The Clinton campaign is already trying to cushion the blow of possible March 4 losses. Today's email to the press:

Senator Obama is riding a surge of momentum that has enabled him to pour unprecedented resources into Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont. The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.

[...] Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states [...] If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem.

Everyone knows that these states are critical for keeping Clinton in the race, and she's been banking on March 4 success for all of February. This is clearly an attempt to downplay the relevance if Obama wins. But I'm not sure when it became a good idea to argue that your opponent is campaigning harder than you are, or that he's spending more money (which presumably means he has more to spend). Besides that, wouldn't one be wise to expend even more effort on those states if there isn't a "surge of momentum" propelling one forward?

--Kate Sheppard

Last fall, John Hagee gave a speech at the late Jerry Falwell's church, where he shared the stage with Tim LaHaye, co-author of the best-selling Left Behind series of novels. "How close are we to the second coming of Christ?" Hagee asked. "The Bible clearly states that heaven and earth shall pass away. … The signs of his coming are very clear in Scripture. If you listen closely, you can hear the hoofbeats of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, racing toward the battle of Armageddon."

For Hagee, the Bible prophesies that certain events will take place before the Second Coming. Hagee believes that many of these events have already occurred or are occurring. Referring to the Rapture, during which he believes Christians will be whisked away to heaven to wait for the Second Coming, Hagee said, "We’re going up in a twinkling of an eye. Jesus Christ could be here before you get home tonight."

While John McCain clearly doesn't believe this stuff, he knows that millions of Americans do. A 2002 Time magazine poll found that “fully 59% [of Americans] say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.” A 2007 AP/Ipsos poll found that one quarter of Americans believed that Jesus Christ would return in 2007 and 46% of evangelicals believed that it was “somewhat likely.” A comprehensive study of Pentecostals and charismatic evangelical Christians conducted by the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life in 2006 found that “Pentecostals have particularly strong views on 'the rapture of the church,' the teaching that before the world comes to an end the faithful will be saved and taken up to heaven.” According to the survey, 90% of American Pentecostals held that belief, while 69% of charismatics and 59% of other Christians did.

Hagee's view of current affairs is animated by his view of the end-times, and his belief that godly forces are engaged in spiritual warfare with satanic forces. The bible foretells, he believes, plagues, natural disasters, and nuclear war. So all those things should be cause for celebration, since they demonstrate the biblical prophecy of the events preceding Christ's Second Coming are taking place in our lifetime.

The events that demonstrate the end is near, Hagee claimed, include:

• Enlightenment and scientific progress. "The knowledge explosion," said Hagee, "has produced a generation that is dying of AIDS, abortion, enslaved by drugs, homosexuality, Satanism, and witchcraft, and the collapse of the traditional family with the celebration of abortion. Why? Because knowledge without God only produces an intellectual barbarian."

• The possibility of nuclear war. Hagee claimed that "I had a congressman sit in my office the other day and say that the CIA now believes that nations hostile to Israel have purchased submarines from cash-hungry Soviets to attack Israel from the Mediterranean Sea. That U.S. Congressman said we have missiles that are missing, and we don’t know where they are. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, nuclear war is coming to the Middle East, and it will engulf the world. That was a mystery that was not known just a few years ago. But now it is known with Bible clarity."

• Jerusalem under Jewish control. Hagee maintained that "Satan wants Jerusalem for his messiah, the Antichrist. God has promised it to King David, that his seed, Jesus Christ, shall rule over it forever and forever. People ask why can’t the Arabs and the Jews get together over this city. Listen to me: it is not about the two-state solution. It is not about money. It is not about land. It is about theology. . . . Muhammed taught a theology of triumphalism . . . .for Islam to rule the earth. The problem is that sitting in the throat of Islamic nations in the Middle East is Israel, who has an unconditional blood covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that the land shall be theirs forever and forever. God did not loan the land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He gave it to them by blood covenant, and the Book of Genesis and that covenant still stands. It is there regardless of what the United Nations wants. It is there regardless of what the U.S. State Department thinks. It is there in spite of what the Arab nations want. It belongs to Israel. . . . I am telling you there will be no lasting peace in the Middle East until the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, returns to that sacred city and sets up his eternal kingdom.

• Deception. Hagee said that "secular humanism is deception. Secular humanism says there is no right there is no wrong. Secular humanism says man is the master of his fate. What nonsense that is. You can’t guarantee your next breath. Only God can give you life. . . . You are the master of nothing! There is one master, he is King Jesus, the son of the living God, and there is no other."

• Pestilence. Asserting that we don't have a cure for AIDS, and that earthquakes are "a tool God has of communicating with those who are hard of hearing spiritually," Hagee claimed that "God will announce the coming of Jesus Christ with the biggest earthquake the world has ever seen when the islands of the sea will disappear, and the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount will be collapsed, and the Mount of Olives will split in half and Jesus will come and say, I am the Lord, and there is none like me, and he will set up his throne on the Temple Mount and rule from the throne of his father King David, of his kingdom there will be no end."

Hagee tries to claim that none of these biblical beliefs influence his foreign policy views, which he claims are based on his "love" of Israel. Does love mean never having to say you're sorry for agitating for nuclear war?

--Sarah Posner

Yesterday Dana and Kate wrote about a NYT article on the increase in the prison population in the United States. Naturally, then this Inside Higher Ed piece about how prison spending is also up isn't too surprising. What is interesting is how they compared prison spending to the amount spent on higher education by state. For states like Connecticut, Vermont, Michigan, Delaware and Oregon, the spending is nearly one to one.

Twenty years ago we spent 32 cents on prisons for every dollar we spent on higher ed, today, it's 60 cents. This is due in large part to the crunch on state budgets--the first thing to be trimmed from the budget is usually colleges and universities. The reasoning is that students can pay higher tuition rates to make up the difference, but with prisons, an increased population must be supported by the state.

-- Kay Steiger

• The new Clinton ad Kate mentioned is a big deal. It essentially calls Obama unfit to be commander in chief, but I really don't get what the difference between the two is. Clinton may have had experience with legislation during Bill's presidency, but she certainly wasn't ordering air strikes or whatever. The Obama campaign responds by pointing out that the one time Clinton did make a hard choice on a national security issue she pretty much blew it.
  
• There's a lot of confusion about whether or not the Clinton campaign is threatening to sue over the complicated primary/caucus process in Texas, but it seems like there was a threat as part of an attempt to gain some kind of agreement with the sate party--though what exactly the agreement is about is unclear.
  
• Ari Berman explores Howard Dean's influence on the Democratic Party and Obama's campaign.
  
• Naomi Klein writes a column in The Nation criticizing Obama for not being clear that there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim which prompts the Nation's own Ari Melber to point out that he's done exactly that many times. You might say it's a Nation divided against itself.
  
• John McCain personally accepts the support of a man who is just as bigoted against Catholics as Farrakhan is against Jews.
  
• Finally, just for fun, Brave New Films has a hilarious song about McCain and the war, will.i.am has another song about Obama (with an even more bizarre mix of celebrities including Landry and Tyra from Friday Night Lights), and Kenyan elders may fine Clinton several cows for the alleged circulation of a photo of Obama in Somali tribal garb.

--Sam Boyd

I don't really have anything to say about this new Clinton ad airing in Texas, other than to note that I prefer it when Democrats leave the fear-mongering to that other political party:

--Kate Sheppard

The undersigned, The Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States, pursuant to the attached House Resolution 979, One Hundred Tenth Congress, hereby certifies to you the failure and refusal of Harriet Miers, former White House Counsel, to appear, testify, and furnish certain documents in compliance with a subpoena before a duly constituted subcommittee of the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. The undersigned further certifies to you the failure and refusal of Joshua Bolten, White House Chief of Staff, to furnish certain documents in the custody of the White House in compliance with a subpoena before said committee. These failures and refusals are fully shown by the certified copy of the House Report 110-423 of said committee which is also hereto attached.

According to the testimony of your predecessor, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and your recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department intends to prevent Mr. Taylor from complying with the statute and enforcing the contempt citations against Ms. Miers and Mr. Bolten. You claimed that "enforcement by way of contempt of a congressional subpoena is not permitted when the President directs a direct adviser of his… not to appear or when he directs any member of the executive not to produce documents." Hearing on Oversight of the Dep't of Justice Before the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 110th Cong. 87-88 (Feb. 7, 2008). You purported to base your view on a "long line of authority," but cited no court decision that supports this proposition. There is no authority by which persons may wholly ignore a subpoena and fail to appear as directed because a President unilaterally instructs them to do so. Even if a subpoenaed witness intends to assert a privilege in response to questions, the witness is not at liberty to disregard the subpoena and fail to appear at the required time and place. Surely, your Department would not tolerate that type of action if the witness were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury. Short of a formal assertion of executive privilege, which cannot be made in this case, there is no authority that permits a President to advise anyone to ignore a duly issued congressional subpoena for documents. Your press spokesman has stated that you will "act promptly" to review this matter and reach a final decision. We will appreciate your acting with appropriate dispatch on this important matter. I strongly urge you to reconsider your position and to ensure that our nation is operating under the rule of law and not at presidential whim. If, however, you intend to persist in preventing Mr. Taylor from carrying out his statutory obligation to present this matter to the grand jury in the District of Columbia, we respectfully request that you inform us of that decision within one week from today, so that the House may proceed with a civil enforcement suit in federal district court.

And so, the gauntlet has been thrown. The letters can be accessed here.

--Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium

TAP's own Sarah Posner was writing about John Hagee and Rod Parsley long before the evangelical ministers stepped into the spotlight this week with their endorsements of John McCain. Check out these profiles from our archives:

With God On His Side
Sarah Posner | October 23, 2005
Meet Rod Parsley: rising star of the religious right, GOP ally -- and subject of lawsuits over his church governance and secretive fund-raising practices.

Pastor Strangelove
Sarah Posner | May 21, 2006
Texan John Hagee has a huge following, the ear of the White House -- and a theory that an invasion of Iran was foretold in the Book of Esther.

Posner has been chronicling the activities of Hagee, Parsley, and their ilk in her weekly FundamentaList column. And there's much more in her new book, God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters.

--The Editors

Yesterday, Canada's CTV posted a story featuring unnamed sources saying Barack Obama campaign officials called Canada's ambassador and reassured him that Obama's talk in Ohio about reopening NAFTA was just, you know, rhetoric, and that the trade deal would be safe under an Obama administration. Both the Obama campaign and the Canadian embassy deny the CTV report. Key quote from an Obama spokesperson: "Senator Obama does not make promises he doesn't intend to keep."

In Canada, it should be noted, this stuff is front-page news. And while I appreciate Kate's concerns about environmental and labor standards, there are other problems to consider when it comes to NAFTA. One might be how Canada and Mexico would view America reneging on the biggest free trade deal in history. If the U.S. pulls out of NAFTA, it's not at all clear it will be easy to renegotiate it with better labor and environmental standards, because Canada, to say nothing of Mexico, has its own set of concerns when it comes to trade. For instance, Canadians are furious about the softwood lumber dispute (I had to spend an entire month on it in grad school), and are just itching to clobber some Yankees over it.

As Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said (warned?) yesterday, "If any American government chose to make the mistake of reopening that we would have some things we would want to talk about as well." And as Federal Trade Minister David Emerson said Wednesday, "Knowledgeable observers would have to take note of the fact that we are the largest supplier of energy to the U.S. and NAFTA has been the foundation for integrating the North American energy market."

--Jordan Michael Smith

Over at TAP Online, David Greenberg reviews Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right:

Not long ago the term "neoconservative" seemed ripe for retirement. The label was originally applied in the 1960s and 1970s to the ex-liberals (themselves ex-socialists) who turned halfway to the right after becoming disenchanted with the Great Society, left-wing politics, and the Democrats' post-Vietnam isolationism. Under Ronald Reagan, however, the neocons kept moving right and joined in a broad right-wing consensus, and by the 1990s it became hard to tell them apart from other Republicans. Did second-generation neocons such as Irving Kristol's son Bill -- baby boomers who never made any left-to-right voyage -- even warrant the moniker? The younger Kristol said he was "just a conservative."

And Eric Alterman has a detailed list of the pros and cons of Bill Kristol on the New York Times op-ed page.

--The Editors

In all the rush to assure voters that Barack Obama is not Muslim, one sector of American society has been thrown under the bus: actual Muslims. The San Jose Mercury News brings us this story today about the effects on their community of using this sort of scare tactic against Obama. As rivals have been busy implying that he's Muslim and therefore a terrorist-lover, Obama's camp has, of course, assured the public that the candidate is definitely not Muslim – he's as Christian as they come! Which then makes it hard for him to do anything to court Muslim voters, and has the unintended effect of validating the idea that the worst thing a politician could be is Muslim:

The Muslim faith group also finds itself politically isolated. Though candidates have been courting voters in this tight race, none of the three top contenders has met with major Muslim groups. Neither, they say, have major interfaith groups and politicians rallied around them to loudly condemn the anti-Islamic strategies.

"It would be good if the president and leaders of both parties would say: 'Enough. We're better than this,' " said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "It's disconcerting to me they haven't."

Which, unfortunately, Muslim Americans have been forced to accept as an unavoidable facet of American society at this point in history:

"We know these candidates will do what they have to do to get voted in," said Safaa Ibrahim, director of the Santa Clara chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Because there's such a negative outlook on Muslims, middle America would not smile upon candidates that are sensitive to Muslim issues."

--Kate Sheppard

Jeffrey Rosen brings up an interesting point about the judicial options for the next Democratic president. The recent Republican dominance of the White House leaves the Democrats with a very small group within the most desirable target candidates (relatively young, female or Hispanic, significant appellate court experience.) This will especially be true if the President has to appoint a justice quickly and doesn't have time to install a future candidate as Bush did with Roberts. I definitely like the idea of perhaps going outside the appellate courts for a first nominee; as Rosen notes many fine justices have come from that background. Rosen also usefully reminds that Elena Kagan, a potentially strong candidate, "was nominated to the D.C. Circuit at the end of the last Clinton administration and never got a hearing." Why, it's almost enough to make me think that the Deeply Principled Republican arguments that Teh Constitution!!!!111One!!!1! requires nominees to get an up-or-down vote were a cynical ruse.

This is also an interesting point:

But a choice like this might be controversial among Democratic activists in the John Edwards wing of the party, who feel the current Democratic justices are already too sympathetic to business. The statistics here bear them out. On the Roberts Court, both Democratic and Republican justices have been remarkably pro-business: The Chamber of Commerce won 13 of the 15 cases in which it filed friend-of-the-court briefs last year, many by near-unanimous margins. In light of this, some Democratic interest groups may prefer a more populist candidate without an extensive resume as a corporate lawyer.

--Scott Lemieux

• Conservatives seem to have trouble keeping their smears straight these days. On the one hand you have Fox News claiming that former leftist terrorist Bill Ayers was Barack Obama's mentor and on the other you have Congressman Jack Kingston arguing that Obama hates America because he doesn't wear an American Flag pin (hilariously, Kingston had to admit that he does not do so either).
• The Clinton campaign meanwhile is descending into recriminations and fingers are starting to point at Mark Penn (finally!). When your staffers are attacking each other on the record you know your campaign isn't going too well.
• Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that it will be very hard for Clinton to regain a lead in pledged delegates. Slate notes that she'd have to win the remaining contests by an average of 16 percent to regain a lead in pledged delegates. I don't see that happening, it is possible that a significant win in Texas and Ohio followed by a series of wins after that could convince enough superdelegates to support her for her to gain the nomination. Still, at this point she only has a slightly greater chance of being a nominee than Mike Huckabee. Run your own numbers over at Slate's new delegate tracker (we really could have used this like a month ago).
• The AP runs a story that chronicles Obama's attempts to convince people that he isn't a Muslim.

--Sam Boyd

Ever since the Iran NIE came out, it's been hard to leverage a strong case against the Iranian regime as being remotely dangerous to the security of the United States. But keep in mind that at one point it was conventional wisdom that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not only insane, but diabolical enough to take over the world. Can we all just agree now that the man is a buffoon, and an ineffectual one at that? Get a load of this:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday that Iran was the world's "number one" power, as he launched a bitter new assault on domestic critics he accused of siding with the enemy.

"Everybody has understood that Iran is the number one power in the world," Ahmadinejad said in a speech to families who lost loved ones in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

"Today the name of Iran means a firm punch in the teeth of the powerful and it puts them in their place," he added in the address broadcast live on state television.

I realize who his audience is, but get real. This guy is a bargain-basement Kim Jong-il who doesn't have the foggiest idea how to get reelected next year.

Bonus fun facts: Ahmadinejad shares a birthday with yours truly. And Bill Gates!

--Mori Dinauer

Dana pointed to the stats on women in prison released today in the Times. But far more shocking in that report were the stats on racial disparities in our prison system. The study, conducted by the Pew Center on the States, found that one in 15 black adults is in jail. Among young black men between the ages of 20 and 34, the number in prison reaches a rate of one in nine.

This dovetails interestingly with another report released this week by the Eisenhower Foundation, which found that black Americans are still significantly disadvantaged in terms of income, education and other measures of well-being. The poverty gap between blacks and whites is 24 percent, and blacks are three times as likely to live in extreme poverty. The study also found that school integration has declined in the past 20 years. In the 1980s, 37 percent of black students attended mostly white schools; today 27 percent do.

The USA Today piece on the Eisenhower report digs up Heritage Foundation senior policy fellow Robert Rector to negate the impact of the report, who argues that the it ignores that a major cause of poverty is single-parent homes. But part of the reason there are a number of single-parent homes is that American society has locked up a full 11 percent of young black men.

It's hard not to see a relationship between the two reports. American society doesn't provide the same economic and social opportunities to its black members as it does whites, thereby increasing the rate at which black Americans to wind up in jail because of drugs and other non-violent crimes. Not to mention the sentencing disparities that put more black people behind bars for longer periods of time while their white counterparts often get more leniency.

The more young black men we put (and leave) in jail, the less they're able to contribute to their family or community, perpetuating a vicious cycle. Even when they're released from prison, we don't often give them meaningful ways of reconnecting with society and push them further to the margins. States spend an average of $23,876 a year to keep someone in jail, and not much of which is used to curb recidivism rates. Wouldn't that money be better spent on programs that address these continuing societal disparities and give young black men and women better opportunities?

--Kate Sheppard

Last week, environmental justice groups from California issued a declaration against cap-and-trade, stating that pollution already disproportionately affects low-income, communities of color, and they will "fight at every turn" against regulations that create a carbon-trading system that would only exacerbate those trends. EJ groups, long overlooked in the more mainstream environmental movement, fear that climate legislation will once again disregard the concerns of the communities who are already most affected by the factories and refineries responsible for global warming. In a cap-and-trade system, poor communities, where polluting plants are most often sited, will still bear the brunt of impacts if industries are allowed to trade for rights to pollute there. Instead of this system, they're advocating a carbon tax, direct emissions reductions, and meaningful measures to move America to clean, renewable energy sources.

"[C]arbon trading is undemocratic because it allows entrenched polluters, market designers, and commodity traders to determine whether and where to reduce greenhouse gases and co-pollutant emissions without allowing impacted communities or governments to participate in those decisions," says the statement.

Mainstream environmental groups have also noted that a cap-and-trade system in which carbon credits are handed out to polluters would be problematic. Most support a cap-and-trade system in which credits are auctioned off and the proceeds are used for projects like new renewable fuel technologies, green job training programs, and helping folks adjust to increases in energy costs. In an ideal system, these programs would benefit the communities of concern for environmental justice groups. But the EJ groups in California are taking a hard line: "[O]ur demands for real changes in the way we make and use energy will not be silenced by promises of money or token adjustments to the fundamentally flawed trading and offsets approach."

There has long been a perception in the environmental justice community -- for good reason -- that mainstream environmental groups don't pay attention to the concerns of low-income communities and people of color. Ignoring their opposition to cap-and-trade would only further that impression. The big green groups in California are already trying to strike some sort of balance on the issue. Says Bill Magavern, the director of Sierra Club California:

We share many of the concerns of the EJ groups regarding pollution trading, like possible hot spots, loopholes and windfall profits [...] We are also open to using well-designed market compliance mechanisms to achieve some of the emission reductions necessary, as long as big polluters have to pay for their emissions and local air quality is protected.

A cap-and-trade system is more politically feasible than a carbon tax at this point. It doesn't look like these EJ groups will be able to push mainstream environmental groups away from supporting it. But their concerns about a cap-and-trade system that doesn't make polluters pay are valid and shouldn't be ignored. Whatever system we do adopt can't throw poor communities under the bus yet again.

--Kate Sheppard

This week's compromise between President Bush and House Democrats on PEPFAR -- the Administration's HIV-AIDS relief bill for sub-Saharan Africa -- represents only a partial victory. The legislation will increase funding to $50 billion from the $30 billion suggested by the White House, and it will remove a provision that required one-third of all the money to be spent on abstinence-only programs. But contraceptives and abortions are still banned from being paid for by PEPFAR funds. This is a severe limitation that undercuts Bush's own promise to support the ABC method of prevention (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms). And if PEPFAR nations spend less than half of their alloted funds on abstinence and monogamy messaging, they must justify that decision to Congress.

For more, see the Washington Post's report.

--Dana Goldstein

To follow up on Dana's post, Silja J.A. Talvi, who has done some of the best reporting on women in prison, recently published a book on the subject, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System.

Here's an excerpt, via In These Times.

--Phoebe Connelly

Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, has secretly been in Afghanistan for the last ten weeks:

Harry, 23, who is third in line to the throne, has spent the last 10 weeks serving in Helmand Province.

"I finally get the chance to do the soldiering that I want to do," the prince said before he left.

The deployment was subject to a news blackout deal, but broke down when leaked by foreign media.

It's not unusual for the "spare" to participate in British military action; Prince Andrew was a helicopter pilot on HMS Invincible in the Falklands War. Apparently, the Queen herself told Harry that he was headed to Helmand; it is rumored that she intervened in 1982 to make sure that Andrew wasn't removed from Invincible.

-- Robert Farley

From a must-read New York Times piece on a new report showing the United States has reached its highest level of incarceration in history -- 1 in 100 adults behind bars.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars, but that one in 100 black women is.

The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Wow. So the federal government includes two-year olds in its accounting of the incarceration rate? That seems fair and accurate.

--Dana Goldstein

Joe Romm has an excellent piece over on Salon taking on global warming deniers. It contains some good advice on ways not to feed denialist fires, specifically, when it comes to using terms like "consensus":

One of the most serious results of the overuse of the term "consensus" in the public discussion of global warming is that it creates a simple strategy for doubters to confuse the public, the press and politicians: Simply come up with as long a list as you can of scientists who dispute the theory. After all, such disagreement is prima facie proof that no consensus of opinion exists.

This is the sort of tactic we saw in December when James Inhofe's minions released a list of 400 "prominent scientists" who dispute claims about man-made climate change. A number of them were neither prominent nor scientists. Others actually only disagree about the specifics of the rate and impact of climate change -- not whether it's happening or man-made. But as Romm points out, it's not about "consensus of opinion" -- it's about data and science and scientific conclusions, and needs to be framed as such. And what that data shows is actually worse than the latest "consensus" reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This reflects the progression we've seen in the global warming denier crowd. First, they said global warming wasn't happening. Then they acknowledged it was happening, but swore it wasn't man-made. Then they conceded it was happening and manmade, but doing something about it was just "too costly." And now that most Americans understand of how costly it would be to not take action on climate change, they've resorted to disputing whether scientists are actually in agreement on what's happening to the planet, and pulling out all kinds of bunk arguments to support that idea. Which is precisely why talking about it as "consensus" is problematic. They'll always be able to dig up some folks to disprove that everyone's agreed.

Romm's piece is especially appropriate this week, as the famed ExxonMobil and Philip Morris-lovers at the Heartland Institute bring together as many denialist schmucks as they can dig up for an International Conference on Climate Change in New York, with under the theme "Global Warming: Crisis or Scam?" The event is meant to solidify their denialist message and garner some good press, which they'll probably get. But any examination of the "luminaries" they've invited to speak shows how desperate their attempts at arguing against science have become. (Kevin Grandia is working on a reference list on the conference speakers.) I'd feel bad for them for cobbling together such a pitiful group, except for the fact that they'll probably get plenty of uncritical press out of the whole deal.

--Kate Sheppard

Gershom Gorenberg on the ongoing crisis in Gaza:

The most important news photo from Israel this week was the one that didn't appear. It would have shown 40,000 unarmed Palestinian marchers, children and women and men, pouring through a gap trampled in the border fence around Gaza toward Israeli troops. With tear gas failing to work its dark magic in the rain, with the crowd pushing forward past those felled by rubber bullets, Israeli commanders—half panicked, half agonized—would have ordered their men to aim live fire at the marchers' feet. Ineluctably, some of the shots would have hit higher. The footage would have shown people kneeling next to the fallen. It might have shown the crowd still marching forward.

It didn't happen. Instead, newspapers in Israel the next day showed pictures of a 10-year-old Israeli boy lying wounded in the southern town of Sderot, his shoulder torn by shrapnel from a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip. Next to him kneeled his eight-year-old sister, her hand on his forehead to calm him as they waited for an ambulance. At least for now, the Hamas government of Gaza and its allies proved unable or unwilling to use nonviolent confrontation even as a one-time tactic.

Instead, the "ballistic intifada" of rocket fire continues, as do Israel's siege of the Strip and its raids and air attacks inside the enclave. Each side is imposing suffering on the other, and achieving little else. Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas's Fatah government in the West Bank has no influence over events in Gaza, just one sign that it is the weakest side of the Israel-Hamas-Fatah triangle. One potential outcome, an Israeli invasion of Gaza, would be a disaster for all sides. If there is a political alternative, it may require restoring a unified Palestinian government. That, in turn, could depend on Israel making the painful choice to release Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah leader and symbol of either terror or violent resistance, depending on who’s speaking.

Read the rest (and comment) here.

--The Editors

Apparently Michael Bloomberg is not running after all. But that doesn't mean he's going to stay on the sidelines, he warns:

In the weeks and months ahead, I will continue to work to steer the national conversation away from partisanship and toward unity; away from ideology and toward common sense; away from sound bites and toward substance. And while I have always said I am not running for president, the race is too important to sit on the sidelines, and so I have changed my mind in one area. If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach — and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy — I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House.

--Kate Sheppard

John McCain picked up the endorsement yesterday of San Antonio televangelist and Christians United for Israel (CUFI) founder John Hagee, who cited the candidate's opposition to abortion and "support" of Israel.

Even though Hagee hosted Mike Huckabee for a guest sermon at his church last December, his support for McCain is not a huge surprise. Last year, Hagee and McCain had a private breakfast in San Antonio after which Hagee declared McCain "solidly pro-Israel", which, in CUFI parlance, is code for opposition to a two-state solution. Hagee contributed $1,000 to McCain's campaign (although he also later contributed to Huckabee's as well.)

This past summer, McCain appeared at CUFI's annual summit, where he "joked" about how hard it is to do God's work in the city of Satan. (He repeated a similar line earlier this week at a town hall event in Cincinnati at which McCain "spiritual guide" Rod Parsley shared the stage.) While McCain might be able to laugh this off as a little quip about the foibles of Washington, to followers of Hagee and Parsley, "spiritual warfare" is a very real part of everyday life, in which they, as godly people, do battle with Satanic forces. When talking about CUFI, though, talking about battles is really no joking matter, since Hagee has been beating the drum for war with Iran -- which he believes will result in the world-ending battle at Armageddon -- for over two years.

At the CUFI summit, McCain got a lukewarm reception, and many participants I spoke with were skeptical about his socially conservative credentials -- although Israel was a top issue, abortion was also high on their lists. Most I spoke to supported Huckabee, who at that point (July 2007) was still an asterisk, and some others Sam Brownback -- who is now supporting McCain. But as far as Hagee's endorsement goes, I guess there's not much of a question now what Hagee's upcoming sermon is going to be about.

--Sarah Posner

For those who are still -- still -- struggling to identify policy differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, check out Education Week's run down of their education platforms. There are some real distinctions; Obama has supported teacher merit pay pegged to the test scores of individual instructors' students, while Clinton, who has been endorsed by the major national teachers' unions, believes merit pay should be awarded only when entire schools improve their performance.

In interviews with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel prior to the Wisconsin primary, Clinton rejected private school choice outright, while Obama expressed some openness to private school vouchers -- if studies ever show they improve student achievement. Still, he made it clear that he's aware of the many problems with real-world voucher programs. "My view has been that you are not going to generate the supply of high-quality schools to meet the demand,” Obama said. “Instead, what you’re going to get is a few schools that cream the kids that are easiest to teach." That describes almost perfectly the problems with the Utah voucher proposal that voters in that state rejected last November.

Indeed, it's long been my view that the more promising school choice is public school choice.

What about NCLB? Both Obama and Clinton are critical of the bill and want to expand the way it assesses students' progress to include measures such as Advanced Placement exams, graduation rates, and student portfolios. There have been some tonal distinctions in the way the candidates talk about the law, with Obama speaking about it being an unfunded mandate, while Clinton focuses more on the problems of NCLB's testing requirements, in which each state is allowed to craft its own standards, some of which are pitifully low.

Both Obama and Clinton want to move toward universal pre-school, though Clinton has signaled more of a commitment to attacking the issue at the federal level. On teacher education, Obama is more aggressive; he would like to provide full college scholarships for students who agree to teach for four years, and has said there should be a national teacher certification exam.

On education, a Democratic president will have a host of Congressional and union pressures on them. So make of these subtle distinctions what you will.

--Dana Goldstein

• So there was a debate last night and I continued my longstanding policy of intending to watch and then being too lazy to find a friend with cable, but it seems that if I had I'd have ruined both some innocent person's TV and one or both of my shoes. Apparently, Tim Russert might as well have shown up in a black hooded robe and put the candidates on the rack. I mean, tough questions are fine, but angrily badgering them about pointless endorsements and inconsequential misstatements even after they've offered full explanations is a waste of our time and theirs. See Mori, Paul, and Matt for more on the Russert style in American Politics.
• Obama hits one million donors. Or, should I say, one miiiiilion donors? That means that 1 out of every 300 Americans has given him money. By November that figure could easily be one out of every 100. Kinda makes it hard for McCain to argue that Obama is doing something terrible if he opts out of public financing for the general election.
• John Lewis finally does switch to Obama.
• What is it about Tennesse Republicans and black Democrats? First they smeared Harold Ford Jr., now they're going after Obama.
• Newsweek interviews designer Michael Bierut who argues that the Obama campaign is the first to have a coherent brand identity that extends to all elements of the campaign. For instance, every sign (that isn't handmade at) at every rally is in the same font, perfectly spaced, and so on.
• Mark Penn sent Tony Blair twirling, twirling, into the future.
• I thought the Saturday Night Live sketch I linked to on Monday was funny too, but I didn't expect it to be mentioned in yesterdays debate.

--Sam Boyd

A few weeks ago, General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz told reporters that he thinks global warming is a "total crock of shit." But he attested that he's "a skeptic, not a denier," and that his opinion "doesn’t matter" when it comes to what goes down at GM. After the blogosphere lashed out against Lutz's statements, he took to GM's own blog to defend his remarks:

What they should be doing, in earnest, is forming opinions not about me but about GM, and what this company is doing that is -- and will continue to be -- hugely beneficial to the very causes they so enthusiastically claim to support.

The Wall Street Journal weighed in on the issue earlier this week and concluded that the company's actions are more important than Lutz's opinions. Which is, of course, the real crock, considering how much GM has done to thwart action on climate change and greenwash their own image. They've been one of the big forces in ensuring that the country invests heavily in corn-based ethanol, and they've been a leading opponent of any increases to fuel efficiency standards. They've worked against states like California and now Minnesota and Arizona who are trying to set tougher emissions standards for automobiles. They might be working on a neat plug-in hybrid electric car, but they've been using it to lobby against higher CAFE standards. So yes, actions do speak louder than words – especially when those actions defy all that greenwashing GM has been trying to do.

--Kate Sheppard

John McCain supporter and Ohio talk-radio host Bill Cunningham made headlines yesterday for repeatedly referring to Barack Obama using his middle name, Hussein, and disparaging the candidate as a terrorist sympathizer in introductory remarks at a McCain rally. But it was former Ohio congressman and former Bush administration official Rob Portman who really had his "macaca" moment yesterday by telling the crowd that Cunningham is an "extremely important" part of McCain's presidential campaign and not condemning those types of remarks, as McCain himself did in remarks following his speech.

Portman, who has his sights set on a leading role in national politics and who has been rumored as a possible running mate for McCain, instead praised Cunningham for his flagrant racism: "Willie, you're out of control again. So, what else is new? But we love him. But I've got to tell you, Bill Cunningham lending his voice to this campaign is extremely important."

McCain, on the other hand, who has himself been a victim of this sort of racist disparagement from fellow Republicans, was willing to take on Cunningham's remarks: "Whatever suggestion was made that was in any way disparaging to the integrity, character, honesty of either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton was wrong, and I condemn it. I will take responsibility, and I apologize for it." He also said he will "make sure nothing like that ever happens again."

If McCain means that, he might want to think of shelving Portman as a spokesman for his campaign and possible VP pick.

--Kate Sheppard

Matt and Ezra don't seem to see what the big deal is over NAFTA, but I think both Clinton and Obama are right in plugging for a reevaluation of the labor and environmental standards of the deal and its counterparts, though they may well be doing so in Ohio now largely because it's politically expedient in a place where the deals have few supporters. Even if the deal has had little impact in the United States outside of concerns about the corporate welfare it provides, as Ezra argues, there is a serious need to reevaluate it based on what it's failed to deliver for our trade partners, and for the decline of labor and environmental standards that it facilitates.

On the Mexico piece, Matt points to Brad DeLong to reinforce his belief that NAFTA was a good idea, but it should be noted that DeLong says he's not willing to declare it a total success. Especially, he notes, when it comes to what it promised to do and what is has actually done in Mexico – which is directly contrary to Matt's claim that "insofar as NAFTA was intended to improve the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical relationship and help consolidate moves toward political reform in Mexico." It's been bad for the agricultural sector there, and it hasn't yielded the kind of investment or increase in living standards. Mexico is now further behind the United States in relative terms than it was in 1992 and the distribution of income is more unequal. As DeLong himself admits, he's "still a believer, but my belief is relatively shaken now."

NAFTA should be reevaluated to put in place better labor standards, as both candidates argued last night – both here and in the countries we partner with on trade. Tougher labor standards all around will make it harder for companies to skirt those standards by shipping their jobs to other countries, and they shouldn't be getting tax breaks for doing so. A renegotiated pact should also put in place better environmental standards, especially as the United States seems on the verge of finally putting in place a cap on carbon. Exporting all our polluting industries to other countries doesn't help anyone in the long run.

On a separate but related note, as much as we all hate on Tim Russert, I think he was actually fair in pushing on Clinton last night for praising NAFTA in the past as a success of her husband's presidency. Sure, she's allowed to -- and should be praised for -- changing her mind on the pact. But you can't do so without acknowledging that you might have been wrong in the past.

--Kate Sheppard

John Sides at The Monkey Cage channels Brian Arbour on early voting trends in Texas:

I measured the turnout increase from 2004 against demographic characteristics that have differentiated the two Democratic candidates to this point—% Hispanic, Black, Bachelor Degree, and Median Income. The numbers below measure the number of voters through February 25, 2008 (7 days of early voting) to those of February 29, 2004 (also 7 days of early voting).

Early voting numbers show that turnout is up strongly in counties that have demographic characteristics that favor Barack Obama. Turnout is up only modestly in counties whose demographics favor Hillary Clinton.

Following up on Scott's post about the Amy Sullivan interview over at Salon (and I, also, have not yet had a chance to read Sullivan's book), I wanted to point out another peril of Democratic religious outreach, beyond the abortion question.

In the interview, Sullivan worries about Democrats "making fun" of George Bush or John Ashcroft for praying, which in turn makes religious voters believe that Democrats are hostile to religion:

Instead of coming up with a strategy to micro-target different groups in the electorate, I really think it's just adjusting the path overall where they have refused to talk to any of these voters in the past . . . . Those types of approaches aren't geared toward picking off a few voters here and a few voters there. They're geared toward changing the perception about the Democratic Party. And in some cases that perception was unfair and unearned by Democrats. And that was a result of Republican spin and conservative spin. But in some cases, there's something to it.

When you write off Catholics and evangelicals as not your voters, you're stereotyping. When you make fun of John Ashcroft or George W. Bush for praying, you are giving off a sense that there's something wrong with that. That there's something ridiculous about people who spend their mornings with prayer . . . . If you could be getting voters and you're not simply because you're appearing to be antagonistic to them, why wouldn't you make the changes, even if you think they're cosmetic, to win those voters back?

There's a difference, though, between making fun of someone for praying, and (1) exposing a questionable merger of church and state when the Attorney General of the United States conducts prayer sessions in the Justice Department; (2) questioning whether a candidate or elected official who says he/she prays is just making a cynical appeal to religious voters; and (3) questioning whether engaging in a prayerful life should even be a requirement to hold elected office.

Just yesterday, I poked fun at Hillary Clinton -- not for praying, but for appearing to think that an evangelical audience was more interested in hearing about how her faith and prayer have gotten her through the tough times in her life than about her political views. Clinton could have reached out to her evangelical audience and stayed true to her Democratic base if she had focused less on her own troubles and described how her plan for universal health care is a real life policy example of how Jesus called his followers to care for the "least among us."

But that highlights the real problem with infusing political talk with religious talk: The world's other major religions operate by essentially the same directive, as do progressives who who reach the same conclusion without God. And that's why a lot of Democrats -- and yes, even Republicans -- object to mixing politics and religion: our constitution calls our elected officials to be neutral on religion.

The real problem for Clinton in trying to peel off some moderate evangelical voters yesterday is that she knows that the audience of the 700 Club is largely conservative, and still likely fret about socialized medicine fear-mongering. So in the end, trying to get them to vote for her based on her commitment to praying every day seems pretty silly.

--Sarah Posner

It's not just that the Air Force is requesting $112.5 million for PR; it could buy a little more than half of one of the F-22s it so deeply covets with that, but hey, that's cool. What bothers me is that the campaign seems so obviously calibrated for embarrassment; for some reason, the Air Force is incapable of describing its activities in something other than military terms, even when the targets are the other services or the American people:

The proposed advertising campaign's goals are laid out like the strategic targeting plan of an air war.

The targets are 220 million adults. The goal is that each adult over a year's span will see 30 Air Force advertisements, from ads on Web sites to full-page newspaper ads to prime-time television ads.

Success will be measured by creating a positive attitude about the Air Force. "The program seeks to change a mind-set by educating the American public on how today’s Air Force is the most engaged, versatile and high-tech of all the military services," according to the budget proposal.

A reader also reminds me that the new slogan of the Air Force appears to be "Air Force: Above All". Now I'm as big of a fan of the German national anthem as any liberal fascist, and if I had known that the USAF had similar inclinations, I wouldn't have been nearly as critical.

Via Yglesias.

--Robert Farley

Various bloggers have reacted negatively to Amy Sullivan's claim that her support of legal abortion can't be labeled "pro-choice" because she believes that abortion is morally problematic. Kevin Drum defends Sullivan, arguing that it's entirely possible for a good pro-choicer to acknowledge the moral complexity of abortion. And this is true as far as it goes; it's certainly possible for a pro-choicer to acknowledge that people disagree about the morality of abortion and then go on to explain why bans on abortion are a bad idea no matter what your position on abortion is.

The problem that I and other people have, though, is that for the most part Sullivan (and Saletan) don't actually do this. Their arguments about abortion emphasize moral agreements with anti-choicers, not legal disagreements. Sullivan claiming that she can't be described as pro-choice implies that pro-choicers can't disagree about the morality of abortion, and of course asserting that everyone has to acknowledge that abortion is icky is central to Saletan's shtick. And while Obama goes on in the speech cited by Kevin to argue that everyone can agree that it's good to lower abortion rates but that we need "family planning and education for our young people," Sullivan has argued that such policies represent "standing up to" pro-choicers whose goal is allegedly to maximize abortion rates per se.

Good coalition-building on reproductive freedom would consist of emphasizing agreement (the stupidities and inequities of using inevitably arbitrary state coercion to force women to bring pregnancies to term, the greater effectiveness of the broad panoply of pro-choice policies in reducing abortion rates by reducing unwanted pregnancies) and de-emphasizing moral conflicts. People object to Sullivan and Saletan because they emphasize the latter rather than the former -- and especially in Saletan's case, in fact denying that abortion is morally complex but that people who don't share his moral views are simply wrong -- and argue almost exclusively on the political terrain favored by anti-choicers. Creating conflicts where no necessary ones exist -- like writing yourself out of the pro-choice movement because you think there are moral problems with abortion -- is coalition-fracturing. Acknowledging that many people find abortion immoral can be the start of a pro-choice argument, but it can't be the end of one.

--Scott Lemieux

Identifying the worst moment in last night's (hopefully) final Democratic debate is, I realize, a matter of taste. But identifying the source of those moments is easy: Tim Russert. Memorable moments include the following:

• Russert reminding us, again, of his blue collar credentials, acquired on the mean streets of Buffalo, NY: "And I was reminded of your campaign in 2000 in Buffalo, my hometown, just three hours down Route 90 ..."
• Russert trying to draw a connection between Obama and Louis Farrakhan, based solely on the fact that the latter supports Obama's campaign -- an unsolicited endorsement. But ever the one to ask "tough" questions, Russert felt the need to impersonate your garden variety right-wing talk radio host by asking, "Do you reject his support?" This line of questioning then continued for approximately an eternity.
• After failing to pin down the candidates on withdrawing troops from Iraq, Russert gave them a chance to reassert their bellicosity with a bizarre hypothetical: "If we -- if this scenario plays out and the Americans get out in total and al Qaeda resurges and Iraq goes to hell, do you hold the right, in your mind as American president, to re-invade, to go back into Iraq to stabilize it?"

In light of this, allow me to re-recommend Paul Waldman's piece on Tim Russert from last year. 

--Mori Dinauer

William F. Buckley has shuffled off his mortal coil. For want of something useful to say, I'll just link to this account of a conversation on a NRO cruise between Buckley and Norm Podhoretz, cited by Wolcott:

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him that Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War One, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we are winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

--Robert Farley

That's a headline from the Boston Globe. Here's the lede:

A holy war is about to break out inside the Christian Right, and the way it is resolved may change the character of American politics. ... On one side are crusaders who believe that opposition to gay rights and abortion still provides the path to the political promised land. On the other are equally ardent warriors who have wearied of the relentless drumbeat against homosexuals, abortion providers and feminists and believe that economic issues provide the movement with its brightest future. In short, this battle comes down to a small question with big implications: Should hardliners soft-pedal their own message?

See if you can guess who is being discussed in this paragraph:

Now ________ is trying to steer the movement away from its traditional issues. [He] argues that it "has limited its effectiveness by concentrating disproportionately on issues such as abortion and homosexuality."

I'll give you a hint: the article was written in 1993.

Find out in this week's FundamentaList.

--Sarah Posner

There was yet another Democratic debate last night, the 20th thus far in the primary. Since we've had this record number of debates this year, there was of course not much new information presented in last night's event, short of Hillary Clinton citing Saturday Night Live to validate her claims that Barack Obama is getting an easy ride from debate questioners. There was also the obligatory discussion of health care and NAFTA. In the blogosphere at least, most folks are getting pretty weary of these debates.

Matt Yglesias:

Through my own eyes, i.e. those of a person who's watched about a million Democratic primary debates at this point, the whole thing seems tedious. How does it seem to voters in Ohio and Texas who are watching these two go at it for a first or a second time? I don't know.

Megan McArdle notes that Clinton performed well, but wonders if it matters:

Was there really any possibility that she was going to deliver a sweeping blow to Obama with her spectacularly charismatic responses? The debates draw about 4 million viewers, most of whom are not in Texas or Ohio--indeed, as far as I can tell, most of them are wonks, journalists, or political operatives of one type or another, none of whom needed to hear what Hillary thinks about NAFTA in order to decide how they're going to vote.

Digby calls for Tim Russert's head:

The country wants change. They want Washington to stop all the partisan bickering and they want a different tone. They want their government to be serious and deal with real problems. Can someone please explain to me how that can possibly happen until something is done about the reprehensible political press? From tax returns to Farrakhan to footage shown by "mistake" to the endless, trivial, gotcha bullshit, this debate spectacle tonight was a classic demonstration of what people really hate about politics. It isn't actually the candidates who can at least on occasion be substantive and serious. The problem is Tim Russert and all his petty, shallow acolytes who spend all their time reading Drudge and breathlessly reporting every tabloid tidbit and sexy rumor and seeking out minor inconsistencies from years past in lieu of doing any real work.

And Chris Hayes, like me, just wishes that watching this debate wasn't a job requirement.

Will this be the final debate of the Democratic primary, or might we be forced to slog forward with a 21st?

--Kate Sheppard

Yesterday at a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, John McCain was flanked by Rod Parsley, who called the candidate "strong, true, consistent conservative," according to the Columbus Dispatch. McCain referred to Parsley, who preaches the same word of faith doctrine as the televangelists under investigation by McCain's fellow Republican Senator Charles Grassley, a "spiritual guide."

Later, according to the Dispatch:

Parsley said he supports McCain because the senator will be tough on national security and "protect the unborn."

The megachurch pastor, criticized in the past for mixing religion and politics, acknowledged that McCain isn't the ideal candidate for evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly backed President Bush in 2004.

"Yet at the same time, when you put John McCain up against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, the ideological and philosophical differences are overwhelming," Parsley said.

In conservative circles, Parsley's considered one of the religious kingmakers in the 2008 presidential race. While he's not universally loved in evangelical circles by any stretch of the imagination, McCain is likely very pleased with the, er -- shall we call it an endorsement? Add John Hagee, the chairman of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), along with McCain-endorser Gary Bauer, who serves on CUFI's board, and Parsley, who is a CUFI regional director, and it looks like McCain is lining up the support of a contingent of the Christian right that could make McCain's off-the-cuff bomb-bomb-Iran and 100 years in Iraq remarks seem, well, prophetic.

--Sarah Posner

As Somerby points out, the New York Times yesterday had yet another story about the Clinton campaign's doughnut expenditure. Admittedly, it's tough to tell in this case how much of this is Clinton Rules and how much of this is the inevitable tendency to retroactively claim that every strategic decision by a losing campaign was bad, but this is a silly story. Campaigns really do need to provide food to their workers, volunteers, caucus voters, etc., and it's not as if the amounts involved are especially large. There are legitimate issues with the financial management of the Clinton campaign -- it seems highly unlikely that the marginal value of Mark Penn's services has been more than $10 million -- but this isn't one of them. (Unless the scandal was supposed to be about choosing Dunkin' Donuts per se; serving your loyal workers deep-fried sawdust could be a comparative disadvantage if the Obama campaign located decent doughnuts...)

--Scott Lemieux

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, and other congressional Democrats are challenging EPA administrator Stephen Johnson's decision to deny California and 16 other states a waiver to allow them to set their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles, and had subpoenaed internal EPA documents on the matter. Yesterday the Environment and Public Works Committee released some of those documents, which show an EPA "in crisis," as Boxer put it in a press conference yesterday. As all accounts already indicated, the memos reveal that Johnson rejected the advice of EPA staffers and caved to the Bush administration's ideological stance against meaningful action on climate change. An excerpt from the advice given to him by staff members from the EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality:

From what I have read and the people I have talked to, it is obvious to me that there is no legal or technical justification for denying this. The law is very specific about what you are allowed to consider, and even if you adopt the alternative interpretations that have been suggested by the automakers, you still wind up in the same place.

The internal memos also revealed that staffers warned him of the risks of denying the waiver: "If you are asked to deny this waiver, I fear the credibility of the agency that we both love will be irreparably damaged." If he did deny the waiver, his staff advised him that he may have to resign from his post. This is just the latest instance of Johnson ignoring his staff and science in general to appease the Bush administration; asked in a hearing last month whether he thought climate change was a major crisis, Johnson retorted, "I don't know what you mean by major crisis."

His staffers were right on the California waiver; let's hope they're right about that resignation part. California is suing for the right to set tougher standards, and a Johnson-less EPA might make for an easier path for them and other states who want to take aggressive action on climate change.

--Kate Sheppard

• Chris Dodd endorses Obama and reinforces the idea that the primary will be over after March 4th.
• Noam Scheiber has a good piece on Obama's policy shop, though I think it overstates the extent to which you can say there's a real ideological difference. Still, it does get at a difference in emphasis and tone that I think is important.
• Marc Ambinder reports that if Clinton decides to continue campaigning after March 4th with a win in only one state she'll face massive staff defections.
• Obama apparently has a sophisticated grassroots operation in Ohio.
• In the cats-and-dogs-living-together department, Obama gives a speech on Israel that pleases both Marty Peretz and Matt Yglesias. I feel a disturbance in the force...
• A McCain surrogate emphasizes Obama's middle name and McCain apologizes profusely and quickly. That's... refreshing, though I worry that it will give McCain yet more cover if he eventually decides to go for an underhanded attack (and he will, I think).
• Josh Romney suggests that his father might get back into the presidential race. In other news, the corpse of Richard Nixon is considering throwing his hat into the ring.
• Chris Cillizza interviews some governors mentioned as potential VPs.
• Via Slate, Oprah handles Omentum and it's way grosser than you'd expect.
  

--Sam Boyd

John McCain's excellent lawyer Trevor Potter and his campaign manager Rick Davis held a call for reporters this afternoon to present their defense on the manipulation of the public financing system, and a vigorous defense it is. But, ultimately, it doesn't amount to much more than: in our interpretation of the law, we think we're fine, and this is all a distraction by the Democrats. The letter declaring McCain out of the federal matching funds system, Potter declared, is "self-executing." (The fact that all previous withdrawals from the system were approved by a vote of the commission was simply a convenience, because "they happened to be there."

Josh Marshall put it very well, if surprisingly profanely, in his video explainer on the McCain scam, when he said that the McCain response to the FEC was basically, "blow it out your a**." Perhaps there's a law professor reading this who can provide the actual legal term Josh was surely looking for.

I was surprised that Potter and Davis didn't have a better answer to a question about whether the campaign had used its qualification for matching funds to qualify for the primary ballot in Ohio, avoiding the very expensive signature-gathering process there. They immediately shifted the question to talk about Delaware and Montana, other states where the matching-funds eligibility is tied to ballot access, and where they seem to have a case. On Ohio, Davis went into a long spiel about how many signatures the campaign collected, and how they used volunteers, but at the end mumbled that Ohio was an exception, and that there they had used the matching funds-qualification rather than signatures.

In addition to bluffing their way through legal questions (many of which are so totally without precedent that absent an adjudicating body, McCain's assertion is as good as any other, or as bad), they were clearly trying to portray this as a purely partisan controversy: "The Democrats decided to make this their attack." And judging from Michael Luo's account in the Times, this seems to be sticking: Luo writes that "The issue emerged Monday in a complaint that the Democratic National Committee filed," as if no one had been talking about it before this week!

But -- to beat a familar drum -- it only seems partisan because the nonpartisan reform groups are silent. I'm not operating as an agent of a political party -- I'm someone who cares about political reform and money in politics, and I've been involved in that issue for 12 years -- coming to it in response to the largely Democratic scandals of the mid-1990s  (This is how I came to know and admire Trevor Potter, incidentally.) But if it were anyone but McCain doing this -- any other Republican or any Democrat (including reform champions, because they are replaceable), the "reform community" would be all over it.

It's no secret why they are not, but at least one of the reform groups that has signed onto the letters attacking Obama had the integrity to just come out and say it. That would be Public Citizen, which put out a press release today headlined, "McCain Has Solid Record on Reform":

We are compelled to note something that has been lost in the recent criticism of Sen. McCain’s association with lobbyists: Regardless of how many lobbyists are working on his campaign or raising money for him, John McCain fought for 14 long, hard years for reforms that seriously limit lobbyists’ power. He has fought for campaign finance reform, limits on gifts and travel from lobbyists, and extensive public disclosure of lobbyists’ activities - all of which limit the influence of lobbyists and the companies that hire lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

The release (which isn't on the Public Citizen website yet) ends, "We also must have public financing of congressional elections, as proposed by Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), to restore democracy to the people. On this issue, Sen. McCain has not yet taken a position." Um, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Joan, but he has taken a position, and that position is "No." Or, to give him the benefit of quoting him fully in nuanced context, "No, I don’t think that’s what we want to do."

One can't help but wonder: Is there any line that McCain could cross that would lead these groups to realize that they don't owe him anything, and should treat his current conduct the way they would treat any other politician?

From San Antonio televangelist John Hagee's weekly newsletter:

We are entering the Presidential Election Season.

I feel this election is literally about the future of America. In 2 weeks I am going to begin a sermon series titled "Vote the Bible." The purpose is to help America understand that they must enter the voting booth with their values supported by the Word of God and vote for a Presidential Candidate that most completely fulfills those Bible positions on political issues. I want you to listen to this series, buy it and give it to friends and neighbors. The future of America is hanging in the balance.

Not exactly in time for the Texas primary, so I wonder which candidate just might measure up? Hagee has contributed money to both the McCain and Huckabee campaigns and has allied himself with McCain on on Armageddon Middle East policy.

--Sarah Posner

Hillary Clinton appeared on Pat Robertson's 700 Club today, in an interview with David Brody, author of the widely-read Brody File blog at the Christian Broadcasting Network's website. (Remember, the Christian right is dead, but somehow Democrats think they need to pander to its audience.)

In the interview, viewers are assured that Clinton's "faith shapes her policy," and that her faith got her through the tough times (i.e., those times that were made tough by a well-orchestrated campaign by certain -- well, never mind, let's show some Christian forgiveness, for Pete's sake)! "My faith has sustained me, it has informed me, it has saved me," Clinton insisted.

Brody emphasized that Clinton is a "committed Methodist" who prays daily on the campaign trail. Whatever she thinks might work at this point, I suppose.

--Sarah Posner

Via Rick Perlstein, an interesting nugget in this CBS/NY Times survey:

Almost three-quarters of Republican primary voters - including 60 percent of conservatives - want a candidate who would compromise with Democrats in order to get things done. Only 14 percent said they want a Republican president who will stick to Republican positions even if it means getting less accomplished [23% of conservatives -- MD]. A majority said they believe McCain would compromise the right amount as president.

What does this say about the status of the old polling staple that American voters are "ideologically conservative" and "operationally liberal?" Survey results like these cast doubt on the notion that the electorate is, in the aggregate, all that ideological in the first place. What we see here is an emphasis on pragmatism, on "getting things done." Moreover, these results were taken from Republican primary voters, who we would expect to be more ideological than the electorate at large. So while that 14-23 percent will refuse to budge, compromise or yield their position, come hell or high water, the rest want to work things out.

Of course, deciding what's to be done is another issue entirely. Conservative ideologues have staked out positions that are immune to compromise; there is no meaningful middle ground between preserving Social Security and privatizing it, for instance. That ideologues control the agenda for the Republican party is not news, but if the party rank-and-file are uninterested in taking positions on public policy that lead to legislative deadlock, then what does that say about the future electoral fortunes of conservative Republicans? The survey doesn't tell us what exactly these primary voters want the government to do, but the very fact that they see an active rather than a negative role for it does suggest, in Perlstein's words, that "the conservative era is over."

Republicans refused to compromise in 2006 and it cost them dearly. We can't say for sure that they will be more circumspect in 2008, but I think it's safe to say that they will run on the fashionable platform of "change," albeit one narrowly focused on addressing the most egregious lapses of the Bush years: corruption, cronyism, waste and incompetence. The groundwork for this reconciliation with government has already been laid by Newt Gingrich, whose most recent book and public statements argue for a platform of "real change" based on Americans' supposed unity on "almost every important issue." Of course, Gingrich only focuses on issues that are typically understood to be "conservative" positions, such as "making English the official language" or including "'one nation under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance" or "support[ing] the option of a single income tax rate for everyone." It's hard to see how these tailor-made "important issues" are going to resonate widely in an election year dominated by the economy, health care and Iraq, but the promise of change and reform from endangered Republicans with moderate reputations might be enough to keep them in office. If not, then it becomes hard to describe the electorate as anything but ideologically and operationally pragmatic, if not outright liberal.

--Mori Dinauer

One of the great ironies of misusing and manipulating a law, after advocating its strict enforcement, is that you empower and validate the opponents of that very law. Case in point: I don't usually agree with Brad Smith, the former Federal Elections Commissioner who now runs the Center for Competitive Politics, which is kind of a mirror-image of reform organizations, advocating total deregulation of money in politics.

Smith had a long post yesterday, with the title, "What a Tangled Web We Weave: Everything You Need to Know About John McCain and Matching Funds," which got even deeper in the weeds than I have. Smith, as well as current FEC chair David Mason, who is also an anti-reformer, are clearly just enjoying tweaking McCain, who has treated them with self-righteous contempt. (While not agreeing with the anti-reformers who oppose all regulation and public financing, I've long argued that the libertarian criticisms of some campaign reform should be taken seriously -- they are often correct.)

Smith points out something I had not fully realized until this weekend: In addition to the tangible benefit of using a loan to get the benefit of public financing without the spending limits, McCain also took a material benefit from public financing, in the form of automatic qualification for the ballot in Ohio and several other states:

Senator McCain used his FEC certification for at least one other purpose.  Qualifying for the presidential primary ballot in Ohio is a complex process, requiring a candidate to gather over 100 signatures in each of the state’s 18 districts, using separate petitions for each county within the district, which must be filed with local election boards around the state.  Additionally, the candidate must gather still more signatures statewide, all under some very complicated rules and local interpretations.  Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and most of the presidential campaigns went through this process, at considerable time and expense.  With a filing date of January 3, this was done by these campaigns at precisely the moment McCain was desperately borrowing to keep his campaign afloat, lacking money and resources to organize and gather signatures to be placed on the Ohio ballot.

But Ohio has an alternative means of getting on the ballot – you can simply present your FEC matching funds authorization to the Secretary of State, and go straight to the ballot, without petitioning.  And this is what Senator McCain did. 

Smith makes two points I disagree with: First, that by blocking the nomination of vote fraud lawyer Hans von Spakovsky to the cast of Hogan's Heroes FEC, Senator Obama is "using his power as a Senator to directly hamstring his opponent's campaign," by denying a quorum on the FEC that could rule on McCain's request. That's ridiculous. First, there's zero indication that McCain wants a quorum on the FEC, because it might actually, um, enforce the law. Second, while Smith is right that each party usually gets its own appointees to the FEC (including, after a hold by McCain, Smith, in 2000), there has to be some line, and von Spakovsky, having overruled Justice Department staff attorneys to protect the Georgia voter ID poll tax, has clearly crossed it.

Second, Smith argues that this proves that all public financing of campaigns is a waste of money, which of course is not true. Public financing like the Arizona "clean elections" system or New York's generous matching funds system is very different from the presidential: most candidates participate, it allows people to run who wouldn't otherwise, and they are well enforced. As Democratic election lawyer Bob Bauer put it, "Smith, by making of McCain’s conduct an indictment of the system, surprisingly lets his old adversary off the hook.  But it is McCain’s conduct, and only that conduct, that is the issue, to be examined under the unforgiving standards that the Senator has advocated for others."

-- Mark Schmitt

Some folks in the United Kingdom and Ireland are floating the idea of individual carbon allowances as the best way to combat global warming. This would mean that a limit would be set how much carbon dioxide an individual can emit from his or her household and transportation, and those who exceed their limits would have to buy extra shares -- much like an industry-based system, except putting the burden directly on people. Those who emit too much carbon have to buy more credits, while those who emit less get to sell their excess credits to others. UK environment secretary David Miliband endorsed the idea back in 2006, and the British government is exploring the feasibility of this sort of policy, which would most likely be put in place in addition to an industry-based cap-and-trade system.

But the Boston Globe piece on this idea misses an important part of the picture: how hard this would hit lower-income people. In fact, they seem to think it would be good for them:

One of the main attractions of this idea is its equity. The outsized carbon footprints of the wealthy - those who fly by private jet and live in McMansions -- would come with an extra price tag, so the penalty would fall on the people most able to afford it. The poor, who generate much lower emissions, could actually turn a profit by selling their surplus.

It's true that, in general, lower-income folks generate lower emissions than wealthy jet-setters. But that's not universally true -- think of all the folks who drive tractor trailers for a living, or those who are forced to drive a lot because they work multiple jobs, live in rural areas, or live in the parts of cities where there isn't access to reliable public transportation. Or people who are forced to heat their homes as cheaply as possible, and those who live in older homes that aren't as efficient as new models. Right now, energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, hybrid cars, solar panels, organic foods, and other means of reducing your personal emissions have front-end costs that prevent them from being accessible to lower income individuals. They're only accessible to those who can afford them, who will be able to buy their way to lower emissions. It's also the privileged few who can choose to do things like bike or walk to work to reduce their emissions – the people who have the time to do so, and who live in places where it's possible and safe to do so.

There would need to be a lot done to change those realities before an individual carbon allowance would be feasible. We'd have to invest in bringing down the costs of emissions-reducing technologies on the front-end. We'd have to invest heavily in grant and subsidy programs to help those who can't afford to take these steps on their own. We'd have to heavily invest in improving and expanding our public transit systems. Without all these investments, the individual carbon allowance system would only further the chasm between the haves and have-nots, widening the "eco-divide." (Poor people already bear the greatest burdens of our pollution and energy woes.)

There's also the problem of making it seem like confronting climate change is simply about individual actions. Changing a few light bulbs and driving less is great. But those little things mean nothing without sweeping, solid national and international plans for capping emissions and changing to a new energy economy.

--Kate Sheppard

Over at TAP Online we consider who could fill the number two spot:

Though the Democratic presidential contest has turned into a longer-running show than anyone could have imagined, it's not too early to begin the quadrennial quest for the perfect Democratic vice-presidential running mate. Accordingly, the Prospect asked a group of journalists and politicos to name their picks and state their reasons, and what follows are our sketches -- please do not misconstrue them for endorsements -- of some of the most interesting possibilities. For the record, the two names our mentioners mentioned most frequently were Jim Webb (could bring Virginia and white working-class males and provide some national-security experience on either a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ticket) and Joe Biden (provides foreign-policy bona fides and age to Obama's youth). And, for the record, the names of Govs. Sebelius and Napolitano came up as running mates for Obama, not Clinton.

Since Super Tuesday, however, the calculus on the veep question has shifted. If Obama and Clinton continue to split the vote down the middle, all logic suggests that she (if she wins the nomination) will offer him the No. 2 spot as the best way -- maybe, the only way -- to ensure that both halves of the party march off arm-in-arm to the fall wars. Should Obama win the No. 1 spot, the reverse logic is also compelling, though it's harder to see Clinton accepting the veep spot than it is Obama. Conventional wisdom hardly suggests putting a woman and a black man on the same ticket, but if she brings the base and he the independents to the polls, conventional wisdom may prove mighty foolish.

Read the list here.

--The Editors

The Clinton campaign sent out a statement yesterday about the now well-circulated photo of rival Barack Obama dressed in a Somali robe. The Clinton campaign says they didn't release the photo to Drudge, and I really have no way of knowing who did put the photo out there. But the response from the Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams yesterday was remarkably tone deaf:

Enough. If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely. This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry. We will not be distracted.

It's one thing to refute claims that your campaign sent out the photo – that's understandable. But it's another thing altogether to dispute the idea that the photo is "divisive." Whomever released that photo at this point in the campaign clearly intended for it to be just that. And to imply that a photo of Clinton in the same manner of garb would be no different is either totally naïve or willfully misleading. The Clinton campaign can't seriously think that there's no difference between a photo of a white woman in African clothing and a photo of an African American candidate who has already been the subject of a number of smear tactics, and whom many Americans have already been lead to believe is a secret Muslim/foreigner/terrorist lover. The Clinton campaign might be wise to recognize that the photo – not the reaction from their rival – is divisive. But this statement just makes them look even worse.

--Kate Sheppard

• Well, so much for Obama and Clinton skipping arm in arm into the sunset as people seemed to expect after the last debate. Today Clinton gave what was billed as a major foreign policy speech, but in fact was just her standard arguments with unusually direct attacks at Obama. Clinton also was viciously sarcastic about Obama yesterday, suggesting that he wanted to "waive a magic wand" and have "special interests disappear." Of course, that would make him a naive simpleton which somehow doesn't quite seem plausible to me. Or maybe he's jut a terrorist. Jonathan Stein has more complete take on the various charges and counter charges of the weekend.
• This newly angry Clinton campaign may be an attempt to shrug off reports of a demoralized and depressed campaign or it could be confirmation of them.
  
• Tina Fey had hilarious pro-Clinton bit on Saturday Night Live last, um, Saturday.
• Ezra nails a big reason the press loves McCain.
• That may be why we're just now learning that a key McCain adviser does much of his business as a lobbyist from the straight talk express.
• Steve Benen takes apart Mark Halperin's sixteen point plan for McCain's campaign.
• Finally, even though the primary is probably winding down, it still has the power to literally turn brother against brother.

--Sam Boyd

Howard Dean and and Democratic National Committee lawyer Joe Sandler yesterday announced that the Democratic National Committee would file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission regarding John McCain's violation of the primary campaign spending limits. On the call, I asked whether they would ask the campaign finance reform advocacy groups -- like the five that sent letters to Senator Obama echoing a baseless McCain attack on Barack Obama, to join in the complaint. Governor Dean answered that they would not ask nonpartisan groups to join the party's complaint, but that he would certainly "expect" them to share the concern about McCain's manipulation of public financing in the primaries, evading the choice between public money and unlimited spending, through a series of complex loans.

As it happens, the five groups sent McCain a letter late last week. Did they ask him to obey the spirit of the law, or keep his own commitment to public financing?

No. They gently asked McCain to sign on as a cosponsor of legislation to fix the presidential public financing system, and respectfully noted his leadership on the issue in the past.

(No doubt the system needs fixing. I was at a conference in New York last week on the 20th anniversary of the New York City campaign finance system, which is the model for how to fix the presidential system, because it encourages small contributions with generous matching funds -- now 6:1 for contributions of $175 or less -- and has been continuously improved. Former mayor Ed Koch described his role in creating the federal system when he was a member of Congress in the early 1970s -- and I realized that except for the Buckley v. Valeo decision that stripped out the law's mandatory spending limits, and some increases in the numbers, the public financing element hasn't been substantially revised since then. It's no wonder that it's become a last resort for desperate candidates, or, worse, a playground for McCain's sort of manipulation.)

But that's not really the point right now, is it? It's nice to ask McCain to cosponsor a fix-up bill, but it won't do anything about the current abuses, and even if it passes, George W. Bush isn't going to sign it. More importantly: McCain is not going to cosponsor the bill, or any other. He has no intention of advocating campaign finance reform. He doesn't even intend to obey the laws, or pay attention to a letter from the chairman of the FEC. He says he's still interested in reform of the independent groups known as 527s, but his only hope of winning the presidency, is as the beneficiary of Freedom's Watch and it's promised $250 million, and other 527s. John McCain is just not that into reform.

I've alluded to this with subtle jabs, but it's time to come out and say it clearly: There are a set of groups in Washington identified with the cause of campaign finance reform that seem to sit up at night staring at a picture of John McCain and waiting for the phone to ring. The four-year affair that ended with passage of the McCain-Feingold legislation banning soft money was the high point of their lives (to their credit, it was quite a political achievement -- still the only piece of legislation enacted over the objections of a majority of Republicans and the misgivings of Bush) but at this point, especially after the (entirely predictable) Supreme Court decision striking down its restrictions on television ads, McCain-Feingold doesn't amount to more than a memory.

This unrequited loyalty not only apparently gives McCain a free pass on abuses such as the loan; it has allowed him to essentially dominate the field, without lifting a finger. McCain's monopoly, as the only Republican interested in reform, gave him incredible power over the agenda (pushing purely restrictive policies, such as the proposed restrictions on political bloggers in 2005, and on non-profits the previous year) and leverage over the organizations, whose support from foundations depends on being bipartisan. This "McCain Wing" of the campaign finance reform movement is led by Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, both generally admirable and adept organizations, with small staffs and significant influence on the Hill and with reporters and editorial writers. The largest campaign finance organization, and the only one with real members, Common Cause, has been gradually moving beyond the cramped, restrictive view of reform represented by the McCain wing toward a more open approach, with great internal angst -- a longer story than can be told in a blog post!

Fortunately, after several years of waiting for the phone to ring, other Republicans have stepped into the vacuum left by McCain: Arlen Specter has cosponsored, along with Obama and Clinton, the landmark bill to create a system of real public financing for congressional campaigns, and Susan Collins has backed the bill to fix the presidential system. Perhaps this will free the other groups to stop waiting for McCain's return and start telling it like it is.

(I just noticed that Jane Hamsher made much the same point this morning, and she named names.)

-- Mark Schmitt.

Ezra points to a New York Times chart from a few years ago that demonstrates that average median hourly wages for high school drop outs -- the demographic most likely to compete with immigrants for jobs -- don't seem to be driven down by higher immigration rates. States with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants like Nevada and California actually have higher median hourly incomes when compared to states like Kentucky, which has a less than 1 percent immigrant population. This data is reinforced pretty squarely by a report issued last month by the conservative group America's Majority. Their study of all 50 states and D.C. found a high resident population and/or inflow of immigrants is correlated with elevated levels and growth rates in every category -- gross state product, personal income, disposable income, and median household income, both in general and on a per capita basis.

In 1999, high immigration jurisdictions (HIJs) had higher rates of unemployment, individual poverty, and total crime than other states. In subsequent years, trends in each of these categories favored HIJs, compared to the other jurisdictions. By 2006, high immigration jurisdictions had lower rates of unemployment, individual poverty and total crime than other states.

What both these reports illustrate is the illegitimacy of claims that immigration concerns are chiefly economic. By most accounts -- even some conservative accounts -- illegal immigration has very little effect on the wages of of low income workers and a positive net impact in states with higher immigrant populations.

--Kate Sheppard

The New York Times today features an article on a subject that, up until now, hardly dared to speak its name in mainstream media: fears of an assassination attempt against Barack Obama. I've been hearing comments from friends and acquaintances such as those highlighted in the piece by Jeff Zeleny for a while, but haven't blogged about them, doing my bit (until now) to prevent the evil eye from turning its gaze to the nation's first truly viable African-American candidate.

A few days after the Washington, D.C., primary, I was talking to some friends after a jazz concert. One man, an African-American, a Julliard-educated classical musician in his 60s, said of Obama, "Even if they kill him, he'll have done a great thing by getting all of these young people engaged in the process."

"Don't even think that!" I barked back.

But, of course, my mind wanders there, too. Those of the baby-boom generation and older have a political experience defined as much by assassinations and assassination attempts as by the great political accomplishments (and defeats) of their time. Yet we treat these assassinations as little more than mile-markers on the highway of national memory, and think little about how they have shaped the course of American politics. We deride cynicism, but fail to attribute any of its extremes to a history of political killings and attempted killings that marked a generation. We abandon the field to the tin-foil hat crowd.

One quibble with the Times piece: Zeleny suggests, as something of a rationale for Obama's willingness to take the risk, that the tender age of six at which Obama experienced the national trauma of the RFK and MLK killings rules it far from his consciousness. If anything, I think the result was likely the opposite. I'll bet Obama remembers exactly where he was when he learned of those shootings.

--Adele M. Stan

Kevin Drum objects to my argument about experience, claiming that Obama's experience will be a disadvantage against McCain but Clinton's would not. I'm not entirely convinced. It's worth untangling the normative and empirical issues here. The heart of Kevin's argument is this: "Like it or not, most voters have a sort of vague operational view of experience that means something like "involvement in big league politics." And on that score, Hillary gets 15 years: 8 years as an activist first lady and 7 years as U.S. senator. Obama, conversely, gets a total of 3 years as U.S. senator." The problem here is that this seems pretty arbitrary, with the general criteria selected to give Clinton maximum advantage. Do most voters believe that serving as first lady counts as full "involvement in big league politics" but Obama's longer (and arguably more effective) history as a legislator doesn't count at all? Maybe, maybe not. The difficult first lady question is particularly crucial, because without full credit Clinton is clearly at a major disadvantage to McCain if experience matters, and my guess is that voters not only won't give full credit to this but will indeed give less credit to it than I would consider appropriate. At any rate, it's even less clear that this qualified edge in experience matters very much. Consider not only this year's Dem race but compare Bill Clinton (zero years big time experience by Kevin's criteria) against the lengthy resume of George H.W. Bush, or the latter's son against Al Gore. Either voters evaluate experience in a more nuanced manner than Kevin suggests, or it's a pretty trivial consideration. Perhaps a little of both, but pols from Henry Clay to Robert Dole might suggest that it's more the latter. (Or maybe the things that go along with experience in politics make candidates unattractive for other reasons.)

On the normative question, I have a hard time believing that Obama's somewhat greater inexperience make him much riskier than Clinton. Clinton's extra Senate term means pretty much nothing, especially since she got the most important question of her tenure wrong. Her first lady experience may be marginally more relevant than Obama's good state legislative record, community organizing, and work in legal academia, but it's hard to see that it would compel you to vote for anyone you otherwise wouldn't. (And this cuts both ways; some Clinton supporters may think I'm underrating the importance of her experience in the White House, but I also don't think that her husband's general failure to mobilize support for major progressive reform is much of an indicator of what Hillary Clinton would do as president.) The Presidency is sui generis, and you really are rolling the dice either way (including McCain, even though he's the most experienced.) None of the major remaining candidates has experience that really sheds much light on how effective they'd be (such as direct major executive experience). You pull the lever and takes your chances.

--Scott Lemieux

In his continuing campaign to become a walking punchline, Ralph Nader is running for president. Again. Four years ago, Harold, Matt, Garance and I ruminated on the prospect of what then the second Nader run. We all agreed it was a really bad idea.

The question I'd like to hear Nader answer now is, "Why president?" I agree with much of the substantive critique Nader offers of the state of American government. But I have yet to hear him offer much of an explanation of why he thinks him embarking on another presidential campaign will do anything to address the problems he identifies. At the end of Nader for President 3.0, will corporate America's grip on the legislative process be loosened? Will we be closer to getting a more environmentally sound energy policy? Will the problem of widening inequality start to be addressed? Is there any imaginable way in which this campaign will have any impact on the problems he professes to care about?

Ralph Nader accomplished great things in his life. But at this point he's become simply pathetic, a man who seeks not meaningful change but attention, adulation, the ego boost that comes with an appearance on Meet the Press. It's just sad.

-- Paul Waldman

I'm sitting outside a Starbucks on Olaya Street in downtown Riyadh with two major young Saudi bloggers, Ahmed Al-Omran and Saeed Ajaber, both of whom blog about political and social reform in the Kingdom.

Ahmed has made international news, including appearances on CNN and other television segments, for using blog to advocate for the release of Saudi blogger Fouad Al-Farhan. Saeed , whose blog I cannot read because it's in Arabic, is also pushing the conversation about domestic political reforms.

If you're interested in what's happening on this part of the Arab Street, go check them out.

--Tom Schaller

• As the John McCain/lobbyist story plays out the focus is shifting from self-righteous denunciations of the New York Times to consideration of the issues involved and, especially, McCain's response. For instance, it turns out that he lied about one aspect of the story and he broke his usual habit of frequent press availabilities. See Josh Marshall on his habit of making obviously false categorical denials of things and go read Matt Yglesias about how this story has the potential to disrupt the chummy relationship McCain enjoys with the press. McCain's new strategy is to refuse to comment.
• It's also worth noting that McCain's campaign is almost almost entirely run by current or former male lobbyists. But don't worry, he says that his lobbyists are "honorable."
• Yet another fine moment in GOP disregard for election laws--the Indiana secretary of state puts McCain on the primary ballot despite the fact that he hasn't met the legal requirements for listing.
• There. Are. No. Plagiarists. In. The. Democratic. Primary.
• Another anonymous and racist smear email accuses Obama of anti-semitism and emboldening "World Terrorist Groups he physically resembles." Yuck.
• Clinton seems less and less likely to stay in the race if she loses on March 4.
• Ralph Nader will most likely announce his presidential run this weekend. It's like a bad dream you just keep having over and over again.
• Blacks may outnumber Latinos at the polls on March 4 in Texas.
  

• Finally, just for fun, an awesome song called "Viva Obama" and a probama reggaeton song. And do you dream of Hillary or Barack? Are you interested in other people's dreams about them? Well then I've got a site for you!

--Sam Boyd

Mickey Kaus, playing a familiar High Contrarian card, makes fun of Republican anti-choicers for endorsing John McCain in spite of views that Kaus asserts with no evidence whatsoever are pro-choice. But abortion, of course, provides another example of an issue where McCain's record is even worse than his rhetoric. Creating obvious problems for Kaus's unshakable belief that McCain must secretly be pro-choice are such inconvenient details as his 0% NARAL rating, expressed support for South Dakota's total ban on abortions, the vote for Robert Bork that would have unquestionably led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the vote for Sam Alito that could lead to a similar outcome and will make virtually every abortion regulation short of a ban constitutional in the meantime, etc, etc. etc. If Kaus means that McCain's consistent support of forced pregnancy isn't reflective of sincere views, as with many Republican elites this may be true but is also completely irrelevant to anything. If McCain is a down-the-line anti-choicer in a safe Senate seat in a state with a pro-choice governor, he's certainly not going to behave differently as a President beholden to cultural reactionaries.

--Scott Lemieux

It's been a rough month for the coal industry, after the country's leading financial institutions announced they're putting in place tougher standards for financing new power plants and the Department of Energy pulled funding from their pie-in-the-sky "clean coal" project.

The energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie recently released a report on the future of coal, which paints a bleak picture for the industry. During 2007, plans for more than 50 conventional coal-fired plants were delayed or canceled because of concerns about the environmental impact and/or fears that they wouldn't be financially sustainable. According to the Wood Mackenzie study, "the rate of coal plant cancellations accelerated during 2007 to the point that more than 50 percent of the new coal capacity announced since 2000 has now been canceled." And as David Roberts points out on Gristmill, the cost of building a coal-fired power plant has gone up 130 percent in the past eight years. This latest report also concludes that the problems for coal are only going to get worse, in the wake of last year's Supreme Court ruling that the EPA can and should be regulating CO2 emissions.

So it should come as no surprise the industry is dropping millions on lobbying, ad campaigns and debate sponsorship. They're putting up a good fight, but appear more and more desperate in the face of reality. Take for instance the industry's retort to talk of the eminent demise of coal. Says National Mining Association spokesman Luke Popovich:

This is part of a concerted effort to grossly exaggerate opposition to coal-based electricity generation ... The NGO's (nongovernmental organizations) are on a jihad, exaggerating anecdotal evidence to conclude that coal is on the way out. Demand for coal in the world, let alone the United States, continues to set records, despite what they say. Affordable power is critical for the U.S. economy.

Yes, affordable power is critical. But coal won't be affordable for much longer, which is what all the "jihadists" (including notable radical cells like Citigroup and Bank of America) are pointing out. Demand for coal remains high (accounting for about 50 percent of our energy currently) because we haven't developed adequate replacements. But as we begin to invest in other sources and put a monetary value on carbon, coal will become just as unsustainable financially as it is environmentally.

--Kate Sheppard

Not to harp on John McCain's lack of green credibility or anything, but the League of Conservation Voters released their annual congressional scorecard yesterday, and the "Maverick" scored a giant goose egg on all things environmental in 2007 – worse than representatives who had terminal illnesses or even died during this session, as Grist points out. His lifetime score now stands at a paltry 24 percent. But it's not that he voted against environmental protections – he just didn't show up to vote on the 15 legislative issues LCV included in the scorecard. The votes he missed would have saved Americans $499 million on gasoline and $550 million on energy bills, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and could have created a major green component of the stimulus package.

Of course, since he's running for office he's expected to miss some votes. But Clinton and Obama scored a 73 and 67, respectively, keeping them well above the 53 percent average in Congress last year. Clinton maintains a lifetime score of 87 percent, and Obama a score of 86 percent. So in both rhetoric and record, McCain just doesn't hold a candle compact florescent lightbulb to the Democrats.

--Kate Sheppard

Mr. Trend situates the opportunity for a new Cuba policy within the context of Brazilian foreign policy aspirations:

One of Brazil's better newspapers, Folha de São Paulo, has recently reported that, on his last trip to Cuba, Lula met with Raul Castro. Folha reported this past Wednesday that, during their meeting, among the other items Raul mentioned were the possibility of entering an agreement with Brazil that would send more sugar-based ethanol to Cuba, as well as the possibility of Lula brokering a dialogue between the U.S. and Cuba that could potentially open relations between the two and end the embargo ... Brazil hasn't really been considered a major diplomatic influence in the world. Brokering an agreement between the U.S. and Cuba would certainly help change that. And given his relations with Africa, China, the United States, and the European Union, Lula and, perhaps by extension, Brazil, would certainly have a strong claim on being a capable broker for international deals, economic and political.

--Robert Farley

While on the topic of climate change and the military, Inside Defense had a couple of good articles last month on how a couple of different combatant commands are thinking about the problem. On Joint Forces Command:

The U.S. military may be deployed more often to prop up weak governments worldwide as the effects of climate change are expected to destabilize entire regions, offering fertile ground for extremist ideologies, according to a new report from U.S. Joint Forces Command.

"Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states," JFCOM officials wrote in a December 2007 document called the "Joint Operating Environment."

--Robert Farley

Julian Sanchez scored the first interview with Lawrence Lessig since he announced his congressional run and I think it answers a lot of the questions Mori raised yesterday. I don't think Lessig has any illusions about the difficulties of his project nor does he expect to make a difference solely through example. Rather I think he hopes to change congress through the platform a congressional seat gives him in the media and through the direct connections it would give him to lawmakers.

Lessig says he began considering the prospect after a member of the audience at one of his recent lectures asked him why he wasn't doing something about the problem of political corruption—a challenge that struck home. But he admits there's also a practical angle. "When I was doing free culture stuff, there were hundreds of fora every year where people wanted to talk about these issues. There are no industry conferences on political corruption, and I quickly realized this was going to be harder to talk about than I had expected."

Finally, there's what sounds like a bit of a perfectionist streak in the equation. "It would be painful to watch other people try to solve the problems I'm talking about and do it wrong," Lessig says.

On campaign finance he has fairly standard, but nonetheless sound ideas (though "earmarks" is an overused buzzword that tends to confuse the issue):

One simple means of reducing the political power of campaign cash, Lessig says, "could be done tomorrow." He wants to ban legislative earmarks, those juicy morsels of targeted federal funding legislators direct toward pet projects and political supporters. Lessig also hopes to encourage more robust public financing of campaigns, noting the salutary effect such policies appear to be having in states like Maine and Arizona.

It's also worth noting that, for all the talk about changing congress, Lessig's first passion was the egregiously corporate-friendly state of our copyright laws and communications regulations. As he says:

But while Lessig wryly notes that the RIAA and MPAA "won't be excited to have an opponent of extremist copyright legislation in Congress," he also stresses that a congressional run would not be some kind of crusading extension of his work on "free culture." For Lessig, the central policy question will be, "Who ultimately controls innovation on the Internet? That's the net neutrality fight; that's the open spectrum fight."

One obstacle to such innovation is the Federal Communications Commission, which "was established in order to protect the incumbents," and may now need to be "restructured to facilitate competition." As an example, Lessig points to recent spectrum policy, which he describes as "extremely disappointing." According to Lessig, "circa 2001, the basic lesson we had learned is that we had undervalued unlicensed spectrum, that we didn't understand its innovation potential. Everyone was adopting the view that we needed more unlicensed areas alongside more spectrum auctions."

--Sam Boyd

Although Paul Krugman frequently delves into his area of expertise, economics, in order to dispatch conservative myths and cons -- on tax cuts, health care, the stimulus package -- his strength has always been to tie policy to political motivation. 

With this in mind, Krugman's column in today's Times begins with a promising premise. He notes that the looming economic crisis seems, superficially, to resemble that of the late 1970s. Krugman questions whether it is accurate to say we are actually headed towards "stagflation" or not, and whether this means the next president is doomed to suffer the fate of Jimmy Carter, or the elder George Bush. We don't have to end up with stagflation, he pronounces, but only if the next president is willing to take a bold political stand against an intransigent Congress packed with a not-insignificant number of conservative ideologues who view tax cuts as the only effective economic remedy.

Krugman is skeptical about a Democratic president being able to do this (he dismisses a Republican president outright for obvious reasons). But what's curious is his conclusion, in which he says, "And if effective action isn’t forthcoming, the next president will suffer the fate of Jimmy Carter, who began his administration with words of uplift -- “Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust” -- and ended up delivering America into the hands of the hard right." Now who could that be? Perhaps a prominent and charismatic contender for the White House whose main flaw, according to his critics, is that he is an empty suit? What grates isn't that Krugman appears to have a problem with Barack Obama -- that has been obvious for some time in his writings -- but rather that Krugman's antipathy towards Obama appears to have clouded his judgment to the point where he is making basic causal errors. Until this closing paragraph, Krugman had not even considered the impact of a unity governing philosophy. Suddenly, it has major consequences, possessing the power not only to explain why the peanut farmer from Georgia only served one term, but why future presidents could suffer the same fate.

If a president Obama fails to stabilize the economy in his first term, it won't be because he tried to govern on "change we can believe in." It will be because of the difficult political obstacles Krugman describes in the middle of his column, and apparently forgets by the end.

--Mori Dinauer

Tara McKelvey reports on one vet's campaign to turn his experience into a lesson for lawmakers:

Over the past several years, [Andrew] Pogany has visited military installations, set up meetings between congressional leaders and soldiers, and examined ways the Army can improve its mental-health care. On Jan. 1, 2008, he was hired as an investigator for the National Veterans Legal Services Program, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization. Experts in the field of veterans' care say he is one of the most effective advocates in the country. "Congress tends to hear about the military from higher-ups, and there's an institutional response. They're making things look the best they can," says Charles Sheehan-Miles, former executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. Pogany has worked hard to ensure that people in Washington meet directly with individuals who have been through the military's mental-heath-care system -- "the folks on the ground," as Sheehan-Miles explains.

Pogany knows a great deal about the subject of mental-health care for veterans and soldiers, both through his research and from his own experience in the military. "I see this guy, and he's always pushing the meds," Pogany recalls, describing the mental-health treatment he had received. "‘So I say, 'Let's just say I'm going to take this drug. What are the side effects?' He had to look them up. One of them, it turns out, is an inability to get an erection. I'm like, ‘You think I'm depressed now?' He said, ‘If that happens, we'll just give you a prescription for Viagra.' We both laugh. "Later, I find out people I know are on nine or ten meds. I felt like I was dealing with a M-A-S-H episode. There is this comedy of errors, and it culminates with this guy going home and blowing his brains out. And they say, 'Oh, well, he was depressed.'"

Read the rest (and comment) here.

--The Editors

Via Matt, it appears House Republicans have hired director Joel Surnow to create this self-parody:

Unbelievable.

--Ann Friedman

Over on his blog, Ezra explains that the much blogged-about Kos diary on Clinton and Obama's legislative records isn't even close to a fair comparison.

--The Editors

As I reported last week, environmental groups are conflicted about whether to get behind a comparatively weak climate bill this year. One of the reasons groups like Environmental Defense and others cite for passing legislation this year is the widespread support for action coming from unexpected sources like major leaders in the business industry. USCAP, a coalition of 27 companies that includes folks like General Electric and General Motors, has been publicly advocating for major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. But plenty of environmental groups have been leery of these big business advocates, fearing that their heightened calls for cuts now might be because they know that waiting is likely to produce a more stringent climate action plan, as Nick Berning of Friends of the Earth pointed out.

As BusinessWeek uncovered this week, many of the same industries signed onto the coalition are actively working to undermine progress on climate. Three members -- General Electric, Caterpillar and Alcoa – are also on the board of the Center for Energy & Economic Development, a group that opposes regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions. Duke Energy is part of the pact, but also is also part of "Americans for Balanced Energy Choices," the coal-pushing front group. Others are part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has also been actively working to thwart climate legislation.

What does this say about their role in pushing for climate action? Well, their support probably shouldn't be seen as an important factor in crafting climate legislation this year. A climate bill needs to have the validation of science, not what these industries (many of which are among the nation's top polluters) say we need. Seems like their "support" is more dangerous than beneficial in the long run.

--Kate Sheppard

One can't talk about coal without noting its influence in this campaign season. A very obvious place we see its thrust: the industry is once again sponsoring the Democratic presidential debate tonight. "Americans for Balanced Energy Choices," an astroturf organization that promotes the interests of mining and other coal-related companies, has sponsored a number of this year's debates, which has meant that nearly every commercial break has brought us ads much like this one touting the virtues of this dirty, dangerous, climate-endangering fossil fuel.

ABEC's website is registered to the coal industry trade organization Center for Energy and Economic Development, which is one of the leading advocates of keeping coal in the US energy mix, even as it becomes increasing obvious that it is no longer sustainable in the environmental or economic sense. ABEC spent $1.3 million on billboard, newspaper, television and radio ads in the first three states to host Democratic primaries, not to mention all the money they've dropped on sponsoring the CNN debates. The rest of their friends in the coal industry have dropped at least $35 million this primary season in hopes of rallying public support, and they're going at it even harder in coal states, with ads like these. They're worried that all this talk about curbing climate change, since all the candidates support some manner of cap on carbon, poses a danger to them, and they want to ensure that the voting public is as misinformed about it as possible. They have much to fear; coal currently accounts for half of our energy, which is not going to be a tenable mix in a world with a price on carbon.

So it's no surprise they're sponsoring yet another debate. The real question is, will anyone ask the candidates about where they stand on coal? It's the underlying question of everything related to climate change. We can't migrate to a new energy economy and effectively reduce our emissions without radically reducing our reliance on coal, but in not a single debate thus far have we heard the word mentioned outside the industry's endless ads. Of course, this could be simple neglect of the issue on the part of questioners, but I'm sure the industry sponsorship doesn't help encourage discussion on the subject.

--Kate Sheppard

• The big news today is the New York Times piece on John McCain's special interest in a certain lobbyist. While there's no evidence of sex, the real story is that he wrote several letters for a lobbyist he seems to have had a personal relationship with. The Washington Post has a much simpler story on the same topic. Not a huge story, but potentially embarrassing for a politician with McCain's holier-than-thou image. The McCain camp denies that there was any relationship besides a legitimate lobbyist-politician one (to the extent that you can call that legitimate) or that the lobbyist was asked to stay away from the campaign. McCain adviser John Weaver who was quoted in both stories has a slightly different story.
• The real McCain scandal of the day is how he has attempted, and will probably succeed, at doing an end-run around the campaign finance system and is now basically lying about it.
  
• Obama wins the Democrats Abroad primary.
• The Change to Win coalition of unions endorses Obama in a primarily symbolic way.
• Congressional Quarterly looks into Clinton's 35 yeas of experience claim.
• Fundraising numbers are in.
• Some young Clinton supporters (yes they do exist) put up a pretty spiffy website where people can put up testimonials about why they support her.
• Finally, just for fun, I'm apparently way behind on the "blank is your new bicycle memes." Also, this probama song is pretty cute and catchy.

--Sam Boyd

Speaking to Hillary Clinton's Youngstown, Ohio, rally on Tuesday night, Tom Buffenbarger, the president of the International Association of Machinists, AFL-CIO, delivered what he apparently viewed as a red-meat speech to what he apparently viewed as a carnivorous, blue-collar crowd. After citing two instances in which he believed Barack Obama had let down the members of his union, Buffenbarger paused to assess the Obama phenomenon as such.

"The Barack show is playing to rave reviews," he began. "Sold out on college campus after college campus. Standing room only crowds to hear his silver tongued orations. Hope! Change! Yes we can! Give me a break. I've got news for all the latte drinking, Prius driving, Birkenstock wearing trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak. This guy won't last a minute against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter."

Wow-ee. Nothing like channeling the spirit of Lee Atwater and George Wallace (who railed at "pointy-head intellectuals") to caricature your fellow Democrat's supporters. Good thing that Hillary, should she win the nomination, won't need the votes of all those airy-fairy Obamaniacs to beat John McCain.

--Harold Meyerson

Ezra and The World's Most Dangerous Professor get in some shots before the plug is officially pulled. And, indeed, the late Penn/Ickes era of strategery is pretty much begging for mockery. What, for example, is this trying to accomplish? It's 1) silly-to-appalling on the merits (with the particularly high comedy of a campaign dedicated to arguing that states don't count if they're too small, use caucuses, have too many black people, if Obama once spent a week there on vacation, etc. arguing that retroactively counting straw polls as elections is central to a "50 state strategy"), 2) not going to work directly because superdelegates aren't going to reverse a loss in pledged delegates, and 3) unlikely to work politically ("if we go down narrowly we're taking the Democratic Party with us" is unlikely to persuade many swing voters in Texas and Ohio to help stop the bleeding.) On the other hand, at this point such nonsense is just borne out of desperation; there's no effective strategic means of getting out of the kind of hole the campaign finds itself in.

In some respects, then, I agree with Matt's more charitable take although I'd put it a little differently: it was a failure to adapt. Pre-Iowa, the Clinton campaign was a logical frontrunner's strategy well-executed. I agree with Matt that her communications and speech-writing people are good. What Iowa should have revealed, however, is that Obama was an unusual frontrunner not only because he has more compelling political gifts but -- and this is the key -- he had more resources. A frontunning strategy works against Huckabee, although he's a better politician than his major competitors, because he just didn't have the resources to compete outside of his base. Because Clinton almost but not quite squandered her big New Hampshire lead, she had a reprieve to react to Obama's unique advantages, but she failed to do so; rather, her campaign seemed to think that their initial strategy was vindicated. It's not exactly that the campaign intentionally left states on the table, but that focusing on big states usually allows the frontrunner to take the small states. However, Obama's fundraising changed the usual calculus, and the Clinton campaign did blunder badly by failing to recognize this in time and not making the modest investment necessary to control Obama's margins in small states.

In this sense,  making fun of Mark Penn's silly "states we lose don't count spin" isn't just a cheap shot, because it seems to reflect genuinely mistaken beliefs about the nature of this particular campaign. Usually, frontrunners can clean up small states off the momentum of big wins, but there's nothing inevitable about this, and in a PR system failing to understand this is particularly costly. Clinton's campaign did a lot of things well but could never react properly to the unique challenge posed by Obama.

--Scott Lemieux

Last night, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), admitted to feeling a bit guilty, as a woman, for her support of Barack Obama in the contest for the Democratic presidential nominee. Appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball", McCaskill conceded that Hillary Clinton would make "a terrific president," but that an Obama presidency would best suit the historical moment America faces right now.

For weeks now, a heated debate has taken place between feminists who find an onus to support, based on her gender, the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton, and those who do not. I am not one who subscribes to the notion that a vote for Clinton is the only feminist option, and, following American Prospect Deputy Editor Ann Friedman, have not hesitated to say so. However, I do believe it to be high time that a woman appear on the Democratic ticket, and strongly suggest to the Obama campaign that, if their man wins the nomination, he choose a woman as his running mate. Call it a return to affirmative action. It's not just the right thing to do; it's the smart thing to do.

Since the mid-1970s, the health of the Democratic Party has been reflected in the strength of the women's movement. When the women's movement moves as a cohesive force, the Democratic Party benefits, both in electoral politics and the mechanisms of governance. A divided feminist movement threatens to divide the party. Should Obama prevail, putting a woman on the ticket would shore up his own feminist cred, showing himself willing to take up the work the party abandoned more than 20 years -- the two decades it has allowed former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro to stand as a flash in the pan. For Obama, a more pragmatic reason to do so would be to generate excitement among one significant group he seems to have trouble convincing: white women over 50.

--Adele M. Stan

The Supreme Court recently refused to hear an appeal to a 6th Circuit ruling that dismissed a challenge to the constitutionality of the NSA wiretapping program -- not by upholding its constitutionality, but (in a grim Catch-22) holding that because the program was secret the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the program.

Julian Sanchez is therefore probably right that in order to refute Andy McCarthy's claim that the Sixth Circuit's rejection of the ACLU's standing to sue over the the Bush administration's wireless wiretapping (and then the Supreme Court rejecting the appeal) demonstrates that the program is constitutional on the merits, one needs merely to restate it. But just in case Tim Lee gives the long version. I'll add that if anything the fact that the two Republican judges on 6CA rested on standing suggests, if anything, that the program isn't constitutional.  If they believed the program to be constitutional they could have granted standing -- as the dissenting judge plausibly did -- and simply upheld the program on the merits. Although it's possible in theory that the two conservative judges felt the program was constitutional but decided to rest on an illogical standing argument instead of vindicating the program on the merits, it seems rather unlikely.

I'd have to say this may be my favorite example of McCarthy's hackery since he suddenly reversed course and discovered in 2005 with no textual or logical support that filibusters of judicial nominees are unconstitutional. If all goes well, I think we can expect him to revert back to the correct position in roughly January of 2009.

--Scott Lemieux

When you cover religion, you get all sorts of flack from all corners of the universe, and today I found a Jewish blogger for Mike Huckabee accusing us here at TAP of engaging in a "campaign to keep Jews from voting Republican."

The blogger, Howard Richman, finds in this week's FundamentaList the early seeds of "a coming propaganda storm from liberals designed to prevent Jews from voting for a McCain-Huckabee ticket."

That and my grandmother slipped a tin foil hat in my kreplach.

--Sarah Posner

Yesterday, Sam Boyd noted the possible candidacy of Lawrence Lessig for California's 12th Congressional district premised on a "Change Congress" campaign that, in addition to banning earmarks from the appropriations process, also seeks to make running for office 100% publicly financed.

What isn't spelled out in Lessig's pitch is the idea that it's not so much that big money corrupts politics -- that's nothing new -- but that it's the source of the money that's the problem. Lessig has trained his sights on the lobbyists and PACs who have undue influence over the system. His answer is public financing, but it is unclear whether he wishes to completely eliminate private, non-corporate contributions as well, which would be a considerably more ambitious goal, requiring nothing less than overruling a more than 30-year-old Supreme Court precedent.

Boyd observed that Lessig "spent ten years arguing about copyright law, didn't get anywhere, and wondered why. His conclusion was that money has too much influence in politics and so he decided to turn away from copyright work and start trying to mobilize people, mainly via the internet, to try and change things." This raises a question about Lessig himself, namely whether he's aware of the limits on activism that a House seat imposes. If anything, he would likely find himself more constrained by the institution of Congress -- the very institution he's trying to change! -- than if he continued to work as an influential private citizen. Like one of my former professors used to say, when you've got a Congress made up overwhelmingly of lawyers, lawyers who need to finance their own reelection as often as every two years, they're going to write the law in such a way that will allow them to attract big dollars while putting on airs of getting big money out of politics. There will always be a "soft money" loophole. And then a few years later there'll be some campaign finance reform huffing and puffing, and the loophole will be plugged. And then gee, what do you know! We found a new loophole for 527s! It's unclear how Lessig, a lawyer himself, will singlehandedly end the cycle of finance reform charades through his own example.

There was a smart article in Salon last year that addressed this very problem, how to create a real publicly-financed election system without trampling over the free speech rights articulated in Buckley. This seems like the sort of effort Lessig should be putting his weight behind, rather than working from within the system to remove the rot of corruption from the political process.

--Mori Dinauer

Matthew Yglesias on the humanitarian liberal hawks spawned by Kosovo:

With Kosovo's formal declaration of independence from Serbia on Monday, and the United States' decision to extend recognition to the planet's newest country, the time has come for a look back on the approximately 10 years of intense U.S. involvement in that conflict. Kosovo is a tiny, seemingly worthless patch of land lacking in all natural resources, but it plays a strangely large role in our foreign-policy debates. During arguments about the Iraq War, in particular, liberal hawks had a habit of wielding the poor Kosovar Albanians as a cudgel: If you supported Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing campaign, the argument went, then surely you could support a war against Saddam Hussein.

Then and now, many pro-Kosovo, anti-Iraq liberals could persuasively (Kenneth Roth's 2004 "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" is my personal favorite) argue that various factors distinguish the two cases. Still, the argument was never about a strict Kosovo-implies-Iraq logic. Rather, first Bosnia and then Kosovo provided the impetus for an intellectually influential, humanitarian hawk movement aimed at advocating the use of military force to advance liberal values whose leaders, inspired by the success of Kosovo, saw Iraq as potentially continuing the momentum built up in the Balkans.

Read the rest (and comment) here.

--The Editors

Barack Obama has been ramping up his conversation on climate change of late, in part as a way to draw a clear distinction between himself and John McCain (whose "green cred" I've debunked here and here). Of course there is Obama's $250,000 Super Bowl ad that focused on just two subjects: ending the war and stopping global warming. Climate and energy were also strong features of his victory speech in Houston, Texas Tuesday night, and over the past week he's been calling out McCain for not supporting an auction-based method of dispersing carbon credits in a cap-and-trade plan, which is what both he and Hillary Clinton have called for. An auction-based system would require polluters to pay for the carbon they emit, whereas climate plans that McCain has indicated support for, like the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, give away a significant portion of credits, resulting in a loss of trillions of dollars in revenue that could be invested in renewable energy, weatherization, or green jobs programs -- projects that would further the goals of cutting emissions and weaning us off oil.

Obama has also pledged that he won't wait until Jan. '09 to start working on climate change: "The moment I secure the nomination, I want to bring together experts in this area to start putting together the U.S. position ... what we're going to be doing internally, what we can agree to with other countries," he told a crowd recently. Of course, part of the ramping up might be an effort to play down past poor choices on the environment like voting for the 2005 energy bill, or his multitude of missteps on coal in the past. But putting these issues at the center of his campaign now demonstrates both his commitment, and his willingness to take some political risks.

The Wall Street Journal is positing that Obama's increased green rhetoric will hurt him in coal states like Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Wyoming, which have yet to vote. But he's already done well in coal states like Kansas, as well as, of course, Illinois. Chances are the people in those states, unlike a lot of the rest of the country, realize first-hand the problems associated with mining and burning coal -- the environmental, health, and safety hazards abound -- and see the writing on the wall. While the industry provides much needed jobs now, it won't be a cheap, abundant energy source for much longer, and will need to be replaced with jobs in a green economy. Which is exactly what the Democratic candidates have proposed – energy plans that make polluting industries pay and then invest those funds in creating new technologies and new jobs. The death knell is sounding for coal and other old, dirty energy sources. The question is no longer if we will adapt, but how -- and how to do so in a way that provides new opportunities for coal staters.

That said, let this serve as the kickoff to what will be a recurring feature on TAPPED exploring the role of coal in American life, the 2008 election, and the nation's energy future. It's one of the biggest underlying subjects in all discussion of climate and energy, and merits a much closer examination than it's often given.

--Kate Sheppard

As part of an apparent effort to reinvigorate political journalism's most tired cliches, James Kirchick declares that "the Left lacks a sense of humor." He offers as proof my Think Progress post from Tuesday, in which I noted what a sad commentary on conservatism it was that Christopher Buckley felt that John McCain needed to be forgiven for opposing torture. Quoth Peretz's ward:

Aside from the fact that the author of this post totally misses the point in that Buckley is lampooning McCain’s conservative critics, he also seems like a total party pooper. Observe that, in the column, Buckley refers to the “the Archfiend, Ted Kennedy” and notes that Fred Thompson “could barely manage to stay awake during his own announcement speech.” Indeed, Buckley opens the piece with an anecdote about a New Yorker cartoon. The problem with the liberals at ThinkProgress is that, since they themselves have no sense of humor, they cannot recognize a joke when it hits them square between the eyes.

Observe that I do, in fact, realize that in some circles Christopher Buckley is considered a talented satirist. This has always perplexed me, as my understanding of satire is that it's supposed to be witty or clever, and I've generally found Buckley's work to be about as clever as mocking the help for stealing the flatware (I think the examples Kirchick offers speak for themselves). But, clanging bricks aside, the relevant point here is that Buckley was only "lampooning" torture-supporting conservatives to the extent that he seems to believe they should just relax and recognize McCain as one of them. That's not funny, that's tragic. Years from now, when we look back at the twisted moral wreckage that was 00's conservatism, then it might be funny. (I'm also a little curious why Kirchick refuses to identify me as the author of the post. My handle is right there at the bottom. I know he knows my name, he's tried to mix it up with me before. Why so coy?)

In related Kirchickian hilariousness, Jamie goes to the Plank to plant a post dismissing this morning's New York Times McCain story, which he claims is proof that the Times is “in the tank for Obama.” Fellow Planker Chris Orr notes in comments that, rather inconveniently for Kirchick's thesis, the Times "strongly endorsed Hillary Clinton less than a month ago."

Meanwhile, Kirchick’s Commentary co-blogger Jennifer Rubin references Kirchick’s Plank post as proof that “both the Right and the Left in the blogosphere are not too impressed by the New York Times story," with Kirchick being offered as representative of "the Left." That’s a cute little racket you got going there, Jamie. I will say, though, that I find your work just as humorous when you write for the Left as for the Right.

--Matthew Duss

From what I can gather, at least from the standpoint of someone who has never thought John McCain had any particularly high level of integrity and could care less even if unsubstantiated implications that he might have had sex with someone not his wife are true, this is about as much a "blockbuster" as The Hottie and the Nottie. I just don't see anything remotely surprising or, with the exception of the well-known Keating scandal, terribly important (although perhaps this portends something else or its political impact will be greater.) And although one might take solace from the fact that the Times is actually taking on the Straight Talkitude Express, the fact that they let his campaign kill an apparently more substantive version dilutes this.

Publius has more. In a rational world, I would agree that it's "hard to imagine the NYT (after institutional deliberation) going forward with such an explosive article with such a thin foundation," but when we're talking about the former employer of Jeff Gerth and Judy Miller this isn't necessarily true.

--Scott Lemieux

Erik Loomis points to a Financial Times op-ed by John Podesta and Peter Ogden on the military response to climate change:

In the run-up to the United Nations climate change conference in Bali, business people implored political leaders to take bold steps to combat global warming. They insisted that their ability to undertake effective long-term planning was undermined by uncertainty about the future cost of carbon emissions. Yet their calls for action were ignored.

Perhaps the outcome would have been different if the world's single largest organisation -- the Pentagon -- had joined the chorus. After all, it also needs to know what kind of environment to prepare for to allocate its vast resources efficiently.

Having participated in a few of the sessions that eventually led to the new Maritime Strategy, I can report that considerations such as peak oil and global warming were taken seriously, if not necessarily prioritized. All of the services have certainly given some thought to the possibility of energy shortages. I think it should also be noted that the process of such theorizing within the military and civilian defense establishment will benefit immensely from the election of a president who is not George W. Bush. In any case, to the extent that we want the role of the military in United States foreign policy to be about management of crises (such as disasters and failed states), taking seriously the problems presented by climate change is absolutely critical to planning. But of course, as Loomis notes, this also involves certain assumptions about the hegemonic role of the United States in the international system.

--Robert Farley

In case you needed any additional evidence that Huckabee supporters are stuck in another decade:

--Sarah Posner

• So Obama won. Again. Even though his 17 point victory in Wisconsin was the smallest margin he’s won by since Feb. 5 he continues to make inroads in Clinton’s key demographic groups, continues to expand his delegate lead, and continues to improve his chances of winning on March 4. How exactly that will play out is of course unclear, but it seems to me that an Obama sweep finishes Clinton for good while a victory in any state, though far from putting her on the road to the nomination, at least lets her limp onwards in the hopes of adding more victories.
• As much as I find it almost physically painful to disagree with Mark Schmitt, if Clinton wins most of the states after March 4 in a convincing way I don’t think it’s crazy to imagine that she wins with the help of superdelegates even if she hasn’t made up the gap in pledged delegates. And really, that wouldn’t be particularly illegitimate in my mind. A series of big wins would indicate that she’s changed the dynamic of the race and that, if earlier states were to vote again, she might win more of them. All of this is most likely moot though—I just don’t see the kind of comeback she’d need happening. Also Matt Yglesias is right that all this talk about delegates, even if true, certainly doesn’t help Clinton.
• A new pro-Clinton 527 launches an ad in Ohio promoting Clinton’s economic plan. That's same economic plan Clinton accused Obama of stealing.
• In a just world this Hendrik Hertzberg piece would end the ridiculous “plagiarism” kerfluffle (though then I’d have fewer opportunities to use the world kerfluffle which would just be sad for everyone). Of course, in a just world this malarkey wouldn’t have been in the papers at all (this topic just attracts all the great words). Also, Clinton’s claim that her campaign isn’t pushing the story is just not true.
• An Obama surrogate is totally unprepared and ends up embarrassing himself and his candidate. This being the 21st century and all, he blogs about it and lists some things he should have mentioned if his mind hadn’t gone blank. It’s actually a hilarious post and it kind makes me like the guy—it’s not something I can see most politicians writing.
• The notoriously wine-swilling teamsters endorse Obama.
• Apparently Obama is not only a Muslim coke dealer, but a communist as well. It’s nice to see the classics are still around.
• Clinton plans to scale up her negative campaigning against Obama. We all remember how well that worked for her the last few times she tried it. Oh wait …
• The Obama campaign has new fund-raising email noting that they have 900,000 unique donors and asking for another 100,000 to make it 1 million. Pretty amazing stuff. See the full text of the email in the extended text.
  
• John McCain argues that Obama is too hard on terrorists. Really.
• Karen Tumulty has a fascinating post pointing out that it’s almost certain that no canidate will accept public financing for the general election because the FEC has been shutdown for the most part by a standoff between the president and the Senate.
• The DNC prepares to attack McCain.
• Ana Marie Cox has some interesting thoughts on campaign coverage. Joe Klein responds.

--Sam Boyd

Sam —

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Unlike Senator Clinton or Senator McCain, we haven’t taken a dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. Our campaign is responsible to no one but the people.

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We started this improbable journey a little over a year ago in Springfield, Illinois.

And because you’ve joined together to make your voices heard, this journey isn’t looking as improbable anymore.

Since our victory on February 5th, we’ve won ten straight contests.

But on March 4th, we face a huge challenge in Texas and Ohio, who will vote along with Rhode Island and Vermont. We are behind in the big states and need as many people involved as possible if we’re going to win.

If we can reach our goal of one million donors by March 4th, we can send a powerful message that the Washington establishment and big-money interests cannot ignore.

As one million people with one voice, we can tell them that their days of dominating Washington are coming to an end — the old politics are crumbling and a new voice is breaking through. Our voice.

Will you make a matching donation now to make it happen?

https://donate.barackobama.com/match

I learned the power of ordinary people coming together as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago.

I worked side-by-side with people who had been laid off from steel plants that were moved overseas. These were people who needed new jobs to rebuild their lives, and their political leaders were ignoring them.

But even though the odds were stacked against them, they discovered that by coming together with one voice, they could no longer be ignored.

When we launched this campaign, we knew we were up against similar odds. We knew we’d be running against a massive political machine with deep ties to the Washington establishment.

We knew it wouldn’t be easy.

But if we can do this, we’re not just going to win an election. We’re going to change our country.

Thank you so much,

Barack

I cringe whenever I see that the Roberts Court is taking a case like this:

In theory, a criminal-law doctrine known as the exclusionary rule forbids prosecutors from using evidence obtained by the police as the result of an improper search. In practice, the rule has significant exceptions, like for evidence obtained in good faith through reliance on an invalid search warrant or as the result of erroneous information from a court official.

Justices on the current Supreme Court have made no secret of their desire to carve more exceptions out of the nearly 100-year-old exclusionary rule. On Tuesday, the court accepted a new case that could provide a route toward that goal.

The question in the case is whether the list of exceptions should be expanded to include evidence obtained from a search undertaken by officers relying on a careless record-keeping error by the police.

I explained last year why I think reducing the exclusionary rule to an empty shell is a bad thing. To repeat, "[w]hen Congress passes the "Ice Cream Castles In The Air. And A Pony!" act creating an effective, viable civil remedy for this particular violation of the 4th Amendment I might happily join" opponents of the exclusionary rule, but until then it's the best remedy available. And it's misleading to claim that the rule can't benefit innocent victims; this is true in individual cases, but the larger effect of the exclusionary rule is to encourage professionalism and legality by the state by removing incentives to violate rights. The trend of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts making it clear that the police can usually find a way to get illegally obtained evidence admitted creates the opposite incentives.

--Scott Lemieux

Before Bush's surrogates started comparing him to Lincoln, they used to compare him to Truman. The president himself liked the latter comparison, because he could find solace in being an unpoular president in his time, only to be vindicated in the future.

Well, it looks like Bush may even be exceeding Truman in unpopularity, according to this ARG poll. They have him pegged at a 19 percent approval rate, with a whopping 77 percent saying they disapprove (4 percent were undecided). Truman, by contrast, managed to hold a far more respectable 22 percent approval rate, his lowest Gallup polling, while 13 percent were undecided. That poll was taken at roughly the same point in Truman's presidency (February 1952) as the current ARG poll was for Bush, so if he's lucky, he might bounce back up to 33 percent, like Truman in October 1952.

Now, that's what I call a legacy.

--Mori Dinauer

Lawrence Lessig, best known for his critiques of copyright laws and the creation of the Creative Commons foundation, has recently shifted his attention to political corruption and changing the influence of money in government. Essentially he spent ten years arguing about copyright law, didn't get anywhere, and wondered why. His conclusion was that money has too much influence in politics and so he decided to turn away from copyright work and start trying to mobilize people, mainly via the internet, to try and change things. And I think he's right, if he can start a popular movement to bring something like the clean elections laws passed by Maine and Arizona to the Federal level we could actually change quite a bit. He's also very big on enhanced openness which I'm more skeptical about, but he's a smart guy and there may be ways to connect donations with votes more directly that we haven't thought of yet. What's more, Lessig has a rabid following among a web-savy, geeky, politically-minded set of people who conceivably could do a lot to promote transparency. This is what he's trying to work towards with his Change Congress website which will launch soon (see an interview about his plans here).

Conveniently, he also happens to live in the congressional district of recently deceased congressman Tom Lantos and he's now considering running for Congress. His introductory video is quite interesting. It makes it clear that he doesn't think his main opponent is a bad person--to the contrary he quite likes her--he just sees her as limited by the system. It's also worth noting that Lessig is uniquely well placed to run this kind of campaign both because the district has a relatively high concentration of techy sorts of people who he appeals to and because his fame on the internet and popularity among the netroots will allow him to raise enough money to compete in the San Francisco media market (The Hill has more on the race).

As Chris Hayes says, if this election wasn't interesting enough already...

--Sam Boyd

The USAF has been irritating a lot of people lately.

The first problem is the F-22. The Air Force insists that it needs a lot of them. Congress, footing the bill, isn't so sure. The Air Force has at least half of a case on this. It's true enough that the F-22 is useless in our current wars, but utility in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the sole criteria of a weapon's merit. Moreover, there's something to the Air Force complaints that the F-15 fleet is getting old and uncompetitive. The F-15 is still one of the best platforms in the world, but the age and wear on a lot of the frames means higher maintenance costs and lower readiness rates. Finally, in a perfect world you really would want what's probably the best air superiority fighter around, even if you can't predict precisely when and where it's going to be used.

But of course we live in the real world, and while utility now isn't the only criterion, it is a pretty important one. It's unclear why we need the F-22 now in the numbers that the Air Force wants. It's also unclear why procurement right now should favor the Air Force instead of the Army. The F-35 seems to me to be a much preferable option; it has ground attack and air superiority capability, it's being developed with a number of other countries, and it has variants that the United States Navy and several foreign navies want. It's almost as if the Air Force wants the F-22 simply because other countries won't have it; this makes a tiny bit of sense, but not a terribly large amount, because we're not going to war against Norway anytime soon. I'm pretty convinced that the F-22 is attractive to the Air Force for prestige reasons; it wants the aircraft simply in order to have a plane that's more air superiority capable than anything the Air Force has. This amounts to essentially a cultural argument, as the fighter faction in the USAF has always been strong, if not necessarily dominant.

What's really interesting is that as fewer people take the Air Force seriously, it seems to up its demands. AP:

The Air Force isn't alone in wanting more money, but its appetite is far greater than the other military branches. Shortly after President Bush submitted his defense plan for the 2009 budget year, which begins Oct. 1, each service outlined for Congress what it felt was left out. The Air Force's "wish list" totaled $18.8 billion, almost twice as much as the other three services combined.

"There's no justification for it. Period. End of story," said Gordon Adams, a former Clinton administration budget official who specializes in defense issues. "Until someone constrains these budget requests, the hunger for more will charge ahead unchecked."

The intriguing thing about this is the resentment it seems to be stirring.

The Navy is also requesting weapon systems that have no direct utility in Afghanistan or Iraq, but apparently it either has a better PR department or a better sense of when and when not to push. It can't help that the Air Force has decided to treat the Army and Navy as enemies in the procurement battle, or that the USAF has been, well, quite blunt in the demands that it's making. After General Bruce Carlson publicly stated that the Air Force wanted 380 F-22s (double the current fleet projection), SecDef Gates slapped him down pretty hard.

All of General Dunlap's claims regarding the critical role of the Air Force in counterinsurgency can't change the fact that it's not a service built for the kind of war we're fighting now. Moreover, the jobs that the Air Force is being asked to do now (ground support, transport, etc.) are things that it has bitterly resisted doing at every opportunity. Whereas the Navy has done a lot of good work on laying a theoretical and doctrinal foundation for its continued prominence, the Air Force seems capable only of clawing at the other two services.

It's good that people are starting to notice this.

--Robert Farley

The news about the resurrection of Jim Bakker led me to search for some video of the televangelist's halcyon days, and I discovered a fantastic YouTube compilation of the greatest hits of televangelism, circa the Reagan era: the Bakkers' Heritage USA fraud; Jerry Falwell's attempts to save Heritage USA from collapse, his charges of Jim's homosexuality, and his notorious fully-clothed free fall down the Heritage USA water slide; Jessica Hahn with her big '80s hair, accusing Jim of having sex with her and then paying her hush money; and Oral Roberts' plea for money for his university lest God take him home early. Here's Notable Evangelical Moments (Part I):

Back in the late 1980s, Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were universally ridiculed for sexual and financial improprieties. Many thought that Bakker's fraud, his alleged homosexuality, his affair with Hahn, and Swaggart's propensity for hookers, would spell the end of televangelism for profit. But today we see popular televangelists threatening to declare holy war on congressional investigators, major presidential candidates using televangelists for fundraisers, and a credulous following believing that God's anointed ones are entitled to great riches and that questioning them is satanic. The only popular figure who can't be forgiven is Ted Haggard , because the ultimate sin is not stealing other people's money or cheating on your wife, but being gay.

So when people shout with glee that the religious right is dead because no one listens to James Dobson anymore, or Falwell is dead, or because the political elites can't get it together to endorse the same candidate, I just have to laugh (or cry). The continuing vibrancy of televangelism is just one bit of evidence of it, but the fundamental belief that anyone spreading Christ's word -- even if in a most un-Christian way -- is entitled to a free ride is a very big part of what continues to fuel its engine. God's messengers are entitled to forgiveness and redemption. Except, of course, if they're gay.

--Sarah Posner

Here's what Clinton campaign top strategist Penn had to say about his candidate's deficit, compared to Barack Obama, in match-up polling against John McCain:

The polls that you're seeing now are just a reflection of the recent primary wins. ... Unfortunately, winning Democratic primaries and caucuses is not actually reflective of who can beat the Republican. ... When Kerry got the nomination he was 17 points up, ahead of Bush. ... Poll evidence frankly has never been a reliable indicator of who's going to win a general election. These polls are momentum based rather than reliable indicators of how the race is going to play itself out.

It's pretty clear that Obama is a much, much more attractive politician than Kerry, so that's a bit of a low blow. But it's certainly true that Obama's small lead over McCain right now shouldn't be taken for granted going forward.

--Dana Goldstein

On a conference call with reporters today, the Clinton campaign disagreed strongly with Mark: They said superdelegates will, indeed, decide the Democratic nominee, regardless of the pledged delegate count in June after all the states and territories have had their say.

"When this whole process is over on the 6th or the 7th of June with Puerto Rico, both candidates will need a certain number of unpledged delegates to clinch the nomination," said Harold Ickes, a longtime Hillary Clinton adviser.

Ickes said key upcoming primaries for Clinton -- in addition to Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania -- are Mississippi (March 11) and Puerto Rico (June 7). Mentioning these states is clearly an attempt to push the narrative that the race will continue on beyond March 4, regardless of the outcomes in Ohio and Texas.

The call also featured a rehash of the new "commander-in-chief" language Clinton has rolled out in the past several days. "She is the only person in this race who is both ready to be commander-in-chief and end the Iraq war and begin to bring troops home in 60 days," Ickes said.

Mark Penn's comments on polling to come.

--Dana Goldstein

In a development worthy of The Simpsons or Sinclair Lewis or Stephen Colbert's old This Week in God, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Jim Bakker, televangelism's most notorious felon, who went to jail for ripping off his followers by selling non-existent shares in his Heritage USA Christian theme park, has rehabilitated himself with a new TV program -- and a new investment scheme. The plan: a Christian community called Morningside, admittedly modeled on his fraudulent and failed Heritage USA, in which thousands of people invested and collectively lost over a hundred million dollars. At Morningside:

[visitors] stand surrounded by a surreal indoor streetscape of Italianate store facades and condo balconies. A grand chapel sits at one end and a portico at the other, the entire color-bursting scene playing out under a ceiling painted like a cloudless blue sky. It looks so real one woman decides to keep her coat on.

This is even more than Jim Bakker promised them. For months they had heard Bakker on his TV show touting his impending move here. Bakker, the disgraced TV minister of PTL-and-Tammy-Faye fame, said the day was coming when he would no longer broadcast his bare-bones show from inside a converted restaurant in nearby Branson, as he had for five years. He talked about moving to a sprawling complex being built for him as the new headquarters for his television ministry, the heart of a 600-acre development named Morningside . . . . [a development that] The development has its own sewer and water treatment plants. The main building, with the domed sky, is 200,000 square feet of mixed retail and housing. It holds 115 condos, going for $80,000 to $350,000.

How is is possible that a "Christian," convicted of multiple counts of mail and wire fraud, was shown to have been a philanderer and an adulterer, had his ministry's tax exemption stripped away, and saw his ministry descend into bankruptcy with over $70 million in debt, can return to the airwaves and convince anyone to give him money? Bakker's dedicated followers believe he's a man of God, that his conviction was a miscarriage of justice, and that God will ultimately take care of the money they give to him -- even if they gave him money for the Heritage USA scheme. There's a sucker born every minute, and people's faith in Bakker's resurrection gives a whole new meaning to being born again.

--Sarah Posner

The particulars of what Barack Obama actually "pledged" to do on public financing notwithstanding, it's pretty clear that what coverage there has been of this issue assumes it's an ironclad pledge. Obviously, it would be of great benefit to Obama to opt out of the system, because as of now it appears he'd be likely to raise far more money than John McCain. So how can he opt out and still save face?

The answer is: 527s. No, I don't mean that he should encourage people to organize 527s on his behalf. But he can use the very well-funded Republican 527s as the lever to enable him to opt out.

The argument would go something like this: "I said I would 'aggressively pursue an agreement to preserve a publicly financed election' with my Republican opponent. And I'm happy to have our two campaigns sit down and see if there is a way to make the debate between me and John McCain, within the publicly financed system. But as long as there are 'independent' Republican groups out there planning on spending hundreds of millions of dollars attacking me, it would be pretty foolish to lock myself into a spending limit that makes it impossible to respond. So I ask Senator McCain: Can you call off the right-wing hit squad? If you can do that, I'll be only too happy to say we should both accept public financing. But if you can't, I'm not going to sign away my ability to compete."

McCain would squawk, of course, but the real question is whether it would be enough to satisfy the press. And it just might -- at least enough to shorten the issue's life. It would also have the benefit of beginning a discussion on all the nasty, nasty stuff that will be coming at Obama from the right, and what kind of responsibility McCain bears for what is going to be done on his behalf.

-- Paul Waldman

OK, I’m going to take a stab at making the case that John McCain will defy the whole “stay out the Bushes” conventional wisdom and pick Jeb Bush over frontrunning option Mike Huckabee as the vice presidential nominee. My argument leads from the assumption that the Bush family still has a lot of power in Republican circles, that they want to repair their family name, and that they see McCain as probably losing anyway and so want to set the table for the Big Jeb Family Comeback.

First, the McCain-Bush détente, which famously began with a Caribou Coffee klatch between John Weaver and Karl Rove back in 2004, is sufficient to have yielded benefits to McCain in states like South Carolina and, more recently, with the endorsement of former President George H.W. Bush. So, McCain knows on which side his bread is buttered, and since he’s already saddled with Bush legacies on the war and the tax cuts, he may as well go whole hog and be literally paired with a Bush legacy running mate.

Second, because the Republicans are still going to need to have an inside track in either Florida or Ohio if they have any chance of winning, and because Charlie Crist, the current Republican governor, is unlikely to be chosen for a variety of reasons we won’t delve into here, and given what happened in Ohio in 2006 and the fact that the Democrats now have Gov. Ted Strickland there (and thus no more Ken Blackwells for the GOP), the smarter play is Florida. And Jeb provides ample help there.

Third, McCain is aiming for a more inclusive GOP coalition that includes Hispanics, and would like to get his national number close to if not equal to the 40 percent Bush drew in 2004. That’s gonna be hard enough, but made somewhat easier with Jebbie on board, because he speaks fluent Spanish, has a Mexican-born wife, and has street cred with Hispanics.

Fourth, the Bush family and its circle of donors can produce a lot of money for such a ticket and, given the amazing disparities between what the Democrats are raising right now and what McCain, who went practically bankrupt last summer, has collected, McCain may need access to the spigot.

Finally, and purely from the Bush family’s self-interested angle, the damage to the Bush brand is so bad that having the more articulate, smarter Jeb on the national stage certainly can’t make things worse and probably would make things better. If McCain can win, the Bushes are back in line for the next Republican opportunity, in 2016. If not, Jeb moves up even faster, to the head of the queue in 2012.

--Tom Schaller

Over at TAP Online Spencer Ackerman interviews A.J. Rossmiller about his new book, Still Broken:

Spencer Ackerman: I won't pretend I've finished Still Broken, your excellent memoir/cri de coeur of your experiences as an intelligence officer in Iraq. But what I've read is excellent, and anyone interested in either Iraq or intelligence work will find it fascinating. One thing, though. I'm interested in both Iraq and intelligence work. And you were in Iraq for a whole year, if I'm not mistaken, without leaking to me a single time. Not once. Not even so much as an e-mail I got from you. What did I do to deserve this insult?

Or to phrase the question differently: A lot of people—reporters, progressives, progressive bloggers who report—would have found your experiences in 2005 in Iraq invaluable. A well-timed leak could have cut through the fog of obfuscation put out by the Bush administration. There you were at the Tactical Operations Center, armed with the material that's now in Still Broken, and a private e-mail address. Why no leaks?

Of course, if you answer, "Well, Spencer, I leaked to other people," we're not friends any more.

A.J. Rossmiller: I am, of course, horrified that you haven't read my transcendent tome, but seeing as how you continue to be among the best observers of military and intelligence issues around, I'm willing to let it slide. And your question is an interesting one, one that I haven't been asked before. The answer comes in two parts: First, even if I had wanted to get that kind of information out, I—like, I think, most of the people involved at the analytical level of the intelligence business—wouldn't have had any idea where to go. I became acquainted with the entire set of young D.C. bloggers and journalists after I left the Department of Defense (DoD), not before, and there's no real conception within the machine that anyone is interested in the kind of mundane problems and manipulations that occur when you're in the middle of them. Only when I ruefully described my experiences to others in the world of professional foreign policy did it become clear just how aberrant things were in the intelligence process, which ended up being the motivation for writing the book.

The second part, which is perhaps more determinative, is the fact that even if I had known where to go with information, I didn't have a very good conception of what the rules were regarding talking to reporters (or anybody) about the work, other than, "Don't ever do it." To the best of my knowledge any kind of information transmission had to be cleared From Above, and even if you're simply talking about unclassified information which, of course, everything in my book is, after a lengthy (and costly) DoD review process—it's a scary (and possibly illegal) call to make on your own. The polygraph exams definitely cover whether you’ve revealed confidential information, and it’s a tough thing to ask a young analyst to potentially ruin his career, or worse, by reaching out into the unknown. People at the top know how that stuff works; people at the analytical level do not.

Read the rest (including Rossmiller's take on Kelly Clarkson) here.

--The Editors

I recently had an argument with a fellow New Yorker about the merits of Mike Bloomberg. We both agreed his presidential aspirations were too ridiculous to be discussed. But then we began to debate Bloomie's record as Mayor.

"I could never, ever support a former Republican, the man who brought the Republican National Convention to New York City and endorsed George W. Bush," my friend said.

"Okay," I replied. "But what about Bloomberg's reformist record on education, his support for congestion pricing, and his experimental anti-poverty and safe sex programs? Sure, Bloomberg wasted time and money on an ill-fated Olympic bid, and he supports some neo-liberal development projects that New York progressives loathe. But he's been a force for some important positive change in New York City."

Yesterday the New York Times weighed in with an important editorial about the lack of focus on urban issues in the presidential race. The problem, of course, is exacerbated by the front-loading of rural states in the primary schedule, and also by the electoral college, which gives disproportionate weight to the minority of Americans who neither live nor work in a city. By harping endlessly on the challenges of rural areas while hardly ever speaking publicly about cities, Clinton, Obama, and McCain not only cede expertise on urban issues to self-promoters like Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, but they also ignore crucial solutions to our major policy challenges: For example, what role should public transportation play in solving our global warming crisis? What public health measures should be taken in Washington, D.C., where 1 in 20 adults are estimated to be infected with H.I.V? As a nation, are we comfortable with the ever-increasing racial segregation of our urban and suburban schools, or do we want to promote integration as a social good?

These are some of the toughest, most intractable problems in American politics, so in part, it's no surprise our politicians aren't running to tackle them. Histories upon histories have been written about Americans' love-hate relationship with our cities; there's no doubt that culturally, we still sometimes stereotype cities as dens of crime and drugs, even though they remain the engines of our economy, producing 75 percent of our GDP. Indeed, in conservative politics, the diversity and tolerance of urban life are still pointed to as aberrant and abhorrent -- think of right-wing reactions to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to marry gay couples, or outrage over some cities' decisions to fundamentally ignore unworkable federal immigration statues.

There isn't a domestic political problem in America that can be solved without serious attention being paid to urban issues. If there's a presidential candidate who gets this, it's probably Barack Obama, who once worked as a community organizer on the troubled South Side of Chicago. Especially in the last month, Obama has drawn upon that experience as evidence of his ability to bring people together to solve economic problems such as joblessness. But we haven't heard much more talk of cities from Obama than we've heard from any other candidate. A lot more is needed.

--Dana Goldstein

1. Here's the really amazing number from Wisconsin:

The loser of the Wisconsin Democratic primary got twice as many votes as the winner of the Republican primary. (440,000 for Clinton to 220,000 for McCain).

I know we've seen numbers like this in other states. But Wisconsin is a state that just a few years ago had Tommy Thompson as its governor and in the last two presidential elections, was decided by 10,000 votes in '04 and 5,000 in '00.

2. Can we just stop talking about the superdelegates?

This is not complicated. If Senator Clinton comes into Denver without a majority of pledged and seated (i.e., not Michigan and Florida) delegates, she is not going to be the nominee. Period. That would be true in almost any case, but in this case it's doubly certain, because the African-American superdelegates would switch to Obama first. That would create a dynamic in which, for Clinton to win, the white superdelegates would have to override the preference of the elected delegates, the Democratic primary and caucus voters, and the African-American superdelegates. I know some serious Clinton loyalists, but I don't know anyone who would be willing to be responsible for that racialized and ugly outcome. It isn't going to happen.

I've made this point to various hyper-knowledgeable people, who want to turn it into a game of margins: How big does Obama's lead need to be for the superdelegates to not matter? The answer, I'm pretty sure, is one. If he has a lead in pledged delegates, he will be the nominee.

Which is not to say that Clinton can't sharpen her message, change her tone, and win Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania by sizable margins. If she did that, she would win the nomination. But she is not going to win it by somehow convincing the press that she's going to win it by superdelegates or some other means. And everyone on her campaign who is wasting time spinning reporters about how they could win with superdelegates is someone who is not doing the task at hand.

-- Mark Schmitt

• Wisconsin and Hawaii vote today, but since Obama is expected to win they don't count unless he doesn't win. It's fun being the frontrunner!
• Meanwhile, it turns out that the Clinton campaign failed to submit a full slate of delegates for the Pennsylvania primary. Not a big deal for a variety of reasons, but indicative of a failure to appreciate how complex the primary would be. As Matt says, if I figured this out in January, shouldn't a campaign full of seasoned professionals have also?
• In another example of incompetent campaigning, a top Clinton strategist tells a reporter that the campaign will try to persuade pledged delegates to switch sides (yet another possible delegate quirk you read here first). The campaign has since issued a denial, but whoever said it deserves to be fired for not being able to keep his or her mouth shut. I mean, how in the world is that a useful thing to discuss publicly even if it is being considered by the campaign?
• In a third piece of news about the Clinton campaign's seeming inability to deal with a delegate-centric race, Jake Tapper highlights a rather jaw-dropping quote in which Clinton says the Texas primary process is so complex, "grown men are crying ... I had no idea it was so bizarre." Of course, she would have had an idea if she'd been reading the Lightning Round. I linked to the first of many explainers of the process in Texas on February 6. Yet another explainer of the process is available here, this time from former Rep. Martin Frost.
• Finally, the Clinton campaign also seems to boast some musically incompetent supporters.

--Sam Boyd

A gem of a paragraph from Mike Allen's piece on the Obama plagiarism fracas:

Without naming him, [Obama campaign senior advisor David] Axelrod then took a shot at Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign's communications director: "Our buddy in the ugly sweater will show up on your show and try to make this and other things an issue. Anything they can grab on to now."

Would be sad if it weren't so funny. Or funny if it weren't so sad. Something like that.

--Dana Goldstein

Via the Tank, Henry Kissinger talks with the German magazine Der Spiegel about, among other things, Barack Obama's idea that Pakistan should be the real focus of America's counter-terrorism efforts. He begins with this gem: "You can always say there is some other war I would rather want to fight than the one I am in."

Why, some geniuses (cough, cough) even said the Vietnam War was a distraction from the Cold War with the Soviets! But I digress. The former Secretary of State went on:

"What does it mean to fight the war in Pakistan? Should we use military power to control the tribal regions in Pakistan and to conduct military operations in a region which Britain failed to pacify in over 100 years of colonization? Should we use military force to prevent a radical take-over of the Pakistani government? Should we prevent the Pakistani state from splitting up into three or four ethnically based groups? I don't think we have the capacity to do that."

All good questions, those. Alas, those were also questions that might have been posed vis-a-vis Iraq, but Kissinger apparently didn't think of them then.

But fine. That's in the past. Currently, the Bush administration is already conducting in Pakistan exactly the kinds of military operations that Obama proposed, and which Kissinger thinks will lead us to disaster: low-key, quick, targeted strikes that avoid long, costly occupations that inflame nationalism and that require hundreds of thousands of troops. These strikes don't get us bogged down in the day-to-day political machinations of a country we know little about. They're the best military-oriented course of action to fight anti-American terrorism.

They're a bad idea, though, according to Kissinger. Of course, that's when only when Obama proposed them. Now that Bush is carrying them out, I'm sure the famously sycophantic Kissinger would say they're brilliant.

---Jordan Michael Smith

Two things are noteworthy about Fareed Zakaria's short column, "The End of Conservatism." First, Zakaria hitches conservatism's demise to an abandonment of conservative principles by conservative politicians. But even if we could agree on a set of conservative principles, that is something different from a set of conservative policy proposals, whose efficacy, Zakaria avers, were the result of a particular moment in American politics. It is quite true that appeals to law and order and proposals to shrink or eliminate the "socialist" bureaucratic welfare state -- while proposing a more muscular foreign policy -- were hallmarks of the late-70s, mid-80s conservative revival. But was this rhetoric popular because it was based on sound principle or because it was timely? Since ideological conservatives haven't given up on these policies, we have to conclude that it was the policy pitch that was salient, not any supposed principles undergirding them.

The second point concerns Zakaria's odd conclusion that John McCain represents, at least in the eyes of Republican primary voters, a return to these lost principles. He writes:

Political ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. They need to meet the problems of the world as it exists. Ordinary conservatives understand this, which may be why—despite the urgings of their ideological gurus—they have voted for McCain. He seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.

If by "ordinary" Zakaria means "most" conservatives, then why didn't McCain win more than mere pluralities in past primaries where he actually faced competition? McCain's likely nomination, rather than being the product of a conscious choice by an introspective conservative base, seems instead to have been the product of luck: In a field of candidates, each unacceptable to one or more faction in the Republican coalition and each with their own unique flaws, McCain survived, ironically, because his campaign nearly died last summer and thus wasn't forced to spend treasure fighting his rivals for the second half of 2007. If anything, McCain was demonstrably the most "electable" Republican, despite his being despised by most of the base. This is light-years from the notion that McCain represents a turn towards "new" conservative ideas.

A fundamental conceit of the conservative movement is the notion that conservative principles resonate with a majority of the public. This is the conceit that argues Reaganism was a triumph of conservative ideas instead of a timely, well-honed political message. Zakaria seems to understand this, but still chooses to paint McCain the Maverick as some sort of conservative standard-bearer. I think tolling the bell for the conservative movement is a bit premature, considering the counter-establishment they have erected to sustain themselves, but their electoral effectiveness is certainly at an end for the time being, and not even Reagan himself could change that.

--Mori Dinauer

If you held an election, and one faction threatened the other with death for daring to vote at all, and this had the effect of suppressing the turnout of the threatened group to the point where, in at least one major province, only 8 percent of its voters got to the polls, would the election be valid?

Most would say not. But that's pretty much what appears to have happened in Pakistan yesterday, except instead of a faction, it was gender that was targeted. Women were warned away from the polls by extremist religious parties, and most women, understandably, complied. This was especially true in Peshawar, near the Afghan border, where women poll workers risked their lives in valiant acts of feminism, in order to permit their sisters to vote at women-only polling stations.

Now, for reasons of practicality and stability, I'm not asking the world to throw out Pakistan's election results. But I do ask the media to consider how they report an election where women were bullied away from the polls. Kudos to the New York Times from examining the election from a gender angle. But no one seems to be asking whether this sort of intimidation of women adds up to a bogus vote.

--Adele M. Stan

In the debate over what Senator Obama meant when he pledged "to aggressively pursue an agreement to preserve a publicly financed election," much of the attention has focused on his most expansive statement, in response to a questionnaire put out last fall by the Midwest Democracy Network, a fabulous coalition of five state-level reform groups that agreed to work together on a more comprehensive vision of reform. Although the groups agreed not to comment on the substance of the answers the candidates provided, today they put out a press release:

While the focus of the questionnaire has centered on answers submitted by Senator Barack Obama's campaign, it should be noted that the campaigns of Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator John McCain, Governor Mike Huckabee and Congressman Ron Paul have yet to answer a single question from the questionnaire.

Yes, only Obama and John Edwards bothered to respond to the extensive and well-designed set of questions about lobbying reform, congressional redistricting, media policy and election procedures. The two candidates who are now on the attack didn't even respond.  The reform groups have asked the other campaigns to respond by February 26.

And, speaking of reform groups, have you seen the press release from Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Public Citizen, the League of Women Voters and U.S. PIRG urging Senator McCain to keep his commitment to public financing and stop manipulating the matching funds system for the primaries? No? Me neither. I'm sure it's coming any. day. now.

-- Mark Schmitt.

More nuggets from the Clinton camp's media call, which is just finishing up:

Ace Smith, when asked about polls in Texas tightening: “I don’t think there’s any movement. What’s meaningful is what you see on the ground here. We don’t lose any sleep about the polls.”

On TX, Mark Penn added: “I think we are seeing substantial turnout among the Latino community. Even if public polls tighten, we think we have excellent prospects there.”

Penn, on Wisconsin significance tonight: “There is a large independent vote in this primary. We’ve always seen this as challenging.”

Asked by USA Today’s Susan Page how the WI results might affect their respective states, Smith of TX said, “I think Texans will make up their own minds.” Robbie Mook echoed: “I don’t think voters in Ohio are worrying about the horse race…I think they’ll be looking at what the candidates do here.”

--Tom Schaller

Apparently, the track of the debris from the satellite the United States Navy plans to blow up tonight (10:30 Eastern) goes right across western and central Canada. Perhaps our Canadian readers should stay indoors tonight...

--Robert Farley

I’m listening in to the noon Clinton campaign call with chief strategist Mark Penn, communications director Howard Wolfson, OH state director Robby Mook, and TX state director Ace Smith (great name!). The general theme was to try to focus intently on what’s to come, as opposed to Hawaii and Wisconsin, other than to play the expectations game by saying, as Wolfson did, that the Obama has “predicted very sizeable victories” in both.

Most of the call was turned over to the two state directors, so here are some early, quick-transcription highlights. Note that they are emphasizing the early vote advantage, which makes sense since they are basically trying to collect votes before Obama even starts holding events there. This was, I suppose, the benefit of mostly bailing on the other 10, post-Super Tuesday states:

Mook: We have a full operation up and running, and we are up in all 18 congressional districts. We’ve been all over the state; Sen. Obama has only been to Youngstown so far. We are targeting every delegate in every district but also to win statewide….

“We have a farm tour with upstate New York farmers coming in to talk to Ohio farmers about what Sen. Clinton has done to promote agriculture. And another set of surrogates from NY to talk about her efforts to protect and promote jobs in New York….

“We have an aggressive absentee and early-voter campaign. We are aggressively encouraging our voters to vote early,” adding that the campaign had events with Gov. Ted Strickland and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones to encourage people to vote early.”

Smith: “The first thing you want to look at is the crowds the candidate is generating. There are two reasons for the enthusiasm she is generating. One, she has a 36-year history down here…she has a long relationship. The other thing is that Texans realize this is a fight for the middle class…

“We already have 100,000 volunteers and 4,000 precinct captains. We fell comfortable we will have a ground operation like nothing seen in this state in a long time. We have 20 campaign offices open and will concede nothing here.”

“There’s a huge early voting component in Texas. It really means showing up to different locations in your county and you can show up and cast your vote. The absentee vote is relatively small. The main part of it is the early vote. We have operations in every county pushing the early vote.”

Wolfson piped in between Mook’s and Smith’s presentations, again playing expectations game: “These are real battlegrounds. The Obama campaign is pouring in real resources and pulling out all the stops.”

--Tom Schaller

One thought in follow-up to Dana’s post about the Republican veepstakes: If John McCain picks Tim Pawlenty, how is the Minnesota governor’s position on allowing seniors and others to cross over into Canada to buy cheaper prescription drugs going to fly with the drug companies who help bankroll the GOP?

Get out the Molsons, folks: That should be as wild and wacky as watching old Doug Flutie CFL highlights.

--Tom Schaller

Paul Waldman returns to the two pieces he penned for us last July on the power of campaign narratives. Obama, he argues, is the one who has nailed it:

... indeed, as long ago as his explosion into national consciousness at the Democratic convention in 2004—Obama has been telling a story perfectly keyed to the current moment in history.

As Obama tells it, the country is held hostage by a political class that sows partisan and cultural division, making solving problems ever more difficult, while the country yearns for a new day of unity. As the youngest candidate, the only post-boomer candidate, the only bi-racial candidate, and the one candidate with a preternatural ability to obtain the good will of those who disagree with him, he can bring all Americans together and lead us to a future built on hope.

Your own reaction to that story may be a quickening of the heartbeat, or a disgusted '"Give me a break.'" But there is no denying that many, many people are willing to sign on to it. And though he is careful not to say it himself, Obama''s story benefits greatly from how often other people say that he is a Man of Destiny. This is a story we know well, because we have read it and watched it so many times before.

Read the rest (and comment) here.

--The Editors

This story by Roger Simon in today’s Politico has already generated a lot of buzz , sourcing to a high-placed Clinton campaign source the notion that the Clinton team will go after pledged delegates won by Barack Obama, if necessary.

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer, via internet director Peter Daou, flatly denied it, saying: "We have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama. It's now time for the Obama campaign to be clear about their intentions."

--Tom Schaller

Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments on one of the major discrimination cases this year, CBOCS West v. Humphries. The case concerns Hedrick Humphries, an African-American assistant manager at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Humphries says he was fired when he complained about racially discriminatory behavior by a white supervisor.

Unlike in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear discrimination case of last year, in which Goodyear Tire basically admitted that sex discrimination in pay and promotions may have taken place, but said it was beyond the two year time limit for awarding back pay, in this case Cracker Barrel is defending its decision to fire Humphries. The company argues that the very definition of retaliatory termination is based on the employee's behavior and therefore couldn't possibly be based on racial discrimination. The problem, of course, is that Humphries was fired because he complained about racial discrimination. As Emily Bazelon points out in Slate, there wouldn't be much of a point in having Title VII, the umbrella anti-discrimination legislation, if there isn't protection for the employee against retaliation if they make a complaint.

What is similar in both the Ledbetter and the Humphries cases is that employers are relying on technicalities of the law to avoid the real issue of discrimination. This seems to be the way of fighting discrimination charges these days; employers can no longer justify discrimination itself, but they protect themselves by pointing to the limitations of current law. If Cracker Barrel's parent company can successfully argue that retaliation is not the same as discrimination, this could have major implications: Employers could be protected against discrimination lawsuits by simply firing the pesky employee who complains. If the Court votes in the vein of Ledbetter, the rights of employees to fight discrimination will suffer one more blow.

--Kay Steiger

On the foreign affairs front:

1. Fidel Castro has stepped down as president/charismatic authoritarian leader of Cuba. I'll outsource the commentary to Rob, and also to Steve Clemons, who asks, "Which of the presidential candidates is prepared to finally break US-Cuba relations out of the anachronistic Cold War cocoon they have been frozen in and initiate a new course that benefits American interests?" But with Castro's brother, Raúl, set to take power, it may be premature to get too optimistic about change.

2. Kosovo is independent, prompting both celebration and violence in the new state and in Serbia, from which it has broken away. I visited the former Yugoslavia this past August, and the strains of ethnic and religious nationalism there were truly stunning to American eyes. I watched a wedding service at Jupiter's temple in Split, Croatia. During the ceremony, the groom's friends danced around the church waving the Croatian flag and singing patriotic songs. Every happy occasion was cause for national pride. Here's hoping that in Kosovo, inclusive democracy is the outcome.

3. Pakistani voters have rejected Pervez Musharraf's military rule, and Musharraf has agreed to accept the results. I hope we'll have more on this later from our resident Middle East experts.

4. The U.S. State Department is ending its practice of barring HIV-positive individuals from entering the foreign service. The change comes in response to a lawsuit filed by Lorenzo Taylor, a trilingual international affairs specialist who met every qualification for the service, but was rejected when he revealed he had HIV.

--Dana Goldstein

Those who think John McCain will buck expectations by choosing a non-white or non-male Republican for a running mate -- Condi Rice and Bobby Jindal's names are in the air -- should check out Jonathan Martin's piece on Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. He's a longtime McCain endorser and the subject of what seems to be (at least from Martin's reporting) a serious whisper campaign to gauge reaction to his prospects as a V.P. nominee:

Sara Taylor, former White House political director and a veteran of both Bush-Cheney campaigns, contacted this reporter to offer unsolicited observations on the governor.

"He's a conservative, rock-n-roll Republican and is counterintuitive to the party stereotype that we're old and rich,” says Taylor, who recalled visiting St. Paul and finding the governor jamming in his office to recording artist Bruce Springsteen. “He's young and blue-collar."

Known as a hockey fanatic and the son of a truck driver, Minnesota politicians see the charismatic Pawlenty as having shifted to the right, particularly on economics, to advance his national ambitions. His fiscal priorities don't exactly signal concern for pocketbook issues: Pawlenty balanced Minnesota's budget while raising student fees at state colleges, and used tax dollars instead to fund a new baseball stadium for the Twins. In 2004, his health commissioner was forced to resign after propagating the medically false claim that abortion causes breast cancer.

All in all, Pawlenty is exactly the sort of safe choice I would have guessed McCain would closely consider, especially in a potential match-up against Barack Obama: White, male, young, and a conservative with proven appeal to moderates.

--Dana Goldstein

Fidel Castro has stepped down after forty-nine years and ten American presidents. It's worth noting that the proposed policies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama differ in important aspects; Clinton won't talk to Raul Castro, while Obama has held open the possibility of negotiations with the regime.

Last year the Patterson School simulated the fall of Castro, although in that case it was because of the sudden death of Fidel rather than his retirement. With Fidel still in the background Raul's position will be stronger, which is probably why the former retired rather than serving until death.

-- Robert Farley

The truly mystifying thing about William Kristol-cum-NY Times columnist has nothing to with the fact that he's a serial liar. Or that he writes banal copy. Or even that he is a transparently partisan writer. Nor is it even the mystery of why the Times hired him in the first place. Rather, the true mystery is who Kristol's audience is -- who, precisely, is going to glean insight from his mendacious, banal, partisan and, in a word, awful, columns. I think this week's installment -- which posits that contemporary American domestic politics are best understood in terms of 19th century imperialist rhetoric -- might help us shed some light on the subject. While commenting on a George Orwell essay about Rudyard Kipling, Kristol notes that Orwell identified Kipling with "the ruling power and not with the opposition," which Orwell goes on to describe as the essence of conservatism, something that didn't really exist anymore in Orwell's time as he saw it. Kristol doesn't comment on Orwell's definition of conservatism. Nor does he comment on the following passage, appearing at the end of the essay in question:

Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.

The fact that Kristol would choose this essay as an organizing vehicle for his column is so auspicious that it's almost eerie. If we take Kristol's advice at face value -- that Democrats should be acting more like Kipling and less like "the opposition" -- then he is suggesting that Democrats should sell themselves out emotionally, and let themselves be swept up in "folly and snobbery." That is, they should start behaving more like William Kristol, who despite this warping, at least has the advantage of imagining "what action and responsibility are like." Viewed through this prism, Kristol's natural inclination towards intellectual dishonesty -- on full display in the rest of his column, on everything from successful governance to FISA -- comes into focus. It's not that he's simply a partisan hack or a smug liar, it's that he feels so comfortable with wielding power that he has never taken any steps to update his worldview. (See this fascinating video clip from Jonathan Schwarz of Kristol debating Daniel Ellsberg shortly after the 2003 Iraq invasion to witness his epistemological intransigence in action.) Kristol's neoconservatism (or neo-imperialism) is simply a political manifestation of that comfort with power. He grew up believing, as his father came to believe, that Democrats were uncomfortable with using military power in Vietnam or countering Soviet aggression. And domestic politics, he believes, is no different -- raw will to power. Kristol's columns are a product of his arrogance (and the Times' largess) and their target audience would appear to be nothing more than ... Kristol himself.

--Mori Dinauer

• As we wait for tomorrow's primary results in the badger state and Hawaii, it's interesting to learn that the Clinton campaign may have staked everything on Texas without realizing that its unique rules will make it hard to gain many extra delegates there.
• Hey, check it out, policy differences between the democratic candidates!
• RNC members outline future attacks on Obama, none of which seem particularly likely to work to me. I mean criticism on policy substance are laughable coming from McCain and any discussion of "toughness" in foreign policy will come back to Iraq where McCain's 100 years policy will come back to haunt him.
• That story about Obama-friendly precinct registering zero votes for him in New York turns out to be not nearly as scandalous as it seems.
• Clinton likes to say that there could be new and unexpected dirt about Obama yet to surface, but if this ridiculous "plagiarism" "scandal" is an example of that I'm not very worried. This is dumbest controversy since Clinton accused Obama of having a messy desk.
• On the other hand Obama should avoid talking about Clinton in a derogatory and somewhat sexist way as Ann says.
• Nicholas Kristof can apparently read minds.

--Sam Boyd

I'm with Cernig on the Clinton campaign's "plagiarism" charge against Obama: I think they take at least as big a hit on this as he does. TPM has more, and points us to this from Jake Tapper:

In a conference call just now the Clinton campaign would not guarantee that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has never used someone else's rhetoric without crediting them.

I asked Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson and Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass, if they could assure the public that neither Clinton nor McGovern has ever done what Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, did when he used the rhetoric of Gov. Deval Patrick without footnoting him.

They would not.

In fact, Wolfson seemed to say it wouldn't be as big a deal if it were discovered that Clinton had "lifted" such language.

"Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric," Wolfson said.

--Matthew Duss

James Kirchick's concern-trolling over the various spurious attacks against Barack Obama's campaign (some launched, of course, by Kirchick's co-bloggers) reminded me to link to this post by the Magnes Zionist on a recent letter from some Middle East policy heavyweights in support of Robert Malley. Malley is a Middle East scholar and part-time Obama adviser who has been a frequent target of neoconservatives for having produced work that challenged their preferred pro-Israel narrative. The letter states, in part:

Over the past several weeks, a series of vicious, personal attacks have been launched against one of our colleagues, Robert Malley, who served as President Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs. They claim that he harbours an anti-Israeli agenda and has sought to undermine Israel’s security. These attacks are unfair, inappropriate and wrong. They are an effort to undermine the credibility of a talented public servant who has worked tirelessly over the years to promote Arab-Israeli peace and US national interests. They must stop.

Attempted character assassination against legitimate critics of Israeli policies has long been a favored tactic of neocons (something which fellow conservative Jacob Heilbrunn acknowledges in his recently published history of that faction, They Knew They Were Right). It's nice that we're starting to see some push-back.

---Matthew Duss

Still running also-ran Mike Huckabee has been using Boston's song "More Than A Feeling" at campaign rallies, and performing it with his band. News of this has reached the ears of Boston's founder, guitar geek demigod Tom Scholz, who is not amused:

Huckabee, a bass guitarist himself, has the endorsement of one of the band’s former members, Barry Goudreau, but its leader Tom Scholz made it clear that the group has never endorsed a candidate and even if it did, the former Arkansas governor was not in tune with them. “Boston has never endorsed a political candidate, and with all due respect, would not start by endorsing a candidate who is the polar opposite of most everything Boston stands for,” Scholz said in a statement. “In fact, although I’m impressed you learned my bass guitar part on More Than a Feeling, I am an Obama supporter.”

Scholz then announced his intention to release a response to Huckabee in the form of a sequel to "More Than A Feeling" entitled "But Substantially Less Than A Plausible Argument For Your Presidency." The song will feature 452 separate tracks of harmonized electric guitars, take seventeen years to produce, and will be best enjoyed while speeding down the highway in a '78 Camaro with a trunk full of Coors purchased with a fake ID.

(Also: Barry Goudreau? You got Barry Goudreau's endorsement? How silly. Everyone knows that when it comes to political endorsements from former members of Boston, Sib Hashian is the real prize. No one delivers the splendidly afro'd Armenian-American drummer-percussionist-vocalist vote like Sib. Someone in Huckabee's campaign really dropped the ball here.)

--Matthew Duss

Continuing to man the "Surge Success!" booth at the Bush Country Fair, neocon carnie Reuel Marc Gerecht looks at the bright side of life:

Regarding the Iraq war and jihadism, two facts stand out. First, if we make a comparison with the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-89, which was the baptismal font for al-Qaeda, what's most striking is how few foreign holy warriors have gone to Mesopotamia since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

What's impressive about this is that for years the Bush administration and the neocon apparat relentlessly inflated the numbers of foreign fighters in Iraq, first in an effort to deny the genuinely indigenous, nationalist nature of the insurgency (after first denying the insurgency's existence for over a year), and then to tie Iraq to the broader war on terror by over-representing al-Qaeda's role there (something which only caused al-Qaeda's stock to rise in the Middle East). Don't you remember, these guys had a whole "flypaper" theory worked out, in which terrorists from throughout the region would be attracted to Iraq, and, immediately after getting off the bus ("Baghdad! Just like I pictured it! Minarets, and everything!") stumble into a hail of American machine-gun fire. There was just one tiny flaw in the plan: It was bollocks. Jihadis didn't just come and die, though many of them did, they came and learned. They experimented, refined, innovated, and generally took great advantage of the terrorism laboratory with which the U.S. provided them. Though fewer mujahideen traveled to Iraq than did to Afghanistan, thanks to the power of the internets they have been able to have an immeasurably greater effect in the dissemination of terrorist propaganda, methods and tactics throughout the world.

Gerecht:

A second striking fact about Islamism and the Iraq war is that the arrival of foreign holy warriors is deradicalizing the local population -- the exact opposite of what happened in Afghanistan...If bin Ladenism is now on the decline -- and it may well be among Arabs -- then Iraq has played an essential part in battering the movement's spiritual appeal.

First, I suppose if you define "radicalism" as "Wahabbism", this is true. But, of course, Wahabbism was never popular in Iraq, at least not until the U.S. got there. As for Islamism, it is now effectively the law of the land. Second, I simply can't keep up with how often these guys seem to redefine success in Iraq. Understand that Gerecht himself previously wrote that "As long as [bin Laden] lives, we have lost the war against radical Islamic terrorism" ...and now he celebrates the possible, maybe, could be, you never know, decline of "bin Ladenism" as a benefit of the Iraq war. (I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis are grateful to have contributed to this possible, maybe, could be, you never know outcome.) While on a darkly satirical level I appreciate that Gerecht's new line of pro-war bull directly contradicts previous lines of pro-war bull, it must be understood that there is simply no way to draw a smiley face on all this, no calculus that can justify the costs of this debacle, no way that the Iraq war ends up as a net positive for the region, or for the U.S. Any productive debate over where to go from here must begin with that.

--Matthew Duss

Gershom Gorenberg on the state of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process:

They are building at Har Homa. The round hill, once forested, is now a hive of muddy streets, of men in hardhats shouting over the pneumatic thumping hammers and grinding cement mixers and the big shovels growling on tank treads. Tall spindly yellow cranes rise above the dense throng of apartment towers in every stage of construction—from empty-eyed concrete shells, to stone-faced buildings with windows and mailboxes and elevators waiting for moving crews, to the buildings, higher on the hill, where real residents have already put flowerboxes on balconies. Developers' signs decorate the streets like picket signs above a demonstration. Long bundles of steel rods for reinforcing concrete lie on muddy lots. Below the lowest ring road around the hill, in the wadi, olive trees still grow on ancient terraces lushly green from winter rain, but the terraces' day will come, because all of the frenzy and concrete visible today constitute only the first third of the planned Israeli neighborhood stuck strategically between Bethlehem in the West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem.

If there is a freeze on settlement, you wouldn't know it by looking at Har Homa. Under the U.S. "road map" for peace, Israel is required to stop "all settlement activity," just as the Palestinian Authority is obligated to take "sustained, targeted, and effective" measures to stop terror. Since the Annapolis conference in November, the United States is supposed to be monitoring both governments and holding them to their commitments. So far, the freeze is mostly talk.

Read the rest (and comment) here.

--The Editors

We now have the exact language of John McCain's "second loan," and it is a legal masterpiece, albeit an ethical travesty. Based on the Washington Post report, I inferred that McCain had not excluded public matching funds from the collateral for his additional loan. But it's much more complex than that. The second loan, for $1 million, was actually a modification of the first, and so it continued to exclude the certification for matching funds from the loan's collateral. But it included this remarkable addition (which I'm going to quote in full just so no one thinks I used an ellipsis to distort the meaning):

Additional Requirement. Borrower and lender agree that if Borrower [McCain's campaign commitee] withdraws from the public matching funds program, but John McCain then does not win the next primary or caucus in which he is active (which can be any primary or caucus held the same day) or does not place at least within 10 percentage points of the winner of that primary or caucus, Borrower will cause John McCain to remain an active political candidate and Borrower will, within thirty (3) days of said primary or caucus (i) reapply for public matching funds, (ii) grant to Lender, as additional collateral for the Loan, a first priority perfected security interest in and to all Borrower's right, title and interest in and to the public matching funds program, and (iii) execute and deliver to Lender such documents, instruments and agreements as Lender may require with respect to the foregoing.

(Here's the document: http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?_28039612468+0. From this link, you can read the document by page or produce a pdf. Much of it is blurry and boilerplate, until you get to the loan modification agreement starting page 21, which is legible.)

What does this mean? It means that rather than pledge his existing  certification for matching funds as collateral for the loan, which would bind him to the system and thus the spending limits, McCain carefully pledged to seek to re-enter the system later, and to use a non-existent future certification as collateral. And while the system is "voluntary," McCain essentially traded away for cash his right to choose whether to participate in the system, and even his right to drop out of the presidential race, allowing the bank to force McCain "to remain an active candidate" in order to reapply for and qualify for funds. He was betting the spread (10 points) on his own primary performance! I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan.

Is this illegal? Who knows. Note that it took several days of discussion among top lawyers and former FEC commissioners to figure out whether it was even possible to opt out of the public financing system after opting in and qualifying for funds. No one's ever done that. And therefore, no one's ever opted back in, after opting out, after opting in. And therefore, no one's ever borrowed on the basis of a promise to opt back in, after opting out, after opting in. Is your head exploding yet?

What we know is that McCain found a way to use the public funds as an insurance policy: If he did poorly, he would use public funds to pay off his loans. If he did well, he would have the advantage of unlimited spending.

There's a reason no one's ever done anything like this. It makes a travesty of the choice inherent in voluntary public financing, between public funds and unlimited spending. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Legal or not, it should bring to an end whatever tiny thread of credibility John McCain still has as a straight-talker or reformer of the political process.

-- Mark Schmitt

The first great skirmish of an Obama-McCain general election has broken out over a matter of such arcane policy-wonkery that until this weekend, you would find it only here at TAPPED: the precise relationship between a loan and public financing for a presidential campaign, and the agreement, if one can call it that, between McCain and Obama to participate in the public financing system for the general election.

On the first, regarding McCain's ability to drop out of the public matching funds system for the primaries, it seems to be the consensus of experts that a candidate can drop out of the system, even after being certified to receive funds, as long as he or she hasn't used the certification as collateral for a loan. And McCain specifically excluded the prospect of public funds from the section on collateral for a loan he took out in November. While I think such an in-again/out-again dodge violates the spirit of the law, which calls for a firm choice between public funds and unlimited spending, it appears McCain hewed closely to the letter of the law. But on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that there was a second loan for $1 million on December 17 that pledged "incoming contributions" as collateral but did not exclude public money.

The story quotes McCain's lawyer as saying that the bank asked, " 'You've explained how you can pay us back if things go well. What happens if things go badly?'," and that the campaign explained, that "McCain could reapply in the future for federal matching funds," but that the existing certification was not used as collateral.

"McCain's victories in the early primaries meant he never had to enter the public financing system," the Post says. But this isn't quite right. At the time of the loan, McCain was in the public financing system ( the certification remained among the campaign's assets until Feb. 6, according to the Post). The question of reapplying in the future would have been irrelevant in December.

The Post suggests that "McCain may have inadvertently committed himself to entering the public financing system for the remainder of the primary season," which was my original argument, but it's pretty clear that his attitude toward the Federal Election Commission on this question is, "Come and get me!"

One would think that between this dodge and McCain's general flip-flopping about public financing (including voting for the elimination of the entire presidential system in 1995), he would have no credibility on this issue at all. And yet, backed by several of the reform groups and their freinds at the editorial boards,  McCain seems to be getting the better of Obama, for the moment, on the issue of whether both would agree to participate in the full public financing system for the general election ($85 million, no private funds). With Obama staffers now describing this as an option for further negotiation, he is being accused of "waffling" on a pledge.

I described this a few weeks ago as a "pledge" to participate, but I should not have. Obama's precise statement was, and has always been, "If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." That's an artful statement, and it's not artful in a "meaning of 'is'" sense -- it's exactly the right answer. A commitment to "preserve a publicly financed election" would have to mean much more than whether both participate in the system. It would require some significant agreement about how to handle outside money, 527s, "Swift Boat"-type attack groups, party money, etc., and  other factors that have undermined the last two publicly financed elections, from both sides.  It is hardly an evasion to describe this as an agreement to be negotiated, rather than a simple pledge.

The side story here is why many of the the "traditional" campaign finance reform advocates and the Times and Post editorial boards still seem so hynotized by McCain-as-reformer, a pose he adopted for a period that ended years ago, that they cannot call him on his evasion of public funds in the primary, and are happy to be used to echo his first partisan attack in the general election, against someone who, unlike McCain, really has been a remarkably consistent and hard-working supporter of public financing, at both the state and national level.

-- Mark Schmitt

• Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement and Clinton backer, said yesterday that he would vote for Obama at the Democratic National Convention because of the wishes of his constituents. This is, as they say, a big deal. Still, it's more of an indicator of shifts in the party than a source of those shifts and it definitely does not halve Clinton's chances at the nomination.
• Obama picked up the support of the SEIU today as expected and also got the UFCW. National endorsements override any existing state-level ones.
• Mr. Vague Generalities, John McCain, doles out some not-so-straight talk on FISA.
• The DNC will reevaluate the nomination process after November. I should hope so.
• Former President Bush will endorse McCain.
• Finally, Clinton stumps with murderous billionaire actor Ted Danson and actress Mary Steenburgen.

Dan Balz has an interesting article about the effect of Obama's focus on caucuses:

Like Obama, Clinton threw everything possible into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, spending $20 million to $25 million on what turned out to be a losing effort. The experience seemed to sour the Clinton campaign on caucuses -- she has repeatedly disparaged the caucus process in public remarks -- and ever since, her team has largely ignored them in favor of states with primaries. If the Democratic race is all about delegates, as the Clinton campaign declared shortly after the Jan. 8 New Hampshire contest, the decision has given Obama an unexpected gift.

Here is a simple way to understand the consequences of that choice. Take two states that held Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5: big New Jersey, with 107 pledged delegates at stake, and tiny Idaho, with 18 delegates up for grabs. Clinton won New Jersey's primary and made headlines for doing so early on that night, while Obama won Idaho's caucuses long after many of those watching had gone to bed. But because of the rules of proportionality, Clinton netted just 11 more delegates than Obama from her New Jersey victory, while he gained 12 more than her by winning Idaho.

I agree with Dana's recent post about the merits of caucuses in general and that the factors she identifies hurt Clinton's chances in caucuses. However, while the poorer and more Hispanic skew of her support is a disadvantage, the older skew of her support should be an advantage; even if one stipulates that the balance of factors is in Obama's favor (which seems fair) I don't think it can explain the margin and consistency of Obama's victories. Part of it seems to be that Obama's campaign seems to have a better strategic understanding of the effects of the proportional allocation of delegates. In addition, I'm guessing that this is also partly a product of Clinton's lagging fundraising and the apparent financial mismanagement of Patti Solis Doyle. Obama's broader focus is more easily available to someone with his resources.

Having said this, I also agree with Ezra that it's important not to exaggerate the problem with Clinton's campaign. Given that she ended up on the wrong side of the most important issue of the Bush era and is up against a once-in-a-generation political talent, her campaign's performance can't be considered bad on balance. (Her fundraising, for example, would be impressive by any standard... except Obama's.) And the books aren't closed; if she wins (which remains possible) her campaign will deserve considerable credit for that. Still, in a close campaign one mistake can have huge consequences, and at this point it's more likely than not that leaving caucus delegates on the table will be a decisive error.

--Scott Lemieux

Over at The Corner, one of Jonah Goldberg's emailers responds to Goldberg's latest iteration of his argument that torture is no big deal by suggesting that Jonah "go read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It will tell you all you need to know about torture." Jonah fires back:

I've read the Gulag Archipelago. It didn't tell me everything I needed to know about torture, it told me almost everything I needed to know about the evil of the Soviet Union. And, guess what? The comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union is idiotic and slanderous.

Now, obviously, one doesn't have to believe that the U.S. and the USSR were morally equivalent in order to be deeply troubled now by the U.S.'s operating a global network of secret prisons wherein suspects are held indefinitely without charge and tortured. One just has to be decent. What brings Jonah's sanctimonious response to the level of farce, however, (or, as Frank Zappa used to say, "out of the realm of mere mumbo-jumbo and into the world of mumbo-pocus") is the fact that Goldberg, as you may know, recently published a book in which he compared American liberalism to fascism, spending over 200 pages arguing that liberals are the political heirs of Naziism. So, while he considers it reprehensible, unacceptable, out-of-bounds to compare the Soviets' use of secret prisons and torture to the U.S.'s use of secret prisons and torture, he thinks the contention that Adolf Hitler was a non-smoking vegetarian who believed in unity just like liberals who support national health care, shop at Whole Foods, and also believe in unity is not only permissible, but compelling enough to justify an entire book. The sad thing is, I really doubt Goldberg would admit any inconsistency here.

--Matthew Duss

Lots of stuff out there today on the decision to destroy a "rogue" satellite with elements of the missile defense system. Noah Shachtman explains how the satellite will be destroyed, and eviscerates the public rationale for destroying it. This sounds about right to me:

Our veteran space security specialist believes there are several [rationales]. To him, the satellite shot is a chance for the military to try out its missile defense capabilities; a way to keep secret material out of the wrong hands; and a warning to the Chinese, after they destroyed a satellite about a year ago.

--Robert Farley

A survey by Washington state's NARAL chapter found that over 10 percent of pharmacies in the state either don't stock the morning-after pill or employ at least one pharmacist who refuses to dispense it. Here's an interactive map NARAL created to show how Washington's pharmacies measure up. Over a dozen pharmacies in the Seattle area alone are on the record as refusing the drug at least occasionally.

The NARAL report is controversial, as it doesn't take into account factors like the average age of a pharmacy's customers. If you own a pharmacy, you may not want to stock EC if most of your clients are senior citizens. But lack of access is a real problem: In Washington, a court battle is raging between pharmacists who refuse to dispense Plan B and the state Board of Pharmacy, which ruled last year that pharmacists must dispense all legal medication unless they can refer customers immediately to another pharmacist.

I would say that even a referral is too much of an imposition when a girl or woman is in need of this time sensitive drug. So presidential candidates -- do you believe a pharmacist has the right to turn away women looking for emergency contraception? I'm looking at you, John McCain.

--Dana Goldstein

Ross Douthat takes a long look at the effect of the surge on the political debate over Iraq and concludes that while perception of the surge's success makes it difficult for Democrats to appease their anti-war base, the surge also makes it tricky for Republicans, particularly John McCain, to campaign on success in Iraq for 2008. The poll numbers simply aren't there, Douthat argues, and the real effect of the surge has been to freeze withdrawal sentiment, not reverse it:

by reducing the body count and arresting Iraq’s spiral down to civil war, it pushed the conflict off the front pages and often out of the public eye entirely. This achievement didn’t increase support for the war, but it did reduce, at least on the margins, the priority that Americans placed on ending it, and allowed closer-to-home anxieties – over health care, the mortgage meltdown, immigration and now the looming recession – to rise to the fore.

This seems right to me, and certainly does put the Republicans in a tight spot: in order for them to run and win on the war, the surge must continue to be viewed as a success from now until November as well as increase support in the public for staying in Iraq as long as it takes. John "100 years" McCain has left himself little wiggle room when it comes to war policy, and his candidacy lives or dies (but by no means succeeds) based on the surge's ability to keep violence out of the newspapers. The Democrats, too, find themselves in an awkward position, but one that potentially offers more room to shift. Even if the surge continues to keep Iraq out of the news, that by no means prevents Democrats from calling for an end to the war. All they have to do is change the subject from the surge's visible product (less violence) to its intended goal (political reconciliation).

The smart thing for Democrats to do, if they're serious about ending our involvement in Iraq, is to avoid falling into the trap of talking about the surge purely in military terms. It seems all but forgotten now, but the original justification for the surge was to create enough security for political space, and ultimately, reconciliation to emerge in Iraq. Since declining levels of violence became the only metric cited as a way of gauging the surge's success (let's call it the "Petraeus effect"), how those declining levels of violence were achieved, and whether they had more to do with negotiating with local warlords than simply beefing up the United States' military presence, were forgotten, and so too was the original goal of the surge -- political reconciliation. It's politically easy to say "the surge has reduced violence." It's far more potent to ask, "is the reduced violence in Iraq leading towards a self-sustaining central government, or one that continues to be reliant on U.S. military might?" Whether Democrats possess the political will to make this argument come November remains to be seen.

--Mori Dinauer

Over at TAP Online we have the second installment in our dialogue about HBO's The Wire. Every three episodes, we're hosting a discussion of the series between TAP Online writers. This week, Kriston Capps kicks off our dialogue about episodes four, five, and six. Warning--contains spoilers. (If you missed the first one, catch up here.)

--The Editors