• Did John Edwards let slip an endorsement this morning? Watch the video and decide for yourself.
• Obama picked up seven superdelegates today and ABC declared earlier in the day that by their count, Obama already leads Clinton in this category for the first time. (A story in tomorrow's New York Times puts Obama ahead as well.) Most other news sources still have him trailing Clinton by single digits.
• According to "West Wing" actors he dined with in 2001, John McCain voted against George W. Bush in 2000, something he has repeatedly denied.
• Stay classy: Rumsfeld blames the military for botching the Iraq War. Think Progress reminds us what really happened during the war planning.
• Speaking of Iraq, Ari Berman argues that Clinton's position on the war "doomed" her campaign from the start.
• Jonathan Chait shrewdly notes that Clinton has been campaigning as a conservative populist for some time now.
• Both Reason's Michael C. Moynihan and the NY Times' David Brooks argue that American conservatives ought to start emulating British conservatives. The Corner flips out.
• You can't make this stuff up: 178 House Republicans vote against Mother's Day. Meanwhile, McCain puts his mother in a new campaign ad.
• And speaking of mothers, salary.com determines that moms ought to be making about $117,000 a year, based on the work they do.

--Mori Dinauer

Matt says that while Clinton's assertions about the importance of her greater appeal to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" are "one part fallacy, two parts baseless speculation" they're not "offensive." Let's assume that she misspoke and didn't intend the fairly overt racism of her literal comments; they remain problematic, but it's a fair assumption. But even given a more charitable interpretation, the fallacies in her argument are precisely what makes it offensive.

The baseless speculation, I assume, is the transparently illogical claim that because Clinton attracts more working-class whites against Obama that she would therefore attract more against McCain. But even if we assume that Clinton would perform better among this group in the general, we are left with the fallacy central to Mark Penn's approach to politics. Particularly when you consider that turnout as well as margins are not static, there's no reason why Obama's lesser performance with respect to any particular demographic can be assumed to be problematic. If Obama does worse among working-class whites in Pennsylvania but compensates by getting a higher turnout among African-Americans and young professionals, so what? The fact that the latter two groups are more reliably Democratic doesn't matter. If you get an extra 100,000 votes (whether by higher turnout or higher margins), the fact that the relevant demographic was already majority Democratic is wholly irrelevant.

This glaring logical fallacy leads us to what's offensive. Precisely because which group such analysis chooses to focus on is entirely arbitrary, the choice always reflects political interests (in Penn's case, inevitably with center-right results.) Clinton has outperformed Obama among a number of demographics, but surely it's no a coincidence that Clinton -- as is usually the case when people make this argument -- identified white workers rather than, say, Latinos or older women. It reflects the Bill Schneider assumption that there's something suspicious about a coalition that doesn't rely enough on white voters. Jon Chait's article about Clinton's desperate embrace of reactionary populism correctly identifies the context in which Clinton's comments should be evaluated:

Historically, the conservative populist's social divide ran along racial and ethnic lines. In recent years, overt racism has all but disappeared from mainstream political life, and even racial hot button appeals like the 1988 Willie Horton ad have grown rare. What remains is a residue of nostalgia about small towns--whose residents are said to have stronger values and work harder than other Americans, and who also happen to be overwhelmingly white. In 2004, after John Kerry declared that some entertainers supporting him represented "the heart and soul of America," George W. Bush embarked upon a national tour of small- and mid-sized cities, where he would say, "I believe the heart and soul of America is found in places like Duluth, Minnesota," or other such places.

Likewise, Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated. Hillary Clinton's statement about "hard-working Americans, white Americans" simply made explicit a theme that conservative populists usually keep implicit.

--Scott Lemieux

Today, McCain embarked from New York City on a boating jaunt down the East River, and in preparation for his ride, Democrats have posted a tongue-in-cheek tourist's map to mark all the sites along the way that McCain has opposed funding: the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York ports, et cetera. His party's latest move to cut New York City's funding, however, got left off the list.

This week as Blue Dogs were busily digging in their heels against veterans' benefits, Senate Republicans quietly lined up to block a vote that would've provided New York City with the last of the President's pledged September-11th recovery aid: $1.7 billion to build a rail-link between Ground Zero and the Kennedy Airport in Queens.

Meanwhile, far from being abashed, Republican senators in fact defended the vote, with Sen. Judd Gregg going so far as to call the proposed rail a "train to nowhere" -- an apparent reference to Rep. Don Young's notorious $941-million attempt to build an Alaskan bridge to an island of 8,000 people. Not content to dismiss Ground Zero alone, he went still further to attack New Yorkers as a whole: "This is a situation where the folks from New York, who are good and decent people, have decided to raid the Federal Treasury to get some money to pay for something in a very questionable way."

Despite his anti-earmark reputation, McCain's already expressed a comfort with the notion that earmarks come in varying ethical stripes and colors. This week's latest gambit only helps flesh out the contours of the GOP's double standard still further. That is, earmarked military aid for countries like Israel and Egypt, good, earmarked 9/11 recovery aid for the people of New York City, bad.

--Te-Ping Chen

Karen Tumulty reports, as have a few other sources, that one of Hillary Clinton's considerations in staying in the race is a feminist one:

But the voice she is listening to now is the one inside her head, explains a longtime aide. Clinton's calculation is as much about history as it is about politics. As the first woman to have come this far, Clinton has told those close to her, she wants people who invested their hopes in her to see that she has given it her best.

I don't think there's any question that Clinton has already given it her all -- and more. But I do understand the rationale here. The race between Clinton and Obama has mobilized Democratic voters as never before. Now that we're just a month away from the finish line, there's little reason -- if Clinton can constrain her attacks on Obama -- not to give voters in all 50 states the chance to weigh in. And yes, some women out there, especially older women, desperately want a chance to vote for a female presidential candidate. They may not have another chance in their lifetimes.

--Dana Goldstein

On the heels of stepping out of anonymity, Edward Espinoza -- A.K.A. Mr. Super -- has endorsed Barack Obama, according to the candidate's web site:

“I am endorsing Barack Obama today because throughout this process I have seen him show a judgment and character that we need in our next president. From day one he opposed the Iraq war and has a plan to end the war in a responsible way and bring our sons and daughters home. He has shown he has the character to lead our great nation, from his choice to spend his career serving people in the poorest communities in Chicago to his commitment to speaking truth to the American people, even when it isn’t politically convenient to do so. To unify the country at this time in our history we need a president who has these qualities, and that is why I am proud to endorse him today. My good friend Bill Richardson, who backed Obama some weeks ago, knows what it takes to lead and I trust his judgment in this decision as well. I look forward to working with this great movement to bring victory in November.”

Espinoza reiterates his intention behind mrsuper.org here. This makes four superdelegate endorsements for Obama today.

--Mori Dinauer

The Clinton campaign has rolled out another pitch to undecided superdelegates in the form of a PowerPoint presentation that argues Clinton does better in competitive House districts than Obama. Slide three notes that "In 2006, the Democrats retook Congress by picking up 31 new seats. 20 of those freshman Democrats are in Republican-leaning districts that voted for President Bush in 2004."

Hey, I'm a fan of the Democratic majority as much as the next (liberal) guy, but taking a look at these districts in slide four, one notices that only five or six of them are in competitive states. The rest are in Dem locks like New York and California. Is the campaign arguing that a Democrat winning California will really hinge on him or her winning CA-11, for example? And even with the districts that are in competitive states, are we really supposed to believe that the results are going to hinge on those districts? I guess since learning that the Democratic primary isn't a winner-take-all system, the Clinton campaign decided to take that insight to its logical conclusion -- the reductio ad absurdum of all electability arguments.

--Mori Dinauer

In assessing a potential unity ticket, Mark Schmitt says:

Obama is in many ways the most plain-spoken liberal to win the Democratic nomination since Walter Mondale. But while Clinton is probably inherently more cautious than Obama, her record marks her as more conservative on only one issue, and that's the one on which she is most out of step with the vast majority of Americans--the decision to go to war in Iraq. And yet, she still suffers under the reputation, developed during the 1990s, that she is some sort of quasi-socialist. That's the worst possible combination: perceived as more liberal than she actually is, while being demonstrably more conservative only on less popular points.

There is, I think, and important larger point here. Some people have talked about this week's primary as being salutary because Clinton's silly gas tax pander failed, but that's a trivial example. The war is the big one. Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that's impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it's hard to imagine that she wouldn't have prevailed without the Iraq albatross. Whether or not Clinton's support was sincere -- I don't think it really matters -- sometimes getting big policies wrong really is politically damaging. (See also the 2006 midterms.) This is evidently a good thing.

--Scott Lemieux

It's been such a long, and divisive, primary. And since no deus ex machina has yet descended from the sky to settle the Democratic race for once and for all, why not choose both? After all, as Ed Kilgore argues over at the Plank, "nothing quite scratches the itch like a unity ticket."

Except if you have to start your argument with three "maybe's" -- as Kilgore does -- it's probably a fair sign you don't have a very strong case. And based on the last Clinton White House's record alone, one whiff of the possible "what-ifs" Kilgore raises (too much inter-staff and personal tension, too many power struggles, too much baggage) should be enough to stop Obama in his tracks.

A dual ticket not only detracts from Obama's positives, it adds on Clinton's negatives to boot. Early opposition to the war, turning over a new leaf in foreign policy? Not when your vice-president voted for the former, and has since casually threatened "obliterate" a major Middle Eastern country with aplomb. Hitch on a squarely Washington insider, and suddenly the Obama campaign's key tagline--"change"--starts to sound weirdly akimbo. (Somehow, Changexperience just doesn't have that ring.) Meanwhile, take the people who in February said they won't ever vote for Obama (34 percent), add on the number who won't ever vote for Clinton (47 percent), and even assuming a healthy degree of overlap, you've got a pretty good scorecard right there for John McCain.

Regardless of the good face the candidates might put on a unity ticket, particularly given the clash in their governing styles, it would still be something of a clumsy two-step. Onstage, the contrast in their demeanors and abrasive lack of chemistry has always been painful. (To be frank, the moments I've found both candidates most off-putting are during the debates, when they're sitting side-by-side.) Pundits will inevitably keep mixing up the ticket name and have to awkwardly correct themselves: "Clinton-Obama--I mean Obama-Clinton."

Would bestowing the VP slot make Obama look gracious? It's possible, but it also might just make him seem a bit feckless. Had the nomination been settled several months ago and Obama decided to offer her a position as VP then, that could've been a different matter. But at this point, it would come off less like the Lincoln-like gesture of statesmanship that Andrew Sullivan has suggested, and more like what it really would be: an attempt to settle the drama for once and for all.

As for possible Clinton defectors? Passionate declarations of such perverse loyalty to the contrary, I'm hard-pressed to believe that Democrats would, in the end, choose a third term of Bush over the eventual party nominee.

To date, Obama's run a campaign that's been singular in its clarity of themes: a new politics, grassroots-powered, change. In 1992, the last time a Clinton ran for the White House, Bill bucked conventional wisdom to reject a candidate who would 'balance' him, and instead picked a fresher candidate that helped define the generational metaphor of his campaign. This time around, Obama would be wise to do the same.

--Te-Ping Chen

Marc Ambinder flags this DNC memo (PDF) that touts the impressive gains Democrats have made in turnout this primary season. But this turnout is, in part, simple proof that this primary has taken a different course than previous primaries. First of all, it's not surprising, as the memo notes, that "comparing 2008 Republican turnout to the last contested Republican primary in 2000, Republican turnout either stayed relatively stagnant or decreased." In both years the Republican nominee was decisively determined relatively early on. They were comparable races with comparable results. By contrast the Democrats have been going at this for nearly five months, with neither candidate yielding, which is quite unlike 2004, where Kerry was crowned almost immediately after Iowa. Turns out more people vote when their vote matters.

All of this is to underscore that you simply can't use primary results to make a general election argument. The only meaningful comparison is to use polling data that pits a Democrat against a Republican. After Tuesday's primaries the conventional wisdom coalesced around Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee, which means it's time to take a closer look at the hypothetical match-ups between him and John McCain. According to Gallup, which has been tracking these numbers, Obama's support, broken down demographically, starts to look a lot like John Kerry's performance among Democrats in the 2004 general election (a point I have made here before). The good news is that McCain does worse in every demographic compared to how Bush fared in '04, save church attendance (McCain outperforms Bush in the "occasionally" and ties in the "never" categories). Obama does better than Kerry did among black voters, college graduates and postgraduates (unsurprisingly), but Obama does worse in every other category.

Another way to look at this is by directly comparing performance between Obama-McCain and Kerry-Bush. Obama does better against McCain than Kerry did against Bush in every category except church attendance. Obama does better in weekly attendance (losing by 19 instead of 22 points), but does worse by a 12-point margin in the "occasionally" category and seven points in the "never" category (which he still wins handily, by the way). Adjusting the percentages each of these demographics represent in the general public ought to give us a rough sense of the probable electoral outcome, or at least as good as we're going to get fully six months before Election Day. For now, Gallup has Obama leading John McCain by one point, 46%-45%. That's considerably shakier than the DNC's turnout numbers would have you believe.

--Mori Dinauer

If I may add a point to Robert's post below, this story in The Hill about the obstinate-yet-conflicted House “Blue Dog” coalition is exactly the sort of problem that ought to frustrate liberals. Here you have (some) conservative Democrats who have repeatedly voted to fund a war without worrying about how to pay for it, and now all of sudden they show pangs of fiscal responsibility about not coming up with the monies to fund one program in the new war spending bill. Blue Dogs finally getting with the program: Sounds great, right?

Not so fast, because the part they are raising fiscal responsibility objectives about is…wait for it, because it’s really going to infuriate you…education benefits for veterans. Where was this sort of ethic from Blue Dogs when the Bush administration was asking for billions to be handed over to venal, wasteful, no-bid contract-winning war profiteers?

“Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it’s butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition who serves on the House leadership team as a deputy whip. The so-called GI Bill of Rights, authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), would give veterans money for college and cost $720 million in its first two years. But critics say that could grow to billions in future years.”

No! Not billions spent without funds to pay for it -- that just never happens in defense spending!

Two comments: First, thank goodness for Webb. Second, I’m going to keep saying this until it starts to sink in: Since Reconstruction, the Blue Dog element within the Democratic Party has gone from dominant majority, to significant minority to what it is today -- a declining coalition of conflicted complainers. Among the blessings of building a non-southern Democratic majority is that there is greater intraparty ideological cohesion, thus marginalizing Blue Dogs and their hand-wringing interference with emerging liberal project.

--Tom Schaller

Terence Samuel tells you which election you should really be watching on Tuesday:

The Tuesday special election in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District is being held to replace veteran GOP congressman Roger Wicker, who was appointed to the Senate last December by Gov. Haley Barbour to replace the retiring Trent Lott. Wicker had been in the House for five terms and had always won re-election with more than 60 percent of the vote. This is exactly the kind of district that Democrats are routinely forced to write off because it is so difficult to overcome the culturally tainted associations that come with being a Democrat.

The election is producing extraordinary levels of GOP anxiety, because of what it says about Republican prospects in November. While losing any congressional seat these day is distressing for a Republican Party looking for ways to rebuild a majority in the House, to lose this particular seat, in this particular state, is to confront just how much trouble Republicans are in with voters all over the country. Mississippi is the last place Republicans should be in trouble.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Noah highlights the fact that about a third of the new war supplemental bill is for weapons not directly related to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The latest war-funding bill might pay for more than just the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could add billions of dollars' worth of the latest manned and robotic aircraft to American fleets, as well. Nearly a third of the $165.4 billion measure, $51.8 billion, would be "devoted to new weapon systems," Inside Defense reports.

Since 2005, the Defense Department has used these so-called "supplemental," "emergency" funding measures to buy new gear. First, it was equipment worn out by war. Then, upgrades to those depleted items. Finally, a recent Congressional Budget Office report notes, the Pentagon began to use these war-time kitties to "accelerate planned purchases of new systems, address emerging needs, and enhance the military’s capability not only to continue current operations but also to be better prepared for the longer war on terrorism."

Of course, as the war develops new weapon systems will come in to use, so it's not strictly helpful to think only in terms of the replacement of worn or destroyed platforms. Moreover, it's kind of nice to think that part of the war supplemental may be going somewhere other than down the drain; being able to use weapons in a future conflict is, all things equal, a good thing.

The problem is that civilian oversight of the defense budget is growing more and more distant and lax. Thirty years ago the size of the defense budget was the subject of vigorous national debate, as were its various constituent elements. Now there hardly seems to be a peep on Capitol Hill about some of the largest budgets on record. The war supplementals are both more and less controversial than the main budget; they obviously carry a lot of political baggage, but at the same time it appears relatively easy to sneak in whatever the services want. All told, it's not a good way to handle long term military procurement.

--Robert Farley

• As Scott noted earlier, the Clinton campaign continued to utilize the services of Mark Penn, despite his lack of understanding for a fundamental feature of the Democratic primary system.
  
• It looks like Michigan Democratic party leaders have come up with a reasonable plan for seating their delegates -- Clinton gets 69, Obama 59, which won't fundamentally change the arithmetic of the race.
• Tom Edsall looks at the Obama campaign possibly settling Hillary's campaign debts in exchange for her dropping out the race. Josh Marshall asks how Obama's legion small donors would feel about their money being put to this use.
• Bloomberg reports that Nancy Pelosi  has been quietly consolidating her power in the House, laying the structural groundwork for formidable Democratic majority after the 2008 elections.
• Ezra flags a Matt Stoller post about how Obama is remaking the Democratic Party -- with himself at the center.
• Speaking of Obama, he was on the Hill today, where he spent 45 minutes schmoozing with House members.
• Hillary moves the goalposts again, arguing that since 1916 West Virginia has been the key to successful Democratic presidential campaigns.
• In case you missed it this week, check out TAP Senior Correspondent Spencer Ackerman's interview with General David Petraeus in the Washington Independent -- the final entry in a must-read five part series on COIN tactics.

--Mori Dinauer

Mr. Super, an anonymous superdelegate I interviewed last month, has identified himself, according to a release on the DemConWatch blog:

MrSuper.org is a website which was created in March to debunk myths, offer insight and answer questions about the 2008 Democratic nomination process for President. The author, who has been posting under the pseudonym "Mr. Super" will announce his identity today.

The site was created by Edward Espinoza, an undeclared Superdelegate and elected DNC Member from California and a former Field Director to 2008 Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson.

The site gained the immediate attention of several political media outlets covering the web, being included in a story by Abbi Tatton on CNN, as well as serving as the subject of magazine articles published in The Nation and The American Prospect. It was recently mentioned in a San Jose Mercury News article, and the site has also been featured on other blogs including Democratic Convention Watch, TAPPED - the blog of the American Prospect, and has received mentions on DailyKos, Ben Smith's blog at Politico.com and a number of other political blogs. All featured stories are listed on a page within the blog under a link labeled "In The News."

I consider this to be yet another sign that this primary is rapidly approaching its end which, incidentally, Mr. Super predicted would be Memorial Day, right after the May 20 primaries.

--Mori Dinauer

Suppose a food crisis hits in, say, Zambia. Or to be more precise--suppose basic staples have skyrocketed by 129% across the globe, to the point that the UN has predicted shortages may stoke civil wars across the developing world. What do you do? Well, if you're the director of USAID, you'll immediately direct your staff to buy food to help. That is, food grown by American producers. Then you bundle it up and ship it--in primarily American vessels-- to countries across the ocean, where people hungrily await the needed stocks. The whole process will take up to six months. And by the time it's through, particularly with rising fuel costs, fully 65% of so-called "food-aid" expenditures will be absorbed by overhead alone.

Of course, this isn't a defensible form of policy. But under the 1985 farm bill, those are the rules, and that's exactly the system Congress has continued to endorse. And today as members prepare to announce the farm bill, it looks like that's precisely what Congress is preparing to do again. According to the latest reports, despite Bush's call for increased food-aid flexibility, the farm bill will provide just $60 million for a pilot program that would allow the purchase of food from from local producers overseas. That's only a 4% change in overall total giving. [Eds. Note: Corrected from .04%]

So in a time of soaring agricultural profits and food crisis, this is what they've delivered: a shiny, gift-wrapped $300-boondoggle that keeps inflated farmer subsidies and rejects food-aid reform. Oh, and hands out tax breaks on behalf of people like Sen. Mitch McConnell, who got $498-million tax break for his home-state thoroughbred industry.

Still unclear if Bush will go ahead and veto the bill. Either way, it's just another reminder of the stakes--and constituencies--that Congress is willing to go to the mat for.

--Te-Ping Chen

Slate has a pretty interesting article on the finances of Barack and Michele Obama; long story short, there's a pretty vast gulf between the Obamas and either the McCains or the Clintons. In any case, prior to the publication of Barack's two books the Obamas were squarely on the cusp between upper middle and lower upper class; I have to wonder how their financials compared with the rest of the Senate. The books made quite a bit of money, which the Obamas have invested in what the authors suggest is a "too conservative" strategy for a couple of their age and means.

I have to admit that an investigation this detailed leaves me vaguely unsettled, even when the subject is a presidential candidate. Nevertheless, I find it endlessly fascinating that the candidate most vigorously tarred with the "elite" label in this election possesses by far the most modest means ...

--Robert Farley

In a speech Tuesday on his strategy for appointing conservative judges, John McCain failed to mention Roe v. Wade. As you should already know, McCain has said time and time again this election cycle that the ruling should be overturned. And if you still believe he's a centrist moderate on social issues, consider the co-chair of his recently-announced "Justice Advisory Committee": Sen. Sam Brownback. Brownback is the man who believes abortion should be illegal in every single circumstance, even when the woman's life or health is at risk, and even in cases of rape or incest. Here's the full list of committee members. Do you spy a pro-choicer among them?

--Dana Goldstein

There's been a lot of talk about veteran suicides this week, and much of it, unfortunately, has centered on a statistic Bloomberg reported on Monday: The total number of veteran suicides is expected to exceed the number of U.S. casualties in the Iraq-Afghanistan wars.

Once the statistic's initial shock value wears off, it's clear that--as Winds of Change notes in its calculations--the figure is fairly misleading. Taking the national rate of suicide (about 13 per 100,000) and applying it to the 1.6 million U.S. troops that have to date served, the figure comes out to 8,409 -- a little less than twice the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq. More an artifact of the comparatively low casualties the U.S. has suffered in Iraq than anything else.

The more compelling statistic is the one revealed in an independent CBS analysis last November, namely that veterans aged 20-24 (that is, those who've served in current wars) have a suicide rate up to four times higher than civilians the same age. What's more, even among soldiers who seek help--and up until last week, admitting PTSD could cost you your security clearance and career--only half, RAND reports, receive even "minimally adequate" care. That's the kind of statistic the VA's been none too eager to release, and as emerged in hearings this week, has in fact worked to stonewall.

--Te-Ping Chen

This is amazing:

With the Clinton campaign widely viewed as being on its last legs, staffers are now more free than ever to dish out some dirt on the many strategic blunders of Mark Penn.

The latest: At a strategy session last year, Penn reportedly said that a Clinton win in California would effectively wrap up the nomination by awarding her all of the state's 370 delegates.

What's even more amazing, of course, is that Clinton continued to believe that the strategic services of someone who failed to grasp basic elements of the nominating process were worth millions of dollars. It really does seem that the "arbitrarily selected big state" strategy wasn't just lame ex post facto spin, but represented what they actually believed. But given the way the system was structured, it couldn't actually work.

--Scott Lemieux

On Tuesday night, just minutes after networks called North Carolina for Barack Obama, the state of Georgia quietly resumed killing those on death row. The executed was one William Lynd, a 53-year-old convicted of murder. It was the first execution since Baze v. Rees, and one of 50-60 planned before the end of the year. (After a 7-month pause, death rows have a lot of catching-up to do.)

But when it comes to the death penalty, Baze v. Rees' focus--whether a particular cocktail of drugs produces pain severe enough to violate the Eighth Amendment--was patently absurd. The fact remains that so often, as John Holdridge recently told the New York Times, the problem with the death penalty isn't method of execution, but rather "poor people getting lousy lawyers."

Case in point: North Carolina, which in the past six months alone has freed three people from death row, most recently Leaven Jones, who spent 14 years on death row before a federal judge found that his court-appointed attorneys spent "virtually no time or effort" investigating his crime. Or Alabama, where 194 condemned inmates--mostly indigent--are denied state representation for capital post-conviction appeals.

Like any other statistic in the U.S., death penalty sentencing is strongly patterned on race. But the more basic injustice death row inmates face is lack of resources. Last month in Kentucky, for example, where public defenders already represent over 435 cases per year, the state eliminated another $2.5 million in indigent-representation funding.

Last year, the Duke lacrosse players who faced Mike Nifong were lucky enough to have top-caliber representation. After being found innocent, Reade Seligmann put it best when he said, "I can’t imagine what they do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.” With 129 death row inmates exonerated since 1973, too often, the death penalty isn't a punishment reserved for the "worst" offenders--just the ones with the worst representation.

--Te-Ping Chen

In my latest Bloggingheads with Michael Goldfarb, I talked a bit about the geographic distribution of recent casualties in Iraq, and we both discussed recent bombings in Anbar province. I had assumed that April's casualty uptick was largely a consequence of up tempo operations against Shia militias. Brandon Friedman tells me that I was wrong:

When a yet-to-be-named U.S. soldier was killed while on patrol in Anbar on Tuesday, he became the ninth American to die there in the past three and a half weeks. This is neither random nor insignificant.

In fact, during the past 30 days, 23 percent of coalition combat fatalities have occurred in al-Anbar Province. Considering that only two U.S. troops had been killed in Anbar in the preceding six months--representing just over one percent of total coalition combat fatalities during that period--this is a huge uptick.

In comparison, combat fatalities have dropped significantly in Baghdad over the same 30-day period.

--Robert Farley

On the question of whether Clinton should drop out, my position continues to be one of indifference. It's her decision, and I doubt that it matters much either way. I suppose I would prefer that she not attack Obama using GOP talking points now that the nomination has been effectively decided, but even there, as Dilan says, the effects of this kind of attack are greatly overstated. (Barring a major change in fundamentals, if the election is close enough something so minor could turn the election, I've seriously overestimated Obama as a candidate.) I also object to assumptions that Clinton is trying to tear the party apart or sabotage Obama or whatever. I have no doubt that she will strongly support Obama as soon as she concedes. And I think one has to have some empathy here; it can't be easy to run a race you reasonably expected to win, assemble a very strong coalition of supporters, and fall just short. I can't really blame her for not quite wanting to concede the inevitable just yet. If staying in is "selfish," it is only in the sense that anyone running for that kind of office is going to be.

On the other hand, claims that she's serving some kind of noble ideal by staying in are no more plausible. I've seen in some quarters claims that it would undermine democracy or some such to state that Clinton should leave. The thing is, candidates drop out of races they can no longer win all the time without anyone claiming that it undermines democracy. Democracy means that Clinton can stay in until the convention if she chooses, and it also means that anybody can suggest that her staying in is bad for the party, decide to stop giving money to a lost cause, come out for Obama as a superdelegate, etc. McGovern is no more doing anything undemocratic than Clinton is. (Obviously, the argument becomes farcical when anyone who suggests that advising Clinton to drop out violates democratic values also sees nothing objectionable about counting the results of "primaries" that wouldn't meet Vladimir Putin's standards of legitimacy.)

In another common move, Ambinder says that it "may well be that Clinton refuses to officially drop out until she is satisfied that the voices of Florida and Michigan are heard." The thing is, though, that the voices of Florida in Michigan will not be heard in any meaningful way no matter what happens. A fair contest is not going to be held for their delegates. Michigan Democrats do not suddenly become enfranchised if you declare ex post facto that a one-major-candidate straw poll was an ordinary primary. If "hearing their voices" just means seating them at the convention after it's clear that they won't be used to try to reverse the outcome of the nomination, then Clinton staying in the race prevents the issue from being resolved.

In essence, this is a trivial issue. Clinton is neither doing significant damage to the party nor acting as some sort of crusader for democracy by staying in although she's drawing dead.

--Scott Lemieux

From the Arizona Republic:

In tight Senate votes, McCain not a maverick

When it matters the most, he seldom bucks his own party

Ronald J. Hansen
The Arizona Republic
May. 7, 2008 12:00 AM

Over the years, Sen. John McCain has publicly condemned Republican Party leaders and occasionally voted against the GOP on selected issues.

But an Arizona Republic analysis of his Senate votes on the most divided issues in the past decade shows that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives.

What do you know? An article that actually takes a feature of the McCain image, and -- hold on to your hats -- attempts to ascertain whether it's true. I'm floored.

It's no accident that this is coming from the Arizona Republic. While the Republic is generally considered a pretty conservative paper, they have tangled with McCain a great deal over the years, mostly because they haven't been particularly inclined to simply repeat over and over that he's a StraightTalkingMaverickReformer. As a consequence, McCain has always acted as though he pretty much hates their guts. (In 2000, he wouldn't even let the Republic's reporter have a seat on the Straight Talk Express. So while the national media were whooping it up on board the party bus, she had to follow along in a rental car. And this is the largest paper in his home state.)

One thing I've noticed lately is that there are a bunch of Chicago reporters (like Lynn Sweet and Jim Warren, for instance) who have become regulars on cable TV, presumably because they know a lot about Barack Obama. But the reporters who have known John McCain the longest and know him the best -- the ones from Arizona -- are nowhere to be seen. Why do you think that is?

-- Paul Waldman

A smart, liberal, female Democratic friend of mine repeatedly points out to me ways in which Barack Obama often comes across to some women as arrogant. She says a lot of women who are backing Hillary Clinton will find it hard to support Obama in the fall because, in her words, “he’s another frat boy” candidate: the cool and charming jock who gets his way and doesn’t appreciate or work hard enough to have gotten where he did.

But, at least as concerns this campaign, who really gave it the old college frat boy try? One candidate claimed to be “in it to win it,” as if it were a mere vanity or popularity contest worth winning for winning’s sake. One candidate casually dismissed the notion that the campaign might go much beyond the February 5 Super Tuesday contests. One candidate prepared, as one television political analyst put it recently to me, “absolutely nothing—zilch, zero” insofar as a delegate-capture strategy. One candidate proved to be a stubborn, bad listener who clung to advisers who were not serving the campaign well out of a sense of loyalty.

Isn't, after all, Clinton who ran a much more presumptuous, just-need-to-show-up “frat boy” candidacy than Obama? Wasn’t she the one who proved unprepared and who underestimated the task facing her? Clinton supporters have every right to complain about the asymmetric national media coverage that was tougher on her and, until recently, more favorable toward him. He certainly benefited, to at least some extent, from his gender. But beyond that, she was the frat boy candidate in 2008.

--Tom Schaller

Sarah Posner on the religious right: Former Bush family confidant and televangelist advocate Doug Wead joins the fight against Sen. Grassley. Kenneth Copeland continues to be chummy with politicians while the public turns a blind eye. Evangelical leaders unveil "An Evangelical Manifesto: The Washington Declaration of Identity and Public Commitment," and McCain's "conservative judges" speech resonates with the Christian right.

Read the rest of the FundamentaList here and subscribe to our RSS feed to receive the List as soon as it's published.

--The Editors

Twenty years ago, citing their unwillingness to serve as an "accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public," the League of Women Voters stopped moderating the U.S. presidential debates. (The move was to protest candidate attempts to turn them into ever-more elaborately staged and controlled events.) And especially after the stultified train-wreck that was last month's ABC debate, we've mourned their departure ever since.

Since the League's departure, the corporate-funded Commission on Presidential Debates, in tandem with candidates and major TV networks, has held a monopoly on deciding who can debate what where. Now, though, it looks like an end-run is being planned around this iron triangle. Last November, in a move that triggered sharp controversy, the Commission spurned New Orleans as a general-election debate site. Today, the New York Observer reports that the city is teaming up with YouTube and Google to try and host its own debate this fall anyway.

So far, YouTube's attempts to insert itself into the game haven't been terribly fruitful--for example, thanks to overbearing producers, the YouTube/CNN debate that was to 'revolutionize' the process turned out merely cringe-worthy (diamonds and pearls, anyone?). But if YouTube and Google can successfully entice general-election candidates to appear at an independent New Orleans debate in the fall, that's a major coup. It's about time the Commission's stranglehold over who can participate in what kind of debate was broken.

And what better place for two candidates to start that long-awaited American conversation on race than in New Orleans?

--Te-Ping Chen

Amid all the debate about what's driven spiraling food prices, one piece of history keeps getting left off the table: the key role institutions like the IMF have played in exacerbating the situation. Which is why William Quigley's work to document the contours of Haiti's food crisis deserves a closer look. Last month, starving Haitians ousted the country's prime minister after riots that left at least six dead. At the heart of this tension and history? Rice.

As a small country of just 8 million, prior to Duvalier's expulsion, Haiti grew almost all of its own rice. That changed after 1986, the year Duvalier fled into exile, and Haiti secured a desperately needed $24.6-million loan from the IMF--a loan given on the condition that Haiti cut its rice tariffs, which the country did. Tariffs shrank from 35% to just 3%.

Soon thereafter, not unexpectedly, the Haitian market was promptly flooded with cheap American rice. Unable to compete with American rice farmers -- who receive an annual $1-billion subsidy -- as Paul Farmer remembers, the local rice market disintegrated, to the point that today, Haiti has become the third-largest importer of U.S. rice. And now, with the cost of rice rising over 140% since January, Haitians can't afford it any longer.

It's a painful irony that these days, Robert Zoellick is the one now making high-minded calls for global food aid and reform from his new perch at the World Bank. After all, it was Zoellick who, during his prior stint as U.S. trade representative, was part of the team that aggressively worked to limit developing countries' ability to shore up protective grain reserves, mount tariffs and subsidize farmers -- all in the name of the free market. And all while simultaneously defending egregious U.S. subsidies, like Bush's decision to expand 2002 farm-bill spending by $80 billion.

Yes, countries like U.S. need to step up food aid. But if crisis is opportunity, right now, it can't be forgotten that what countries like Haiti really need is a better deal on trade policy, too.

--Te-Ping Chen

An Onion-esque headline from the LA Times today: "Federal agents arrest illegal immigrants leaving U.S."

To be fair, I understand there's merit to the strategy as an attempt to intercept contraband, address other illicit activities, et cetera. But draining resources on the effort hardly gets us any closer to that fond political goal, "securing the border." A phrase which itself--particularly given recent border debacles--manages to retain its political salience more in a triumph of symbolism than anything else.

What does illegal immigration track with? Not levels of border enforcement spending. Instead, unlike legal immigration, illegal immigration responds to the economy. In the late 1990s, for example, when the economy grew rapidly and job creation was high, illegal immigrants likewise peaked, even as the number of hours officers spent collectively policing the U.S.-Mexico border increased 300% from 1990-2005. And not workplace enforcement, either: the CBO recently estimated that such efforts would reduce federal revenue by $17.3 billion, as undocumented workers would simply be paid outside the system.

That, however, doesn't stop House Republicans--seemingly undeterred by their failure to make immigration a wedge issue--from continuing to try and force the issue. As Frank Perry notes in his very worthwhile recent interview with Firedoglake, by tacking right, members of the GOP can use the issue to distance themselves from an unpopular president.

But unlike Congressmen who have to run for office every two years, Bush has taken the long-term view. Like Karl Rove, he recognizes that by alienating a part of the electorate that's grown by 3 million in just past three years--particularly in swing states--the GOP is further consigning itself to its status as the minority party. John McCain knows that too, but since pushing the issue will alienate conservatives, he's rejected his past positions and pledged to "secure the border" first--a feeble promise doomed from the get-go.

--Te-Ping Chen