The Dish

Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr supporters chant slogans during Friday prayer on April 4, 2008 in the Sadr city, the Shiite district in Baghdad, Iraq. A curfew is still imposed in the Sadr city Shiite district in Baghdad and Maliki has ordered Iraqi forces to stop raids across Iraq to give time to those who want to surrender their weapons. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.

By Patrick
Michigan’s plans for a re-vote flatline.

By Patrick
A reader writes:

I am not a campaign finance lawyer, I am not a lawyer, but I think your conclusion drawn in the post concerning McCain’s Money Woes is wrong as it conflates two very different systems.  The Boston Globe article had McCain returning limited general election contributions to his donors and asking them to redonate to a legal/accounting compliance fund.  This step is being taking in preperation for him accepting general election public funds. You suggest that this is being done because he has locked himself into public financing:

After using the prospect of public matching funds to secure a private $4 million loan during the primary, it was unclear whether McCain had legally committed himself to public financing and the limits that go with it.

The steps that he are taking are in preperation for the general election.  This decision process is completely independent of the decision process and rules that govern public financing of the primary season.  For instance in 2004 both John Kerry and George W. Bush opted out of the primary public funds but opted in for the general election public funds.  This decision allowed both candidates to raise and spend $100+ million dollars up to their respective party’s nominating conventions. At that point federal funding and spending limits kicked in.

John McCain has currently opted in, received tangible benefits from remaining with the primary public funding program and is claiming to have lept out of these promises while the FEC is not releasing him from his clearly defined obligations.   This is the issue of the loan that was partially backed by a promise of the McCain campaign to stay in the race if he was a loser in order to collect public funding.  The public funding in question was the primary election funding and spending caps.  The area of dispute is that the FEC does not allow candidates to opt-out after opting into the system if the promise of those funds were used as collatoral for any tangible benefits.

Going back to why McCain is opting into the general election matching funds, I agree with you that this is a sign of weakness as the ‘weaker’ Democratic fundraiser (Hillary Clinton) has roughly raised in two months as much money as McCain has raised in two years.  The stronger candidate, Obama, has raised in two months more than the entire public funding allocation McCain will receive this fall.  And this is with a divided party.  Either Democrat will be able to spend McCain into the ground using hard, disclosed, coordinated action dollars if McCain opts-in. And if he opts-in, it is because his campaign does not believe that they can raise enough money fast enough from a demoralized Republican base to justify the fundraising costs and more importantly the opportunity costs of fundraising instead of campaigning.  Not a good sign, but significantly different reasoning then the analysis you proposed.

By Patrick
I posted a map by Richard Florida a few days ago showing the number singles across the US by gender. Ezra Klein takes a look at Julio Gonzalez Altamirano’s reworking of Florida’s map (above), manipulated to only include the "creative class," which is defined as educated 18 to 44 year-olds. The results suggest that you might not want to move across the country just to snag a date. While the new analysis still doesn’t consider sexual orientation, an unfortunate oversight, this rings true:

Florida’s map vastly oversimplifies the dating game. If you’re a computer nerd, and want to find friends and lovers able to quote XKCD comics back at you, you probably want to be in a tech-heavy city on the West Coast. If you’re a political bloggers who wants to find attractive policy obsessives, DC will do ya fine. If you’re a literary snob, you might want to check out New York…[Dating is] about compatibility, which is why people seek out creative classes oriented towards their interests and lifestyle, rather than mindlessly looking for a large number of widows per capita.

By Patrick
A quote from Noah Feldman, author of ‘The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State’:

"The new constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite being drafted in the shadow of U.S. occupation, both make Islam the official religion and shari‘a a source of law; both also bar laws that contradict certain aspects of Islamic law. These are democratic and Islamic constitutions. And whatever their many flaws, they are the two constitutions most recently drafted under relatively free conditions in the Muslim world. (I don’t count Musharraf’s unilateral amendments in Pakistan.) This raises the question what other majority-Muslim states would do if they were redrafting their constitutions under popular influence."

By Patrick
The Clintons release them: they show $109 million in income, almost $52 million of that from Bill Clinton’s speaking.

(Hat tip: Drudge)

By Patrick
Today is the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. In 1963 the Atlantic published his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. An excerpt:

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodyness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience …

Yokosuka, Japan, 6.03 pm.

By Patrick

Virginia Postrel has a smart critique of Obama:

His glamour makes it easy to imagine that a President Obama would dissolve differences, abolish hard choices, and achieve political consensus—or that he’s a stealth candidate who will translate his vague platform into a mandate for whatever policies you the voter happen to support.

Where optimists fill in mystery with their hopes, however, pessimists project their fears. The flip side of glamour is horror: the vampire, the con man, the femme fatale, the double agent. These glamorous archetypes remind us of how easy it is to succumb to desire and manipulation. What, ask his opponents, is Obama hiding?[…]

To rely on illusions is to risk disillusionment. If Obama the dream candidate becomes Obama the real president, he’ll be forced to pick sides, make compromises, and turn “hope” and “change” into policies some people like and some people don’t…Some of his supporters will feel disappointed, even betrayed.

I don’t agree with all of her points. For instance, it is hard for me to accept that Obama’s platform is "vague"; as has been written in this space many times, Obama has a plethora of detailed policy proposals. That said, Obama’s theme of unity, hope, and bipartisanship certainly allows room for supporters and opponents to fantasize. There are good reasons to support Obama beyond the glamour, but I have no doubt many Obama supporters are guilty of the projections Postrel describes.   

By Patrick
Continuing the penny debate, Paraguay has another solution.