Category: The Dish

Poblano uses his very powerful demographic model to hazard a guess about how the delegates would have spread if Michigan hadn’t broken the rules and had a regular primary:

Overall, we project that Obama would have carried Michigan by a narrow margin — about 4.0 percentage points or 80,000 votes. After accounting for delegates awarded at the statewide level, we project him to win 65 Michigan delegates to Clinton’s 63. Certainly, there is some margin for error in these calculations, and Clinton could certainly have won the state herself. But it would undoubtedly have been very close. Interestingly, if you take the average of the winning margins in Indiana (Clinton by 1.2 points), Ohio (Clinton by 8.7) and Wisconsin (Obama by 17.3), you come up with an average of Obama by 2.5 points, which is very close to our estimate.

The idea that Obama should get zero delegates from Michigan – and that this represent a triumph of democracy – is cuckoo for cocopuffs.

Aleman, Texas, 6.30 pm.

A Newsweek poll homes in:

Who exactly are these high Racial Resentment Index voters? A majority, 61 percent, have less than a four-year college education, many are older (44 percent were over the age of 60 compared to just 18 percent under the age of 40) and nearly half (46 percent) live in the South.

Bowl me over with a feather. And we wonder why Clinton won Appalachia.

Hitch reviews Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker’s book on how World War II was wrong and avoidable: 

Follow Baker’s logic just a little further, and it becomes possible to imply that the war might actually have helped facilitate the Holocaust. This in turn would help make all participants in the Second World War into morally equivalent forces. And that in fact is Baker’s view, as is the view, not just that all wars are essentially the same, but that they are also all essentially part of the same war. What we call the Second World War was only an extension of the long struggle for mastery between the various European powers, all of which were all the time also wreaking indiscriminate cruelty on colonial peoples. That there is some truth to all this is what gives pacifism its enduring appeal.

… aren’t you as psyched by all these new ads as I am? Well, maybe not. But the business side of the Atlantic.com is taking off. Which is good news for all of us.

Hilzoy writes:

People are writing about [Clinton] as though she were a bomb that needed to be expertly defused, as opposed to a person who can govern her own life, and is responsible for her own choices. I am aware that it must be hard to face the fact that you’ve lost. But it became clear that she was not going to win the nomination months ago — I would say after Wisconsin, but certainly after Texas. Moreover, this is not unprecedented. People lose the nomination every four years. Most of the time, they do not stay on until it is mathematically impossible for them to win; they leave when it has become clear that they will not win. They do not complain about disenfranchising all the states with later primaries, they do not threaten to keep their supporters home, and they certainly do not threaten "open civil war" if they don’t get nominated for Vice President. On those rare occasions when some candidate does this in the absence of some truly monumental issue, we normally think that that candidate is a narcissistic and unprincipled person who has just shown why s/he should never, ever be President.

There is absolutely no reason not to apply these same standards to Hillary Clinton.

Right now, instead of floating demands in the press and comparing herself to abolitionists and suffragists, she could be telling her supporters that she lost fair and square; that while there was a lot of sexism in the campaign, there was racism as well, and that sexism does not explain why a candidate with literally every institutional advantage over her opponent lost the nomination. She could be reaching out to the voters who supported her in places where Obama has had trouble, and urging them to vote for him. She could, in a word, be doing the right thing: trying to earn that respect she seems to want.

Instead, she’s throwing tantrums, making demands that she has no right to make, and threatening civil war.

I can’t imagine a better demonstration of why she should not be President or Vice President. Nor can I imagine a better demonstration of why some of us who are committed feminists are not happy with her as our standard-bearer. She lost. It happens. If she were an adult or a professional, she would deal with it. Apparently, she is neither.

Ann Althouse, seconded by the Passive-Aggressive one, poo-pooed the notion that the Clintons are sociopaths in their Florida and Michigan grandstanding. They’re just being lawyers – preparing to litigate. There is one obvious problem with that argument, as a reader explains:

Althouse is right to an extent.  Often in ligitation, if the rules help you, they are iron clad, and if they don’t, you look for reasons why they shouldn’t apply. But that’s not what’s going on here.To use the ligitation analogy, if you walk in to court espousing the exact opposite position of an earlier stated position, you lose, plain and simple.  Your opponent calls it an admission, throws it in your face, and probably moves for sanctions.  The judge accepts the earlier position as the truth and the later position an obvious attempt to impose a different standard of liability than what everyone agreed to before the litigation (or at an earlier point in the litigation). Worst of all, you lose all credibility with the judge, which any litigator will tell you is the most important weapon in your arsenal. By Ann’s analogy, Clinton loses (and gets sanctioned).

Lord knows I’d like to litigate that case.

Rauch’s "modest proposal" from the Atlantic archives:

It seems to me that the only honest and effective way to confront this issue is to tax not fattening foods or fattening companies but fat people. It is they, after all, who drive up the government’s health-care costs, so it is they who should pay. What I propose, then, is to tax people by the pound.

This needn’t be very complicated.

Fat-tax rates would be set by a National Avoirdupois Governing System (NAGS). To hit the worst offenders the hardest, the tax could be graduated. People would pay one per-pound rate above the "overweight" threshold, and a stiffer rate above the "obese" threshold. Fat people might not like this tax, but of course they could avoid it by becoming thinner.

In fact, I might go further. Carrots often work even better than sticks, so I propose a skinny subsidy to complement the fat tax. People who maintain trim, firm physiques should be rewarded for their public-spiritedness with large tax credits—funded, of course, by the fat tax.

My plan would address the nation’s fat epidemic equitably and efficiently. It would make Americans put their money where their mouths are. And did I mention that I weigh 135 pounds?

The six most commonly quoted bogus statistics.

Weigel reports from the Libertarian convention:

"I want us to broaden the base," says one Texas delegate and reform caucus stalwart. "I’ve been a Ruwart fan for a long time but she can’t do that. But Barr can get 3 to 5 percent of the vote and make McCain rue the day he stopped being a conservative."

It appears Tucker isn’t going to make a run after all. Bummer.