Northman's Fury

It seems a fair number of people are getting into the game of bashing McCain and Clinton for trying to pick up some short-term political points by calling for a temporary suspension of a gas tax. Even perpetual Obama-basher Paul Krugman is willing to give Obama some props for opposing it. He also gives a simple explanation for why it won't help those who actually need the help:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

Krugman's colleague at the Times makes a bit more of the so-called tax plan as it relates to the US's non-existant energy policy, and has a rather pithy way of pointing out it's ultimate effect.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

. . .

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Neither of them are as blunt or as pissed off as Jonathan Alter at Newsweek, though.

Hillary Clinton has now joined John McCain in proposing the most irresponsible policy idea of the year—an idea that actually could aid the terrorists. What's worse, both of them know that suspending the federal gas tax this summer is a terrible pander, and yet they're pushing it anyway for crass political advantage.

Clinton and McCain have learned a destructive lesson from the Bush era: as Bill Clinton said in 2002, it's better politically to be "strong and wrong" than thoughtful and right. The goal is to depict Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist. By any means necessary.

I could highlight a long debate among economists on suspending the gas tax, but there is no debate. Not one respectable economist—and not one environmentalist or foreign policy expert—supports the idea, unless they are official members of the Clinton or McCain campaigns (and even some of them privately oppose it). To relieve suffering at the pump, send another rebate check or provide tax credits or something else, but not this.

His list of reasons why the idea is so bad is rather impressive, and worth the read.

The whole point that people are truly hurting and truly do need help with rising costs is what makes this all so sad. McCain and Clinton are willing to give out false hope to score political points and Obama is left making the proper choice and will likely get hammered for it. If you ever wonder why elections always seem to come down to choosing between bad and worse, this whole, "let's bribe the American public with the false hope that they may get to keep two or three dollars more a week in their pocket", is an excellent example in microcosm. Where policy gimmicks mean more than real effort or real solutions.

Nato, whose membership recently defended and encouraged a province of Serbia to breakaway and declare independence, is scolding Russia over a couple of breakaway provinces of Georgia.

Nato has warned Russia that its recent troop build-up in Georgia's two breakaway regions undermines its neighbour's territorial integrity.

Russia's moves in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were raising tensions in the area, a Nato spokesman said.

Moscow has accused Georgia of preparing to invade Abkhazia, and says it is also boosting Russian peacekeeping forces there and in South Ossetia.

. . .

Russia has kept a peacekeeping force in Abkhazia and South Ossetia under an agreement made following the wars of the 1990s, when the regions broke away from Tbilisi and formed links with Moscow.

There are around 2,000 Russians posted in Abkhazia, and about 1,000 in South Ossetia.

Tensions between Russia and Georgia have flared up recently, despite Russia lifting economic sanctions against Georgia earlier this month.

Last week, Georgia accused a Russian plane of shooting down an unmanned Georgian spy plane - which Russian authorities insisted was shot down by Abkhaz rebels.

And on Tuesday, Georgia said it was blocking Russia's entry to the World Trade Organization.

It's hard to say at this point whether the tensions will increase to the point of open fighting between the two sides. The breakaway provinces point to Kosovo as a precedent for their own situation, but of course when seen through the lens of the new Cold War, Kosovo's breaking away was good because it weakened a Russian ally. Abkhazia and South Ossetia breaking away are bad because they're tied closely to Russia.

On the bright side, at least George Bush never got his way in making Georgia a Nato member state, which would have put the entire alliance at risk of war with Russia should this get uglier than it already is.

While most people are distracted by the latest emanations coming from Obama's former pastor in the continuing Democratic Fratricide of 2008, (on which admittedly I spend far too much time on myself.), the situation in the already mostly forgotten war in Afghanistan grows steadily worse.

The insurgency in Afghanistan has not been "contained," Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell testified before a Senate subcommittee in February. "It's been sustained in the south, it's grown a bit in the east, and what we've seen are elements of it spread to the west and the north."

A recent study by Sami Kovanen, an analyst with the security firm Vigilant Strategic Services of Afghanistan, echoed this assessment. He reported 465 insurgent attacks in areas outside the restive southern regions during the first three months of 2008, a 35 percent increase compared with the same period last year. In the central region around Kabul there have been 80 insurgent attacks from January through March of this year, a 70 percent jump compared to the first three months of last year.

The numbers are part of a nationwide trend of rising violence. In the southern and southeastern provinces, including the insurgent hotbeds of Kandahar and Helmand, guerrilla attacks spiked by 40 percent, according to Mr. Kovanen's research.

Kabul itself has been largely free from the violence, but as Sunday's attack shows, there are signs that the Taliban's presence is growing here, too. On the sprawling, serene campus of Kabul University, where the nation sends many of its best and brightest, the Taliban has reached an unprecedented level of influence, students say.

Given NATO is already stretched way past its limits, and that only a few countries are actually willing to place their soldiers in highly volatile areas where combat operations are necessary, the spreading insurgency holds the distinct possibility of causing the entire operation to collapse.

What that will mean for Afghanistan or the situation across the border in Pakistan is anybody's guess, but I doubt it will be pleasant.

This is why it's a bad idea to dig yourself deeper and deeper into a hole.

A topic provoking much discussion, particularly the dangers it holds for the party as it (eventually) gets around to trying to wrest the White House from the Republicans. Makes for some pretty good quotes.

The problem is not that Hillary Clinton is still in the race. She has every right to be. It is that she is running the kind of race that she is. Having failed to convince voters of the viability of her own candidacy, she is now committed to proving the unviability of his.

Hillary once said it takes a village to raise a child. Now she seems determined to destroy the village in order to save it.

or,

Now, Clinton and Obama will inflict themselves on the voters of Indiana and North Carolina and continue to make themselves less attractive to the general electorate. Obama's weakness among working-class whites - glaringly exposed in Pennsylvania - raise questions about his viability in Rust Belt swing states. Clinton's incessant attacks may have helped her win Ohio and Pennsylvania, but they have come at a price - driving up her negatives in the national polls, broadening the perception that she is untrustworthy, and generally damaging her standing with independents who like McCain already.

And the longer Obama and Clinton battle, the more invested in victory - and resistant to unity - their partisans will become. Right now, as many as 25 percent are vowing to support McCain or stay home in November if their candidate is denied the nomination. Some of that is probably just angry talk, the kind that is cheap in April. I suspect we'll know more in June. If the primary season concludes with a scintilla of clarity, perhaps the fence-sitting superdelegates will tilt decisively and end this thing.

But if there is no clarity in June, and if (for example) Clinton spends the summer grasping and clawing at a wounded Obama, like the Terminator after its skin had been stripped and its legs blown off . . . well, we know what could happen at convention time, and beyond.

Democrats are probably in no mood to take advice from a founding Republican, but Abe Lincoln's famous warning to the nation seems apt at the moment. He said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." And he would know. He was instrumental in consigning the fractious Whigs to the dustbin of history.

Or how about some wise words from Clinton supporter George McGovern:

"After I had the nomination won and everything except the crowning at the convention, the other candidates that I had defeated in the primaries and the caucuses ganged up on me and spent the next month just bad mouthing me around the country," he said. "And, of course the Nixon people used some of the quotes and threw them back at me in the general election."

It is in this regard -- not necessarily his general election defeat -- that McGovern worries history could end up repeating itself. Noting that Obama seems poised to be the eventually nominee, though believing Sen. Hillary Clinton should stay in the race, he called for a more civil discourse between the two candidates.

. . .

This, however, is not the only similarity McGovern draws between his run for the White House and the current process. In '72, after he won the California primary and clinched the nomination, McGovern's Democratic opponents argued that the delegation should have been rewarded on a proportional basis, rather than winner-take-all. It was, McGovern says, a changing of the rules in mid-game that resulted both in the weakening of his campaign and his limping into the convention. Thirty-six years later, he sees parallels with the Clinton campaign's push to count the results of the non-DNC-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries.

"We can't overturn those rules now that the counting is over," he said. "I think Barack didn't even enter one contest [Michigan]. Those states knew what the rules were, all the candidates knew what the rules were, and to change it now I think is wrong."

And while Hillary and her supporters may not like to admit it, the data supports the argument that Obama is the more electable of the two Democrats.

It's electability, stupid.

That's what Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been spinning to super-delegates and anyone else who will listen since she lost her grip on once-inevitable nomination.

There's just one problem – when it comes to independent voters, those crucial swing votes in swing states, Hillary doesn't hold the electability edge: Barack Obama does.

Independent voters favor Obama by a 2 to 1 margin over Hillary – 49% to 24% – according to a NBC/WSJ poll taken after the Jeremiah Wright scandal in late March. His approval rating among Republicans is almost twice Hillary's as well – 19% to 10%.

Crossover appeal is the key indicator of electability – especially for Democrats. Despite Democratic dominance of Congress during most of the 20th Century, no Democratic president managed to win more than 51% of the popular vote, with the exceptions of FDR and LBJ. What's the lesson? Democrats especially depend on Independent voters and even some centrist Republicans to win the White House.

That's true now more than ever: Independent voters are the fastest growing and largest segment of the American electorate, as detailed in former Clinton and Bloomberg pollster Doug Schoen's new book "Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System."

Obama's Independent edge has already had an impact in key 2008 swing states like Virginia, where independents made up 22% of the February 12th open primary. Obama won their support by a 2 to 1 margin, on his way to a 64-35 blowout victory.

And finally, a point I've raised before regarding whether or not Hillary really can withstand the Republican attack machine any better than Obama.

Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

My only hope now is that Obama wins both North Carolina and Indiana, and that those victories have the effect of forcing Clinton out. Because if they don't, and if Clinton continues on like that fleshless Terminator all the way to the convention in August, there won't be enough time for the Democratic Party to heal the divisions that have been created in time to take on McCain.

While I doubt Ron Paul's supporters will cause as much grief to the GOP as the continued battle between Clinton and Obama is causing to the Democrats, it is nice to see that his activist base is still quite active.

Outmaneuvered by raucous Ron Paul supporters, Nevada Republican Party leaders abruptly shut down their state convention and now must resume the event to complete a list of 31 delegates to the GOP national convention.

Outnumbered supporters of expected Republican presidential nominee John McCain faced off Saturday against well-organized Paul supporters. A large share of the more than 1,300 state convention delegates enabled Paul supporters to get a rule change positioning them for more national convention delegate slots than expected.

"I've seen factions walk out. I've never seen a party walk out," said Jeff Greenspan, regional coordinator for the Paul campaign.

McCain and his campaign is out making a big deal over a spokesperson of Hamas saying nice things about Obama, and painting himself as their "worst nightmare".

“…I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” said McCain. “So apparently has [Sandinista leader] Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare

. . .

McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told CNN's Dana Bash that the Hamas view was "a fair issue for the American people to ponder should he be the Democratic nominee for president."

“Hamas has said they want Barack Obama to win. The reason for that is his policy. He wants to negotiate with the terrorist-funding, nuclear-aspiring, holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening dictator of Iran.

More of the, "Vote for me or the terrorists win" and smear by association kind of claptrap we've all grown used to hearing from the Republicans. (I'll await the Clinton campaigns attacks along the same lines in the near future.)

There is, of course, a worse kind of implication in this kind of thinking, one that Matt Yglesias does a good job of expounding:

. . . this way of looking at the world reveals a seriously flawed foreign policy outlook. Consider Saddam Hussein. He's a bad dude. And which American president is his worst nightmare? Well, it's George W. Bush. Thanks to Bush, Saddam got booted from power and killed. Compared to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Dubya was a disaster for Saddam. But of course Dubya's Iraq policy has also been a disaster for the United States of America, whereas Clinton and Papa Bush ran policies that made us better off.

Add to that the fact that Dubya's policies have also proven to be one of al Qaeda's biggest recruiting boons, and you get the idea that designing your foreign policy solely to annoy specific enemies generally doesn't make your country safer. But c'mon! Saddam is dead! That has to be worth a few trillion dollars, tens or even hundreds of thousands of American casualties, and uncounted, (literally), Iraqi dead, not to mention lost American prestige, influence and deterrence value, doesn't it? It had better, because at the rate the Democratic fratricide is going, soon-to-be-President McCain will be keeping the US there for the foreseeable future.

While we're at it, maybe Senator McCain can tell us all why he thinks it best to allow bin Laden to control US foreign policy? Because if you think what Hamas thinks of Obama's foreign policy is important, I'm pretty sure you should wonder why McCain says we should do exactly what Bin Laden wants us to do.

I really hate to see what will happen when Hillary loses on May 6th.

Campaign finance records released this week show that a growing number of Clinton's early supporters migrated to Obama in March, after he achieved 11 straight victories. Of those who had previously made maximum contributions to Clinton, 73 wrote their first checks to Obama in March. The reverse was not true: Of those who had made large contributions to Obama last year, none wrote checks to Clinton in March.

"I think she is destroying the Democratic Party," said New York lawyer Daniel Berger, who had backed Clinton with the maximum allowable donation of $2,300. "That there's no way for her to win this election except by destroying [Obama], I just don't like it. So in my own little way, I'm trying to send her a message."

The message came in the form of a $2,300 contribution to Obama.

Donors are not the only ones who have made the leap. Gabriel Guerra-Mondragón served as an ambassador to Chile during Bill Clinton's presidency, considered himself a close friend of Sen. Clinton, and became a "Hill-raiser" by bringing in about $500,000 for her presidential bid.

But he had a fitful few weeks as the battle between Clinton and Obama turned increasingly negative. Last week, he decided he had seen enough.

"We're just bleeding each other out," Guerra-Mondragón said when asked why he had decided to join Obama's finance committee. "Looking at it as coldly as I can, I just don't see how Senator Clinton can overcome Senator Obama with delegates and popular votes. I want this fight to be over -- the quicker, the better."

The Obama converts include William Louis-Dreyfus. The billionaire New York financier said he had been impressed by Clinton's performance in the Senate and distressed by eight years of the Bush administration when he donated the maximum to her campaign last August. Then, he said, he began watching more closely.

"However much one might have supported the Clintons, or one might support the usual suspects in the Democratic Party, I began to believe Obama represents a new approach. He gives off such a sense of relevance that he's sort of irresistible," Louis-Dreyfus said.

He also expressed, as did other big givers who crossed to Obama, exasperation about the tone of the Clinton campaign and frustration with the candidate herself.

"At the end of the day, all she had to do was open her mouth for me not to believe her," Louis-Dreyfus said.

As Matt Yglesias notes, the real surprise here is that more of Hillary's supporters haven't realized that her continued campaign is doing more to help John McCain than to increase her own chances at the nomination. A good example of this came from the usual suspects at Talkleft and No Quarter over the latest Rasmussen poll out of Pennsylvania.

TalkLeft

A new Rasmussen Pennsylvania poll finds Hillary Clinton still more likely than Barack Obama to beat John McCain in in November.

No Quarter:

In the critical state of Pennsylvania, Rasmussen Reports in a poll released today that Hillary leads McCain by 5 points but McCain beats Obama by 1 point.

In their bashing of Obama, they seem to have missed, (or just choose to ignore), the main message of the Rasmussen poll:

What a difference two weeks of intense campaigning can make. The final two weeks of campaigning in the Pennsylvania Primary may not have changed the outcome of the Democratic race, but it helped John McCain in the Keystone State.

Two weeks ago, in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a nine-point lead over McCain and Barack Obama had an eight-point edge over the Republican hopeful. Now, however, Clinton’s lead is down to five points and Obama trails McCain by a point.

. . .

McCain and Obama are each viewed favorably by 51% of the state’s voters, Clinton by 49%. For Obama, that’s a six-point decline over the past two weeks. Clinton’s numbers are down four points. McCain has gained a point during the same two week period.

The infighting is hurting both Democrats while McCain coasts along, but so long as Hillary's supporters remain blind to that fact, the bloodletting among the Democrats will continue.

Turns out telling people you'll obliterate a country has the effect of making some people a tad nervous.

Jaded American insiders shrugged off the remark as typical campaign season bluster, filed away with myriad other exaggerations and gaffes.

But it prompted shock overseas as well as headlines from Bulgaria to New Zealand.

The statement triggered alarm bells in the Persian Gulf, which would likely suffer the consequences of any war between Iran and the U.S. In a harshly worded editorial, the Saudi-based daily Arab News trashed Clinton's comment today as insane:

Update:

All that said, I don't agree with this:

If so, it cannot be assumed that Hillary Clinton as president would be less irrationally hawkish and more restrained in the unleashing of military force than John McCain. The latter, at least, has personal experience with the true, on-the-ground costs of militarism gone wild.

Forget that. McCain is more hawkish than Bush and can't even keep the major players in the game straight. As President, he'll be a disaster, which is why I so dislike Hillary copping his lines so often in her campaign to try and ruin Obama, but she'd still make a better president than McCain.

An interesting story whose theme has popped up before in the BBC this morning. Syria and Israel are talking through third parties about a peace agreement, one which would include the return of the Golan Heights to Syria.

Israel has passed a message to Syria that it would withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace, according to a Syrian government minister.

The expatriates minister, Buthaina Shaaban, said the message had been passed on by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

. . .

Israeli authorities, for their part, have demanded that Syria abandon its support for Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups before any agreement.

The last peace talks between the two countries broke down in 2000.

The last peace talks broke down in no small part due to US pressure after George Bush was elected president. And look here! The US is suddenly bringing up the Syria/North Korea nuclear link again.

A video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping to construct a reactor similar to one that produces plutonium for North Korea's nuclear arsenal, according to senior U.S. officials who said it would be shared with lawmakers today.

. . .

But beginning today, intelligence officials will tell members of the House and Senate intelligence, armed services and foreign relations committees that the Syrian facility was not yet fully operational and that there was no uranium for the reactor and no indication of fuel capability, according to U.S. officials and intelligence sources.

David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program.

"The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities," he said. "The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program."

It is also noted that the site isn't being rebuilt, so the question has to be asked just why the US is suddenly pushing this information out now?

It is, in fact, a bit of a twofer for the neocons. Such speculation on Syria's intentions deflates the chances for peace between it and Israel, plus they have the added benefit of knocking the North Korean talks off-stride; the one place where the Bush administration has at long last actually tried diplomacy and has been at least moderately successful. Which of course undermines neocon arguments about the same kind of tactics being useless against other members of the "axis of evil".

Looking at CNN and memeorandum this morning, all of the focus seems to be on Indiana, which holds its primary on May 6. The same day North Carolina holds its primary, but despite it being a bigger state with more voters and more delegates at stake, it's like they've decided it isn't important.

Why is that? I mean, sure, Indiana is the more competitive race of the two, but if Obama can be called unelectable by Hillary supporters because he can only close the gap in a state that was tailor-made for Hillary to win, why can't we question why Hillary can just ignore and be blown out in states that favour Obama? Apparently the media has decided to buy Clinton's line that the only "important" states are the ones she has a chance of winning in.

Too bad for Hillary that isn't the way reality works.

The Supreme Court offered unanimous support for police Wednesday by allowing drug evidence gathered after an arrest that violated state law to be used at trial, an important search-and-seizure case turning on the constitutional limits of "probable cause."

. . .

vid Lee Moore was stopped by Portsmouth, Virginia, officers five years ago for driving his vehicle on a suspended license. Under state law in such incidents, only a summons is to be issued and the motorist is to be allowed to go. Instead, detectives detained Moore for almost an hour, arrested him, then searched him and found cocaine.

At trial, Moore's lawyers tried to suppress the evidence, but the state judge allowed it, even though the court noted the arrest violated state law. A police detective, asked why the man was arrested, replied, "Just our prerogative."

The specific case aside, any time the police are allowed to violate their own rules and suffer no consequences, the rest of us have lost a little piece of our freedom.

You know, thinking about it, you can't help but feel sorry for Hillary and her supporters. She went in to Pennsylvania needing a huge victory not only there, but in every single remaining contest so that she could pull even with Obama on delegates.

After six weeks of the most vicious campaigning, helped along by several gaffes from her opponent, Clinton held on to enough of a lead to claim a respectable victory by a not-insignificant margin.

All of that, and the mathematical possibility that she'll catch up to Obama has actually decreased. She went in needing 65% in all of the remaining contests. She only got around 55% in Pennsylvania, which means she now needs something like 69% in what remains. That has got to suck.

Not that I expect it to deter her or her supporters. They'll keep campaigning right up until McCain's inauguration.

Despite my somewhat facetious argument that Obama would be able to pull off a victory last night, the winner was the one conventional wisdom and polling had predicted. Still by a larger margin than I would have thought, which as some have said, is large enough to keep her in the race and too small to make much difference otherwise.

I go back to this chart I posted way back in the beginning of March.

Click for larger

If anything, Obama has outperformed the chart, winning more delegates in Texas, winning by larger margins in Wyoming and Mississippi, and narrowing the gap in Pennsylvania. At each point, Hillary's chances get slimmer as the remaining contests shrink in number, but I fully expect her to carry on regardless.

Barring a miracle, Clinton will win Pennsylvania, though probably not by the massive margin she needs, not that it will matter to her or her supporters. I also fully expect some variation of the “kitchen sink” fusillade in the closing days of the Pennsylvania campaign so that she can pad her victory by as much as possible. . . .

That means she stays in until at least the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. NC appears solid for Obama. Indiana is less certain, but most polls favour Obama as well. (ed - actually, they're inconclusive at the moment, but I can expect Obama to pull his support up as he has everywhere else.) Obama takes another late-round flurry, but probably wins both, wiping out any gains Clinton made in Pennsylvania.

It would be nice if this decided the contest, but a look at the calendar shows that a week from these primaries is the one in West Virginia, which favours Clinton, and the week after that she has another solid state in Kentucky while Obama picks up Oregon. That only leaves Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico. Clinton shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing herself to carry on through all of them, continuing to complain about the Michigan and Florida primaries she once agreed were not to be counted all the while.

Basically, regardless how slim her chances get, it is pretty easy to see Hillary continuing to potshot Obama all the way to the convention in August, wearing both of them down to the point neither is capable of taking on McCain.

Short of some unusual event that causes Clinton's campaign to implode, the fight goes on, and on, and on. And Hillary has clearly decided to go with the Rovian attack machine style of politics now, using the excuse of, "the Republicans will do it", to satisfy her followers who would normally be disgusted at such tactics were the Republicans actually doing it. And Obama has had to start responding in kind, which is really beginning to fray the party:

Nearly seven in 10 voters said Clinton has attacked Obama unfairly, and half said the same of Obama's campaign against Clinton. Those are the highest numbers saying the candidates have unjustly characterized each other since before Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5, according to network exit polls conducted with voters as they left polling places.

Barely more than a third of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania said they would be happy with Obama atop the Democratic ticket; less than half of those backing Obama said they would be satisfied with Clinton as the one leading the challenge of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumed GOP nominee.

Clinton voters also appear especially likely to say they will abandon the party if their candidate is not the nominee. Fifty-three percent of those voting for her yesterday said they would cast a ballot for Obama in a hypothetical November matchup against McCain. More than a quarter said they would vote for the Republican, and about two in 10 said they would not vote at all. More of those supporting Obama in the primary, 68 percent, said they would vote for Clinton over McCain in the fall, if that became their choice.

McCain, Bush, and the rest, must be laughin their asses off.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

No. Wait. Seriously.

Osama bin Laden's chief deputy in an audiotape Tuesday accused Shiite Iran of trying to discredit the Sunni al-Qaida terror network by spreading the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

. . .

Al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah's Al-Manar television of starting the rumor.

"The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.

And attention to Senator McCain! You might want to pay attention to just how Zawahiri views the Iranian regime:

The comments reflected al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri's increasing criticism of Iran. Al-Zawahri has accused Iran in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

. . .

"Iran's aim here is also clear — to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban.

A few more comments like this, and McCain may be able to keep the two separate in his mind. And if the US is truly lucky, they'll elect somebody with the brains to exploit this division rather than continue the Bush tradition of trying to force the two enemies into an alliance.

Yesterday, it was the use of bin Laden in a campaign ad. Today, the threat to obliterate Iran should it attack Israel. (What Israel's impressive nuclear arsenal will be employed to do, she doesn't say.)

Apparently threatening to "wipe countries off the map" is a good way to show your foreign policy expertise.

One question: If threatening to "obliterate" Iran is what it takes to proves Hillary's tougher and more foreign policy wise than Obama, who will she be threatening with wholesale destruction in an attempt to out-tough McCain?

For whatever reason, the only voting block that doesn't seem to have decided it's overall allegience is the Caucasian Male. As a result, the Pennsylvania primary will be determined by who these strange and heretofore powerless beings decide to support.

Given the way the race has been going the last couple of weeks, that means they will have to decide whether or not they wish to be painted as racists or sexists.

Condescending shows she's learned well from her mentor:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Rice, in the Iraqi capital to tout security gains and what she calls an emerging political consensus, said al-Sadr is content to issue threats and edicts from the safety of Iran, where he is studying. Al-Sadr heads an unruly militia that was the main target of an Iraqi government assault in the oil-rich city of Basra last month, and his future role as a spoiler is an open question.

"I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr's latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it's all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that's the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he's in Iran."

I'm sure all the American soldiers who will die in such an uprising won't be bothered by the fact that you're safely thousands of miles away in Washington.

More here.

Clinton, Obama insult each other while storming through Pennsylvania

This can't end soon enough.

An important story, if unfortunately unsurprising to those paying attention these last six or seven years, from the New York Times about the propaganda war being waged on the American people by the Bush administration.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

And if the analysts refused to play ball and continued to criticize the administration and its handling of the war, access is cut off and they lose their competitive advantage.

Not surprisingly, a fair bit of this comes out of the ideological view of the Vietnam conflict:

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”.

A few of these guys have come clean and been angered by how they were being played. The rest still play along for the access and the contracts that comes with it. And somehow I'm betting the fact that the Bush administration has and is waging a Psyops war against it's own people will be memory-holed as just some sort of partisan, antiwar attack rather than as the serious threat to democracy that it is.

I wrote a long post about this on Wednesday, but it appears in their final push for Pennsylvania voters, both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are digging deeper into the mud for slinging at each other.

The Obama campaign has apparently decided that now would be a good time to start pounding Hillary over the Bosnia flap. It isn't. Obama's comments during the debate were the right response. Despite the fact it shows her to be a rather enormous fibber, it isn't a fib about policy. Attack her over her hubby's support of the Columbia Free Trade agreement that she says she opposes. That at least has policy implications.

As stupid a move as I think that is, the Clinton campaign had to go one way the fuck over. Not content with amplifying right-wing talking points or leaping ahead of stories on the justification that, "the Republicans will do it in the fall", the Clinton campaign is now handing out blueprints for the right on how to launch even more devastating smears.

A high-ranking labor supporter of Hillary Clinton is distributing to union leaders and to Democratic strategists a document detailing the radical activities of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two former members of the '70s group the Weather Underground, who decades later, in Chicago, crossed paths with Barack Obama.

The document - a three-page emailed essay by Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists as Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) -- takes both literary and political license to outline what Sloan believes would be the thrust of a hypothetical Republican campaign against Obama focusing on his tangential connection to Ayers and Dohrn.

The goal of the essay appears to be to discredit Obama as the prospective Democratic presidential nominee.

Listen, we know the Republicans are going to bring this shit up, but do you really have to game-plan it for them? Honestly, it's getting hard to tell just whose side these guys are on. I'll let Bob Herbert do the conclusion:

The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential election. This is a skill that comes naturally to the party. There is no such thing as a can’t-miss year for the Democrats. They are truly gifted at finding ways to lose.

. . .

That’s been it for the party for the past 40 years. The Democrats have become so psychologically battered by these many decades in the leadership wilderness that they consider the Clinton years, during which the president was impeached and they lost control of both houses of Congress, to have been a period of triumph.

Now comes 2008, a can’t-lose year if there ever was one. A united Democratic Party should be able to win this election in a walk. The economy is terrible and getting worse. The Republicans are demoralized. John McCain is no J.F.K. And the country wants to elect a Democrat.

So what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with flamethrowers, gleefully trying to incinerate the prospects of the party’s leading candidate, Barack Obama. As Bill Clinton put it last month: “If a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.”

. . .

Voters across the country seem disgusted with this state of affairs. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson of ABC News are being pilloried for the way they conducted Wednesday’s debate. Hillary Clinton’s disapproval ratings have climbed into a zone that makes it legitimate to wonder whether she could defeat Senator McCain. And much of the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding Mr. Obama’s candidacy has cooled.

That raucous laughter you hear in the background is coming from the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, President Bush and Senator McCain. They can’t believe their good fortune.

Maybe they can pull themselves out of this spiral. The results on Tuesday will tell us more, but if the campaign goes on much longer, the Democratic Party and their candidate will be a gutted out husk before the Republicans even get started on them.

The polls are all over the place, with Gallup showing the race tightening and Newsweek showing Obama pulling way ahead nationally. But I'm going to ignore those, because they're based on statistical models that can be thrown off when one or the other candidate's supporters are more fired up than normal.

And ObamaNation is fired up, thanks in no small part to the travesty of a "debate". And I do mean fired up. How many spontaneous marches have taken place during the primary season so far?

Clinton, on the other hand, is out slamming the party's "activist base" as the reason she's losing. If it wasn't for all those people Obama has inspired to get involved in politics, she'd certainly be doing better. After all, the best way to beat the Republicans is apparently to count on your base's apathy (?).

I think the highly pissed-off and energized Obama base is going to swamp the polls on Tuesday and deliver the upset coup de grace to the Clintons.

Granted that's a guess with far too little data for me to be sure, but what the hell? It's not like I'm getting paid for this.

This story just boggles the mind:

Iran is installing vending machines in Tehran to sell cheap condoms and syringes to drug addicts to prevent the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, an official said on Wednesday.

"Five of these machines which have been made will be installed in five of Tehran city's welfare shelters for addicts," the deputy head of Iran's anti-narcotics organization, Mohammad Reza Jahani, said.

"Condoms, syringes, bandages and plasters will be easily accessible just by inserting a coin. This protects addicts from acquiring AIDS and hepatitis," he added, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

He said that a single 500 rial (five cents) coin is required to purchase the items.

. . .

Condoms are freely available in Iranian pharmacies.

The Islamic republic in the 1990s started actively promoting contraception as it encouraged families to have just two children to prevent the country's population growth increasing further.

Iran has tried to change its approach to drug addicts by treating users as "people who need help" rather than throwing them into already overcrowded jails.

Now compare the above policies with those advocated by the Conservative Movement.

Just a thought, but if you can't be more progressive than the Mullah's in Teheran, you're shouldn't be considered part of the mainstream.

Unfortunately not very far off the mark.

I recorded the debate while I was out so I could give it a watch and see if there would be any substantive boosts or fumbles. Here is a quick summary

Questions about "bittergate", with Clinton going after Obama

Questions about Wright, with Clinton going after Obama

A question about the Bosnia story, with Obama saying Clinton's entitled to a few gaffes of her own and that such stupid focusing on such things is a large part of what's wrong with politics in the US.

Which leads to a question on flag pins. Really? Fucking flag pins! 45 fucking minutes and there hasn't been a single fucking policy question yet. No, no, lets talk about fucking flag pins.

And a follow-up about William Ayers! Obama beats Stephanopolus over the head with his stupidity, asking why he should be held responsible for something that happened when he was eight and his next line was really good one:

“I’m friendly with Tom Coburn too, and he’s a far-right conservative who thinks we ought to use the death penalty on abortion providers. Do you want me to apologize for what he said too?”

Hillary thinks they were good questions. That's as far as I got.

You want to know how bloody fucking bad this debate was? Jonah fucking Goldberg is making sense!

I'm no leftwing blogger, but I can only imagine how furious they must be with the debate so far. Nothing on any issues. Just a lot of box-checking on how the candidates will respond to various Republican talking points come the fall. Now I think a lot of those Republican talking points are valid and legitimate. But if I were a "fighting Dem" who thinks all of these topics are despicable distractions from the "real issues," I would find this debate to be nothing but Republican water-carrying.

And I'm never getting that hour back.

I have to feel somewhat sorry for US Democrats these days. Six months ago, who would have thought they’d find themselves in this position? They had before them a bounty of highly qualified and inspiring candidates running for president, while the Republicans fielded a group of has-beens, never-weres, and you got to be kidding mes. Now though, the Republicans are the ones sitting back with smirks on their faces while the Democrats snarl and snipe at each other.

If the Democrats go down to defeat this November, a large part of the blame will fall on Hillary Clinton’s shoulders, (according to ABC's latest poll, of the 41% of Democrats who think the campaign is "mostly negative", over half blame Clinton compared to just 14% who blame Obama).

To my thinking, not an inconsiderable part of that is deserved. It wasn’t always this way. While her campaign made some cheap shots and other ridiculous stagings back in January once in became apparent the Obama campaign wasn’t going to buckle under the Super Duper Tuesday wave, the campaign remained a remarkably clean and high-minded affair.

After Super Tuesday, however, the Clintons found themselves flatfooted and without a plan for the rest of the campaign. Obama was better-prepared and had better managed his finances and began racking up victory after victory, taking a firm delegate lead and finally starting to be competitive in the national Democratic polls.

The Clinton campaign began all sorts of rationalizations as to why they deserved the nomination despite Obama’s lead. States she lost don’t matter, caucuses are unfair, her primary wins in big states and swing states meant somehow Obama couldn't win them in the general, her flip-flop on seating Michigan and Florida, if the Democrats used winner-take-all she’d be ahead, pledged delegates aren’t really pledged.

By mid-February, her antics were already inspiring rants from me. I was talked down since her path to the nomination was at that point still relatively viable, but that has changed. Hillary’s only chance now is to destroy Barack Obama utterly so that the super-delegates have no choice but to pick her as the nominee. Given her antics of the last several weeks, and particularly the last few days, that appears to be precisely what she plans to do. The fact that doing so will destroy her own chances as well has never seemed to occur to her or her supporters.

Back in early March, one of her biggest supporters made this plea:

What if she instead starts attacking McCain and making the case that she is better able to run as a true Democrat against McCain’s strengths and weaknesses than Obama can? What if she draws the contrast with Obama not with personal or character attacks, but with direct arguments that she is a better advocate for progressive causes and concerns against McCain on issues such as the economy, health care, protecting Social Security, tax fairness, the Supreme Court, energy independence, and the environment? In other words, what if she runs more as a Democrat than he does?

Having the two Democrats tag-teaming McCain would have been a lovely campaign to watch. Unfortunately, Hillary apparently decided that running as a Democrat wasn't going to do the trick. Her campaign is now predicated on the belief that she alone can stand up to the Republican attack machine since she has been through its fire before while Obama is too untested and soft to take a chance on. There are two points to make about that.

First is the assertion that Obama is untested and incapable of defending himself from the Republican attack machine. That may have been a concern back before the campaign got going, but nobody can really believe that he hasn’t been tested now. The Clinton campaign has not only boasted about throwing the “kitchen sink” at him, they’ve co-opted the Republicans lines in their attempts to hammer him. The major backlash against her started when she repeatedly painted herself and Republican John McCain as the only candidates experienced enough to be president. She went even further than McCain during the blow-up over Rev. Wright’s comments, and it has been her that is leading the attacks over Obama's "bitter" comments.

Attacks like these are far more potent when launched by your own party as compared to being fired from across the partisan divide, and yet Obama has weathered them and continued to eat away at her support.

Even more damaging for her own prospects, most of these attacks are tailor-made for McCain even if she does win. Whether it be experience, answering the 3am call, not being a liberal snob, or courage in a war zone, McCain soundly thrashes her on them all.

The general election campaign is still going to be far harsher than the primaries have been. Obama will face questions about Rezko and Wright. He’ll be painted by the Kristols and Liebermans as far-left radical Marzist commie and face inquiries over his past acquaintance with William Ayers. There will be racism from the subtle, to the Geraldine Ferraro condescending, to the outright and blatant.

But the Clinton camp can hardly expect they’ll get off easier. They’ve provided enough ammunition from this campaign alone to paint her as a cold, calculating political opportunist, a flip-flopper, and a liar. There’s the Bosnia story that refuses to die. There are the conflicts over the Columbia Free Trade Agreement she says she opposes, but had to demote her chief strategist over and try to laugh off questions about her husband’s involvement. I doubt the Republicans are going to allow her to laugh that one off in the general, and that doesn’t even get into her own conflicted history with trade issues or her time on Wal-Mart’s board, or her less than populous approach to working-class whites during her husband's administration. And regardless of the fact that its already been pawed through, the long Clinton baggage train from cattle futures to Whitewater to Vince Fosters death to Bill’s indiscretions will all be brought out of the woodwork should she somehow clinch the nomination. Add to all that the misogyny and hostility of the press corps.

Which leads to the second point: Can she really weather the Republican attacks better than Obama? Look at the way the two of them have dealt with the most damaging scandal of their respective campaigns so far.

For Obama, it was the furor surrounding controversial clips from his former preacher, Reverend Wright. When it became apparent the guilt by association meme was hurting him in the polls, Obama went out and gave a speech that not only dampened the fire, but raised the respect many had for him and possibly even converted more people to his campaign for the candid and honest way he addressed the issue.

Clinton’s Bosnia flap was entirely self-inflicted. For whatever reason, she went far beyond mere exaggeration to repeatedly make it appear as though she had put her life, (and her daughter’s, and Sinbad’s and Sheryl Crow’s) on the line to go there. After it became blatantly obvious just how outrageous the story was, her defense was to claim she merely “misspoke”, drop the story, and hope it would go away, (not helping, Bill).

Again, I don’t think the Republicans are going to be kind enough to ignore it. Just hoping the bad stories go away, doesn’t strike me as very comforting as to her ability to face the attack dogs once they’re unleashed.

And Hillary would be facing a far more daunting challenge come the general. Her negative campaigning has boomeranged and made her the least likeable of all the candidates, hurting her more than even her target, Obama. Nevertheless, she looks set to continue the attempted knee-capping all the way to the convention in August, by which time Obama may be as unelectable as she’s now claiming, her a pariah, and a generation of voters lost to the Democrats forever, (not that its stopping Mr. Helpful from insulting them already).

The only real hope for Democrats at this point is that Clinton’s latest tactic causes her to overreach too far and that Obama’s counterpunch puts her down enough that support unravels.

Because if it doesn’t, the entire Democratic Party is going to be bitter as they watch President McCain sworn in.

Apparently, the only people "bitter" about his comments are the elitist multimillionaires trying to claim he's out of touch.