Shoot! You were planning a rice-and-beans dinner party for 100, and you thought for sure your local Wal-Mart would meet all your bulk rice needs.

Think again. Because of rising rice prices around the globe and worries about shortages, the biggest big box has announced that it will ration long grain, jasmine, and basmati rice, allowing customers to purchase only four bags per visit.

Since the beginning of 2008, rice prices have risen 68 percent worldwide. This is one of the main reasons that food riots have broken out recently all over the developing world.

Saint Louis Meriska's children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry,' and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."

In light of this two-spoonfuls anecdote, Wal-Mart's four-bag limit sounds downright decadent, but rice rationing in the U.S. means that whatever is going on with supply and demand trends is not good. Once land-o'-plenty retailers start fretting about global food shortages, you can be sure it's time to worry.

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Daniel Kimmage, a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is the author of a new study called "The Al Qaeda Media Nexus" (.pdf) about recent developments in jihadist Internet activities. The study finds that Al Qaeda and related groups "are moving toward a more structured approach based on consistent branding and quasi-official media entities. Their reasons for doing so appear to be a desire to boost the credibility of their products and ensure message control." In essence, Al Qaeda is seeking to emulate the "brick and mortar" structure of mainstream Western media with the creation of elite news brands—a select group of fundamentalist CNNs, if you will, complete with "jihad correspondents"—that can manipulate and control the virtual discussion among terrorist groups. Online propaganda operations like the Global Islamic Media Front, the Al-Sahab Institute for Media Production, and the Al-Fajr Media Center typically receive content, in the form of ideological screeds or videos of bombings or beheadings, from an array of terrorist groups in various conflict zones around the world, to which they afix a logo, suggesting to jihadist readers that the message has received "official" approval from a larger, global movement.

The trend runs counter to Al Qaeda's operational modus operandi, which emphasizes small cells working in isolation with minimal oversight from Al Qaeda central—a fact that could open Al Qaeda's media arm to new vulnerabilities if intelligence agencies can figure a way to disrupt key online hubs for the distribution of propaganda. But the larger threat may come from within, suggests Kimmage. Al Qaeda has long been ahead of the curve in terms of using the Internet to spread its message, but has so far refused to incorporate new technologies focusing on user-generated content... a decision that has the potential to backfire.

According to Kimmage:

In 2006, Al Qaeda released a big position paper and they warned their supporters against creating their own content. They said this was 'media exuberance' and that their supporters should let the official distribution and production groups handle this. Even when Al Qaeda has tried to be interactive, it is quite old-fashioned. So the question that we end up with is: Al Qaeda—which had done so well using the Internet to spread its message over the last few years—are they now doomed to fade with this new more interactive and user-generated network? And will they be replaced by a much larger, much more integrated, much freer, much more empowered world in which it is very difficult to control messages and in which no one has a monopoly on information?

Freer and more empowered networks, in the end, will do more to undermine Al Qaeda's message than the actions of any government. In the end, an idea that takes root in the political sphere—an idea that encourages people and inspires them to commit violence—it only fades and dies when the idea itself is discredited. The discrediting of this idea, of this ideology, will happen online through a large conversation that takes places mainly without governments.

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Six weeks ago, Hillary Clinton won Ohio by ten percentage points. Tuesday night, she won Ohio's equally bitter neighbor to the east by ten percentage points. The voting blocks she relied upon to win the two states are the same: Hillary Clinton was twice carried to victory by white voters, female voters, and voters lacking a college education. Barack Obama made headway with older voters, but saw young voter turnout drop. He also gained among independents, but fewer of them turned out to the polls. Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania because she successfully defended her base for the six weeks between the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 and the PA primary Tuesday.

According to CNN exit polls, women were huge for Clinton in both contests. They were 59 percent of Democratic voters in both Ohio and Pennsylvania, and she won 57 percent of female voters in both contests. White women were particularly important for Clinton. In both states, two-thirds of white women voted for her.

Obama could point to a modest five point jump among white men and four point jump among whites overall. It did not help Obama that the white vote in Pennsylvania was slightly larger than it was in Ohio (80 percent to 76 percent), and the black vote slightly smaller.

In Ohio, those lacking a college education went 58-40 for Clinton. In Pennsylvania, the numbers were a nearly identical 58-42. It's hard to then point to correlations in under $50,000/over $50,000 voting groups (often, voters lacking a college degree and voters making less than $50,000 show identical trends, indicating that they are in fact the same voters), because Clinton won both income groups Pennsylvania, as she did in Ohio. White collar Pennsylvanians were no more receptive to Obama than their blue collar counterparts.

[Read more]

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The Clinton campaign is claiming that it has raised nearly $2.5 million since Pennsylvania was declared a Clinton victory earlier tonight. Eighty percent of the donations are from first-time donors. Those are some pretty astonishing numbers.

For all the talk of Obamamania, there is a real excitement behind the Clinton campaign, too. Where were these candidates in 2004?

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