MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: January 6, 2008

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January 12, 2008

Bush Working to Insure Permanent Presence in Iraq

We've been in Korea for fifty years. And under an agreement that President Bush is hammering out with the Iraqis, we'll be in Iraq for the same period, or more. According to Newsweek:

...Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: "We're putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington," he told reporters. "The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process."

[snip]

Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq... will become a sworn obligation for the next president. It will become just another piece of the complex global security framework involving a hundred or so countries with which Washington now has bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements. Last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton urged Bush not to commit to any such agreement without congressional approval. The president said nothing about that on Saturday, but Lute said last fall that the Iraqi agreement would not likely rise to the level of a formal treaty requiring Senate ratification. Even so, it would be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact.

This means the withdrawal plans the Democrats are currently running on are likely meaningless. We're going to be in Iraq more or less permanently.

And McCain rejoices.

January 11, 2008

The True Victims of Abortion: Men

Now that I'm raising a son, I take time every few months to worry about him getting someone pregnant accidentally. I'm more worried about him being a selfish dog with women, but pregnancy's right up there. (I'm less worried about my daughter; if she's like me, and like most affluent women, I'll never know what she's up to sexually hard as I'll try to delude myself to the contrary). I'm going to try hard to teach them both to wait til they're ready and then protect themselves, and their partners, to the max. But shit happens, right?

Big a deal as an unplanned pregnancy is for women, I know it's no walk in the park for men, especially if the relationship was casual. I have little sympathy for men who play no, little, or an antagonistic role in birth control - you're on your own. Abort, pay child support or maybe raise a kid; you made that bed. But if you did your part and still end up waiting to hear what the woman's decided to do - major drama. But some things cross a line. Now we have men of long-ago aborted kids claiming center stage in the abortion debate. No big deal then, big deal now.

From the LA Times:

Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an intensity that bewilders him: "How can I miss something I never even held?"

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of "post-abortive men." Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

"We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

And now you'd like a do-over? Goes without saying that this is religion-based (the traumatized men are instructed to visualize their aborted babies playing in a sun dappled meadow at Jesus's feet) but most of all it's political. And insofar as it's politcal it's cynical manipulation. Imagine some guy you had a misguided one nighter with two decades ago tracking you down to make you relive your abortion. I wonder if any of these guys realize that the abortions aren't as painful as the memory of having been involved with them? This 'activist' sums it up:

If he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.

But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the abortions a choice that set them on a better path?

Aubert looks startled. "I never really thought about it for the woman," he says slowly.

Emphasis added, as if I needed to. I don't even want to know what "trying to save the babies" might entail, given these guys' sense of entitlement and self-pitying bullshit. If ever there was a time for aliens to come and show us the alternate reality where Aubert and Baier are in court fighting not to pay child support or ignoring their pre-marriage kids, this is it. There should be a summit between these guys and the ones who think they shouldn't have to pay child support if they have no say in abortions. I guess it all depends where you are in the cycle.Sorry folks. Just too convenient, just like the women who abort, get their lives together, then want us to help them feel sorry for their abortions. Be a woman. Be a man. Make your choices and live with the consequences.

Election Mischief: Democrats for Romney in Michigan

Kos is advocating a little election mischief in Michigan. The Democratic side of the January 15 Michigan primary is meaningless because the DNC stripped Michigan of all its delegates to the national convention when it moved its primary ahead of Feb. 5 without permission. Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich are on the ballot there, but no one else is.

Happily, Democrats have lots of other options, because under Michigan state law, they can vote in the Republican race. So what is a good Michigan Democrat to do?

Kos says vote for Romney because a Romney victory would mean that Huckabee, McCain, and Romney will all have won one primary—no frontrunner means more turmoil, more negative ads, and more in-party fighting for the GOP. Keeping Romney, in particular, in the race makes sense because Romney goes negative the most often and has no qualms about tearing up his competitors.

Except there's a problem: if no frontrunner emerges from the GOP's early primary calendar, Rudy Giuliani has a much stronger chance in Florida and the February 5 super primary. And do Democrats want to accidentally help elect Rudy Giuliani? When Giuliani puts everybody in camps and bombs the entire Middle East, they're going to feel terrible.

So what else can they do? Vote for Huckabee, a not-ready-for-primetime evolution-denier that holds fewer foreign policy credentials than the greenest Democrat? That's an okay idea. Vote for Fred Thompson, just so the old man can make a decent showing before he drops out? Or vote for Ron Paul, who is right roughly half the time and is a delightful player on the national stage?

Before considering McCain, recognize that independents who don't have the Democratic field available to them will probably flock to the Arizona Senator. He likely won't need any help.

So the choice is yours, Michigan Democrats. If you actually want to take the time to go to the polls to vote in a meaningless election, you have a number of awful but bizarrely wonderful options available to you.

When Feminism Means Knowing How Just Screwed You Are

Kids are so ungrateful. Mine decided to get sick during Iowa and New Hampshire. If you haven't 'slept' in two day old clothes on a 'Mom barcolounger' on the peds ward next to your mysteriously sick child, sans toothbrush, you just don't know misery. I'm only just now trying to make sense of it all, the whole 'future of our nation' thing. Having been news deprived during such a pivotal time, I have a new appreciation for why Josephine Average is either so disgusted with us (the media) or so overwhelmed that she just watches reality TV instead. What a goat rope. A few things jump out, though.

We're stiiiill doing the "big hypocrite feminazi Hilary is riding her husband's coat tails" thing. I guess Eleanor Roosevelt did, too. Even in those days, homegirl could have gotten elected to something, if any woman could - would that be coat tailing, too? Lordy I'm sick of this particular sack-o-crap. Let's unravel this little mental do-si-do, shall we? Identifying as a feminist means:

A) You hate men, children, marriage, heterosexual sex
B) You reject anything traditionally gendered (stay at home mothering, etc.)
C) you put yourself first, always and only
D) if your husband cheats on you, you must divorce him immediately.
E) you can't take a back seat to your husband for the good of the family unit, not for even a moment, not even to raise your kids while he gets famous, then leverage the success you made possible for him to your own advantage. No matter how worthy you are in your own right.
Define the terms, control the debate. And, oh yeah, 'Iron my shirts'.

Anne Applebaum, whom I usually find so bracing at Slate, shocked me with this:

There is no escaping the fact that Hillary chose the most traditional path to power. I certainly wouldn't want her as a model for any of the young women I know. "Get into Yale Law School - and then find an upwardly mobile spouse." What kind of advice is that?

Wow.

Fortunately, the other "XX" bloggers at Slate have fired back with passion and reason, but what is it with women hatin' on other powerful, ambitious women? Hilary chose the "traditional path to power"? She chose to painfully sublimate her own personal desires for the good of her marriage and family. I only know about a million smart, talented, ambitious feminist women hiding their lights under a 'husband basket,' wiating either for his career to catch up or for their kids to get older. Feminism often means understanding just how inescapable gender roles are. Unless, of course, you're one of the few women to whom the above actually applies.

Are we to believe Hilary knew Bill would be so successful and that she couldn't? Or, even less believably, than she was willing to work for? Hilary was a star long before she met Bubba and there was no reason to believe she didn't see her professional future as unlimited. For women, especially in the 1970s, it's having a personal life that's the problem, the unknown, the uncontrollable. Thank God that little problem doesn't exist anymore. She didn't gamble on Bill becoming a star. She gambled that she still could, once she'd gotten her family squared away. If all she'd wanted was her Mrs. why not just plant flowers along the highway like Lady Bird Johnson, or tout child literacy, the stuff of traditional First Wives? She could have been the Hostess with the Mostest but what she wanted was to find out what she was made of. Instead of applauding her for standing by her man and waiting for her turn, instead of women acknowledging that most of us have been there and done that, we pretend fat meat aint greasy. She isn't a feminist (i.e. selfish, man-child hater.) She's a hypocrite. As for staying with a man who humiliated you with his hoochies - how rare. Women neeeever do that.The same conservatives who want to outlaw divorce condemn her for not setting his saxophone on fire and locking him out of the White House. God forbid they might check to see whether the operative definition of feminism is the problem here. But if we did that, we'd have no way of blaming the victim; damned for being traditional, damned for merely thinking non-traditionally. Iron those shirts with a smile on your face.

There's hypocrisy here. It aint Hilary's.

Occam's Razor, y'all. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the explanation. Unless understanding isn't really what we're up to. She didn't sell feminism out, she sold herself out, like most women do. She put her own needs and wants on the backburner. For her husband. For her daughter. For her family. If you think your wife didn't do it for you...well, let's just go with that.

Brutal South Carolina Ad Slams Huckabee for Rape Case

Politics ain't beanbag, as Mike Huckabee likes to say. In South Carolina, it's more like a wrecking ball.

In an ad currently running in the Palmetto State, Mike Huckabee is slammed for the Dumond case. If you are unfamiliar with the case, Wayne Dumond was put in prison for the 1984 rape of a 17-year old girl. When Huckabee became Governor of Arkansas, he bought into the conspiracy theory that Dumond had been railroaded because the alleged victim was a distant relatives of the Clintons. Huckabee announced that he thought Dumond should be released (writing a letter to Dumond saying as much), met with the parole board to make that case, and eventually oversaw Dumond's release from prison in 1999.

A year later, Wayne Dumond sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old Kansas City woman named Carol Sue Shields.

Huckabee issued a lot of pardons and commutations as Governor, demonstrating a mercy and compassion that probably granted new life to an awful lot of people. He deserves credit: Huckabee did this despite the knowledge that he would someday be open to allegations of being soft on crime (see Romney, Mitt). In this instance, though, he screwed up big time.

And now, it's being used against him. And the group who created the ad, Victims Voice, isn't pulling any punches. Starring in the ad: the mother of Carol Sue Shields.

Our Prez Finally Made Hell Freeze Over

It's snowing in Baghdad.

Clinton Faces Trouble in South Carolina for MLK Remarks

Before the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton went on Fox News and responded to Barack Obama's frequent invocations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," she said. "It took a president to get it done."

The message was clear: knowing how to work the levers of power is more valuable in getting stuff done than even the mightiest of speeches.

But slighting Dr. King is probably not the best way to make any political point. Maybe the biggest ramification is this: South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress and a veteran of the civil rights movement, appears poised to abandon the neutrality he has maintained throughout the presidential race and endorse Barack Obama.

"We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics," Clyburn told the New York Times. "It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone's motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal."

Clyburn is a heavyweight in South Carolina politics, and his endorsement could help solidify Obama's support amongst the black community there. The black vote in South Carolina, as we've discussed, is not solidly in anyone's camp at the moment, and if Obama can add that voting block to others that are on his side, he will have a very solid chance at the nomination. After all, if he could win Iowa and be competitive in New Hampshire, two states that are heavily white, imagine what he can do in places that are more diverse.

(And PS — Does Clinton really want to use the LBJ vs. MLK analogy? Who is going to say, "Well, I guess we could elect the Martin Luther King guy, but I'll go with the Lyndon Johnson lady instead." That's crazy. Ain't nobody getting a day off on LBJ's birthday.)

January 10, 2008

Another Email Scandal

As a follow-on to Nick's post about the missing White House emails, I should point out that there's another email scandal brewing—this one in Missouri, where the former deputy legal counsel to Governor Matt Blunt (son of House Minority Whip Roy Blunt) has alleged that the governor and four of his aides schemed to destroy potentially damaging electronic communications. According to a suit filed yesterday by Scott Eckersley, Blunt's one-time legal counsel Henry Herschel instructed staffers to destroy email records related to the politically-motivated firing of a state official, rather than turn them over to the press under a public records request. Ed Martin, then serving as Blunt's chief of staff, subsequently "instructed the governor’s office to delete e-mail in inbox and trash files 'to ensure they did not have to be turned over to the press or the public in response to Sunshine requests,'" according to the Kansas City Star.

And this is what happened when reporters confronted Blunt about the allegations earlier today:

At the governor's annual prayer breakfast, Blunt declined to answer questions from The Associated Press about Eckersley's lawsuit but pledged to discuss it at a later news conference on drunken driving laws. At that news conference, however, Blunt devoted barely 2 minutes to questions about the lawsuit—refusing to discuss it any detail—and then turned his back on reporters and walked out of the room while ignoring continued questions.

Still M.I.A.: Millions of White House Emails

Remember how White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told us in April that she "wouldn't rule out" that the Bush administration may have lost 5 million emails? You know, the emails the White House doesn't want you to see? No? Here's your update:

The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA) noticed the administration's "technical issue," and they sued to find out how and if the White House plans to recover them.

The White House, which is nothing if not predictable, has of course refused to answer any questions about the "lost" emails, which could contain information on everything from Valerie Plame to the U.S. Attorneys scandal to Hurricane Katrina. But a court order (PDF) issued Tuesday by D.C. District Court Judge John Facciola gives the administration five business days to answer four questions about whether and how the emails are backed-up. These are the questions the plaintiffs needed a court order to get the White House to answer (I am not making this up):

1. Are the back-ups catalogued, labeled or otherwise identified to indicate the period of time they cover?

2. Are the back-ups catalogued, labeled or otherwise identified to indicate the data contained therein?

3. Do the back-ups contain emails written and received between 2003-2005?

4. Do the back-ups contain the emails said to be missing that are the subject of this lawsuit?

To make this perfectly clear: the plaintiffs are still trying to find out whether the White House even has the emails. Meredith Fuchs, the NSA's General Counsel, told me she's doubtful that, even faced with a court order, the White House will provide full answers to their questions.

"I hope that we're going to learn something about what emails still exist and are recoverable, but I worry that they will continue to evade answering the questions," she says.

That seems fairly likely, since evasion works to the White House's benefit. If the backup tapes do not in fact contain the missing emails (Question 4), then every day that goes by means the emails are less recoverable. If they weren't backed-up, the emails would have to be dredged up from the depths of computer memory on individual workstations and servers or through other, unnamed "forensic means." And as anyone who has ever deleted an important file and tried to recover it knows, the more you use a computer after losing a file, the harder it is to recover. According to the court order, "[E]mails that might now be retrievable from email account folders or 'slack space' on individual workstations are increasingly likely to be deleted or overwritten with the passage of time." So if the White House is trying to keep damaging emails from prying eyes, the more it delays, the less likely it is that anyone will ever see them.

Judge Facciola appears to recognize that time is of the essence. Thus the court order. But Anne Weismann, CREW's Chief Counsel, says that the White House has lots of ways to buy more time. If the White House gives incomplete or vague answers to questions that Weismann characterized as "pretty straightforward," "not burdensome," and "discrete" the plaintiffs would have to push the court to find the White House did not sufficiently answer the questions.

"If we have to go down that road it uses up time and that really seems to be the goal on the administration's side—to use up the clock. Judge Facciola recognized that time is running out, but it's very sad that we're talking about the possibility that the White House may not comply with a court order. How have we gotten to that point?"

Both the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee have taken an interest in the missing emails, but CREW and the NSA would like to see Congress do more. Weismann said her group is doing its best, but Congress is simply better-positioned to hold the administration to account for its record-keeping failings. Weismann said that Congress could subpoena documents that might break the story wide open.

"There were documents created that reflect all this information," she said. According to Weismann, when the missing email problem was first discovered, the federal Office of Administration developed an action plan to recover the missing data from backup tapes. But Weismann said that she's been told the plan was never implemented. CREW used a Freedom of Information request to try to obtain the documents relating to the plan, but the administration has so far refused to release the documents. "It does seem that Congress has some tools that they could more effectively use, like subpoenas," Weismann said. "It would be a first step in the evidentiary proof that this White House has blatantly disregarded its record keeping obligations. That might be something that Congress might want to get and they might have more success than we've had so far."

(The House Oversight Committee has not yet returned a call seeking comment.)

The next step for the plaintiffs depends on how the White House responds. If it turns out that the emails are on backup tapes, then CREW and the NSA will ask the judge to ask the National Archivist to ask the Attorney General to force the White House to have them restored. If the Attorney General then does nothing, they could ask Congress to force the issue. The plaintiffs will also ask the judge to force the White House to install an appropriate record-keeping system so similar problems won't happen again.

If the emails are not on the backup tapes, that could lead to an even bigger legal standoff. "If they deleted the backups knowing that they were the only remaining copies of these missing emails, that raises all sorts of questions about criminal misconduct," Weismann said. But criminal misconduct aside, the plaintiffs would then pursue obtaining the emails from other sources, like individual computers and email accounts. It's unclear whether the court would permit that.

In the middle-to-long-term, CREW and the NSA would also like to see Congress amend the Presidential Records Act. As currently interpreted by the courts, the act does not give groups like the NSA cause of action to sue to force the White House to obey record keeping laws. Neither does current law give the National Archivist jurisdiction to monitor presidential record-keeping, as it does for federal records. So the current lawsuit is entirely under the auspices of the Federal Records Act.

Interestingly, the NSA and CREW were only able to bring their lawsuit because of the Bush administration's haphazard record keeping. It's only proceeding because the Bush administration doesn't have a system that divides presidential and federal records. (Presidential records are produced by bodies like the National Security Council that simply advise the president. Federal records are produced by bodies that have functions beyond giving advice, They are governed by a different statute.) The Clinton administration had a system that sorted emails automatically and stored them in a secure, searchable archive, but the Bush administration discarded that system when it came into office. As far as anyone outside the White House knows, that system was never replaced, so federal and presidential records were commingled. (The Clinton system wasn't perfect—some of the Vice-President's records went missing, which led to a mini-scandal and a report from the Government Accountability Office that stressed the importance of good record keeping.)

So when 5 million (or as many as 10 million, according to Weismann) emails went missing, they included many federal records. That is what made it possible for NSA and CREW to bring their suit. If the Bush administration had kept the two types of records separate, and the only missing emails were presidential records, the plaintiffs suit would probably have been dismissed out of hand. But it remains to be seen whether this story will get the coverage it deserves. Anne Weismann told me she worries the issues involved are too complex.

"Ultimately, the story is a huge scandal, but in order to get there the public has to understand a lot of technical and legal things, and I think the White House has been lucky that this hasn't taken off yet in the way it should because it's complicated."

That's too bad.

Rick Santorum, Back From the Grave to Slam John McCain

I love when Republicans rip each other. And Rick Santorum just went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and did nothing but rip John McCain the entire time. Enjoy.

HH: Why can’t John McCain win this election?

RS: Well, number one, John McCain will not get the base of the Republican Party. I mean, there was a reason John McCain collapsed last year, and it’s because he was the frontrunner, and everybody in the Republican Party got a chance to look at him. And when they looked at him, they wait well, wait a minute, he’s not with us on almost all of the core issues of…on the economic side, he was against the President’s tax cuts, he was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues. He was…I mean, on medical care, I mean, he was for re-importation of drugs.

I mean, you can go on down the list. I mean, this is a guy who on a lot of the core economic issues, is not even close to being a moderate, in my opinion. And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened. I mean, this is a guy who says he believes in these things, but I can tell you, inside the room, when we were in these meetings, there was nobody who fought harder not to have these votes before the United States Senate on some of the most important social conservative issues, whether it’s marriage or abortion or the like. He always fought against us to even bring them up, because he was uncomfortable voting for them. So I mean, this is just not a guy I think in the end that washes with the mainstream of the Republican Party.

More after the jump. Santorum's final message? The GOP is like a meat-lover at a San Francisco co-op grocery store. No good options.

HH: ...did you serve alongside Senator McCain for 12 years or longer?

RS: 12 years.

HH: So you know him well.

RS: I do.

HH: When you hear the media talking about him, and of course, he got Iraq right, and we’re all grateful for that, but he wasn’t the only Republican to get it right. Do you believe he’s sincerely changed on the immigration bill to where he understands the message that was delivered last summer?

RS: No.

HH: Why not?

RS: Well, I mean, because John McCain was the leader on the other side of the aisle. John McCain was the guy who was working with Ted Kennedy to drive it down our throats, and lectured us repeatedly about how xenophobic we were, lectured us, us being the Republican conference, about how wrong we were on this, how we were on the wrong side of history, and that you know, this is important for his…because having come from Arizona, knowing the strength of the Hispanic community, that we were going to be seen as racists, and he wasn’t going be part of that, that he was not a racist, and that if we were for tougher borders, it was a racist thing. Look, John McCain looks at things through the eyes, on these kind of domestic policy issues, looks at it through the eyes of the New York Times editorial board, and accepts that predisposition that if you are not, if you stand for conservative principles, there’s some genetic defect.

HH: We’ve got about 30 seconds, Senator Santorum. Have you sensed today the conservative movement waking up to its peril?

RS: I guess my answer is yes, but I also…a lot of folks are throwing up their hands, not sure in what direction to go. That’s the problem.

HH: The direction’s toward Romney, isn’t it?

RS: I don’t know. I mean, I’ve got…I mean, I could have a whole long discussion on Romney and my concerns with him, too. So it’s not an easy call. Thompson and Romney are certainly the two most conservative candidates in the race. But they both have their problems, not as severe as the others, but they both have their problems.

Forward This to Every Naderite and Bloomberg(ite? ian?) You Know

Some Democrats are worried that Michael Bloomberg, the liberal Democrat-turned-Republican mayor of New York City, might run for President as an independent. After all, Democrats have always tried to convince (or force) left-leaning third-party candidates not to run. The argument is that people like Ralph Nader and Michael Bloomberg split the Left-wing vote, damage Democrats' electoral prospects, and allow Right-wingers like George W. Bush to waltz into the White House. There might be something to that.

But third-party types, for their part, tend to argue that the country has a need for more diversity in politics, and that one day the public will come around to their line of thinking. But reasonable people know that's not particularly likely. Why? Because the nature of our voting system create an environment that favors two stable parties:

From FactCheck.org (emphasis mine):

The winner-take-all system in the U.S. favors two stable parties. The U.S. political system is based on what political scientists call a single-member district plurality (SMDP). That's a fancy way of saying that the U.S. elects representatives from particular districts, with the person who gets the most votes in a district (also called a plurality) winning the seat. Each district is winner-take-all, and votes in one district have no effect on other districts. Presidential elections, though nationwide contests, are likewise really state-by-state races, thanks to the Electoral College, in which every state except Maine and Nebraska awards all of its electoral votes to whichever candidate wins a plurality of the state's votes.

So basically, the United States' electoral system doesn't support a viable third party, because a third party that was actually successful would mean the demise of one of the two existing parties. Why?

The reasons here are mainly statistical. Third parties may have statistically significant support (maybe 15 percent of voters in every district supports a third party). But in an SMDP system, the third party may well not win any seats. So those voters will likely join with another party and look for a compromise candidate that could represent them. Similarly, suppose that a district has 200,000 conservative voters and 110,000 liberal voters. One would expect a conservative candidate to be elected. But if two conservative parties each run a candidate, then a liberal candidate may well be elected – unless the conservative parties unite behind a single candidate.

So it turns out that voting for a third party just because you think there should be more than two parties is economically and electorally irrational. Because unless we change the first-past-the-post system, it's unlikely that the U.S. is ever going to have more than two major parties. My colleague Jonathan Stein points out that Michael Bloomberg, who is no dummy, probably knows all this. If he doesn't think he can actually win electoral votes (i.e., win states and force either the Democrats or the Republicans into third place nationally), he probably won't run. And who knows. If you have Mike Bloomberg's kind of money, it's quite possible that even basic laws of political science will bend to your will. Good luck with that, Mr. Mayor.

(If you want to learn more—way more—about our voting system and potential alternatives, check out Michael Mechanic's great interview with the author William Poundstone.)

Obama's Chances in South Carolina: Can a Wine-Tracker Win?

Let's do some thinking about the Democratic race in South Carolina (primary: Jan. 26; current polling here). Considering the Democratic electorate there is roughly 50% white and 50% black, Obama ought to have a huge advantage. But his main opposition is the wife of America's first black president—the Clinton's have very strong ties to many parts of the black community—and the polls show a close race.

The easiest observation is this: Edwards continued presence in the race divides the white vote, making things easier for Obama.

But here's a more interesting hypothesis: South Carolina may prove Obama's viability more generally. Here's why. Obama is considered a "wine-track" candidate. He appeals to upper-class, well-educated voters. Professors love him. So do college kids on Facebook. He isn't a "beer-track" candidate, someone who appeals to working- and middle-class voters. Usually, beer-trackers get the support of traditional Democratic constituencies like labor. Here's a better explanation:

Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.

It's not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values.

Thing is, wine-trackers don't win. Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, John Kerry (Bradley and Kerry have endorsed Obama)... they've all lost in either the primary or the general.

But Obama might rewrite the equation. If you take the wine-track voters (who looove the fact that Obama has written books, for example), but you add an unprecendent number of young and independent voters, and you add a hefty share of black voters to that, now you've got a coalition that can beat the working class block that traditionally sides with the establishment candidate.

Two other notes, re: Kerry and Richardson, after the jump.

The Kerry endorsement, which was just announced, is a bit slap in the face to Edwards, who ran on a ticket with Kerry in 2004. But Edwards reacted graciously, saying, "Our country and our Party are stronger because of John's service, and I respect his decision. When we were running against each other and on the same ticket, John and I agreed on many issues. I continue to believe that this election is about the future, not the past, and that the country needs a President who will fight aggressively to end the status quo." Translation: I respect John Kerry, but he's a figure of the past. And besides, he's part of the Washington system that I've spent this campaign criticizing.

After struggling to catch fire for months, Bill Richardson is dropping out. I've been struggling for something to say about this, and I can't find anything. Some of his supporters probably liked his experience and will drift toward Clinton. Some probably liked his opposition to the war and will drift to Edwards or Obama. Any Richardson supporters want to give their thoughts in the comments?

Roger Clemens' Strikeout Secret: Vioxx?

Looks like Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens is getting a reprieve from Rep. Henry Waxman, who has rescheduled part of next week's hearings on steroid use in baseball until after the sentencing of former Mets batboy and MLB steroid dealer Kirk Radomski. Too bad, because I was looking forward to Clemens' testimony, especially in light of his claim on "60 Minutes" this week that he never took steroids, but that at the peak of his career, he was "eating Vioxx like Skittles." (Clemens was referring to the painkiller withdrawn from the market in 2004 after it was linked to an increase in heart attacks and strokes.)

I was hoping that Clemens might elaborate on his Vioxx consumption for Congress after seeing a Power Point presentation earlier this week by American Enterprise Institute scholar Ted Frank that cheekily charted Clemens' win record before and after Vioxx was pulled off the market. Ted was kind enough to share his slide, which is posted below. So, was it steroids, or was it Vioxx that led to his amazing strikeout record? You be the judge!

Another NH Explanation — The Hillary Effect

Add another potential explanation for Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory to my on-the-fly list composed on election night: the Hillary Effect.

The idea, courtesy of Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, is that supporting Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary opens a voter up to accusations of being (1) for the old guard; (2) resistant to change; (3) blind to all of Obama's messianic glory; (4) motivated by a simple gender-based preference, if you are a woman; and/or (5) subtly or not so subtly motivated by race, if you are white. And Hillary supporters just don't want to put up with it any more. They don't want to be judged by their fellow liberals and they don't want to be yelled at by conservatives. So they are purposefully vague when they are polled (either suggesting that they are undecided, or for another candidate), and then pull the lever for HRC in the privacy of the voting booth.

Something to consider...

January 9, 2008

FINALLY Cracking Down on Milk Crate Thieves

I'm glad someone is finally taking a stand against college kids who want to make cheap coffee tables.

Representative Michael F. Kane, a Holyoke Democrat, is pushing for the crackdown on milk-crate thieves, or, translated into legislativese, anyone who "intentionally removes a plastic bulk merchandise container that is used by a product producer, distributor, or retailer or agent thereof which is used as a means for the bulk transportation, storage, or carrying of retail containers of milk . . . with the intention of permanently depriving the merchant of the possession, use, or benefit of such container."

Inspired by complaints from several retailers and dairy suppliers, Kane said, his bill would set a sliding scale of fines for first, second, and third offenses, all the way up to $1,000 and a year in prison for stealing more than $100 worth of crates.

"These crates have been used for many years in college dorms for basically storage and furniture," Kane said. "Obviously, I don't want to see any college students going to jail over this, but it is becoming a cost to the industry." Kane is hoping the measure will come up for a hearing in the Judiciary Committee this winter.

Massachusetts must be a paradise, if this is what the legislature is acting on.

Dep't of Terrible Ideas: Obama Surrogate Questions Hillary's Tears

Slamming Hillary Clinton for crying didn't help John Edwards any in New Hampshire. In fact, it probably hurt him substantially. What makes the Obama folks think questioning those tears' authenticity will do anything other than cause a backlash?

Really? We're supposed to think that because Hillary Clinton didn't cry publicly over Katrina, these tears were part of a political calculation? This is stupid and weak.

Is assuming the worst on the behalf of your opponents part of the politics of hope?

The Wearing Of the Orange

This Friday, January 11, is the six-year anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. To observe it, the American Civil Liberties Union is asking everyone to wear orange, and there is a call to close Guantanamo Bay prison now. There will also be rallies and vigils in some U.S. cities, and Amnesty International is staging protests all over the world.

As of December 1, 2007, there were still 305 inmates at the prison, including 20-year-old Omar Khadr, who arrived in Guantanamo Bay when he was 15. The youngest known prisoner to spend time at Guantanamo Bay, however, was 13, and the oldest was 98. Four prisoners are known to have died in custody, and one of those is thought to have been 16 years old when he was detained.

55% of Guantanamo Bay's prisoners have been officially determined as not having committed any hostile acts toward either the United States or its allies.

The Bush administration has indicated that the prison will remain open throughout Bush's alleged presidency.

Bored With Rock and Roll? How About Shock and Roll? Now You Can Taser With a Beat

leopard%20taser.jpg If giving people 50,000 volt electric shocks just doesn't thrill you like it used to, don't despair: TASER International has a fashionable solution! For a few hundred dollars, you can get yourself a brand new leopard-print stun gun, and an mp3-equipped holster to put it in. Read more over at The Riff.

—Casey Miner

Ron Paul Loses His Luster

With results in from New Hampshire, the wild and pervasive fantasies surrounding the Paul campaign should finally be laid to rest. For months Paul supporters have swamped the comments section of this and pretty much every other major blog with the idea that his poll numbers were vastly underreported, either due to a media conspiracy, or the fact that his young, cell-phone-wielding supporters weren't counted in typical phone polls. I've pointed out that Dean supporters made pretty much the same, baseless case in 2004, and it's now clear that nothing has changed since then: In Iowa, Paul won 10 percent of the vote (phone polls had given him 9 percent) and in New Hampshire he won 7.6 percent (phone polls had given him 6 to 10 percent). In short, the Ron Paul myth should be about as dead as the decomposed remains of Guy Fawkes.

Of course, if New Hampshire voters hadn't written him off, Paul would have self-destructed anyway. As I pointed out back in mid-November, Paul has too many cozy ties with racists to ever survive the scrutiny heaped on front-runners. Yesterday The New Republic revealed those racist ties to be stronger than anyone realized. The Atlantic (where Andrew Sullivan had endorsed Paul) responded with an apologia arguing that fringe idealists are naturally predisposed to tolerate the repulsive views of those with whom they share shards of common ground. It's an interesting idea that doesn't excuse anything. At the very minimum, Paul was grossly negligent in allowing a newsletter chocked full of racist diatribes to be published for decades under his name.

What worries me the most about Paul's meltdown is not that it will discredit Paul, but that it will discredit some of the more noble elements of the movement that surrounds him. As I noted in my recent feature on Paul, the movement, and not the candidate, is the real revolution. Just look at the way Paul supporters have challenged the Republican orthodoxies on Iraq and the Patriot Act from within the Party.

Coy to the possibility of running on a third-party ticket, Paul told the Washington Post last week that he has "no intention" of mounting an independent bid, but also left the door open, adding: "We'll see if the supporters keep sending the money. But right now, our focus is on Feb. 5th." An independent Paul bid would certainly be interesting. Maybe it would suck away some anti-war votes from Democrats, or, in the event that Barack Obama ends up as the Democratic nominee, maybe it would suck away some bigot votes from the Republican. Either way, a Paul bid is looking like an increasingly dangerous idea for libertarians. He has carried them into the mainstream like nobody before, but now that they are almost there, is he really the best guy to represent them? At some point, it might be time for the Ron Paul Revolution to say "no" to Dr. No.

Government Secrecy Guru Reflects on Agee's Death

Steve Aftergood runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). From that perch, he has documented the shrinking of government transparency and civil liberties, including just in recent months, Cheney's office famously declaring itself exempt from both the executive and legislative branches for the purposes of refusing to submit itself to any form of oversight and security office procedures, as well as the National Archives secretly removing declassified documents from its shelves. He's sued the CIA for years to ask for the disclosure of the intelligence budget, published taxpayer-funded non-secret Congressional Research Service reports which Congress otherwise won't make available, and closely followed press coverage of well, the more secretive government agencies for years. As a long time close CIA watcher, I asked Aftergood to comment on controversial former CIA officer Philip Agee's death, and he obliged:

He was a man of his time, and his time was the 1970s. His public persona was shaped by anger at the U.S. Government and the CIA in particular over what he saw as its immoral, imperialist tendencies. He chose to break the rules of non-disclosure, and he paid a price in terms of exile, public opprobrium, etc. I doubt that the “celebrity” he enjoyed was much of a compensation.

For the rest of us, his questionable legacy includes the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to disclose the names of “covert agents.” He also was a pivotal figure in shaping a generation’s antagonism towards the CIA and intelligence general.

(There is a hilarious scene in the movie “Barcelona” where an American is chatting up a Spanish girl in a bar and she goes off into a harangue about U.S. imperialism, etc., etc. Where does she get all of this stuff, he asks. It’s from “Philip Ah-zhee,” she explains as he rolls his eyes.)

Agee’s first book Inside the Company was a bit turgid, if I recall correctly. His second book, “On the Run,” was quite interesting and engaging.

You can check out archives of Aftergood's work here.

So Much Porn, So Little Time--For Accounting

Last year, the SEC opened an investigation into accounting irregularities at Sunrise Senior Living, one of the nation's largest chains of retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, after the company restated its earnings by some $130 million. If anyone was wondering how the company might have misplaced so much money, it might look to former CFO Bradley Rush, who apparently was using his office computer to check out a lot more than the company's finances.

After Sunrise sacked Rush last year, he sued for wrongful termination, arguing that he was rooting out fraud at the time he was fired. However, during the litigation, the Washington Post reports that Sunrise disclosed that it had found some 25,000 unique pornographic images on Rush's laptop, including movies, after he left the firm. With his hard drive so crowded with T&A, it's hard to imagine there was much room there for Sunrise spreadsheets.

All Praise Jesus' General

Sometimes, the blogosphere does something the mainstream media would never dare to do. And it is awesome.

Mothers, Don't Let Your Sons Grow Up To Be...

Contractor%20Children%27s%20Book.jpg

...military contractors. Yep, the acceptance of the modern-day rent-a-soldier (never call them mercenaries; they hate that!) has finally filtered through the culture, right down to the realm of children's books. Hot off the press, you can now encourage your kids to join the ever-thickening ranks of the private military industry with the purchase of a new book. Targeting the 9-to-12 year-old set (and written at a fifth grade reading level), Jared Meyer's Working in a War Zone: Military Contractors includes 64 pages of text, accompanied by full color photographs of contractors doing their thing. (Meyer, a self-described author, consultant, and speaker—see his personal website here—has also penned such sundry titles as Frequently Asked Questions About Being an Immigrant Teen and Occupation Nation: How to Treat Your Health Like It's a Full-Time Job). According to the book's promotional blurb on its publisher's website:

People rarely think about the workers who provide products and services to the military and rebuild war-torn areas. The people who do these jobs, military contractors, have as important and exciting a career as anyone else in the military. This book brings readers right into the thick of the action. A variety of military contractor careers are profiled and brought to life. Readers learn about the daily dangers experienced by these professionals, and the importance of the work they accomplish.

And hey, if you like this one, there's more! Rosen Publishing's "Extreme Careers" series includes other jobs that would surely be a great fit for your 10-year old, including hostage rescue, disaster relief, frontline combat, and homeland security, among others.

Consider it a sign of the times.

CounterSpy: Rogue CIA Officer Philip Agee Dies

The AP reports that former CIA offcer turned rogue agent Philip Agee has died in Cuba. He was 72. From the AP obit:

Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mostly in Latin America at a time when leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers. His 1975 book ''Inside the Company: CIA Diary,'' cited alleged CIA misdeeds against leftists in the region and included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.

I encountered the Agee story up close when I was working last year on a biographical afterword about outted former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Plame had served her first foreign tour in Greece, several years after the killing of the Athens CIA station chief Richad Welch by a Greek terrorist group, N17. While it turned out that contrary to initial belief, it was not Agee's writings but local Greek press revelations of Welch's identity and address that exposed him to his assassins, Welch's murder and Agee's acts prompted Congress to pass the law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, that was mulled again after the outting of Plame, as my colleague David Corn first reported.

But Agee argued that the outting of Plame by her government was nothing like what he had done.

According to the AP obituary,

Agee's actions in the 1970s inspired a law criminalizing the exposure of covert U.S. operatives. But in 2003, [Agee] drew a distinction between what he did and the exposure of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a prominent critic of President Bush's Iraq policy.

''This is entirely different than what I was doing in the 1970s,'' Agee said. ''This is purely dirty politics in my opinion.''

Agee said that in his case, he disclosed the identities of his former CIA colleagues to ''weaken the instrument for carrying out the policy of supporting military dictatorships'' in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Those regimes ''were supported by the CIA and the human cost was immense: torture, executions, death squads,'' he said. ...

[Indeed, Agee actually sued President Bush's mother Barbara Bush for alleging in her memoir that his actions had led to Welch's death-- so lawyers for the publisher (which had published Agee's book, Bush's book, and now Plame's book) took great pains to get the language just right.]

Former intelligence sources have mentioned that back in the 1990s, an official now prominent in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence once - recklessly, in their view - improperly confronted Agee in a Mexico City hotel room, after Agee, in disguise, had tried to lure and harass an inexperienced CIA officer in the station. The now senior ODNI officer supposedly confronted Agee in the hotel, instead of reporting it up the chain of command, and Agee fled before he could be captured.

The Mexico City episode is more fully recounted by James Risen in his 1997 Los Angeles Times report, "Once Again, Ex-Agent Philip Agee Eludes CIA's Grasp," if you scroll down here.

(Above photo from this site).