South Dakota Politics

Time to Start Drilling for Oil

Back when the Clean Cut Kid was still in business, Chad used to make this curious argument: it makes no sense to drill for oil in ANWR because the oil won't be available for at least ten years.  Congressional Democrats are now making the same argument.  I replied to them as I did to Chad: if we had begun ten years ago, we'd have the oil now, wouldn't we?  If we begin now, we'll have the oil in ten years, when we will probably still need it, won't we? 

One of my favorite economists, Robert Samuelson, has this at RealClearPolitics:

It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25-30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity. Americans favor both "energy independence" and cheap fuel. They deplore imports -- who wants to pay foreigners? -- but oppose more production in the United States. Got it?

My colleague, Professor Schaff, raises the prospect of "peak oil," the idea that we are have reached the point that the world oil supply can no longer grow with demand, and that the happy days are behind us.  The argument that we have reached that point is made in a New York Times article:

“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, which advises industrialized countries. “They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”

A key reason that supply is not rising to meet demand is that producers outside of the OPEC cartel — countries like Russia, Mexico and Norway — have been showing troubling signs of sluggishness. Unlike the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose explicit goal is to regulate supply to keep prices up, the other countries are the free traders of the international market, with every incentive to produce flat-out at a time of high prices.

But for a variety of reasons, like sharply higher drilling costs and nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investments, these countries are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to increase output. They seem stuck at about 50 million barrels of oil a day, or 60 percent of the world’s oil supplies, with few prospects for growth.

I am skeptical.  So far, rising prices haven't forced Americans or countries with "nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investments" to change their behavior.  But the kicker is that the Democrats in Congress are still opposing policies that would increase domestic production.  When oil prices do reach that level, one of two things will happen: the Democrats will suddenly decide that they were in favor of new drilling and more refineries all along, or they will be swept out of Congress. 

I think that the supply of oil, like that of everything else, will keep rising to meet demand.  But there will be short term bottlenecks, like the energy crisis of the seventies.  We can spare ourselves a lot of agony by taking steps now to bring more oil into production in the future. 

For those who are worried about the effect of this on the environment, I say this: only wealthy nations have ever cared about the environment, or, what is the same thing, could afford to protect it. If oil really seems to be running out before we get an alternative energy source, no one is going to give a rat's ass about sea levels and beach front property.

McCain's Wright-Wing Pastor

Kudos to Keloland contributor Bob Schwartz, who brings our attention to the Reverend John Hagee. Hagee, I gather, is the closest thing anyone has found to a Jeremiah Wright standing anywhere near John McCain.  Bob concedes that Hagee is not McCain's pastor; the connection is that the one has backed the other for President.  Bob gives us some juicy quotes, with confusingly arranged quotation marks, linked to a site with little atomic mushrooms superimposed on McCain's head.  I gather from a New York Times interview that Hagee has made some very controversial remarks, but I haven't yet found a list of them I would trust.  No, wait, here is something at Salon. 

Well, based on a quick survey of sound bites, produced mostly by people who are no more fond of McCain and Hagee than the conservative press is of Obama and Wright, I'd say Hagee is pretty much way out there, and McCain would be well-advised to keep his distance from him.  Based on the image to the right, he surely cuts a less attractive figure than Jeremiah Wright.

Hagee is not an unmixed bag.   On the one hand, he represents a position that Jews and liberal Christian theologians have been calling for for a long time.  When I attended an international conference on the Holocaust in Oxford, England, in 1988, the most frequent item on the agenda was a call for Christians to put aside their attempts to convert the Jews.  The so-called "replacement theory" held that God replaced the Old Testament religion with Christianity, and therefore all Jews should come to Christ.  A lot of Jews think that this idea is one of the prime historical drivers of antisemitism, and that Christians should drop the idea if they want to oppose antisemitism.  Well, Hagee has dropped it.  He believes that God intended for the Jews to remain as a distinct people with their ancient religion intact.  That represents a significant bit of progress where one does not usually look for it.  He is also a strong backer of Israel, which is also a good thing, in my view.

On the other hand, this is part of his belief that the apocalypse is coming, and that Hagee knows how it is going to go down.  He thinks he knows what part God intends Israel to play in the final drama.  That strikes me as pretty far outside the mainstream, as they say.  His view that the U.S. and Israel should launch a preemptive strike against Iran can be defended on rational grounds, but the apocalyptic vision altogether discredits this reasoning. 

He seems to believe that Hurricane Katrina was an act of God aimed at punishing New Orleans for its sins.  Now I have the same problem with this sort of thing that I have with the Anti-Christ mythology.  I am in no position to tell conservative Protestants how to interpret Biblical doctrine, but when they start scribbling contemporary people and place names into the text of Revelations, they presume to know the mind of God. That, as I judge it, is inconsistent with the very heart of the Bible's teaching, and it shows that they have left the path of wisdom (if indeed they, or anyone else, was ever on it). 

Now all this is subject to the caution that I have not read any of Hagee's sermons in part or in whole. It may be that Hagee's positions have been distorted by a hostile press, just as Wright claims his were (as he went about confirming what his critics had said).   I gather that McCain has denounced some of Hagee's views, and he ought to be very careful not to be associated with them. 

But one reason that McCain has so far had little trouble on this score is that he has no history of any close association with Hagee.  There is simply no reason to suspect that McCain believes any of the strange things that Hagee believes.  He didn't spend twenty years in his church.  He didn't bring up his children in that church. He didn't mention Hagee in his autobiography. 

Another reason that Hagee is less trouble is that, judging by the New York Times interview, he is capable of embarrassment. When he recognizes that what he is said or said to have said is offensive and alarming to the world outside his church walls, that it may damage political allies like McCain or Joe Lieberman, he knows when to back off and disown himself.  This kind of embarrassment is a political virtue in a religiously diverse republic.  Reverend Wright seems altogether immune to it. 

Argus Libel Suit To Be Decided By Jury

The libel suit filed against the Argus Leader by Dan Scott in November 2007 will be decided by a jury:  "A libel lawsuit involving the Argus Leader and its top editor moved closer to being decided at a trial by jurors, rather than a judge, after a court ruling this week.  Former Sioux Falls Development Foundation president Dan Scott’s case against the newspaper and Randell Beck, its executive editor, is best suited for a jury to decide, Minnehaha County Circuit Court Judge Kathleen Caldwell ruled."

UPDATE:  For the record, the transcript of Scott's remarks can be found here (PDF alert).  The link above (or here) is the archive of Beck's column.

VIDEO:  Scott's lawyer, Bill Janklow, says he's looking forward to the trial.

MORE:  Here's a copy of the motion filed to the court (PDF alert), via SDWC.

YET MORE:  Todd Epp writes:  "My guess is that Gannett won’t be writing a check in this case. Scott is going to have to show actual malice as a public figure, which is really, really tough to prove. Janklow is an excellent lawyer but he isn’t exactly up against patsies on the other side either."  That's a good point.  Also recall that Janklow unsuccessfully sued both Newsweek and author Peter Mattiessen on libel charges.

STILL MORE:  A commenter at SDWC has an opposite take on Epp's argument:  "Republican or Democrat, this case may be death of the Argus unless they settle. the Argus needs to pray the 1st amendment will save them because jury likely will not. If a jury finds malice, any appeals court will be hard pressed to reverse a jury."

LAST UPDATE:  The full Janklow interview has been posted.  Money quote: "They say they’re a serious newspaper.  They’re going to get a chance to prove.  Because some people like me don’t think they are."

Random Thoughts

See Scott Johnson's discussion of Churchill has a young man, taking his bearings from this piece by Larry Arnn from the Claremont Review of Books. 

Rod Dreher has some evidence of the "peak oil" theory.  The high price of oil should be spurring new production, but it isn't.  Does that mean there is no more oil to be had?  In other energy news, Congress seems to be working overtime to keep oil prices high.  This is a question for Democrats: if you are really concerned about high energy prices, why do you oppose drilling in ANWR and off-shore and building more refineries?  What does this tell John Q. Voter?  The Democratic Party cares about high energy prices, but not as much as the environment.  That's defensible, but not necessarily popular right now. 

I've beaten up John McCain for his proposal to wave the federal gas tax for the summer.  Well, here's a McCain proposal I can get behind. 

Republican presidential candidate John McCain wants health insurance companies to compete for your business on the open market.

He would offer families a $5,000 tax credit to help buy insurance policies.

"Millions of Americans would be making their own health care choices again," McCain said in remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa. (snip)

Under McCain's plan, anyone could get the credit, and those who like their company health care plan could choose to stay in it. The credit would be available as a rebate to people at lower income levels who have no tax liability, Holtz-Eakin said.

To pay for the tax credit, McCain would eliminate the tax exemption for people whose employers pay a portion of their coverage, raising an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues, Holtz-Eakin said. Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks. McCain would also cut costs by limiting health care lawsuits.

Finally, is a college degree overrated?  This piece argues it is. 

Thune On Farm Bill

Denise Ross has John Thune's reaction to the Farm Bill follies. 

From Ducks Unlimited

    Sodsaver Under Attack:
        South Dakota DU members’ voices needed!

                                                                                                                                                             

Contact Information:

South Dakota                                                    Senator Thune:   866-850-3855     Senator Johnson:   800-537-0025     Representative Herseth-Sandlin:    (866) 371-8747

With the Farm Bill being finalized, conservation is under attack. The assault is now on Sodsaver, a provision that would save taxpayers $120 million dollars and maintain critical duck production habitat.

The proposal being written now would exempt Montana and North Dakota from the provision and pressure is mounting in South Dakota to do the same or eliminate Sodsaver altogether! These developments are unacceptable and would leave millions of acres of native prairie unprotected, unless the governor decides to opt-in.

South Dakota Senator John Thune, Senator Tim Johnson and U.S. Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin have been strong supporters of the Sodsaver provision throughout the Farm Bill deliberations. However, they are under intense pressure from many groups to abandon their support for Sodsaver and need to hear from us ASAP!

It is critical that DU members and supporters contact their Senators and Representatives in South Dakota by 5 pm EDT today, Wednesday, April 30, and thank them for their strong support of Sodsaver and ask them to maintain their support and to not allow this exemption to stand.

When calling, please ask for the staffer handling the Farm Bill and share with them that:

• Native prairie is one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world – more than 70% of native prairie has already been lost
     
   
• The exemption or removal of Sodsaver would open up some of the most important land in the waterfowl breeding grounds to destruction – with the support of duck hunters tax dollars
         
        
• This exemption would negate gains from Sodsaver in other Duck Factory states, undermining the value of the entire provision
         
        
• Continued support for Sodsaver is needed and the special exemption allowing Governor’s to “opt in”, needs to be removed.

If emailing, please deliver this message:

 

Native Prairie is one of the most productive areas for waterfowl, and one of the most endangered. More than 70% of native prairie has been lost, and much more will follow. Under the Sodsaver provision of the Farm Bill, destroying native prairie would no longer be subsidized by the American taxpayer.

 

Thank you for support of Sodsaver throughout the Farm Bill process. Now, more than ever, we need your continued support and also ask your help in removing the exemption from the Sodsaver provision that allows Montana and North Dakota to opt-out of Sodsaver – the last of our native prairies is too important to important to squander.

 

Thank you for your support.

Indiana and South Dakota Get Supreme Court Win

An interesting, but I am guessing largely inconsequential decision was announced by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.  In a 6 to 3 decision, the High Court upheld Indiana's law requiring a photo identification to vote.  Indiana is said to have the toughest voter ID law in the country, though South Dakota and several other states have similar laws.  SD law allows a voter without ID to sign an affidavit and then vote.  Indiana's law allows someone to vote without ID, but requires that person to appear later before an official to verify the ballot. 

The Court split by thirds.  Stevens, Roberts, and Kennedy agreed that the Indiana law imposed no undue burden on voters, i.e., no burden that was not justified by the state's interest in enforcing voting requirements.  But they took seriously the idea that slightly more stringent requirements would violate the Constitution.

Scalia, Thomas, and Alito joined in the decision, but they would have allowed more stringent regulations. 

Souter,  Breyer, and Ginsburg would have struck down the law.

As usual, Scalia was right.  If it is permissible to allow some people to vote (citizens), but others not, (resident or illegal aliens, felons, three year olds), then states should be allowed to impose the same ID requirements that are imposed on job seekers, check signers, and persons wishing to purchase alcoholic beverages. 

To be sure, every registered voter is entitled to vote and states should strive to make sure that they can.  But the people are also entitled to know that the laws are being enforced.  Voting is a fundamental civil right, but that fact does not relieve the citizen of all responsibility in the exercise of that right. 

Obama's Wright Turn

As I hope to have shown above, another reason to blog about Reverend Wright is that his name lends itself to all manner of good post titles.  That, and the fact that every politically aware medium is abuzz with this business. 

My replies to Madville Times, and to reader Mondak, have concerned the question whether the criticism aimed at Wright a few weeks ago were unfair.  My interlocutors argued that Wright's positions (or at least some of them) were defensible.  I disagreed.  It appears that Barack Obama agrees with me, for he has now rejected Reverend Wright and his views in a more categorical way.

It is not just Obama.  Bob Herbert, vehemently left-wing Bush hater in good standing, writes a scathing piece about Wright. 

It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived.  ...

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency.

That last bit is the most serious indictment of Wright on a personal level.  Whatever one may think of the press for its treatment of the Wright sermons when the question hit the net, Wright II, the Sequel, was entirely the decision of the Reverend himself.  Whether it was out of narcissism, as Herbert believes, or out of more laudable motive, he had to know that he was playing into the hands of the Clintons and the Republicans.  It turns out that a woman who "facilitated" Reverend Wright's appearance between the Washington Press Club was a Clinton supporter.  Reverend Wright obviously doesn't care. 

Critics of the media and of blogs will argue that all this attention is much ado about nothing of much importance.  I dissent.  Elections are all about coalition building.  The Democratic coalition has already split down the middle.  Why stop there?  Why not split Black voters, already alienated by the Clintons, into Obama and Wright factions?  And while you are at it, why not split the activist core of the party along the same lines?  That is what Jeremiah Wright is doing, deliberately or not. 

Wright Stuff

At the risk of turning this into a Jeremiah Wright blog, let me do a document dump on the latest on the Rev.  Let's just say it hasn't been a good day.  Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan calls on Obama to disown Rev. Wright, something Obama said he could not do in his famous "race speech." Rod Dreher suspects that Sullivan is the first in the line of many who will become disillusioned with Obama as they learn precisely how left-wing he is.  Ross Douthat's estimation of Jeremiah Wright's weekend is quite direct: Jeremiah Wright, SOB. Mark Hemingway questions Wrights exegesis, while Prof. Schramm thinks that Obama is done, thanks to Wright. 

Here is the transcript to Wright's speech before the National Press Club.  I have not seen the video.  Seems like it was more energetic than most Press Club events.  In this speech Wright defends innate racial differences:

Being different does not mean one is deficient. It simply means one is different, like snowflakes, like the diversity that God loves. Black music is different from European and European music. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black worship is different from European and European-American worship. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black preaching is different from European and European- American preaching. It is not deficient. It is just different. It is not bombastic. It is not controversial. It's different. (Laughter, applause.)

(snip)

Black learning styles are different from European and European- American learning styles. They are not deficient. They are just different.

Wright does not defend genetic racial superiority, but he does defend innate racial difference.  On the other hand, he does defend Louis Farrakhan who does believe in racial superiority:

What I think about him, as I said on Bill Moyers and it got edited out -- how many other African-Americans or European-Americans do you know that can get 1 million people together on the mall? He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. I said, as I said on Bill Moyers, when Louis Farrakhan speaks it's like E.F. Hutton speaks. All black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.

Now, I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan any more than Mandela will put down Fidel Castro. You remember that Ted Koppel show where Ted wanted Mandela to put down Castro because Castro is our enemy, and he said, "You don't tell me who my enemies are; you don't tell me who my friends are."

Let me suggest that if you cannot denounce a Farrakhan or a Castro without significant equivocation than you have a damaged moral compass. 

Wright also buys into Marxist inspired theology:

Now, in the 1960s, the term "liberation theology" began to gain currency with the writings and the teachings of preachers, pastors, priests and professors from Latin America. Their theology was done from the underside. Their viewpoint was not from the top down or from a set of teachings which undergirded imperialism. Their viewpoints, rather, were from the bottom up, the thoughts and understandings of God, the faith, religion and the bible from those whose lives were ground under, mangled and destroyed by the ruling classes or the oppressors. Liberation theology started in and started from a different place. It started from the vantage point of the oppressed.

What liberation theology started from was a Marxist interpretation of history.  This is why John Paul II chastised liberation theologians for politicizing the gospel (yes, I know Wright is not Catholic).  Liberation theology plays with the heresy of pelagianism, which like Marxism denies the fallen nature of man.

Barack Obama claims he is "shocked" at what he is hearing from Wright:

Obama said he was ``shocked'' by Wright's statements during a speech at the National Press Club yesterday in Washington.    

``The person I saw yesterday was not the person I had come to know over 20 years,'' said Obama, an Illinois senator.

This strains credulity.  Did Obama, a smart highly educated man, really not know that he was going to a Marxist inspired church?  Did he really not know that his church preaches a gospel of racial exclusivity?  I mean, it's on the dang website.  Are we really to believe that after twenty years he is "shocked" that Rev. Wright holds those views?  If this is true then Barack Obama is so dense that he cannot possibly be qualified to be president.  But he isn't that dense.  He's just a hedger, like your stereotypical politician.  He hedged his bets with Rev. Wright when he was a Chicago politician who needed street cred, and now that he is being called on it he is going to fold that hand.

Unlike others I think Obama will weather this storm and come out of it a stronger candidate.  He will get his party's nomination and he can still win in the fall.  He will use any attacks on this subject as a reason to play the victim and decry the politics of negativity.  Meanwhile, through his surrogates he will beat on John McCain like Ali beat on Frazier.   
    

      

Chad Schudt Facing Charges

Our former blogosphere colleague, Clean Cut Kid, is now facing charges.  From Keloland:

Former Consulting Firm Employee Faces Charges

A man fired last summer from his job at a Sioux Falls company now faces felony grand theft charges involving $200,000 in losses.

It's alleged that 37-year-old Chad Schuldt overpaid himself, misused a company credit card and racked up federal tax penalties while working for Hildebrand Tewes Consulting firm.

Schuldt has pleaded not guilty. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Now, for the first time, I really feel sorry for Chad.  Twenty years sounds like a lot of time for this kind of crime, but I understand that he is unlikely to serve much of it if he works to pay back the money. 

A Remarkable Story

From the American News:

PIERRE - Math and science standards for all grade levels of South Dakota students score well with the American Federal of Teachers in a new report.

The organization said the standards clearly define what students are expected to learn in those subjects, but South Dakota standards for English and social studies need improvement.

Learning standards should be clear, specific and content-focused, AMT said, adding that the state's standards for math and science meet those criteria. It is important to clearly define the knowledge that students should gain in each subject and at each grade level, the group said.

South Dakota's English standards did not meet ATF criteria for any grade level. The state's social studies standards were judged well-written for middle schools and high schools, but flunked at the elementary level.

South Dakota was in a group of 14 states meeting 50 percent to 74 percent of ATF standards.

Stopping here serves my purposes.  What is remarkable is not the content of the story; I'll leave discussion of that to others.  Notice how many errors are made with what I presume is the American Federation of Teachers (not the American Federal of Teachers).  The abbreviation is then wrong twice, with AMT and ATF substituting for AFT.  I wasn't aware that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was all that concerned with our schools or that our schools paid an Alternative Minimum Tax. 

Reverend Wright's HIV Theory

I have spent a lot of time and attention on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright over the last few days.  I suppose this requires an apology, in the Greek sense.  One obvious reason for this concern is that Jeremiah Wright is a powerful personality, and he has an obvious connection to the presidential ambitions of Barack Obama.  Another is that I am getting a lot of feedback on this issue, from my Keloland comrade Cory Heidelberger, and others.  Such conversations are what the blogosphere should be all about.

I received a thoughtful and very respectful note from Mondak on this topic.  Here is the heart of it:

I say this with the most deep down respect and sincerety.  I think you got caught up the past few weeks in all the quick judgemental quips made about Reverand Jeremiah Wright.  We all do it from time to time. I watched a clip of his interview and his speech to the NAACP last evening. For far too long, we have been given one side of the story from many people who appear to hate the Reverend Wright for reasons that make no sense to me and other people that I know.  The man is very intellegent and from what I witnessed, he is not the hateful and divisive man he has been made out to be by you.  Now, I'm willing to forgive you for being so quick to judge.  I am a Christian and I realize we all make mistakes, including yourself in the latest judgement calls you have made about Mr. Wright.  Ken, I've done it myself in the past and I'm not proud of it.  But, it takes a big man to admit his mistakes and make an honest effort to not repeat them in the future.  I pray that you will see the errors of your ways in this matter and I remain very much hopeful that you will.  Ken, please do not take this personally because you do a great job on your blog.  It's just sometimes, you get ahead of yourself and make mistakes like the rest of us.  I know that Reverend Wright's words were taken out of context by your network and others.  Tonight's speech proves that he really does not harbor hate in his heart and that you probably mistook his words on that videotape that was not entirely shown on some networks.

I appreciate the comment, and I feel very responsible in light of the grace that is offered to me here.  But when all is said and done, I have to call 'em like I sees 'em.  Here is a bit from Wright's interview with the National Press Club. 

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

REVEREND WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola," whoever wrote that question? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"? You've read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

REVEREND WRIGHT: Oh, are you -- is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR: No questions...

(CROSSTALK)

REVEREND WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't -- based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the -- one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Now Wright's defenders will respond to any treatment of such a passage by saying it is taken out of context.  But the context here is this: he was asked a question, and this is his answer.  This is no long sermon.  I do not think that there is anything wrong with paying attention to what he says and taking him at his word.  He mixes a lot of legitimate arguments in here, without ever quite answering the question.  But I think that the answer to the question is quite clear.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright really does believe that "the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color," and so, that the government did invent the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.  This is both loony and atrocious.  If it were true, then we are Nazis.  And that is what Reverend Wright clearly thinks about the United States of America.  But it is a damnable lie. Reverend Wright discredits himself, and all his intelligence and his prophetic sermons.  He didn't merely say this, he preached it!  You can't speak truth to power if what you are speaking is full of tin foil hat conspiracy theories. 

This kind of thing poisons politics.   I'm sorry, Mondak, but if this isn't hateful, what could hateful possibly look like? 

Welcome Back, Northern Valley Beacon!

My esteemed colleague emeritus and Keloland comrade David Newquist has returned after a long period of recuperation.  I know he will not appreciate this, but I was genuinely concerned about him.  He fills us in on his health problems.  Despite our differences, which have been quite hot at times, I have never disliked David.  His style of blogging is not mine, but I do think it adds a great deal of spice to the local blogosphere.  I welcome his return.

One thing that David and I have in common is a love of jazz.  The only friendly conversations I have had with him have been on this topic.  I remind him that I have a established a jazz blog.  I invite him to check it out and let me know what he thinks.  Maybe we can talk about Miles Davis, on occasion, or maybe his hero Lester Young. 

NYT Circulation Falling

Editor & Publisher:  "Print circulation continues on its steep downward slide, the Audit Bureau of Circulations revealed this morning in releasing the latest numbers for some of the country's largest dailies in the six-month period ending March 31, 2008. When a full analysis appears it is expected to find, according to sources, the biggest dip yet, about 3.5% daily and 4.5 for Sunday. . . . The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping 9.2% to 1,476,400. The paper's daily circulation declined 3.8% to 1,077,256."  Meanwhile, circulation at the Wall Street Journal and USA Today is up.  Wonder what the difference is?  (via Instapundit)

UPDATE:  Quote of the day.

"Hildygate" Lives

Argus Leader:

A Sioux Falls man fired last summer from his job at Hildebrand Tewes Consulting Inc. now faces felony grand theft charges in Minnehaha Circuit Court.

Chad Schuldt, 37, stole nearly $200,000 from his former employer by overpaying himself, misusing a company credit card and causing federal tax penalties, according to a Sioux Falls Police affidavit for an arrest warrant.

Schuldt pleaded not guilty earlier this month to a two-count information charging him with grand theft. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Schuldt, then the firm’s business manager, called co-owner Steve Hildebrand in June to tell him the business had problems with the Internal Revenue Service. After finding the IRS had placed a lien on the business for unpaid income taxes, Hildebrand determined through an accountant that Schuldt was responsible.

Read more in Tuesday's Argus Leader.

The Wright Prophet

I read with interested Prof. Blanchard's response to Cory's exegesis on exegesis.  Unlike Prof. Blanchard, I work for a living, so I have just got back into town from a business trip and am pretty exhausted.  I will limit my comments to the suggestion, hinted at by both, the Jeremiah Wright is a "prophet."  Cory, for example, writes:

[Rev. Wright] embodies the finest tradition of speaking in the Christian prophetic voice -- no, not predicting the future, but speaking truth to power. The Bible was written by oppressed peoples, Reverend Wright reminds us. The faith so many Americans conflate with their patriotism was born of opposition to worldly powers of all sorts, from Pharaoh and Caesar right on down to the military-industrial complex. His words deserve our attention and our agreement.

Let's leave aside the notion that Rev. Wright deserves our agreement and concentrate on the claim that Rev. Wright is prophetic.  As I wrote a few weeks ago:

Dennis Prager argued on his radio show last week that a prophet is exactly what Jeremiah Wright is not.  A prophet tells the people what they don't want to hear. A prophet goes to his people and asks them to look inside themselves at their own sin.  Jeremiah Wright assures his congregation that there is nothing wrong with them; it is everyone else who needs to change.

The Gospel, and Scripture in general, is not just for the oppressed but for everyone.  Moses condemned the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf.  Jonah was called to judge the city of Nineveh.  While Isaiah finishes his work with good news of a messiah, the first couple dozen chapters of his book condemn sinful Judah.  Jesus himself speaks of separating the goats from the sheep and the wheat from the chaff.  He also claims the he himself is the way, truth and life, and that no one comes to the Father but through him.  Further, we should repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  The Gospel cannot be reduced to "it's nice to be nice to nice people."  We are called to love the Lord and love our enemies.  I am not sure Rev. Wright's congregation gets much of either message. 

I stand by my statement that Rev. Wright, whatever else he is, is no prophet. That doesn't mean he is wrong, but it does mean that he doesn't seem to spend much time asking his congregation to reform their lives and commit themselves to Jesus; rather he directs our attention to an impersonal "them," e.g., the government, the capitalists, the white people, and asks that they be blamed for the ailments of his congregation.  This is a critique of Rev. Wright as a pastor, not as a social critic.   

While naturally any political system or theology will consider what it is against, it should not be reduced to that.  Let us not reduce our theology or our patriotism to merely what we are against.  For that opposition is not mere negativity, but a reaction to some positive principles that we hold dear.   

Has Wright Doomed Obama?

Dana Milbank thinks so:

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Defending Wright Against the Right Wing

Having had my say on Jeremiah Wright's rhetorical excesses, as I see them, I am now prepared to defend him against recent criticism coming from conservatives.  Powerline links to Michelle Malkin on Wright's recent speech before the NAACP.  You can get a transcript of the talk at CNN.  Here is the passage that Malkin and others have found objectionable:

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story.

Malkin likens this argument to  phrenology, and compares to Leonard Jeffries theory of "sun people vs. ice people."  In other words she thinks it is both junk science and racist.

Neither charge is fair.  I do not know Janice Hale's work, and I confess that I am somewhat skeptical regarding the view that Black Africans are, on the whole, predominantly "right-brained".  Moreover, I see some problems with Wright's defense of this argument. 

[African-American children] have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, DMH and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip hop radio station half of who's words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning.

The problem here is that every culture descends from a people who practiced memorizing long stories, because that was the only way to preserve long stories before the advent of writing.  Someone had to remember the Iliad and the Odyssey before Homer (or someone) wrote them down.  Yet the Greeks look to be about as left-brained as anyone.

But whether or not the hypothesis can be supported, there is nothing inherently racist about it.  The phenomenon that deserves the name of racism is the identification of someone as morally inferior and/or one's enemy merely on the basis of racial identification.  Simply recognizing certain biological differences between racial groups, such as the prevalence of difference diseases, in no way implies racism. 

As to whether the theory described by Wright is junk science or not, for that we would have to see Dr. Hale's evidence.  But the difference between left and right brain functions is very well supported in the literature, and there is considerable reason to suppose that some people are naturally oriented toward one side or the other.  There is no reason I can think of why African-Americans might not differ from European and Asian Americans on this count in some statistically significant way. 

Wright's defenders will complain that, once again, his critics have taken his words out of context.  Once again they will be off the mark.  At least in this case, his critics are merely wrong. 

Supreme Court Upholds Indiana Voter Identification Law

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the challenge to Indiana's voter ID law, 6-3:  "The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws."  Seems reasonable to me.  Justice Stevens, joined by Kennedy and Roberts, announced the judgment of the Court.  Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito concurred with the judgment, while Justices Souter, Breyer, and Ginsberg dissented.  The opinions are here (PDF alert).

Daschle/Obama in West River This Week?

Black Hills Fox News:

The Obama Campaign Kick-off events will take place beginning at 11:30 at Black Hills State University in Spearfish Tuesday morning. Then it's on to the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City at 5:30 Tuesday afternoon. The final Kick-off event will be at the Custer County Annex in Custer at 9:30 on Wednesday morning. Tom Daschle will appear at each of those events.

Also, Representative Herseth-Sandlin will campaign with Obama in South Dakota.

South Dakota Presidential Primary Heating Up

From this morning's Argus Leader:

Who would win that primary today is anyone's guess.

Obama has South Dakota ties here with former Sen. Tom Daschle his co-chairman at the national level. Steve Hildebrand, a longtime strategist and campaign aide to candidates such as Vice President Al Gore and Daschle, plays a significant role for Obama. Clinton has the endorsement of former Sen. George McGovern, whom she worked for when he ran for president in 1972.

Like Obama, Clinton has not been here during this election cycle, but she spent much time in South Dakota in the 1992 and 1996 campaign trips when her husband was running for president. President Clinton's last campaign stop of his presidential career was in Sioux Falls in 1996.

When weighing chances of both candidates, it is becoming more obvious that, while Bill Clinton ignited controversy along the way during his wife's campaign, it oftentimes seemed like he is the Clinton that voters came to see.

That could play a role at some level here, too.

Consider a recent comment from Porter Williams, a prominent member of the black community, who is a Sioux Falls-area contractor, artist and Hillary Clinton supporter.

"Things were never so good when Bill Clinton was president," he said.

Because of his recall of that period, Williams will keep his vote in the Clinton family.

All that said, what South Dakotans need to know is they will be a part of the selection process, said Bob Burns, political science professor at South Dakota State University. "We matter," he said.

The Battle of Indiana

Washington Post excerpt:

Driven by strategy and necessity as the New York Democrat's advertising budget runs low, the Clinton campaign has opened 28 offices in Indiana, where she faces another critical test on May 6. With 72 delegates at stake in Indiana, the Clinton family has made more than 50 stops in the state already, far more than Obama and his wife, Michelle. … While the Clinton campaign advertised 30 organized canvassing expeditions this weekend, the Obama team said it put together 55 "block parties" for supporters and undecided voters on Saturday, complete with food and music. At each, voters were encouraged to go straight to nearby government offices and cast their ballots.

My Boy Jack, PBS on Kipling

I watched the PBS Masterpiece drama yesterday, set at the beginning of World War I.  It was flawed, but still very good.  Daniel Radcliffe played the writer's son, John Kipling, so let me get the Harry Potter jokes out of the way.  Why couldn't he use a shield charm, or take out the machine gun nest with Expelliarmus!  In fact, I didn't think about Harry Potter more than fourteen times during the show.  Radcliffe was that good.

David Haigh wrote the screenplay and played the part of Rudyard Kipling, and for both my opinion of him has risen considerably.  The chief flaw in the production was that it could not quite decide what it wanted to be: a sympathetic portrait of a family tragedy or an anti-war movie.   Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully on the X Files) tried to push it to the latter in the introduction, by speaking of Kipling's "rampant patriotism."  And in the beginning of the film, it seemed to be going that way.  Kipling, enamored of military virtue and intoxicated with the glory of the British Empire, pushes his son to military service and uses all his influence to get his son in harms way.  Jack is killed on his first day of action.  Rudyard is thereafter racked with guilt. 

There is a lot in the film to confirm that interpretation.  It is very deliberately left out that the war started when the Germans invaded Belgium. But Haigh was too good a writer and actor to let the piece descend into a screed.  Kipling was, to be sure, a British patriot and saw, rightly, that war was coming despite all hopes to the contrary.  He may well have pushed his son toward service, but it is quite clear (in fact and in the film) that the boy wanted desperately to serve. These days, when so many criticize those who get themselves or their children out of military service, we might not want to so quickly condemn someone who did the opposite. 

The First World War, like the American Civil War, was fought with very bad doctrine.  Defense so thoroughly overwhelmed offense that either side could have won easily just by not bothering to attack.  But it is characteristic of modern views of the war that they leave out considering the alternatives.  The truth of the matter is that Germany was determined to do what Napoleon had earlier tried to do: bring all of Europe under their dominion.  Should the British, and by extension the Americans, have let the Germans get away with that?  Perhaps not. 

Between 1789 and 1945 Britain set herself again and again against tyranny in Europe. In 1916, America began to back her play.  This is not something either people should be ashamed of.  God bless all who fought, or suffered, or died in that business.  I can only be grateful that I, and my children, were born in the right half of the twentieth century. That is what My Boy Jack is about, though it might come as a surprise to the producers. 

The Wright Interpretation: A Reply to Cory

In a lengthy response to my comments on Bill Moyer's interview with Jeremiah Wright, Cory Heidelberger accuses me of "prooftexting" (building an interpretation on short passages, taken out of context), as opposed to exegesis (careful reading of passages in light of the larger meaning of a text).  Cory's is well-argued, and I recommend it to our readers.  Despite our disagreements, I respect Cory and think that he is fine addition to the Keloland blog page.  He says I was flat wrong in my piece, but I tried to be fair to Reverend Wright, and at least some of what I say agrees with what Cory says, so perhaps I was wrong only in a bumpy way. 

Let me be honest.  I am not so inclined as he is to see truth and light in Reverend Wright's sermons.  Suppose the tables were turned, and we were talking about a conservative pastor who said "Not God Bless Homosexuals,  but Goddamn Homosexuals"?  Suppose the same pastor presented a long list of the sins of Homosexuals and then said that the AIDS epidemic was "the chickens coming home to roost"?  How much "exegesis" would it take to convince Cory that this pastor didn't mean what he surely seemed to be saying?  Cory would vehemently condemn such a sermon, especially if it came from someone who had political significance.  I would condemn such a sermon along with Cory.

I am sorry, but the defense of Wright's infamous "Goddamn America" statement presented in the interview, and backed up by Cory, just won't do.  It is true that condemnation and damnation have a "shared etymology."  So do inspiration and respiration, but they hardly mean the same thing!  Surely "Goddamn" can mean condemnation in ordinary speech; but in a sermon, delivered by a Biblical scholar standing in the pulpit, it means one thing: final judgment.  I tried to be charitable by calling this a rhetorical excess.  But if, as Cory insists, Reverend Wright believes everything he said, then we know what he thinks of America.  Barack Obama found it necessary to disown such statements.  Perhaps Cory is wiser than Obama, or perhaps Obama was being less than truthful about his agreement.  I will let Cory decide that one. 

Both Moyers and Wright and Heidelberger want to have it that the good Reverend is being crucified for "speaking truth to power," i.e., criticizing America.  Of course crucified is here a metaphor for political attacks (which, I dare to point out) are not so painful or fatal), but it is still just wrong.  Wright's sermons became radioactive for Obama because of the extreme rhetoric that he used.  Like Moyers, Cory ignores a couple of other items that populate these sermons: that the government intentionally supplies drugs to Blacks, and that the government "lied about inventing the AIDS virus."  Are these among the "truths" that Wright speaks to power? 

I think that people like Jeremiah Wright have an important place in Republican politics.  We need him to play prophet to our Israel.  But his extremism discredits his message.  In calling these statements "rhetorical excesses", I believe I was doing him more favors that Mr. Heidelberger does by trying to neutralize them with exegesis. 

Cory says this:

Mrs. Madville Times and I watched the full interview last night. (It was worth cheating on TV Turnoff Week.) We listened closely. Neither one of us heard Wright say anything that disagreed with our political beliefs, our patriotism, or with Christianity.

But that, of course, is the problem for Mr. Obama.  He already has Mr. and Mrs. Madville Times, or surely will if he is nominated.  It's those small town voters still clinging to religion and guns, some of whom, at least, are Democrats, who would find plenty to disagree with in Wright's sermons.  I have a higher opinion of such folks than Obama, or Wright, or Heidelberger.  I do not believe, as Cory seems to believe, that any Americans pray to George W.  I think that most Americans know, and are willing to hear, that their country has much to atone for.  They do not, as Cory would have it, conflate their faith with patriotism.  But neither do they think that America is Pharaoh and Caesar. We are sinners, but we aren't the bad guys.   

Suppose for the moment that the United States had never existed.  Would the world today be a better place or a much worse place?  I would like to think that Cory would agree with me on this one.  I am not sure what Barack Obama would say, if he were being honest, and that concerns me a lot more.  I am pretty sure what Reverend Wright would say. 

Clinton's Edge With The Popular Vote

Michael Barone:  "One thing many people haven't noticed about Hillary Clinton's 55 percent to 45 percent victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary is that it put her ahead of Obama in the popular vote. Her 214,000-vote margin in the Keystone State means that she has won the votes, in primaries and caucuses, of 15,112,000 Americans, compared to 14,993,000 for Obama."

Ducks And Pheasants: Casualties Of Our Energy Policy

Another effect of our promotion of corn based ethanol is the destruction of wildlife habitat, including habitat for ducks and pheasants that are important to South Dakota hunting and tourism. 

As this article notes, the subsidization of ethanol has contributed to a spike in corn prices and gives an incentive to farmers to convert land from conservation to production. 

Now, because of federal mandates to turn large amounts of corn into ethanol-based fuel, food prices are beginning to jump. Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand, a situation that is straining old alliances, inspiring new ones and putting pressure on the Agriculture Department, which is being lobbied by all sides without managing to satisfy any of them.

Born nearly 25 years ago in an era of abundance, the Conservation Reserve Program is having a rough transition to the age of shortage. Its 35 million acres - about 8 percent of the cropland in the country - are the big prize in this fight. (snip)

That is just the beginning, warns Ducks Unlimited, an organization with more than half a million members in the United States. They are concerned about the 750,000 acres of grassland that were removed from the program last year in the so-called duck factory in the upper Midwest.

Ducks Unlimited chimes in:

The US Fish and Wildlife Services credits CRP with producing more than 2 million ducks a year. This steady stream of lost habitat will mean significantly lower production of ducks that migrate through or winter in all of the contiguous 48 states and provide and an important part of the hunters’ bags in those states.

DU’s director of conservation programs in the Prairie Pothole Region [mainly North And South Dakota] says conservation-minded people are concerned the country’s new energy policy will wipe out billions of federal dollars invested in natural resources. “Conservation is in for a long swim against a strong current when trying to fight the tide of land rolling out of CRP,” Jim Ringelman said.

DU also notes the efforts our local delegation:

Fifty conservation groups, led by Ducks Unlimited, sent a letter to the Congressional leaders of the Farm Bill last week to push for a strong Sodsaver provision in the final bill, which is in conference right now.  In addition, Senators John Thune and Tim Johnson and Representative Stephanie-Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota all sent similar letters, reminding their colleagues to protect this vital national resource.

Apparently a Farm Bill agreement was finally made yesterday (months late).  The amount of money going to ethanol is down and the money to nutrition is up.  I have yet to find any information about how CRP or the Sodsaver program fared.  We'll keep you posted.

Wright Wash 2

Another remarkable aspect of the Bill Moyers' interview with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is that it happened at all.  The issue of Wright and his sermons did lasting, if not fatal damaged to Barack Obama, but as a talking point it had begun to fade.  Well it's back now, just as Senator Clinton needs a good argument that Obama is unelectable.  It is very hard to see how this is anything but bad for Obama.  ABC's The Note has this on Wright's choice of this moment:

Maybe he'll convince the public that he was misunderstood, his fiery words taken out of context. Or maybe (stop us if you think we're off) he's supplying oxygen and dry brush to the flames that have threatened to engulf Obama.

"When something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public," Wright says, "that's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do."

He may be correct -- but even trying to set the record straight ensures several more weeks of soundbites he and Obama don't get to choose.

So why did Reverend Wright decide to break his silence now?  Here are some possibilities:

First, Wright may care more about his own reputation than he does about Obama's chances, and he may enjoy the national fame he has won and he realizes that this is his moment in the sun. 

Second, Wright may want Obama to lose.  After all, he said this:

No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.

And he said it when Condi Rice was Secretary of State!  But it will be harder to ignore a Black president than a Black Secretary of State.  Maybe an Obama Presidency will puncture his precious view of racism in America. 

Third, Wright and Moyers may want to go for broke.  They are confident Obama will be elected, and they want that election to be a mandate for their view of America.  An unqualified victory for the left is the prize they are after. 

Only the last view if flattering.  It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Wright Wash

I watched Bill Moyers interview the Reverend Jeremiah Wright tonight on PBS.  Anyone who knows Moyers knew what to expect: propoganda disguised as hip, thoughtful, journalism.  In this case, Moyers and Wright missed a great opportunity, for it seems to me that all the material was there, right in front of the viewer, out of which Reverend Wright might have constructed a reasonable explanation for his rhetorical excesses. 

Two of those excesses, saying Goddamn America, and blaming 9/11 on America, did seem a bit more defensible when more of the preceding sermons were included.  All Wright had to say was something like this: as someone who loves America, I hold her to a very high standard; as a preacher of the gospel, I am duty bound to remind her of her sins.  For both reasons I sometimes get carried away and say things that I do not mean and do not really believe.  That wouldn't have entirely gotten him off the hook, or made everyone feel better, but I think it would have let most of the air out of this balloon. 

Instead, Moyers presented Wright as a Biblical prophet, on the same level as Martin Luther King (to whom Wright repeatedly compared himself), if not Jesus.  Neither Moyers nor Wright found fault with one word of the infamous sermons.  They blamed the scandal entirely on wicked people who produced sound bites from the sermons, taken out of context. 

The defense of Wright that emerges from the interview was based on two sophisms.  The first goes like this: Reverend Wright criticized America and he said "Goddamn America."  Therefore, anyone who objects to the latter is really intolerant of the former.  When Wright said, quite rightly, that no government is God and that all governments fail, Moyers chimed in to say that you [Wright] could be crucified for saying that.  That, of course, is utter krap.  No one prays to George W. or confuses the U.S. Government with the Divine Power.  This was a straw man made of rather transparent straw. 

The second sophism, for which Reverend Wright was solely responsible, was that in saying "Not God Bless America, but Goddamn America" he was simply saying that God disapproves of many of America's actions.  But that is a silly argument.  A blessing does not imply approval, else no human being would warrant God's blessing.  When someone says "God Bless America," this is a simple, informal prayer for God's help, on behalf of one's country.  It is the equivalent of "God Save the Queen."  If Reverend Wright was saying that God condemns many of America's past deeds, he would surely be correct, or so it seems to me.  But condemnation is something we can respond to by atonement, and a will to be a better people.  Damnation is final judgment.  Reverend Wright is a smart enough man to know that he is playing the sophist with language here. 

Reverend Wright said that 9/11 was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost."  He defended this by saying that he heard it from a White man, an ambassador speaking on Fox Channel.  But surely race has nothing to do with it. It is one thing to say that America's misdeeds have created the conditions that were partially responsible for the terrorist attack on the world trade center.  It was reasonable and altogether appropriate for a preacher to warn us against the excesses of revenge at that moment, days after the September attack.  It is something else to say that we deserved the 9/11 attack, which is what the phrase "chickens coming home to roost" means.  That is analogous to saying that someone who is infected with HIV when he was shooting up smack deserves to die from AIDS. 

Most, but not all of Reverend Wright's criticisms of America in the passages quoted from his sermons were undeniable.  Slavery, the treatment of Africans before and after the end of slavery, are examples.  I do not agree that the use of atomic bombs on Japan was wrong, but that is certainly a respectable opinion.  But precisely if you think that such criticisms are important, you have to avoid adding stupid and irresponsible accusations to the list. 

Unless I missed it, Moyers never asked Wright whether he really believes that the U.S. Government deliberately provides drugs to Black Americans, or that the U.S. Government invented the AIDS virus. or that the death of Christ is laid at the feet of "Italians."  These bits of lunacy may play well before some congregations, but they give license to anyone else to ignore all the rest of what he is saying.  It is Wright's flights of fantasy, straying into conspiracy theory and racist territory, are what got him and his friend Barack into trouble. 

Reverend Wright's real trouble, I think, is the same as Obama's: they never talk to anyone who doesn't believe the same things they do.  Wright's interview with Moyers was more of the same.  He efforts at hagiography did Wright no favors.   

Civic Education

Here is a must read from NEH deputy chairman Thomas Lindsey. Here he lays out the curriculum and justification for civic education.  Here are the questions he thinks every college graduate should ponder at some point in their education:

First, what is the meaning of human equality as articulated in the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal”? Equal in what respects? What view of human nature does this presuppose? Does the Declaration mean to include African-Americans, as Abraham Lincoln, along with Frederick Douglass and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted?

Second, what does the Declaration mean by asserting that we possess rights that are not “alienable”? Who or what, precisely, cannot alienate our rights? Are all rights deemed inalienable, or only some? And why?

Third, why does the Founding generation consider government just only when it is instituted by the consent of the governed? Is justice for the Founders merely consent-based? If not, what might trump consent?

Fourth, why did the Founders opt for representative democracy over the “pure” version of democracy practiced in ancient Athens? What did The Federalist (penned by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) assert was the inadequacy of ancient democracy?

Fifth, how does the Constitution seek to reconcile democracy, which means rule by the majority, with the rights of minorities? Stated differently, how do we do justice both to the equality of all and to the liberty of each?

Sixth, and finally, what economic conditions make American democracy possible? Why does the Constitution protect property rights? Why do its critics, such as Marx, believe private property to be the root of injustice? How would Madison and Hamilton have responded to Marx’s and his followers’ critique?

Food Follies And Economic Silliness

The New York Sun has a nice run down of the way in which our promotion of biofuels is now causing world wide food shortages. 

“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.

Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”

“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”

Meanwhile the U.N. Secretary General is proclaiming a world food crisis. This crisis, if we want to use that term, exists not because we are unable to feed the world but because right now we choose not to.

In economic news, President Bush expects great things from the "rebate" checks the government will begin mailing out in a little over a week. 

Bush's emphasis on fuel and food prices differed from other comments he's made since signing the economic stimulus legislation, intended to aid the economy by boosting overall consumer spending—which accounts for roughly two-thirds of the nation's economic activity.

Bush suggested the rebates could trigger a spending spree. "When the money reaches the American people, we expect they will use it to boost consumer spending," he said last month.

By saying expressly that people could use these one-time checks to pay for such necessities as food and gas, Bush underscored the deepening challenges facing the economy.

It's hard to know where to begin here.  First, this is akin to Bush's plea after 9-11 that Americans needed to go out and shop.  Now, I think any fair minded person knows that what Bush meant is that we should not let the terrorists make us change our way of life, which is certainly a defensible position.  But Bush seemed unwilling to ask Americans to make any sacrifice or to make any change for the sake of a national purpose.  Here once again Bush is boldly telling the American people to buy stuff rather than prudently planning for the future by saving that money.  There apparently is no problem that cannot be solved by the American people buying more crap.  So we borrow more money from the Chinese so we can give it to ourselves so we can go buy more crap made by the Chinese.  In what universe is this sound policy? 

And apparently we are all Keynesians now.  We need an influx of government spending to "prime the pump" to make up for the old "demand deficit," the Keynesians argue.  What happened to Republicans being supply-siders and monetarists?  What we need is a cut in the corporate tax and in the capital gains tax to stimulate capital investment and help business profitability.  In addition, and here I spit firmly into the wind, we need tighter monetary policy to assuage any inflationary concerns.  Finally, we could use a good dose of belt tightening.  Many of our economic problems are spurred by large public and private debt.  The tax rebate giveaway only makes matters worse. 

Really finally, am I the only one who finds it odd that just last week I wrote a check to the federal government and now the federal government is going to write one to me?  Here's an idea: don't take my damn money in the first place!  Not that I have strong feelings on this matter. 

 

It Isn't The Nazi's, It's The National Socialists

O.K., maybe this story is made up.  I must admit, this guy is so stupid I can't stop laughing. 

U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday....

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn’t know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it. “This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn’t believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn’t Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party....

When asked if meeting with Nazis was a danger to his political career, Zirkle said he was willing to take the chance.

“That’s the risk you have to take to get your point across,” Zirkle said. “If the Black Panthers or the Jewish Zionists want me to speak about these issues, I’ll do it.”

Yes, this moron is a Republican.  How long before he's on The Daily Show? 

We Got A Great Big Convoy

So the truckers are going to roll into Pierre and give an earful to Gov. Rounds:

The organizer of next Monday’s protest in Pierre by truckers who are mad about high diesel-fuel prices says he’s been told that Gov. Mike Rounds will address the group.

Brian Frahm says that means someone is listening.

An estimated 100 to 200 truck drivers are expected to drive a convoy through the capital city to draw attention to high fuel prices.

First of all, I am not sure that we need any convoy anywhere to bring attention to fuel prices.  Just being sentient should be enough to clue one in to the high price of gas. Second, what precisely do the truckers, or anyone else for that matter, expect the governor to do? He cannot repeal the state tax on gas without legislative approval, and even if he could, that move would serve only as a salve, as I argued regarding John McCain's proposal to temporarily rescind the national gas tax. 

Look, if someone is going to protest I'd rather have it be truck drivers than almost any other segment of the population.  But given the paucity of actual policy that the state can enact to assuage the truckers' concerns, this amounts to a kind of play acting as a substitute for actual long range thinking on energy. 

Obama: Another McGovern or Another Carter

Andrew Busch makes a plausible claim that Barack Obama is more like Jimmy Carter than George McGovern. 

And, like Carter, despite his flaws, he is still the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in November. Republicans have not gone into a presidential election facing such stiff headwinds since—well, 1976. On Election Day of that year, Carter squeaked by Gerald Ford after possessing a large set of objective advantages. Obama, should he go on to win the Democratic nomination, will go into the election with at least as large a set of objective advantages. (snip)

Not least, like Carter, Obama will inherit a difficult world, filled with inflationary pressures, recessionary tendencies, energy challenges, and an evolving cast of dangerous enemies of the United States who require taming. He has not yet put forward proposals that harbor a significant probability of success in meeting any of those challenges. To the contrary, he offers a Carterish stew of big government at home and naïveté abroad. We all know how that turned out.

This strikes one as highly plausible.  I recently pondered why Obama, who is almost without a doubt the most left-wing candidate ever nominated by a major party, remains relatively popular despite the fact that his views are far outside the mainstream.  As in 1976, voters are sufficiently dejected as to read their aspirations for change into the candidate who most eloquently mouths such pieties. Thus we are set to elect someone greatly inexperienced and perhaps woefully naive about the ways of the world. 

For thoughtful consideration of the Obama phenomenon see Leon Wieseltier and most especially Peter Meyers, who presents a studied reflection on Barack Obama, race, class, and his view of America.  Just one snippet:

In Obama’s populist vision, unity is at best partial and secured by a spirit of division. In a thoughtful discussion of black nationalism in Dreams, he wonders whether genuine self-respect among blacks depends upon hatred of whites, and he answers No. He never directly addresses the analogous question whether working-class and middle-class solidarity and security depend upon animosity toward the upper classes, but the scattered indications he provides point to an affirmative answer. Then and now, the premise of Obama’s economic populism appears to be class conflict. Having grown beyond the black-nationalist critique represented by Rev. Wright and others, he seems to affirm in its place its close cousin, the class-based critique upon which Du Bois and the later King (each inclined to demonize American capitalists) ultimately ran aground.

Education Lessons

George Will argues we fail to educate ourselves about education.  Despite mounds of evidence compiled over forty years, there is still no evidence that educational performance varies significantly with resources.  The biggest variable was and remains family make-up. 

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced.

But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.

In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas -- solemnly avowed, never fulfilled -- said: "That will not happen." It did not.

Patrick Deneen makes a point about education as it relates to the so-called home mortgage crisis.  Grant that greedy lenders are partly responsible, greedily seeking gain at the expense of their fellow man.  Where did these people go to school?  No doubt many of them graduated from highly reputed institutions of further education.  There they were taught to be good consumers and producers, but we neglected to make them into citizens.   And that at a price tag of $30,000 a year for tuition. 

 

The Popular Vote in the Primaries is Irrelevant

My SDP colleague Mr. Heppler mentions the possibility that H. Clinton will end up winning more popular votes than Obama, thus giving her a substantial claim to the nomination.  Michael Barone follows suite.  After some very interesting historical context for the current exit polls (Hilary is winning the Jacksonians!), he gives us this:

Clinton now leads in the popular vote, if you include the Florida and Michigan results, by 121,943 votes. And even if you include the imputed totals for the Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine caucuses, she's ahead by 11,721 votes. It seems to me that this provides the Clinton campaign with an important talking point, though one they're probably reluctant to use over the next two weeks. Reluctant, because the likely Obama victory in North Carolina could erase this popular-vote lead, and) an offsetting Clinton margin in Indiana seems unlikely (or at least risky to project from current polling). But looking ahead from May 6, Clinton is likely to regain that popular-vote lead (including Florida and Michigan) and quite possibly could gain a popular-vote lead counting just Florida and not the more problematic (because Obama was not on the ballot there) Michigan.

Since the nominee is selected by delegate votes and not popular votes, the latter will only be important in so far as they sway unpledged delegates.  I can think of two reasons why a super delegate might take the popular vote seriously:

First, a delegate might regard the popular vote as morally binding, even though it has no direct legal status.

Second, a delegate might regard the popular vote as an indication of strength in November, and so believe that nominating the candidate most popular among Democrats is the best way to win the White House. 

Either way, it strikes me as very dubious to count Michigan or Florida.  When only one candidate is on the ballot in one state, and breaks party rules by being the only one to campaign in the other state, there is no reason to regard the vote in either state as an authoritative statement of the popular will.  The obvious solution to this problem was to have new contests in both states.  Short of that, neither should be counted. 

Besides, there is no way to tally the caucuses, because many of them did not keep a count of popular participant, so we can't know what Obama's tally would have been if primaries had been held in those states.  It is useful to note how far ahead one candidate is over another in the popular vote.  But it should not be regarded as binding.  If the South Dakota and Montana Primaries pass with neither candidate having enough votes to be nominated, then the Super Delegates will have the responsibility for deciding the matter.  It is their decision, and no other criteria, that will matter.

Don't Drink The Water

I am waiting for the announcement that this is a joke.  Please.

Two signs on the doors leading from the visitors' clubhouse at U.S. Cellular Field to the first-base dugout read, "NO BOTTLED WATER ON THE BENCH."

What's this? Athletes can't drink water? Even in the humid Chicago summers?

Here's the explanation I got:

Gatorade is Major League Baseball's "official sports drink." So instructions were sent that no player could be seen drinking anything but Gatorade in the dugout. Not even Aquafina, which is the "official water" of MLB. Not even bottles of water with the labels removed.

White Sox clubhouse personnel said if players take bottled water onto the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.

So remember, the biggest threat to baseball isn't steroids or HGH or amphetamines or runaway ticket prices or four-hour games.

It's water.

HT Mark Hemingway.

Food and Fuel

Are subsidies for corn based ethanol causing a food shortage?  There is some debate over this question.  From the Financial Times:

Biofuels still have strong political support in many countries. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said last week: “Those rising global food prices have nothing to do [with] biofuels.”

But Rob Bailey of Oxfam said: “We want the government to stop adding fuel to the fire by subsidising the diversion of land to biofuels production.”

Agriculture diplomats are concerned that governments are focusing on biofuels as the main reason for rising food prices. They argue that the use of agricultural land and crops for fuel is only part of a mix of problems including higher demand in Asia, climate change, declining growth in farming productivity and water scarcity.

All around the world high food prices are stimulating unrest:

According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, the price of wheat is more than 80 percent higher than a year ago and corn (maize) prices are up by a quarter. Prices for vegetable oils are increasing at similar rates. The organization also reported that the food price index, based on export prices for 60 internationally-traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year, on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

The effects of this are already visible. Earlier this year protests erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. Food riots have occurred over the last few months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Senegal and Yemen.

Stephen Bainbridge clearly blames government policy:

The massive increase in the amount of corn being diverted into ethanol production is almost entirely a product government policy rather than market forces. In turn, government policy has been driven by interest group politics. Corn farmers, large agricultural businesses, and a subset of the environmental movement have combined into an unholy alliance that few politicians are willing to buck.

For a good discussion of this issue see this Foreign Affairs debate between Tom Daschle and two University of Minnesota economists. Daschle argues:

Having lived through three decades of debates about ethanol, I can attest that the critics of biofuels have often warned of a coming food crunch as a result of the competition for inputs needed to produce both food and fuel....Over the next several decades, the doomsayers were proved wrong: productivity gains for corn averaged nearly three percent per year, and the annual U.S. corn crop increased from approximately seven billion bushels in 1980 to nearly 12 billion bushels in 2006.

The economists reply:

First, we, too, know that meat-producing animals eat more than half of the U.S. corn crop. But people do eat chicken, eggs, pork, steak; drink milk; and consume foods containing cornmeal, corn oil, and corn sweeteners. U.S. consumers spend over 20 percent of their food budgets on meat, eggs, and dairy. And the share of the corn crop used to produce ethanol will rise from less than ten percent in 2004 to an expected 20-25 percent of the crop next year. As more acres are devoted to corn, fewer acres are available for other types of dairy feed, such as alfalfa, or for table vegetables, such as green beans. As a result, milk and vegetable prices are rising. And as acres are bid away from soybeans and turned over to corn, the price of soybean-based feed is also increasing, adding to the pressure on meat prices.

Obviously, read the whole thing to get the entire argument. 

This much seems clear, current policy towards ethanol is misguided.  The economists have it right: the policy is driving up food costs.  Meanwhile, the policy does little to decrease fuel prices.  First, as Bainbridge notes, we exclude much cheaper Brazilian bio-fuels made with sugar cane.  This is done solely as a sop to American farmers.  It is also well documented that the high energy use of producing and transporting corn based ethanol makes its effect on overall energy price questionable.  A smarter energy policy increases oil production by drilling offshore and in Alaska while encouraging efficiency by heavily subsidizing hybrid automobiles. 

A New Life

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has given birth to a new baby boy, her fifth child.  It just so happens that the baby has Downs Syndrome.  Rod Dreher explains why Gov. Palin and her husband are heroes.

Why did I call them "heroic" for simply accepting their baby and welcoming him, despite his handicap? Because a 2005 study found that an estimated 80 to 90 percent of babies diagnosed in utero with Down syndrome die at the hands of abortionists, by consent of their mothers or both parents.

I wrote on this subject here.   

Hillary Leading the Popular Vote

David Freddoso:  "Real Clear Politics calculates that with her victory of 216,000 votes last night, Hillary Clinton is now narrowly ahead in the popular vote count — if you count her victories in Michigan (where Obama wasn't on the ballot) and Florida, and you don't count the totals of certain caucus states that don't record the actual number of caucus-goers who back one candidate over another (Iowa, Washington, Nevada and Maine)."

The Clinton campaign has noticed, and is pushing the popular vote argument forward.

Obama's Media Army

Wall Street Journal:

Nothing in the hysteria over last week's Democratic debate – including the unprecedented opprobrium press critics heaped on the ABC moderators – should have come as any surprise. That doesn't make it any less fascinating a guide to current strange notions of what is and is not a substantive issue in a presidential contest, or any less striking an indicator of the delicate treatment Mr. Obama's media following have come to consider his just due.

Moderators Charles Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos's offense was to ask questions Mr. Obama didn't want to address. Worse, they'd continued to press them even when the displeased candidate assured them these were old and tired questions.

- "Akin to a federal crime . . . new benchmarks of degradation," The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg declared, of the debate.

- "Despicable. . . . slanted against Obama," Washington Post critic Tom Shales charged.

- A "disgusting spectacle," the New York Times's David Carr opined.

- The questions had "disgraced democracy itself," according to columnist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.

The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.

Democrats, Demographics, & Damnation in Penn

Do campaigns really matter?  Maybe, maybe not.  Walter Shapiro makes the negative case at Salon:

Demographics may be destiny in the Democratic presidential race -- and almost nothing else matters. Despite the overwrought controversies swirling around visits to Bosnia and bitter blue-collar voters, despite one of the most plug-ugly debates in recent history, despite a late-breaking onslaught of negative ads, virtually every subcategory of the Democratic electorate performed in expected fashion. Clinton built her victory around women (57 percent in the exit polls), voters over 40 (her percentage rises in near lockstep fashion based on age), Pennsylvanians without a college degree (58 percent) and white Catholics (71 percent). Once again, Obama's strength was among black voters (89 percent), the affluent (handily winning among families earning over $150,000 a year) and voters under 30 (61 percent).

Jay Cost backs Shapiro up at Real Clear Politics.  He shows that the demographics of Clinton's Pennsylvania victory mirror her Ohio victory. This suggests that, aside from a few weird places like Wisconsin, you could just about predict the outcome of any Democratic primary if the only thing you knew was how much of each demographic group would come to the polls. 

John Judis continues to see ominous signs in these demographics. 

If you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s, led by college students and minorities. In Pennsylvania, Obama did best in college towns (60 to 40 percent in Penn State's Centre County) and in heavily black areas like Philadelphia. Its ideology is very liberal.

Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as "very liberal." In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among "very liberal" voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent  [my emphasis].

A lot of Democrats are beginning to wonder if Obama can possibly carry Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Florida.  And without any of those, how does he win? 

But it is Maureen Dowd who pours a lot of bitter syrup on Obama's waffles. 

In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”

His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

That's droppin' the Dowd on 'im.  But of course, she's right.  Obama has lived a sheltered life.  Nothing in his past has prepared him for the sausage and waffles at the local diner.  He doesn't get these people and they don't get him. 

ps.  Obama's half-eaten waffle is apparently selling for $7,000 on eBay.  His campaign should buy it just to get it off the market. 

 

Clinton Wins Penn by Ten

It looks like Ms. C. has won the Keystone State by a clean ten points. 

Precincts Reporting: 93%

winner: Hillary Clinton

 

Candidate	# of votes	% of total	# of delegates
Hillary Clinton	1,148,600	54.79%	52
Barack Obama	947,730	45.21%	46

Because of the Democratic system of proportional representation, this will net Senator Clinton about 6 delegates. 

Here is what is wrong with that.  In the general election, Pennsylvania will go one way or the other.  It won't split 55/45.   If Obama can't win a contest among Democrats in Pennsylvania, can he win when he has to compete for independents and  Republicans?  A rational primary system would give the state's delegates to the candidate who was likely to win the state in November. 

Clinton V. Obama: the Delegate Math Explained

We keep hearing over and over that Ms. Clinton can't win the nomination.  I did a little spread sheet math to get a clearer idea of what the situation is.  I am relying on data from different media sources, and there are a lot of discrepancies in the reported numbers.  For example, CNN reports the total number of delegates as 4,048 and 4322 in different places.    My count adds up to 4,200 total delegates, but I expect the numbers are close. Here is one number that is reliable:

Total needed for nomination: 2,024

Not counting Pennsylvania, here is the current count of "pledged delegates" for both candidates.  These are the delegates won in primaries and caucuses.   

Clinton 1250
Obama 1416

Add to this the number of "superdelegates" who have declared their allegiance.  These numbers are gathered by the press, and should be subject to considerable doubt.  A super delegate is free to change her or his mind at any time. 

Clinton 258
Obama 234

Put the totals together, and you get this:

Clinton 1508
Obama 1650

That is where the two candidates appeared to be standing coming into today's contest.  Now, I estimate the remaining pledged delegates to be assigned in electoral contests, including tonight's Pennsylvania Primary, Indiana and North Carolina, South Dakota, and others, to be this:

Remaining Pledged Delegates: 739

It seems safe to assume that those 739 votes will be split more or less evenly between the two candidates, with perhaps a small advantage for one or the other.  Half of 740 is 370.  So what will the final count look like after the South Dakota and Montana Primaries?

Clinton 1878
Obama 2020

That puts Obama four votes short of nomination, and Clinton 146 votes shy. What's left is the remaining super delegates:

Uncommitted Super Delegates: 303.

So where does that leave us? Assuming that the committed Super Delegates remain committed, there is a chance that Obama will win enough delegates in the remaining contests to clinch the nomination.  That means that Senator Clinton has to keep fighting all the way to Pierre, if she is to keep hope alive.  That is good news for John McCain. 

Tonight's contest will shift a few numbers in her direction.  That probably means that the remaining Super Delegates will likely decide the issue before the convention.  Ms. Clinton will have to convince a substantial majority of the SDs to come over to her side. 

That would mean denying the first Black candidate, with a majority of elected delegates and most of the popular vote behind, a nomination that it looks like he earned.  The only way that happens is if the Super Delegates become convinced that he can't possibly win.

The Democratic Party has done what it does best: it split right down the middle.  In any other year, that would assure a Republican victory.  This year all bets are off.  But John McCain surely does have a nice gap in which to insert his crow bar. 

Clinton Wins Pennsylvania

According to Fox Channel. Washington Post confirms.

Pennsylvania Democratic Primary Results
Candidate	Votes	%
Hillary Clinton	146,836	52%
Barack Obama	133,126	48%
Key: Winner Precincts: 13% | Updated: 9:20 PM ET | Source: AP

It's way too early to tell how wide the spread is going to be.  What are we looking for?

The public spin says that Clinton has to win big, and big is defined as 10% or more.  But those numbers are no more than spin.  I think that Fred Barnes is right, that Clinton will stay in if she wins by a groundhog in Punxsutawney. But under 5% will look pretty bad for her.  At the other extreme, Obama will not be seriously damaged unless she wins way more than the point spread, say 15-25%. That would indicate serious weakness on his part in an electorally important state. 

So: anything between 5% and 15% for Ms. Clinton will leave us exactly where we are now: Ms. Clinton can't win enough delegates to get the nomination; Obama will continue to be subject to doubts about his general election chances. 

Against Term Limits

Talking to some folks recently about term limits for South Dakota legislators, I have seen certain themes arise.
1. Term limits strengthens the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch.  Because the administrators in the executive are usually "long timers" they have all the information and history at their disposal.  Legislators are not around long enough to build that kind of memory.  Therefore the legislature relies heavily on the executive branch officials to provide information. 

2. Term limits empower interest groups.  This is true for the same reasons as above.  Lobbyists often have information the legislators themselves do not have.

3. Term limits make long term planning difficult.  Executive branch officials get frustrated because a term limited legislature, driven by the election cycle, demands immediate results from programs that have long term goals.  The legislators often do not see beyond their eight years in the legislature, while the state government needs to have ten and twenty year plans.  A good example of this is investment in research by universities.  A research program in the sciences, such as is likely to occur at the DUSEL site, may bear no fruit for ten or fifteen years, but the investment must take place now.  A term limited legislature is not set up for that kind of long range planning.

4. Term limits make for committee chairs and party leadership who by definition are not experienced.  This does not make for quality leadership.  Legislators have told me that it takes two or three terms just to get a sound grasp of what is going on in state government.  But by that point they are almost out the door.  Those who are ambitious for leadership must begin their climb early in their legislative career before they have a good grasp on the job, forsaking immersion in policy and process for politics. 

"They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace."

Jimmy Carter is pretty sure that the terrorist group Hamas and Syria, a state sponsor of terrorism, are on board with a plan for peace in the Middle East.  How does he know this?  Why, they told him. 

Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that he had obtained a significant concession from the Palestinian group Hamas regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace and that the Syrian leadership was eager for a full peace treaty with Israel. (snip)

He said he had extracted from Hamas a written promise to respect the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if it were ratified by a referendum of the Palestinian people. He said further that Syria believed "about 85 percent" of its issues with Israel had been resolved in prior negotiations and that it wanted a peace deal "as soon as possible."

Yet there is something about the words and deeds of Hamas that just don't add up:

Is Obama A Winner?

A reader responds, I assume, to this post on McCain's perceived Electoral College advantage:

In regard to your recent coverage on Obama, I think he can win and has a very excellent chance.  I think you are reading too much into all of the surface issues.  Obama has very strong following among Independents and younger voters and polls are starting to show that he is indeed making inroads with baby boomers and voters over 65.  He certainly has shown much willingness and determination in addressing the problems McCain does not or refuses to.  I'm voting for Obama because he has shown that he wants to really change things for the better and I believe that he has the best judgement, temperment, and tenancity to make things happen.

Other than the fact that I have no plans to vote for Barack Obama, I can't say I disagree with this reader. I was in Minnesota this weekend for a family event. One of the hazards of my profession is everyone always comes to you for political commentary, so I got a few "who's gonna win" questions.  Answer: I don't know.  I appreciate the argument of the McCain Electoral College advantage link to above, but Obama has some obvious strengths. 

First, he has a huge monetary advantage (free registration required) over Hillary Clinton and John McCain.  That doesn't just mean that he has more money; it also shows an ability to appeal to a broad constituency.  You don't raise over $200 million without being very popular. 

Second, it does seem clear that Obama is the candidate of choice for the American media, an advantage worth millions of dollars itself.

Third, albeit related to #2, Obama does seem to have a bit of teflon coating.  This is not meant to be an insult, but simply to say that bad news does not seem to stick to him.  Consider this observation from Peter Wehner.

Consider this thought experiment: Assume that a conservative candidate for the GOP nomination spent two decades at a church whose senior pastor was a white supremacist who uttered ugly racial (as well as anti-American) epithets from the pulpit. Assume, too, that this minister wasn’t just the candidate’s pastor but also a close friend, the man who married the candidate and his wife, baptized his two daughters, and inspired the title of his best-selling book.

In addition, assume that this GOP candidate, in preparing for his entry into politics, attended an early organizing meeting at the home of a man who, years before, was involved in blowing up multiple abortion clinics and today was unrepentant, stating his wish that he had bombed even more clinics. And let’s say that the GOP candidate’s press spokesman described the relationship between the two men as “friendly.”

Wehner wishes to make a point about last week's Democratic debate and the fairness of questions about Obama's associations.  But one can draw another point.  Buttressed by Stanley Kurtz today, it seems clear that Barack Obama has attended and offered considerable support to a church which holds as a fundamental belief that American is founded in and perpetuated by injustice.  America and the principles which inform it are essentially unjust.  The solution to this injustice, Jeremiah Wright's theology seems to suggest, is a  re-founding based in heightened racial identity and Marxism.  The fact that Obama can have these kinds of radical associations (to say nothing of the Bill Ayres issue) and still be ahead in national polls tells you that Obama has the ability to appeal to voters despite his deep and prolonged association with those whose teachings can fairly be described as anti-American (which, by the way, does not automatically make those teachings wrong).  This means he'll be tough to beat. 

The combination of Obama's charisma and the putrid state of the Republican party gives Obama a chance to win the presidency despite the fact that his is the most radically left-wing candidate ever nominated by a major party.  Will he actually win?  Ask me the second week of November. 

Calculus of Condescension

Mickey Kaus has some interesting reflections on the link between economic reductionism and condescension, inspired of course, by Obama's Bittergate.  He distinguishes between various versions of the former, and then admits to condescending views of his own. 

The problem for me is that I'm a Vulgar Marxist too. I've always believed that people need to eat, and want to get ahead and prosper. If you give them an avenue that lets them do that, they aren't going to let their religion, their music, their sexual habits, their families or their educational system stand in their way for long. The two most obvious contemporary applications of this economic determinism are 1) China (when the Chinese have a capitalist economy they won't be able to have a Communist government, Vulgar Marxists would say) and 2) the Muslim world (if Islam needs a Reformation in order to prosper in a global market, then Islam will eventually get a Reformation). I agree with both of those propositions.

1)  There is a bit of confusion here.  Vulgar Marxists are not only condescending but naive: they think that Mom and Dad and Grandpa are stupid for holding religious views that support the ruling class, and that they could easily abandon these views if they were only as smart and as good as, say, a nineteen year olds sociology major.  A sophisticated Marxist will say that the views supporting the class structure may be indispensable in a given socio-economic environment, and that those views look perfectly correct from a certain point of view.  This is less insulting and naive than the vulgar view, but it is still condescending.  It implies that the Marxist, by virtue of his superior knowledge, can see through others in a way that they do cannot see through him.

2)  Can I hold the view that person A believes idea B for reasons that I perceive but he does or cannot perceive, without being condescending?  Not on that particular topic.  But I can take such a view of another without claiming to be a wiser or better person in general.  We all may have some blind spots, and it may be obvious to every idiot but me that Mary is playing me for a fool. 

3)  There is nothing condescending in the view that a communist government cannot survive indefinitely in a capitalist system, or that a Muslim country has to adopt a modern banking system if it wants a modern economy.  Those are views are about matters of fact, and intelligent people can take opposite views about them without looking down on one another.  It would only be condescending of Kaus if he were to say that the communists or the Muslims can't see the truth of their situations in a way that he can. 

A Sadr Yet No Wiser A Man

Moktada al-Sadr has been fearlessly directing his war against the Government of Iraq and the U.S., from Iran.  The American media has largely reported this business as another Tet Offensive, but it is getting harder to put the shine on this dim bulb.  The AP does its best.  "Twelve Militants Die as Violence Increases."  That "violence increases" part was just to let us know that the news is very bad.  Now here is the story:

A U.S. military spokesman says 12 criminal fighters have been killed during an "uptick" in clashes in Baghdad's main Shiite district of Sadr City.

The announcement Sunday comes after anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned he will declare war if a U.S.-Iraqi crackdown against his followers is not stopped.

Lt. Col. Steve Stover says "there was an uptick in violence in comparison with the past couple of weeks."

The deadliest strike was when seven militants attacked a U.S. checkpoint just before 8 a.m. in Sadr City. He says U.S. troops killed the heavily armed men, then killed two other snipers firing at them from a rooftop.

Stover says three other militants were killed while trying to plant roadside bombs earlier in Sadr City.

So what we have here is twelve of Moktada's attacking U.S. soldiers and getting, well, dead.  Apart from the silly bit about the "uptick", there is not a shred of evidence that violence is increasing. 

The New York Times, amazingly enough, has an honest accounting. 

Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Despite the apparent concession of Basra, Mr. Sadr issued defiant words on Saturday night. In a long statement read from the loudspeakers of his Sadr City Mosque, he threatened to declare “war until liberation” against the government if fighting against his militia forces continued.

But it was difficult to tell whether his words posed a real threat or were a desperate effort to prove that his group was still a feared force, especially given that his militia’s actions in Basra followed a pattern seen again and again: the Mahdi militia battles Iraqi government troops to a standstill and then retreats.

Why his fighters have clung to those fight-then-fade tactics is unknown.

Well, let me give you a hint: firing a couple of shots and then running like Hell is all they got.  With a little air support, the Iraqi army is turning Sadr's ass into oatmeal.  He has lost popular support in Iraq, and even the Iranians are getting tired of him. Mr. Maliki's government is crushing Sadr, and it's hard even for the AP to turn that into bad news. 

Abortion & Civility, Genetics & Personhood

My Keloland colleague Cory Heidelberger has an excellent post on his conversations with a Catholic friend who disagrees with him on abortion.  This is the punchline:

I'm glad this friend and I remain on speaking terms. I want her around to remind me of the very high moral bar she sets... for all of us.

I agree with Cory that it is hard to have a friendly debate about this topic because there is a lot at stake.  But he clearly recognizes the decency of someone on the other side, and that is a good example for all of us. 

I would add something: both the pro-choice and the pro-life side begin from the same set of principles: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  However difficult the passions may be, this is a family affair.  If we were not, at heart, attached to the same principles, we couldn't have this disagreement.  It might help to remember that.

I received a thoughtful and interesting reply to my last post on the beginning of life.  In that post, I said this:

Consider this question: what color was Sherlock Holmes hair?  I do not remember if Arthur Conan Doyle ever answered that question, but he could have answered it any way he liked because Holmes did not really exist.  I do exist, and so does Professor Schaff and his anonymous interlocutor.  And even if all three of us were died orange or shaved bald, we would still be blond or brunet or what have you because our hair color depends on our genes not on our appearance. Now: when did the question of my hair color first have an answer?  It was at the moment of my conception, when my mother's and father's genes were sorted out to produce a unique cell, with all the genetic information and the machinery to develop into fully functioning adult in time.

My reader replies:

I do not claim to be a biology expert, but I do not think this is quite
right. I wouldn't argue your specific point of human hair color, but I am
not sure that you can extrapolate from that single physical attribute that
personhood is set at conception. Although genes are inherited, their
expression occurs throughout embryo development (epigenesis). Some genes
(and the attributes they represent) are expressed differently as the embryo
develops.

An example of this effect in biology is cat hair coloring. Cloned cats (yes,
there is a company that does this at $50,000 a pop) do not look the same.
Calico patterns, even with the same genes, appear different due to some
randomness in gene expression during embryo development. I have also read of
identical human twins that likewise have physical variations (shoe size, for
example).

Now if you consider personhood to include behavioral, as well as physical
attributes, I would be hard-pressed to say definitively that personhood
occurs at conception. Even if you were to believe that an individual's
personality was 100% genetic, the expression of that genetic blueprint would
not be set at conception.

I emphatically agree that many basic biological traits are not fixed at conception.  My point was a general one, that many questions about an individual are surely answered from conception, and that they are answered about a specific biological organism with his or her own genetic code, distinct from the mother.  So someone, some creature existed, with a certain hair color and/or other permanent characteristics, from the moment of my conception.  And if it was not me, who was it? 

An individual human being has a beginning and an end.  The end can be notoriously fuzzy in certain cases: when the higher brain functions cease, when the personality disintegrates, etc.  If a person is brain dead, does turning off the machine amount to killing him?  Those are serious questions.

I just don't think the same thing is true of the beginning of life.  If that first complete cell had perished,  that cell to which all the cells of my body trace their ancestry, that would have been the end of this person.  So I think that logic does indeed fix the beginning of personhood at conception.

I am grateful to my e-mail interlocutor for his note.