South Dakota Politics

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. 

SDP Jazz Note: A New Blog for Jazz Collectors

The strength of a blog is also its weakness: no editorial supervision whatsoever.  I know that SDP has a lot of regular readers who are interested in the political issues we cover, but how many are interested in movies, let alone horror movies, and jazz?  I don't have to care.  Readers are certainly free to skip the zombie posts along with the reviews of Thelonious Monk records.  I get paid the same either way. 

But I have created a new blog where I will park all of my jazz posts, past, present, and future, in hopes of attracting more jazz-oriented readers.  You can find it at this address: http://jazznotesdp.blogspot.com/. 

A student of mine who is a talented musician recently asked me to recommend some jazz artists.  He was familiar with names like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, and he had heard Kind of Blue.  But he had never heard of Wayne Shorter or Art Pepper.  This got me thinking.  I listened to and loved jazz for a long time before I had any idea how to buy jazz recordings.  As a result, I walked into a jazz record store only a few years ago and came away with three really pedestrian cds, leaving behind some of the most marvelous music ever recorded.  Now I know better, and this new website, along with all my Jazz Note posts, is all about that. 

My strategy for building a jazz collection is what I like to call the "pub crawl" method.  Focus on a single recording or set of recordings, one you like but preferably one that is also recognized to be fundamental to the history of the music, and then use that as a point of orientation.  I began with the four recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet in 1956: Workin', Cookin', Relaxin', and Steamin'.  Each one is brilliant, and together they give you a good foothold in the most important period of jazz. 

Where do you go from there?  Well, the Miles Davis Quintet later became a sextet, with the addition of Cannonball Adderley.  You could look into that.  Then there is the second great quintet in the sixties, with Wayne Shorter replacing Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock on piano.  Another avenue along with to crawl is to follow the work of the various members of the original quintet in the same period.  Coltrane does a lot of brilliant work on his own, and the rhythm section consisting of Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, produces its own body of work.  Then do the same with the sextet and the second quintet. 

The reason for crawling rather than jumping about is that it allows you to build a coherent map of the music, and thus you can intelligently compare different recordings.  It will also allow you to identify periods in each artist's career that you want to avoid.  During the late sixties and seventies, a lot of brilliant jazz men recorded some atrocious stuff, as most will readily admit.  But that doesn't mean you can't pick more than one artist or combo to use as points of orientation.  As you feel your way along, you will find a number of great recordings, jazz geniuses, and spectacular groups to collect and explore. 

Jazz is one of America's great contributions to world culture.  Even the French like it!  Today it is available to almost anyone who takes an interest in what is brilliant and beautiful.