South Dakota Politics

Obama and Fund Raising: An Email

Frequent emailer GG writes:

Obama has done the right and honorable thing by not accepting public funding.  For far too long politicians from both sides have taken advantage of U.S. taxpayers in fuding their campaigns.  I would think that Conservatives, "True Conservatives" would actually aplaud the Obama move on not accepting campaign contribuitions.  But, alas, they keep proving me wrong as usual.  Nothing new here. 

Of course, the complaint from conservatives is not the fact that Obama is opting out of public financing.  I and many (probably most) conservatives do not believe in the public financing scheme.  I am with GG that politicians should not use the tax payers to fund their campaigns.  I have yet to read  criticism of Obama from a conservative on this issue based on some conservative support for public financing of elections.  GG is just making that up.  Perhaps, though, GG should have a talk with his candidate, who said in rejecting public money, "It's not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections." So GG doesn't even agree with his candidate, but, as we see, his candidate's actions don't match the candidate's words.  I guess that's what GG calls "right and honorable."  Others might call it expedient. 

This is the criticism.  Obama claims to be a new politician, open and honest with the people.  A man of his word.  But what has he done? Via Yahoo News.

Last year, Obama filled out a questionnaire where he vowed to "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." But since clinching the Democratic nomination earlier this month, Obama has not broached the subject with McCain. The only discussion occurred about two weeks ago between Obama's and McCain's lawyers,

Obama lawyer Robert Bauer said he discussed the public financing issue for 45 minutes on June 6 with McCain counsel Trevor Potter. In interviews and e-mails, both Bauer and Potter agree that Bauer raised concerns about McCain having a head start because he had secured the nomination in early March and Obama did not until June 3. Potter said he told Bauer that given Obama's fundraising "I was sure there would be no McCain advantage by the end of the summer."

That meeting, Potter said, "was not part of any negotiation" on public financing.

"There was no aggressive pursuit of negotiations with the McCain campaign, there was no pursuit, period, of negotiations with the McCain campaign," Potter added later in a conference call with reporters.

Obama wants all the appearances of being a new politician without actually acting like one.  Relatedly, he apparently is now claiming that he "extended health care for wounded troops who had been neglected" even though he didn't even vote on the bill he cites as evidence.  Whoops. 

To be clear, Obama's rejection of public financing is a smart move.  He has a fundraising and organization edge over McCain.  His prodigious fund raising is a sign of his broad support.  There is nothing dirty in not accepting public funds or being strategic in one's choices.  Yet, Obama did say he would take public funds and now has rejected those funds when they are inconvenient to him. This is a pattern with Obama: take the bold stance until it thwarts his ambitions, and then chuck his alleged principles overboard.  All politicians change their positions from time to time, and certainly electoral considerations take part in this calculation.  I for one hope John McCain changes his position on drilling in ANWR.  But Obama's actions just go to prove what I said yesterday: Obama claims to be a new politician, but in actuality he is just like the old.  So it is worth pointing out that one of his fundamental campaign themes is a house built on sand. 

Darwinian Evolution Observed in the Lab

Critics of Darwinian theory frequently complain that evolution cannot be directly observed.  In fact this has not been true for a long time.  Natural selection as a mechanism for change in the forms of organisms has been extensively demonstrated and studied in laboratories.  Little Green Footballs directs our attention to a twenty year experiment that has confirmed and enriched our understanding of the major elements in the theory. 

His source is science writer Carl Zimmer, who writes about biologist Richard Lenski at Michigan State University. 

Lenski started off with a single microbe [Escherichia coli, the common gut microbe]. It divided a few times into identical clones, from which Lenski started 12 colonies. He kept each of these 12 lines in its own flask. Each day he and his colleagues provided the bacteria with a little glucose, which was gobbled up by the afternoon. The next morning, the scientists took a small sample from each flask and put it in a new one with fresh glucose. And on and on and on, for 20 years and running.

So from one E Coli Jacob, Lenski produced twelve tribes.  Then he changed their environment by adding the sugar.  He has had twenty years to see how the microbes would adapt to the new environment. 

Based on what scientists already knew about evolution, Lenski expected that the bacteria would experience natural selection in their new environment. In each generation, some of the microbes would mutate. Most of the mutations would be harmful, killing the bacteria or making them grow more slowly. Others would be beneficial allowing them to breed faster in their new environment. They would gradually dominate the population, only to be replaced when a new mutation arose to produce an even fitter sort of microbe.

But how do you keep track of what is actually happening?  How do you know what is due to new information introduced by mutation, and what is due to previously unsuspected traits of an existing population? 

Lenski used a simple but elegant method to find out. He froze some of the original bacteria in each line, and then froze bacteria every 500 generations. Whenever he was so inclined, he could go back into this fossil record and thaw out some bacteria, bringing them back to life. By putting the newest bacteria in his lines in a flask along with their ancestors, for example, he could compare how well the bacteria had adapted to the environment he had created.

This is evolution observed and tested.  Lenski could constantly compare later generations to earlier ones, subject to genetic analysis. And if a population became contaminated by outside organisms (a constant problem), he could restore an earlier, uncontaminated sample.  It's a lot like keeping a back up copy of a file. 

What Lenski observed is exactly what Darwinian theory leads one to suspect: general adaptation to the environment, driven in part by random mutation. 

Over the generations, in fits and starts, the bacteria did indeed evolve into faster breeders. The bacteria in the flasks today breed 75% faster on average than their original ancestor. Lenski and his colleagues have pinpointed some of the genes that have evolved along the way; in some cases, for example, the same gene has changed in almost every line, but it has mutated in a different spot in each case. Lenski and his colleagues have also shown how natural selection has demanded trade-offs from the bacteria; while they grow faster on a meager diet of glucose, they've gotten worse at feeding on some other kinds of sugars.

So a beneficial trait emerged several times in different bacterial tribes.  The genes coding for the trait weren't there to begin with.  Random mutation is the only explanation for their emergence. 

But some traits are easier to get by mutation than others.  One of Lenski's bacterial tribes (he would call them colonies) acquired the ability to consume citrate, which is essentially the same compound that makes lemons tart.  Unlike the above mentioned mutations, this one happened only once in one colony. 

Some critics of Darwinian theory, such as the Intelligent Design school, acknowledge the power of natural selection to modify existing species, but complain that we have never observed speciation, the process by which a new species can emerge from existing ones.  Lenski has nailed that one down.  How do we know what a species is?  How do we tell which organism belongs in which species, or when two populations of creatures deserve to be identified as different species or subspecies?  The science of biology has no generally accepted answer to that question, because in almost all cases the boundaries are vague and shifting.  Are dogs and wolves two species or one?  And what about coyotes?  All three creatures interbreed. 

It seems relatively easy to distinguish human beings from chimpanzees, but we do so by recognizing the different traits of each species: they are hairy and walk on their knuckles, we are naked and laugh at jokes.  But one of the defining species characteristics of Escherichia coli is that it can't eat citrate.  In nature, E coli only acquire this ability when they borrow it from other species of bacteria.  In Richard Lenski's experiment, Darwinian evolution has produced a new organism that does not fit the definition of any previously existing species of organism.  Speciation has been observed in the laboratory.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  I think that is almost a tautology, though it leaves a lot of open questions about God.  But He created it according to a number of basic physical laws, and allowed pointy heads like Lenski to discover them. Evolutionary biologists have been more faithful to the Creator, in their own fashion, than have the critics of Darwin. 

For those of us who want to look and things and see what they are, Lenski's work is pure gold. 

RNC Blasts Obama on Free Trade

Obama Stumbles on Fundraising

After losing most contests in the final three months of the primary, Barack Obama's fundraising numbers fell during the same three months.  Numbers released today shows May 2008 was his weakest fundraising month, outperforming John McCain by only one million:

Democrat Barack Obama raised $22 million in May for his presidential campaign, his weakest fundraising month this year, and ended the month with $43 million cash on hand, the campaign reported Friday.

...

The May figures place Obama and McCain on nearly equal footing. McCain raised $21 million in May and reported $31.6 million cash on hand at month's end.

But McCain also benefited from the Republican National Committee, which reported $53.5 million cash on hand to the Democratic national committee's $4 million. The parties are already working with their respective presidential candidates to coordinate their campaigns.

Obama reached a peak in February, where he raised $50 million.  Those numbers dropped to $40 million in March, and $32 million in April.  Between February and May, Jeremiah Wright, the derogatory small-town comments, and several gaffes haunted the campaign.  Meanwhile, John McCain has improved his fundraising numbers since the nomination.  He has spent far less than he raises while remaining in the spotlight, meaning he's been far more efficient with his money.  While Obama's supporters talked about raising $100 million in June, it appears most of their fundraising opportunities passed with the primary.

UPDATE:  A bit premature?

Thune Fighting Crime on the Reservations

From a Thune press release:

Senator John Thune today joined Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Ron His Horse Is Thunder in testifying before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in regard to the draft Indian Crime bill that Senator Thune and others have drafted.

"The absence of basic levels of public safety on many of our nation's reservations has reached a crisis point," said Thune. "The law enforcement surge on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation is already showing signs of success, but there is still much that needs to be done to combat the high crime rates that plague much of Indian Country.

"The draft bill before the Indian Affairs Committee encourages the appointment of Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys to prosecute reservation crimes in federal courts, empowers tribal justice systems, and improves the collection of data regarding crimes committed in Indian Country, which would allow for more adaptive methods to combat lawlessness."

Last year, Senator Thune hosted a roundtable meeting with leaders from all nine of South Dakota's tribes, and law enforcement and public safety was the top concern. Since then, Senator Thune has worked with tribal, state, and federal officials to find ways to address the public safety crisis-including efforts both last year and this year to boost federal funding for additional law enforcement officers and to improve tribal court systems.

Does Obama Now Want to Stay in Iraq?

Jim Geraghty:  "Aren't Obama's comments to Zebari — presuming they're being characterized accurately — a glaring contradiction of the Obama campaign's constant declaration of 'profound differences' with McCain on the Iraq War? Isn't a large chunk of his support from the Democratic grassroots built on this notion that a President Obama would bring the troops home quickly?  Is a trip by Austan Goolsbee to the Iraqi embassy the next step? Will there be private assurances that Obama's Iraq stand on the campaign trail is 'more reflective of political maneuvering than policy'?"

UPDATE:  Abe Greenwald:  "Remember Those Iraqi Benchmarks? Well, Guess What… Democrats no longer talk of the 18 benchmarks for measuring progress in Iraq because so much progress has now taken place."

Re: Obama the Politician

Piggybacking on Prof. Schaff's post below, you also might want to read the post entitled "Barack Obama: The Undistinguished Gentleman" over at Protein Wisdom.

Obama Reneges Public Financing

Barack Obama has broken his pledge to fund his campaign with public financing, a promise he made last year if the Republican candidate also agreed to it.  John McCain has offered to stay within the system, but Obama told supporters today he would abandon that offer.  He offers three reasons for abandoning his position, but never fully explains why.  One reason is because the McCain campaign and the RNC take lobbyist money, but how that differs from the DNC and their interests is left unexplained.  He also says Republicans skillfully use 527s, which has nothing to do with public financing, and Democrats have their own 527s and excelled at using them against the GOP in 2004 with big donors like George Soros.  Finally, Obama declares the system "broken" but never says why he hasn't done anything in his three years as Senator to fix it. 

Obama feels that he can raise more money outside the system than within it.  He may blame McCain, the weather, or the alignment of the planets, but it comes down to the money.  His reasons for abandoning public financing have nothing to do with the examples he cited.

UPDATE:  From April of this year:

Obama The Politician

David Brooks writes that Barack Obama, contrary to popular opinion, is a politician and a pretty deft one at that.  This provokes some thought.  What do we know about Barack Obama? 

Obama argued that he'd meet unconditionally with our enemies, but when he came under attack for that position he said he'd have "preparation," but not "preconditions," as if  there is a difference. 

He argued that Iran was no significant threat to the U.S., but then when criticized he backtracked saying that he has always thought that Iran posed a "grave" threat to the U.S.

He railed against NAFTA while having his surrogates assure the Canadians that  he didn't mean it. 

He recently called for an "undivided" Jerusalem, but when he found out that those are fighting words in the Middle East he had to back off. 

He swore his fidelity to public financing of presidential campaigns until that became inconvenient so now he has forsaken such financing. 

He says he won't be swayed by the special interests and greedy corporations, but, according to Brooks, he has a "phalanx" of corporate leaders bundling money for him. 

He tells us that he won't make promises he can't keep, yet he also promises $900 billion in new spending with only $40 billion in new revenue, all the while insisting that he'll balance the budget. 

He was opposed to the war in Iraq in 2002, but in 2004 he said his position was pretty much the same as George Bush's, and now of course he claims to be the pure anti-war candidate. 

He tells audiences that he is for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but is apparently telling members of the Iraqi government that he won't act too quickly. 

He claims to have a new politics, but he is a conventional liberal, ranked the most liberal member of the US Senate by National Journal.

Relatedly, he claims to offer a new politics, but he is a product of the corrupt Daley machine in Chicago, hiring Daley's right-hand man, David Axelrod, as his spokesperson.  He got a sweetheart deal on a $4 million mansion from corrupt Chicago business man Tony Rezko.  But Obama says he is shocked to find out Rezko is a criminal. 

He makes claims to "post-partisanship," yet he has voted with his party 97% of the time in the US Senate.  You almost can't get any more partisan.  One reason he talks so much about the ethics bill he supported is that it represents the only evidence of bipartisanship he has and is the only piece of significant legislation he has any association with.

He claims to offer bold leadership, but as Brooks documents, throughout his career he has avoided making tough votes, choosing instead to vote "present."   

He claims that he sat in the seats at Trinity Christian "every Sunday" yet was unaware that his pastor was an anti-American racial separatist.  He said he could no more disown his pastor than he could his own family, but he then disowned his pastor only weeks later.

Obama is just like other politicians, only a lot more charming and not quite as competent at governing.   

Songs of South Dakota

I've received some feedback from my post on songs of North Dakota.  Reader Randy R. writes in:

You asked for songs of South Dakota?

"Rocky Raccoon" by The Beatles

Emmy Lou Harris' The Ballad of Sally Rose album

And our blogosphere cohort Pat Powers writes:

You forgot Liz Phair (although no self respecting SDakotan is going to champion this for State song): http://www.metrolyrics.com/south-dakota-lyrics-liz-phair.html

Frank Sinatra: http://www.thepeaches.com/music/frank/IGotAGalILoveInNorthAndSouthDakota.htm

Bee Gees:
http://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/bee_gees/south_dakota_morning-lyrics-1128414.html

Dwight Yoakam:
http://artists.letssingit.com/dwight-yoakam-lyrics-rapid-city-south-dakota-pn9v4rx

Cherry Poppin Daddies (of Zoot Suit Riot fame)
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/c/cherrypoppindaddies799/hazelsouthdakota37688.html
From the Album Rapid City Muscle Car

And that's just the top of the iceberg.....

Why the Russians Lost the Cold War

From shoutwire:

Ok, so we found the entrance.  Now where's the door?

I have just one question: how did they get the barrels there?

Energy and Economics

My esteemed Keloland Colleague, Todd Epp, has a thought provoking post on energy.  That's another way of saying I disagree with almost everything he says.  Or at least the part after the confession. 

Oil will continue to be part of the energy equation for the foreseeable future. But the sooner the United States embarks on meaningful government funded research and development on biofuels, hydrogen, solar, wind, and other "green" energy solutions, we will continue to be held hostage by exorbitant fuel prices, multi-national corporations, unfriendly foreign governments--and our own laziness and lack of will.

I am not sure what "meaningful" means in this context, except for more expensive.  But consider the items in Todd's list.  Contrary to popular belief (and George W. Bush is included here), hydrogen is not a potential energy source.  You start with water and you end up with water.  That's sounds clean and it may be; but applying the laws of thermodynamics, it means that the energy it takes to separate hydrogen out has to be greater than that what you will get back from burning it.  Hydrogen may become a very useful and clean means of storing energy, but it can't solve the basic problem. 

Government investment is biofuels is meaningful if anything is, and it has given us ethanol.  God knows I love it, as it is helping to fuel the South Dakota economy; but it may prove to be one of the most disastrous environmental policies in decades.  At present, the ethanol industry consumes a lot more energy than it adds back, so it is hardly helping. 

The same is true for wind power, which is a technological means of turning air currents into government dollars.  Wind power may become modestly viable in the future; but the obstacles to it as a serious source of power are horrendous, and this make it very unlikely that it will ever be more than a very marginal contribution.  For now it is a net loss.  Solar energy may be more promising over the long run, at least as a source of small scale generation. 

The problem with "meaningful" or sub-meaningful government investment in such things is that it tends to be driven entirely by two forces tangential to the problem it addresses: what sounds sexy and nice (wind and sun, good!), and what constituencies can cash in. Neither of these things is tied to any actual payback in energy production.  The companies that are investing in wind power are doing so for the sake of tax breaks.  They are all but uninterested in selling their meager output of electricity.  So long as government subsides keep corn prices high, producers don't have to care about the cost-benefit analysis of ethanol policy. 

The difficulty in trying to generate "green" energy is illustrated by the experience of one Al Gore.  Last February he was criticized for the fact that his home has a very large carbon footprint, larger than most neighborhoods.  So Gore had all kinds of green technologies installed at his home.  The result?  His personal energy use surged by 10%.  It's very challenging to calculate the real outcomes of any technology. 

But it's easy to tell how much it costs in dollars.  The free market is not the answer to every problem, but it is obviously the answer to this one.  As energy costs rise, two things are going to happen: producers will become more efficient at finding and extracting energy, and consumers will become more efficient at consuming it.  I think those two processes will continue to meet our needs indefinitely, but that of course is speculation.  All we can say for certain is that they have been the engine of economic growth in every society since the industrial revolution began.

I don't think there is anything wrong with government investments in technology research.  If the state can pay Professor Schaff's salary, it can do other useless things with its money.  Some good may even come of it.  But it's contrary to all evidence and reason to think that it will lead to "energy independence." 

Energy News

John McCain is advocating nuclear power.  Good for him.  Meanwhile, Democrats, aware the opening up new areas to drilling is wildly popular, are making sure that such proposals do not come up for a vote.  Instead, they are proposing nationalizing our refining capacity.  To think that central planners can adequately respond to the vagaries of supply and demand for oil is akin to believing that the moon is made of cheese.  It defies all experience. Nationalizing refineries will almost certainly mean greater inefficiency in our distribution of gas.  That means gas shortages, causing a rise in price. 

I haven't met or read the person who thinks that more drilling is the single solution to our energy woes.  But only a fool or an ideologue would not tap domestic sources of fossil fuels as one part of a comprehensive energy policy.  We are not going to eliminate the need for fossil fuels tomorrow.  Since we need them, why not have a greater supply produced domestically?  As I say, this is part of a comprehensive approach to energy, which also includes expansion of nuclear power and renewable power, such as solar and wind as well as promoting conservation.  Look at the opinion polls and consumer activity.  People believe and act in a way that shows a grasp of the obvious: we need to both  drill more while becoming less dependent.  So vast majorities favor more drilling while our buying habits show a rejection of gas guzzling cars.  That's prudence. 

Minnesota: Vulgarian For Senate

If you've been following the Minnesota Senate race, you know that Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken, the comedian, has been getting whooped pretty good over his past writing, including a vulgar piece in Playboy about pornography and a proposed Saturday Night Live skit making fun of rape. Rep. Betty McCullum (D-MN) has been pretty tough on Franken. 

Franken's foibles have now made the Washington Post in a column by Michael Gerson.  Gerson considers the notion that Franken is engaged in serious comedy, the activity of the satirist:

Satire has been called "punishment for those who deserve it." Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.

So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."

Orwell would be so proud.

"Porn-O-Rama!" is a modern campaign document every voter should read -- the Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism. It has the literary sensibilities and moral seriousness of an awkward adolescent nerd publishing an underground newspaper to shock his way into campus popularity. But, in this case, the article was written in 2000 by a 48-year-old man.

As they say, read the whole thing.

An important distinction to be made here is between public and private vulgarity or crudity.  Most men (and probably quite a few women) have been around and perhaps engaged in what we can call "locker room" conversation.  Crude, off-color humor is often part of this jocularity.  It is one thing to do this in private, away from the public ear.  It is another to present is an acceptable mode of public discourse, as the way adults talk to each other.  Gerson is correct; Franken uses his freedom of speech they way an adolescent would: to say naughty words and giggle at them. Franken appeals to the low in us, not the noble. 

Franken's sex talk appears to sink to the level of the puerile, never to rise again.  This is not to say sex jokes are never appropriate. Shakespeare has plenty of sex jokes (think of the bawdy talk from Mercutio and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet). But this bawdy talk serves a purpose, to prevent us from talking sex too seriously, either over-romanticizing it or over analyzing it.  In either case, Shakespeare's bawdy talk serve to provoke thought, Franken's to end it. 

As Gerson suggests, Franken's endorsement by his party likely serves to lower the quality of our discourse. Franken's humor is not just vulgar, it is mean.  The word "mean" literally has the connotation of small or petty (as in "no mean feat").  Franken makes us smaller, a lesser people.  His election would represent a loss for simple decency. 

The Democrats targeted the current office holder, Sen. Norman Coleman, as one of the easiest targets.  Perhaps they nominated one man capable of losing to Coleman.  Either way, whether Franken gains the seat or not, the Democrats come out as losers. They either lose an election or their dignity. 

Flooding Update

A couple days ago I wrote about flooding on the Mississippi, which we passed over on Saturday going from Iowa to Illinois at the town of Burlington, IA.  Well, if I may paraphrase Johnny Cash, "How high's the water, mama?  It's 30 feet over flood stage and rising."  Read the story here.  As I feared, the bridge at Burlington (I have a picture in the original post) is now closed due to flooding.  We contemplated going to Hannibal, MO on the way back.  Well, I guess we won't be doing that. 

Obama the Accident Prone

Today's big goof up was one of those small but really embarrassing unforced errors.  From the Politico:

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

Now it's easy to see what "volunteers" were worried about.  A picture of Obama including two apparently Muslim women would be bound to appear on dozens (or who knows how many) wing nut blogs with Barack HUSSEIN Obama as the post title.  Still, to exclude these women is playing into the hands of bigots, and that is something that one cannot allow oneself to do. 

Closer to the man was Obama's gaffe about Jerusalem.  From Reuters:

Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

 

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. "He has closed all doors to peace," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

The Obama campaign quickly invented excuses for the remarks, but surely they are exactly what they appear to be: evidence that the candidate just isn't that well informed on a lot of key issues. 

Obama is surely eloquent, but he has shown some difficulties in remembering basic facts like how many states there are (50, not 57), or where he is at any one time.  John Podhoretz, blogging for Commentary, makes this point:

It is clear Obama’s path to victory is through the teleprompter. Let him give a big speech and he drives it like Tiger Woods hitting a fairway, as he did Sunday with his stunning sermon about the importance of fathers. But let him sit for an interview with a well-prepared reporter who isn’t interested in shilling for him and Obama makes mistake after mistake. This is what happened the other day with ABC’s Jake Tapper, who got Obama to talk about how we need to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement matter — which is exactly what he should not be saying if he wants to solidify those less-liberal Democratic votes in the states where he was shellacked by Hillary Clinton — and how he opposes all forms of school choice — which works against his vague message that he is a vague agent of vague change.

Now I think these are more interesting cases.  Obama surely had a point: terrorists arrested inside the United States will be subject to the justice system, and there is no reason why that system is not up to the job.  But what we need to know about a President Obama is that he would be willing to make the hard choices that international terrorism might force on him.  Suppose his national security adviser walks into his office and informs him that a terrorist attack against the U.S. is being assembled at a certain location, say, in Sudan.  Will he order his officers to use any means at their disposal to acquire the target, or command them to wait until a warrant can be obtained to listen in on their conversations?  Will he order his forces to launch an attack the way a nation attacks its enemies in war, or hesitate for fear of violating international law? 

What seems to happen again and again is that Obama says the things he needs to say about all this only after it turns into a controversy.  I suspect the reason for this is very simple: he spent twenty years talking only to people who were clustered well to the left of center on the political spectrum. Republicans should not be too hopeful about this.  I am guessing that Obama Inc. will firm up pretty quickly.  But just right now the candidate is a bit accident prone. 

Quantum of Solis 3

Cory Heidelberger rose to the challenge I issued in my recent post, and came up with his own soap opera explanation for the "Obama Hires Solis Doyle" story. 

And then it hits me (thank you, Dr. Blanchard, for the inspiration): Solis Doyle's appointment is proof that Chicago politics rules supreme. It's more than cronyism: it's a reward for a job well done. Solis Doyle's performance as Clinton's campaign manager was too incompetent to be believed. She knew what she was doing: she was the Obama machine's plant in the Clinton camp. They got to Solis Doyle in 2006, got her to burn up Clinton's Senate campaign money and then sabotage the great inevitable campaign in Iowa. Mission accomplished; now Solis Doyle can come in from the cold and openly work for the Chicago pals she's been helping all along.

Well done Cory!  That's much better than anything I came up with.  Of course, if it's true, Solis Doyle ought to be Obama's Chief of Staff. 

But leave it to intrepid reader Gene to come up with a plausible explanation.

Professor—it’s all about the Hispanic vote—nothing more—nothing less.  Gene

Well, ok.  Obama has legitimate reasons to be concerned about the Hispanic vote.  But this explanation is a lot like the Chicago politics explanation: it only tells us why someone like her was chosen, not why she was chosen.  Couldn't the Obama people have found an Hispanic to be the VP chief of staff who wasn't disastrously incompetent, and didn't alienate the Clinton people?  The Department of Mysteries will keep an open file on this one. 

Let's See Your Cat Do This

Another reason to have a dog:

OMAHA, Neb. -- A Labrador retriever lived up to its name Friday when he plucked his 12-year-old owner out of the Platte River, near North Bend.

Tony Bailey can usually swim in the river, but recent rains have pushed it up higher than normal and whipped up unusual currents. When Tony jumped into the Platte on Friday, he was quickly sucked in.

"It was, like, over my head and I couldn't touch," he said.

He was only a few feet away from the shore, but the river current was strong enough that it was pulling him down and under. He said his cries for help weren't being heard by anyone, except Jake, the 4-year-old Lab.

"I was saying, 'Help, help,' and I saw him jump in, and then my head went under, and when I came up, he was right here by me," Tony said.

Tony said the dog swam out next to him and he grabbed the dog's neck. The dog swam back to shore with the boy in tow.

Follow the link above for video about Jake the Wonder Dog. 

George W. & Europe

The critics of the Bush Administration often complain that George W. has wrecked our relations with the rest of the world.  Like a lot of conventional wisdom, this was half true and is now behind the curve.  Our four most important European allies, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, all have rather strongly pro-American governments just now.  The best news comes from France.  From the Washington Post:

President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday announced a major new defense policy that would integrate French troops into the command structure of the NATO alliance for the first time in more than four decades.

Now that represents pretty dramatic progress in American-European relations, and even better news for NATO.  The military alliance between the U.S. and Europe is the only police force the world order has. 

It is not clear how much good this good news is worth.  Europe once hoped to rival the U.S. by uniting, but it is clear now that they aren't capable of much uniting and wouldn't be all that impressive if they were.  Europe is fading.  Still, having them with us is better than not. 

Quantum of Solis

As I posted last night, the Obama organization has hired Patti Solis Doyle to be chief of staff to the Senator's yet unnamed running mate.  I thought this required some explanation.  Our esteemed Keloland colleague, Cory Heidelberger is up to the task.

Blanchard ignores the Chicago angle to the Solis Doyle appointment:

But as long-standing as Solis Doyle's ties to Clinton may be, her Chicago roots run even deeper. Her first job in politics was on the campaign staff on Mayor Richard M. Daley, a leading Obama patron, and she has a long friendship with the Illinois senator's chief political adviser, David Axelrod. She also is close to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, another Chicagoan and Obama confidant [Anne E. Kornblut, "Solis Doyle Joins Obama Campaign," Washington Post: The Trail, 2008.06.16].

So we don't have to read soap opera into Obama's appointment of Solis Doyle; good old Chicago loyalty and patronage might be the simpler explanation... not that I see that one helping me win any arguments with SD Politics.

Let me get this straight: Obama choses a Chief of Staff for his prospective VP before he chooses a VP, when you might think the latter would want to have some say in the matter.  He chooses Solis Doyle, who served as Senator Clinton's campaign manager but was fired by Senator Clinton for manifest incompetence.  And as the Washington Post reports, this is likely to alienate many people in the Clinton camp just when he is presumably trying to integrate them into his campaign.  Moreover, this may well be a insult to Ms. Clinton, as the she and Solis Doyle haven't gotten along so well after the one fired the other.  But Cory thinks it is all explained by the fact that Solis Doyle has Chicago connections.  Well, I am glad we cleared that up.

I offered my own explanation, half in jest:

This is shear speculation, but it might be that Solis Doyle has something on the Clintons.  God knows what.  But that might allow Obama to control the Clintons, which in turn is only important if he thinks that they might actually become an obstacle to his election.

Cory was quite right to call this a "soap opera" explanation.  He means by that, I think, that it is too entertaining to be likely.  But as long as I am entertaining myself, at least, here are some more soap opera plots. 

2.  Maybe Ms. Solis Doyle has something on Obama. A little tidbit that the Clintons couldn't risk using or maybe that she kept in a pocket for a rainy day in Iowa.

3.  Maybe the Solis Doyle-Clinton relationship isn't really strained, Obama is going to pick Clinton, and Hillary wants her old comfortable team back. 

4.  Maybe Solis-Doyle wasn't really responsible for Senator Clinton's debacle at all, but just took the blame like a good soldier.  Now she gets her medal of honor, which Senator Obama agrees to pin on in return for Hillary's withdrawal and support. 

The latter is actually a lot more plausible than the others, but I don't really believe any of them yet.  I produce them to highlight how difficult an explanation would likely be.  There are a lot of people with Chicago connections.  Why this person with this heavy baggage?  I don't have any reason to suspect anything wrong here, I just think it is genuinely mysterious.  I invite suggestions. 

 

Songs of North Dakota

A reader passes this link along by Norman Geras:  Songs of North Dakota

I can think of three right away for South Dakota:

• 8th of November:  "Said goodbye to his momma as he left South Dakota / To fight for the red, white and blue" (1, 2)
• Stays in Mexico:  "He was an insurance salesman from South Dakota" (1, 2)
• Ballad of Hollis Brown:  "There's seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm" (1, 2)

Any other suggestions?  Drop me an email: [email protected].

Where's the Outcry?

National Review:

Where are all of the Hollywood celebrities holding telethons asking for help in restoring Iowa and helping the folks affected by the floods?

Where is all the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hasn't solved the problem? Asking where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) are?

Why isn't the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago?

When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines?

Where are Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks?

Where are all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen television sets?

When will we hear Governor Chet Culver say that he wants to rebuild a "vanilla" Iowa, because that's the way God wants it?

Where is the hysterical 24/7 media coverage complete with reports of cannibalism?

Where are the people declaring that George Bush hates white, rural people?

How come in 2 weeks, you will never hear about the Iowa flooding ever again?

Assistant Editor Of New Republic: Bush Never Lied

I know Jason already blogged on this (see the great video he presents), but James Kirchick's piece in the LA Times is worth the read.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: "Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses."

Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

The disturbing thing, perhaps, is the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee can release a report blatant in its political nature and in its falsification of the record in comfortable assurance that they will never get called on it.   

Days Of Miracle And Wonder

Having spent considerable time on this blog strongly criticizing the overuse of laptop computers in education, let me take a moment to sing the praises of technology.

I am currently writing this post at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, IL.  The use of a laptop and a wireless connection allows me to do this.  On our trip down here from Aberdeen, we listened to an excellent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, downloaded from emusic and played on an Ipod.  We found our way around using the GPS device on my cell phone and kept up with Iowa flood information with the cell phone and computer.  Today I needed to run an errand in Springfield.  I simply typed "Walmart" into Verizon Navigator on my phone. It found the nearest Walmart in Springfield and told me how to get there.  I also listened to part of yesterday's Dennis Prager show today while at the library.  Technology does make our lives more convenient and enjoyable.

On the other hand, today I held letters written by Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman.  That doesn't suck either.  Tomorrow I plan on doing more of the tourist thing in Springfield.  I am sure all readers eagerly await the report. 

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Then there's this from James Kirchick:

If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month's report, titled "Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information," includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats' lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.

Department of Mysteries: Solis Doyle Joins Obama

Well, fearless readers, I am stumped.  The Obama organization has just announced a new hire.  From the Washington Post:

The Obama campaign announced on Monday that it has chosen Patti Solis Doyle to a key general election post, making her the first prominent Clinton official to make the leap to the other side.

But it is not exactly being seen by Clinton loyalists as an olive branch.

Obama is installing Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the future vice presidential nominee, who has not yet been picked. Given that Solis Doyle was fired from the Clinton campaign, is now at odds with several senior officials who remained and has a strained relationship with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton herself these days, the appointment may well signal that Clinton's chances of being picked for the vice presidential slot are close to nil.

Picking Solis Doyle to be Chief of Staff to an as yet unnamed VP may indeed be Obama's way of saying that the VP ain't gonna be Hillary.  But wouldn't it have been cheaper to just come out and say "it ain't gonna be Hillary."

I blogged about Solis Doyle in February.  Senator Clinton fired Solis Doyle, her campaign manager, just at the moment when it was too late.  Looking back on it now, that was the moment that Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 nomination. Joshua Green's piece on the Clinton campaign had just appeared in The Atlantic, and it was devastating. 

If Green was right, Solis Doyle was disastrously incompetent. She created dissension within the ranks of the Clinton campaign, she spent millions upon millions to no effect, she failed to win over key support for Senator Clinton, and was largely responsible for the most fatal decision that Senator Clinton made: waiting to officially enter the race long enough to give Obama an opening.  If you look up big mistake in the dictionary, you will see Solis Doyle's picture. Her one virtue was that she was a creature of Ms. Clinton, having devoted her adult life to Hillary's ambitions. 

The Obama organization cannot possibly have chosen Solis Doyle because she is the best manager they can find for the VP to be named later.  Moreover, the choice threatens to poison the atmosphere between the two camps just when you would think that Obama would want to be building bridges.  After all, Clinton did fire Solis Doyle. 

Although Solis Doyle devoted her adult life to working for Clinton and once counted her among her closest friends, her departure from the campaign was a rough one. Loyalists openly blamed her for the internal warring and strategic failures; after she left, Clinton expressed hard feelings toward Solis Doyle for the way money had been spent. Fairly or not, Solis Doyle is not the person the Obama campaign would pick to send a signal that it is about to welcome Clinton on board. If anything, some Clinton loyalists privately said, it is an insult.

Well, actually, it looks like a slap across Ms. Clinton's face.  I once thought that a Clinton/Obama ticket would be invincible.  I always thought that an Obama/Clinton ticket was unlikely.  Hillary has too much independent support, and Bill is too unpredictable, to make her an affordable choice. The VP has to be strictly under control  If I am right, and Obama has no intention of choosing Hillary as his running mate, then hiring Solis Doyle looks likely to further alienate the Clintons. 

I am accustomed to understanding why politicians do what they do, even when they do something stupid.  It's not that I am all that smart; it's just that politics is usually not all that mysterious.  But I can't quite figure this one out.  Unless ...

This is shear speculation, but it might be that Solis Doyle has something on the Clintons.  God knows what.  But that might allow Obama to control the Clintons, which in turn is only important if he thinks that they might actually become an obstacle to his election.  It does seem to me that Senator Clinton's best bet for the Presidency hinges on an Obama loss this fall.  I don't know how they might contrive that, assuming purely for the sake of argument that they should contrive it.  In order not to alienate the party, Hillary has to look like she is supporting Obama with all her resources.  But if he loses anyway, she is in a great position for 2012. Maybe he's paranoid, and maybe he has some reason to worry about the Clintons that I am not privy to. 

Again, I am pulling all this out of my butt.  But so far, it's the only reason I can think of for hiring the most disastrous campaign manager in recent history to be part of your organization.

SDP Movie Review: The Happening

My son and I went to see M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.  It was that, or the Hulk, and having watched Iron Man three times, I was in the mood for something moodier.  Well, I got it.  As a general verdict, I have to agree with Kim Newman, who blogs on films for The Guardian. 

Here's the thing: The Happening is not that bad.

That's about it.  It's not that bad.  In case you haven't seen a preview, what happens is that a wave of mass suicides begins in Central Park, and spreads outward.  Mark Wahlberg plays a high school science teacher who, with his wife (Zooey Deschanel), a math teacher friend (John Leguizamo) and the latter's daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez), try to get out of the infected zone.  The action was well paced, and the mood of fear well sustained.  Fears of terrorism and ecological disaster were knit together to make a pretty convincing paranoid tapestry. 

PAST THIS POINT A FEW SPOILERS! 

One of the shrewd decisions MNS made was to keep the disaster localized to the "northeast."   I confess it occurred to me that almost all the infected area consisted of blue electoral real estate.  Like global warming, it seemed to select areas that voted for Al Gore.  I think that was shrewd because it makes the drama scarier.  A global celluloid apocalypse looks bad, to be sure, but it means giving up most hopes pretty early.  In a more limited disaster, there is always the possibility of getting out of it, and the hope is part and parcel with the fear. 

Unfortunately, perhaps, we are offered an explanation: it is the plants, fighting back against man and George W.  Well okay, but that was too much and not enough.  The explanation took the edge off the mystery, which can be good, but only if you add enough stuff to deepen the mystery.  That doesn't happen. 

Shyamalan clearly knows what he is trying to do with a movie: weave a modern fairy tale with all the mystery and paranoia the genre is known for.  He did that very well in The Sixth Sense, and in Signs. I haven't seen his last two movies, but this one clearly doesn't rise to the level of the first two.  Still, it's not that bad.  I remember a day when I was about 10 when a big storm left a bunch of long brown worms, about the thickness of vermicelli, all over our neighborhood.  No one (that is, no adults) recognized them.  That created a sense of mystery that made for a very good day of pulling them out of pools and putting them in jars.  There is some of that mystery in this movie, with the added violence of course.  But we needed more.   

Iowa Flood Blogging

I am writing from the Land of Lincoln, otherwise known as the State of Illinois.  On Saturday we drove across the state of Iowa, the eastern part of which has been decimated by flooding.  It will not surprise you that we avoided the worst parts, but we did see some flooding.  Interstate 80 was closed just east of Iowa City, so we headed south just outside of Iowa City and crossed the Mississippi at the town of Burlington.  I do have some pictures to share.

This picture is taken from the car on I-80 in Des Moines.  As you can see there is a baseball park under water.  The water was precariously close to the interstate here.

Just outside of Des Moines we stopped for gas in the town of Colfax.  A fork of the Skunk River (hopefully not named for its smell) had flooded.  The gal at Caseys said that the river had crested, but still seemed to be rising.  The road heading off the interstate was closed one mile from here, according to signs.  Here are a couple pictures from the Caseys store. 

As I said, we crossed Old Man River at Burlington, IA.  I have never been to this town, but it appears to be a beautiful, quaint river town.  This weekend they were to have their river fest.  Instead they appear to be sand bagging and putting up barriers.  Naturally all the water from the flooding to the north of here eventually ends up in the Mississippi.  The Mississippi is already over its banks here, and getting higher.  The first picture is of what used to be a street.  Now it is under water, with concrete barriers and sandbags bordering it. 

And here is the municipal auditorium. This is to the left (roughly east) of the picture above.  The parking lot is all under water and they have barricaded the entrance to keep some of the water out.  This looks like an old historic building.  Let's hope it makes it through this with minimal damage.
 
Up river, to the north, is this building, which is essentially right in front of where I was photographing.

This is the bridge across the river.  As you can see, on the Illinois side, the river is getting close to the bottom of the bridge.

These pictures were taken Saturday afternoon.  Who knows what has happened since.  One can assume the the river has gotten higher.  As I said, we turned south just west of Iowa City.  Unfortunately, this is what we saw to the north, right where the flooding is the worst (yes, this picture was taken by me while driving on the interstate at over 70 MPH):

Tim Russert and Father's Day

In a tribute to both fathers and Tim Russert, I wanted to reproduce an excerpt from Russert's book Big Russ and Me:

Although we loved our fathers, there was a distance between us and a recognition that they inhabited a very different universe than we did. It was not just that they were usually working, although that was part of it. It was that our fathers and mothers were adults, and we were kids, during a time when grown-ups and children lived in separate worlds and were exposed to very different things. (A small example: in the 1950s we never saw a bad word in print or heard an off-color remark on the radio or on television.) Nobody I knew ever called grown-ups, even close family friends, by their first names, and the grown-ups never suggested that we should. To this day, when I go back to Buffalo and I run into one of our old neighbors, I still address them as "Mr. Griffin" or "Mrs. Geary."

Shaking hands with adults was very important, at least for boys, and it was something I practiced with Dad until it became second nature. Dad insisted on a firm handshake, and he worked with me until I developed one. "When you meet somebody," he would say, "you want to make them feel that you're proud and happy to know them. So don't put a wet fish in their hand. Give that hand a good shake, snap your wrist, and look them in the eye. People are people, and if they like you, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Treat them the way you'd like to be treated."

. . .

These things were so ingrained in me that I passed them along to my son, Luke, almost without thinking. When he was four or five, I heard myself echoing Dad's words as we practiced what to do when he met an adult for the first time -- or the twentieth. I'd say, "Come here, buddy, and let's shake hands," and I undoubtedly used the phrase "wet fish" as part of the lesson.

. . .

When Luke was a junior in high school and we went to visit a few colleges, one of the deans took me aside and said, "That is one impressive young man you have there." I was happy to hear this, of course, and I silently hoped he would elaborate, which he did. "Your boy shook my hand," the dean continued. "He looked me in the eye and engaged me in conversation." That's all it took! And from the way the dean said it, I could tell this wasn't something he saw every day. I was proud of Luke, but even more, I was grateful to Dad.

Happy Father's Day to not just to the dads out there, but to all the men in our lives who mentor, teach, encourage, and love.  We appreciate it beyond ways words can express.

North Dakota

Star Tribune:  NatGeo 'Emptied Prairie' writer to insulted N. Dakotans: 'Get over it'

In a related note, the New York Times ran a story last Sunday entitled "Back to Nature and Ready for Guests in the Great Plains" that says the Great Plains are returning to a "wild state, to a kind of American steppe."

Obama, Voice of Unity

The Hill:

Barack Obama is warning supporters that the general election fight between him and John McCain may get ugly, but the Illinois senator is vowing not to back down.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

"We don't have a choice but to win," Obama said, joking that he has heard "folks in Philly like a good brawl. I've seen Eagles games."

Obama again said that the GOP will make try to make him look "scary" to voters.

Obama pledging to swing back at the GOP drew much applause from the crowd.

Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant said Obama's rhetoric abandons Obama's campaign themes of hope and change.

"In the last 24 hours, he’s completely abandoned his campaign’s call for ‘new politics’, equating the election to a ‘brawl’ and promising to ‘bring a gun,’" Conant said.

Divison in the Ranks

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton's defeat.

She's not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama.

And she's not entirely alone in saying she'll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead.

But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer. . . .

Joe Wineke, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, reacted with disbelief when first told Friday afternoon that one of his state party delegates is now a McCain supporter.

"Not a delegate? To the national convention?" said Wineke, who was getting ready for the start of the Wisconsin state party convention Friday in Stevens Point.

"We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she's voting for John McCain?" Wineke repeated, for clarification. "I've never heard of such a thing."