The Dish

Ronald Brownstein puts Obama’s campaign in context.

Hilzoy takes on McCain’s pet peeve:

And, as we all know, earmarks cost the government $16.9 billion and $18.3 billion every year. Unless you adopt the definition McCain uses, in which case they cost all of $52.1 billion. This still leaves a cool $250-350 billion to be found elsewhere. Moreover, earmarks, so defined, turn out to include things like all our aid to Israel and Egypt, $6 billion in new military housing, "critical government construction efforts such as a new Federal Bureau of Investigation building in Los Angeles and 12 facilities aimed at assisting U.S. border patrol and customs officials in fully screening all cargo and individuals entering the country", "drug eradication funds for Colombia" (well, I’d go along with that one, but then I’m in favor of legalizing marijuana and adopting a demand-based approach to other illegal drugs), "two thirds of all foreign assistance", and lots of other fun stuff.

Personally, I think that there are two real problems with earmarks.

The first has been largely fixed: that they need to be fully transparent. The second is that a lot of genuinely useful projects are funded via earmarks, and earmarks are generally a pretty lousy funding mechanism. There is no earthly reason why infrastructure projects shouldn’t be funded according to actual need, instead of being largely funded through earmarks. But this is not an argument for defunding those projects; it’s an argument for funding them via a different mechanism. Even using McCain’s definition, cutting earmarks don’t come close to funding his tax cuts; once we subtract out the genuinely useful programs that have the misfortune to be funded by this silly mechanism, the idea of paying for his tax cuts by cutting earmarks is risible.

The Economist discusses the food crisis:

Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past decade of growth. Because food markets are in turmoil, civil strife is growing; and because trade and openness itself could be undermined, the food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalisation.

"Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin’. So if you don’t want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left?" – Mark Steyn, NRO. Is this really going to be the level of the criticism of Obama? If so, he’s won this election already.

From a pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco:

The primary has become a classic battle of the old politics and the new. My take in the Sunday Times:

If Obama keeps her lead to single digits, if he goes on to win in North Carolina and Indiana, if the momentum of the race does not change, something else will be shown.

It will show that the crisis America is in now has made the kind of tactics of the past two decades moot. It will show that the issues of the Iraq occupation, the teetering economy, the unsustainable debt, the collapsing dollar, the constitutional disarray and the moral collapse of the torture programme are now more salient than cultural identity. It will show that the voters actually want to debate something more than lapel pins and who is or is not a secret Muslim or patriot. It will show we are in a new era.

Maybe we’re not. Maybe the old politics and the old patterns have one more turn of the screw to go. Maybe the Clintons are right. And that’s the beauty of democracy. On Tuesday, we will go a long way towards finding out.

Karl Rove worries that Clinton left the assault on Obama too late in her campaign for it to work. Sarah Baxter has the scoop. Rove is worried about Clinton seeming to be an emblem of the past. But if that’s true of Clinton, isn’t it potentially truer of McCain?

In the intra-Shiite civil war between Maliki and Sadr, it appears that the Iranian regime is now tilting toward Maliki. I don’t know what to make of this, except that it reinforces the fact that any Shiite dominated government in Baghdad will be inherently within the sway of Iran, at least more so than an ally of the United States. Here’s the money quote:

Whether to counter those allegations or simply because, as many Iraqis have recently speculated, Mr. Sadr’s stock has recently fallen in Iranian eyes, the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, on Saturday expressed his government’s strong support for the Iraqi assault on Basra. He even called the militias in Basra “outlaws,” the same term that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has used to describe them.

“The idea of the government in Basra was to fight outlaws,” Mr. Qumi said. “This was the right of the government and the responsibility of the government. And in my opinion the government was able to achieve a positive result in Basra.”

At the same time, Qumi attacked the U.S.-Maliki attempt to wrest control of parts of Sadr City from the Sadrists. I don’t know what to make of all this maneuvring, but it does seem to me to reveal the increasing paradoxes of the war we are fighting. George W. Bush’s major ally in Iraq is now a favorite of Tehran. Go figure. The defeat of the Sadrist forces could well mean an Ahmadinejad-Maliki axis over a large swathe of Iraq, a state of affairs we will have asked young Americans to risk their lives for. And now you see signs from Rice that U.S. policy is to back the Sunni powers against Iran. Whatever else this war started as, it is now something utterly different. And, at this point, it is increasingly hard to understand what exactly it is designed to achieve.

We now have pretty solid evidence that the Fox show, "24", has indeed promoted and enabled torture in real life. By Americans. In violation of the Geneva Conventions. And light years from the constantly invoked "ticking time bomb" scenario. Joel Surnow has blood on his waterboard.

Ed Rendell tells it like it is. I’m sticking with my rule: Clinton needs a double-digit win to survive. But given the way the campaign has unfolded so far, you can see the looming nightmare scenario: Clinton wins by nine points. Not enough to alter the dynamics of the race in her favor, but enough to keep the agony going. For all our sakes, I hope we get a real decision soon.