places as she can: she doesn't just need a victory, she wants an ass-kicking. If he loses bad, he's got to campaign twice as hard to keep up, which is going to be harder because his money will start to dry up.

Obama just needs to keep things close, for two reasons.

1. There are still plenty of states that vote after Tuesday, some of them with a whole lot of delegates (can anyone say Ohio?). Super Tuesday is when the media sprint is supposed to end: everyone wants a definitive victory for someone, which often means backing the winner just because you smell blood in the water. If Obama survives and can keep Hillary's numbers close, everyone realizes that this is going to be a distance race and not a sprint. The frenzy dies down a little bit and voters realize that they've really got two winners, and they can go with someone they like better. My money says that if Obama can keep it close to a tie (or better), he'll prove that he's got just as much of a juggernaut as Hillary and he doesn't raise as many hackles with voters of either party. The conventional wisdom is that Hillary is brilliant and she's cutthroat enough to win at any cost. But I suspect that voters would rather pick someone who can win in a principled battle, who will expand the party (rather than make efforts towards strategic disenfranchisement). I see Hillary as a 51%-er: someone who will do what it takes to get her 270 electoral votes and to hell with the rest. Obama wants everyone to like him, he wants to (or claims to want to) really represent all of America as best he can, and I think that lowers the collective national blood pressure just a little bit.

2. Superdelegates! That's right, regular voter-chosen delegates get to be augmented by beings whose electoral powers transcend that of mortal delegates. Superdelegates are members of the Democratic Party, Democratic members of Congress, Governors, etc. who get to vote as delegates but don't have their support pledged on their behalf by the voters. They get to vote for whoever they like, and damned if there aren't a lot of them: roughly 800 or so. When you need 2,025 delegates to win, 800 superdelegates (about 20% of the total delegate count) are real important. If Obama keeps the primary-elected delegates close, all he has to do is play the nice guy up through the convention and schmooze the hell out of the members of the party. The Clintons (both of'em) are likely to keep fighting hard and keep fighting dirty, and all Barack has to do is be charming and watch her popularity fall. By the end of August, he'll be sitting pretty to convince his fellow elected officials that he's better for the party across the board, and he can take the nomination.

In Sum:
Super Tuesday will not settle anything definitively (it's actually mathematically impossible). It will decide how hard John McCain has to barter before the convention, and it will decide the tactics of the Democratic race.

Where I personally stand on the candidates:
For all of my talking, it should be fairly obvious at this point that I'm backing Barack Obama. But honestly, it's not all that cut-and-dry. So as briefly as I can, I'm going to throw out my feelings on the six remaining candidates worth mentioning.

1. Barack Obama - I don't have quite the hopeless man-crush on Obama that some people (*coughcoughAndrewSullivancough*) do, but I do have a remarkable admiration for the man. I got a chance to see him speak at a small cafe in Chicago when he was running for the Senate primary in January of 2004, and he was every bit as smart and insightful as I could have hoped for him to be. He spoke with equal devotion to both urban renewal and rural concerns. He spoke in terms of finding practical solutions that wouldn't step on anyone's toes, which was his reputation in the Illinois legislature. Honestly, in comparison to what I know the man is capable of, Obama's campaign has been a bit of a disappointment: he has been vague (I'm pretty sick of hearing about "change," honestly; I want specifics), and he has been clumsy, and he has not been half the wily debater that I expected. But I honestly do believe that his promises to bring about a more civilized climate in Washington are not bullshit, and I believe he has the intelligence to build constructive solutions to problems in America and the charisma to get Congress to agree on them. I think he can be a great president.
   
   
2. Hillary Clinton - Hillary is a shark. She will shake any hand to get a vote ahead and stick the knife in the second someone is no longer useful. She is absolutely brilliant, and she is absolutely vicious. If there is a Democratic counterpart to Karl Rove, she is it. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. I do believe she has her ultimate goals in the right place. The Clintons have been slammed from the left for their moderation and devotion to gradual change, but more often than not, they're nudging the country in the right direction. And frankly, politics is a dirty game, and it is not at all terrible to have someone as fiercely, ruthlessly, magnificently competitive on your side. She will do whatever it takes to win, and that's what we're looking for.
   
   
3. John McCain - I disagree with John McCain on a lot of things, but I believe he would be an honorable president. I fear his dedication to continuing the Iraq war, but I believe that he will fight it with decency, without any of this torture crap, and uphold things like the Geneva Conventions and the constitutional bounds of presidential power. Honestly, if it had come three years earlier, I would have supported a plan for a troop surge, because I do tend to lean towards McCain's "you break it, you bought it" mentality. I just don't think that at this point we can really convincingly fix anything in Iraq.
   
   
4. Mike Huckabee - Mike Huckabee would not be disastrous in some ways. Unlike many in his party, he's not allergic to social spending and government programs. He understands that some people don't really get a fair shake and do need a leg up, and he'll give that to them. On the other hand, it's always a MONUMENTALLY BAD IDEA to give religious zealots control of the acquisition and disbursal of knowledge. Abstinence education leads to kids getting pregnant and getting sick. Prohibition of stem cell research costs lives. Blind devotion to the idea that your faith is absolutely right starts extraneous wars. If he were an agnostic, I wouldn't have a huge problem with Huckabee, but he is not, so I am forced to fight his campaign as hard as I can.
   
   
5. Mitt Romney - Mitt Romney is as close as this election will come to posing a candidate that represents a continuation of the Bush years. What's worse, he didn't used to believe all of this crap: he used to be far more reasonable, and he's manufactured the jibberish he's spewing now. But to be fair, George W. Bush can barely speak English and ran several companies into the ground. Mitt Romney is as slick as he can get without sliding off the stage and he's been a magnificently successful businessman. At least that's sort of an improvement? Right? Right?
   
   
6. Ron Paul - Once again, I have major problems with some of Ron Paul's beliefs. But he is more dedicated to his principles than anyone still in the race (in either party), he has done more to invigorate the formerly-non-voting populace than anyone other than Barack Obama, and he's the only GOP candidate opposed to the war in Iraq. I consider myself to be a states' rights liberal, and while I think there are some problems that can only dealt with on a federal level, I appreciate Ron Paul's dedication to delegating as much of it as possible to governments who can focus on problems locally and specifically. I eagerly anticipate his third-party run.