What this show needs is a prog rock summary

Have you ever watched an episode of “Lost” and thought “I wonder what a Zappa-influenced weirdo prog band would think of this?”  Well, your wait is over.

Holy crap does Vista blow

Man, I have been using computers for a long ass time now, and have worked through tons of exotic bugs.  I remember having to do really stupid complicated recoveries back in Windows 3.1 days, when choosing the wrong SoundCard for some Sierra adventure game, or accidentally misconfiguring AOL would send my poor Aptiva into grand mal seizures.

But man.  I’ve never had a system crap out on me THE VERY FIRST DAY I BOUGHT IT, particularly as a result of downloading a required OS update.  And Microsoft has known about this for months without offering a solution?  FTW?!

Obama did what Chamberlain did, whatever the hell that is!

Ok so I think this type of OMG WE ARE ALL YELLING style of “interview” is usually pretty dumb.  But man, this total takedown of conservative radio host Kevin James for comparing Obama to Chamberlain without even knowing what Chamberlain did is pretty hilarious:

You will catch more flies with sugar than icky racism

As cool as Tuesday’s primary results were, the state of the race really hasn’t changed in any substantive way.  Obama’s got the numbers, the money, and all the legitimate indicators of popular opinion.  Clinton — has an argument she can make to superdelegates.

The weird thing about Clinton’s campaign, though, is that she doesn’t seem to recognize any of the legitimacy issues this would raise.  I mean maybe you don’t think it would be illegitimate for the superdels to overrule the will of the voters — they’re a part of the DNC rules and she’s entitled to use that loophole.  Even if you think that’s the case, actually getting a superdelegate trump will LOOK sleazy.  It will be a vindication of every radical view of minority oppression.  You can just hear Rev. Wright ranting about it: “Even after one of us actually won the vote to be President, white folks took it away from us!”

Now that alone shouldn’t be enough to dissuade her from trying to get the nomination, but you would think Clinton would want to be really careful, and try to prevent that perception from coalescing because the superdelegates are the ones that will ultimately have to deal with the long-term consequences. You would think she would be trying to make it easier for her to support them. As elected Democrats or part of the campaign infrastructure, they know very well that minorities are a key part of the Democratic coalition, and are the ONLY thing that keeps the party competitive in many seats around the country. Even if they might like Clinton better than Obama, at least some of the superdelegates won’t tip over to her if it means risking depressed turnout & hurt feelings among their constitutents in later elections.

So why is she going around saying things like this:

I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

The more this primary looks like a race thing, the more superdelegates are going to worry about blowback.

Good way to wake up

Headlines in my blog reader this morning:

Barack Obama looks all but certain to be the Democratic nominee (From The Economist no less!)

GOP leaders warn of election disaster

It’s enough to almost compensate for the fact that I have to spend most of the day reviewing Civil goddamn Procedure.

October Surprise

Harold Ickes is darkly warning that Democrats will face an “October Surprise” if they follow the will of the people and nominate Barack Obama as their presidential candidate — some weird and crazy thing in Obama’s background that will totally fuck over his possibility of winning the White House.

In the context of this kind of whisper campaign, isn’t it about time Obama starts actually throwing some mud back?  I mean I know it goes against the whole “Hope and Change” theme, but the idea that Barack Obama is a dirty politician (and possibly Islamofascist Black Panther Christan Fundamentalist Elitist Cryptofascist) but Hillary Clinton is a paragon of untouchable political virtue is just begging to be taken down. 

I mean if we’re talking about spurious right-wing style attacks “just to prove she’s ready”, you’ve got the whole of the Arkansas Project to choose from.  If you want to stay a little classier than that, you’ve got a whole lot of substantiated gross associations from the 90’s, as the Politico recently detailed in a feature entitled “What Barack Obama Wishes He Could Say”:

You want to talk hypocrisy? How about piously criticizing me for Jeremiah Wright when you have a trail of associations that includes golden oldies like Webb Hubbell? (‘90s flashback: He was one of Hillary Clinton’s legal partners and closest friends, whom she installed in a top Justice Department job before prosecutors sent him to prison.) It also includes modern hits like Frank Giustra. (In case you missed it: There was a January New York Times story, which did not get the attention the reporting deserved, highlighting how this Canadian tycoon and major Bill Clinton benefactor was using his ties to the ex-president to win business with a ruthless dictatorship in Khazakstan.)

Now I really don’t think any of these are REAL issues — this is all just stupid CNN-style scandal mongering where you try to nail someone to a wall because they happened to have some dealing with some person who ended up doing something stupid.  But the same can be said about Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and Bill Ayers.  If Obama has skeletons in his closet, Clinton has a mortuary.

Headlines that Inspire Confidence

F.B.I. Raids Office of Special Counsel

But this actually seems like a good sign, given the focus of the investigation:

The office of the official responsible for protecting federal workers from political interference was raided by F.B.I. agents on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether he himself mixed politics with official business.

The Bush Administration has, of course, featured some of the worst politicized research and enforcement in the history of the regulatory state.  The fact that the FBI is finally moving on this in the twilight of the Bush years may mean there are some juicy and fun headlines coming up.

How unfortunate that at least one of the three major Presidential candidates right now shares Bush’s attitude towards the quote-unquote experts…

Superdelegates, Democratic Party history, and why exactly those two matter

Josh Marshall provides some interesting history on the rationale behind the superdelegate process, tying it to a party trying desperately to form a working electoral coalition after the post-Civil Rights/Vietnam earthquake of the 70’s:

Obama supporters say that the superdelegates as a group should not overturn the verdict of the primary and caucus election process while Clinton supporters say that it’s precisely the point of the super delegates to make their own considered judgment about who the party’s nominee should be regardless of the tally of pledged delegates. And while I strongly agree with the first point there is no denying that the second is true.

In fact, that puts too gentle a gloss on it. Coming out of the 1970s, the Democratic party establishment created the superdelegates precisely to put a brake on the power of “the groups” or activists, which was shorthand for, and not necessarily in this order, the hippies, the blacks, the gays, the feminists, the environmentalists and everyone else suspected of driving the Democratic party to left of the American mainstream and out of contention in national elections. In this view there were ordinary Democrats on the hand and these assorted freaks on the other who came out every four years and out-organized the former group to nominate rotten presidential candidates who got slaughtered in national elections.

And this is exactly why it’s legitimate for Obama (and his supporters) to attack this element of the Democratic nomination system. The superdelegate system was specifically designed to keep excluded groups out of the political process, and it was justified by an assumption that America was simply not ready for a President backed by “the hippies, the blacks, the gays, the feminists, the environmentalists,” etc.. Maybe that was a valid assumption then, but it’s a little absurd when the two viable Democratic candidates are now a black person and a woman.

My point is that there’s an underlying assumption involved in suggesting the superdelegates should overturn the popular vote. That assumption is that your opponent is a person who is ideologically or personally unfit to be President. It’s totally fair for Obama to loudly and persistently insist that Clinton either vocalize or denounce this stance.

The Clinton supporters say this strategy is basically valueless simply because it’s in the rules of the process. I think that argument is ridiculous — the procedural justification doesn’t change its value-laden status. It’s analogous to impeachment; the rules (in this case the Constitution), provide for it, but the decision to go forward with that particular application of the rules means something. No one would ever say that starting impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton was a value-neutral or non-political act. The decision to exercise that application of the rules said something about the Republicans’ underlying set of assumptions and values (namely, that it was more important to score political points than to enact substantive law), and it was perfectly appropriate for the Democrats to drag those assumptions out into the light. This situation is the same.

Quote-unquote idiots.

Via Ezra Klein comes this … disturbingly familiar quote from Hillary Clinton, in response to the withering criticism that economists (AND environmentalists) have dumped on her gas tax holiday scheme:

“Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

This comes on the heels of her Communications Director saying:

“There are times that a president will take a position that a broad support of quote-unquote experts agree with,” spokesperson Howard Wolfson said. “And there are times they will take a position that quote-unquote experts do not agree with.”

If there is one thing that you could point to as the most depressing part of the Bush years, it’s the routine failure to deal with easily foreseeable problems because the quote-unquote experts weren’t being sufficiently faithful to the ideology.

I imagine residents of New Orleans wished the President had listened to the quote-unquote experts warning him about the likely devastating effects of a major hurricane on the city.  And the same for the residents of Minneapolis, with their aging bridges.

I wish Bush had listened to the quote-unquote experts who tried to tell him (and the American people) that, no, Saddam Hussein did not have WMD.

I would hope we all wish Bush had listened to the quote-unquote experts who tried to warn him about 9/11 (“Bin Laden Determined to Attack United States”).

There are hundreds of other examples, from the politicization of DOJ to the shocking rollback of FDA and EPA standards, to the colossal lost opportunities of the early days of Iraqi rebuilding.  Bush has consistently sacrificed strong data and years of study to blind ideology, and we are now feeling the impacts of that.

The major argument Clinton has made is that she is an experienced leader who understands policy.  I had hoped that meant this quote-unquote expert attitude would die with the Bush White House.  I guess that’s (depressingly) untrue.