politics

Edwards is out. Giuliani is out.

Barring miracles or disasters, it'll be Clinton or Obama versus McCain or Romney. IMHO, of these four contenders, in the long run the worst possible outcome would be a Clinton victory. Not that she'd be a worse president - or at least, not much worse - than McCain or Romney, but a victory for her would do a lot of damage to the Democratic Party, just beginning to restore itself after the damage done by Bill Clinton and his conservative friends in the "Democratic Leadership Council".

A Clinton victory would also be a terrible blow to feminism. What's the lesson for little girls here - the path to success is marry a scheming bastard and ride his coattails? I'm all for a female president - but I want the real deal, a woman who gets there on her own merits. Hillary Clinton's senatorship and presidential candidacy is an insult to all the female officeholders who won office through their own efforts.

And I maybe could forgive all this, if she hadn't been so wrong on Iraq, and hadn't sponsored an attempt at an end-run around the First Amendment. Clinton delenda est.

McCain is old. He's hale and healthy for his age, but the office takes a toll on a person, and there's a good chance that if he made it, he'd be a single termer. He certainly wouldn't see the end of the hundred years (or thousand, or million years) of American occupation of Iraq that he wants. Still, he's a comfortable choice for a lot of people. And the far right hates him, which is something of a plus. If he gets the nomination, he could win in November - if he manages not to blow his top.

Romney makes a lot of noise about his experience as a CEO. Wasn't W supposed to bring us his business acumen, to be the "MBA President"? Running a country ain't like running a business. But it isn't like Romney was running a real business, a factory or a store or something - he ran a robber baron investment house that put a lot of people out of work to fatten investor's wallets. If he's the nominee, and the economy continues to tank between now and November, the Democrats can beat him like a gong if they spin it this way.

As for Obama, all I can think of is the poster that hung over the desk of Fox Mulder on The X-files: "I Want to Believe". I mean, look at this piece by conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan: .

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war — not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade — but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama — and Obama alone — offers the possibility of a truce

Obama is rapidly becoming more myth than man. I guess there's always been an element of that in the presidency, our dangerous psychological drive to look for a king, a savior, an alpha male (or alpha female) to lead our pack. Still, I think just the reality of a black president would do this nation a world of good.

I grew up Catholic. (But I'm feeling much better now.) I was a teenager before I learned that Catholics had once been a persecuted minority in this country. I think that the presidency of John F. Kennedy did a lot to wipe out that prejudice - not anything that he did as president, mind you, just the fact that he was, and that the world didn't end as a result.

So, yeah. It's irrational, it's unlikely, but I Want to Believe.

After a distant third place finish in the Democratic primary in South Carolina, his state of birth, I think it's pretty clear that Edwards is out of serious contention for the nomination. How long will he stay in the race? He's been splitting the "Anybody But Clinton" vote with Obama - how big a swing will Obama see when that block comes over to him? And will Edwards endorse one of his rivals? Interesting times.

Charles Darwin Has A Posse. Stickers (including images for DIY fun), t-shirts, and more available on the other side of the link. From Colin Purrington at Swathmore University's Department of Biology. Evolve!

Huffington Post passes on the news about a recent interview with the Reno Journal Gazette where Obama had nice things to say about the Reagan presidency:

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." -- Barack Obama

I'm with Edwards on this one:

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people...He was openly -- openly-- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country...He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment...I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."-- John Edwards

Way back in 2005, I noted that "the American people do not elect Senators to the Presidency...Since Amendment XVII redefined the Senate in 1913, only two Presidents have been elected whose highest political qualification was service in the Senate: Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy."

On the democratic side, all three of the candidates with a shot at the nomination (sorry, Dennis) fall into that category. On the Republican side, a recent national poll puts McCain just ahead of Huckabee. There's a chance the general election could come down to two contenders from the Senate.

Remember John Edwards? Manlier then Hillary, whiter than Obama, but by some estimations more progressive than either? Not as progressive as Kucinich, of course, but Edwards is considered more electable - especially by NBC, which is trying to revoke Kucinich's invitation to a debate.

And apparently they'll be able to keep Kucinich out, so long as they keep the broadcast only to cable's MSNBC. Broadcast and cable TV fall under different rules.

Last March, Democrats in Nevada planned their caucus to include nine at-large sites to allow casino workers (union and non-union) to vote during the workday. It's a great idea to make it easy for as many people as possible to vote, right?

Hillary Clinton doesn't think so, at least not anymore. Two days after Culinary Workers Union Local 226 (Vegas's casino, hotel, and restaurant worokers union) endorsed Obama, the Nevada State Education Association – clearly acting as a Clinton proxy – filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to shutdown the sites.

I've come to expect efforts from Republicans to keep people from the polls, but this...ah, well. Remember when Greenspan called Bill Clinton "the best Republican president we've had in a while"? Perhaps this just shows that Hillary is indeed trying to follow in her husband's footsteps, as a moderate Republican in a Democrat's skin.

Also worth reading are these two little pieces on Clinton in Slate: Timothy Noah on her claims of "experience", and Christopher Hitchens on her flexible approach to truth.

Rumors fly about the New Hampshire primary results, tabulated by Diebold machines from paper ballots. There are calls for a recount, but there are said to be issues with the ballot chain of custody which might make a recount worse than meaningless.

The results don't match the exit polls, which is a big problem. It was results not matching the exit polls that set of the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine. Of course, when that happened in Ohio, Bush apologists claimed that people just lied to exit pollers.

It's already been admitted that one town "mistakenly" reported zero votes for Ron Paul when the actual count was 31.

According to this AP report, Huckabee says he stands by belief from fifteen years ago that AIDS patients should be quarantined. (Though he declined to call it that, there's no other word for what he advocated.) He also stands by previous statements that homosexuality is "an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle."

In honor of Barack Obama's victory in Iowa, a photo from my last trip to Japan. Did you know that "Obama (小浜市, Obama-shi) is a city located in Wakasa Area of Fukui Prefecture," on the main island of Honshu, Japan?

I was going to make a joke about "O'bama" being a good Irish name - well, the Universe beat me to it. Seems his great-great-great-great grandfather was "Joseph Kearney, a well-to-do shoemaker from Moneygall, County Offaly, Ireland".

I am reminded of Bill Murry's speach from Stripes: