The Dish

[Patrick Appel]

I tried to think of something clever to say about this, but it’s so ridiculous there just isn’t anything to add:

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament’s tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave "legitimacy to sodomy".[…]

He called on lawmakers to stop "passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes."

[Patrick Appel]

Post Wisconsin a lot of bloggers are realizing how bad of shape the Clinton campaign is in. Here is Dave Weigel:

[Clinton needs] to win Democratic voters in a landslide. But now that the Clintons are losing, the ornery labor unions—who have never fully forgiven Bill Clinton for his New Democratic feints on trade—have lost their fear. They’re going for Obama, driving the final nails into Clintonism. You can see how afraid Clinton is with her current campaign (bolstered by 527s) in Ohio. She sounds like arch-populist Sherrod Brown, or like an even less relatable John Edwards.

And here is Junah Grunstein: 

The Clinton campaign’s performance since February 5th makes me wish that there were some sort of procedure in place whereby a candidate can be penalized by having delegates that they’ve previously won taken away from them. Something along the lines of a 15-yard penalty and loss of down in football. Because I’ve never seen anything as pathetic as what the Clinton camp has trotted out, not just once or twice, but consistently, almost daily, for the past two weeks.

Even this Hillary supporter thinks she should call it quits.

[Patrick Appel]

In response to Peter Suderman’s post yesterday, a reader writes:

That global warming and global environmentalism both inspire fear, and fear can result in antipolitics, is quite clear, but the analogy between this war on terror and the war on global warming breaks apart at a fundamental level.  The war on terror has been characterized by affirmative misrepresentation of facts to achieve political ends while the war on global warming is characterized by a struggle to bring facts to human consciousness, which will have political consequences.

To be sure, the economic and environmental outcomes of global warming are unknown.  All we can do is predict, and certain predictions clearly will have no basis in what is presently known.  The seeds of antipolitical outcomes exist.  Theories wildly divergent from what we know could take hold.  But the debate about global warming can always come back to the science.  Predicted outcomes can be measured over time.  Because we are dealing with outcomes that will be unknown for years to come, we might well take leaps of what can only be called faith, not science, and we might leap the wrong way.  But at all times, the science will be in evidence, and open to scrutiny by all, and all parties will be free to point out what is unknown, where the leaps are unreasonable, and why we ought to be going in another direction.  This is what politics in a democracy ought to be. 

But the war on terror has been carried on largely in the dark. Everything is a national secret.  All decisions reside in the halls of the Oval Office.  Nothing is open to the public.  And we know today that the facts have been wildly and consciously distorted.  The war on terror has by its nature been antipolitical because it has been anti process.  Fear is a purpose not a result.   

These distinctions matter to me.  I can accept a political debate which says (1) here is the best science can offer today about the long term effects of global warming,  (2) here are a series of possible actions we can take that might avoid some of these predictions, and (3) the best we can predict, the economic effects of the different alternatives are as follows…  Now choose, or choose to do nothing, always an option.  I cannot accept a situation in which the National Academy of Scientists says (1) we will not show you the underlying data, but it says the effects of global warming are as follows, and (2) as a consequence we will be taking the following actions on your behalf.   Fear resides in both wars, but the procedural differences which war is essentially antipolitical.

[Patrick Appel]

This comment over at the Plank is priceless:

This just goes to show that Obama only wins in states that hold contested elections. Sure, he wins big in caucus states, he wins big in primary states, he wins big when turnout is low, and he wins big with record-high turnout. But what the Obama-worshipping media is overlooking is that in each of the 25 state contests Obama has won so far, his name appeared on the ballot. It’s time to stop giving Obama a pass on this critical issue.

Remember, if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama’s name will not be on the ballot in November. And only Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she can win when Obama’s name is not on the ballot. In fact, she’s undefeated in contests where Obama is not on the ballot, making her clearly the more electable general-election candidate.

by hilzoy

Earlier tonight, I went to the FEC’s website to check out the January fundraising reports for Clinton, Obama, and McCain. Matt Stoller wonders whether the McCain campaign is broke, based on the fact that its liabilities exceed its assets. They do, but on the other hand, most of those liabilities are McCain’s bank loan, whose due date seems to be in May, so he has time to drum up the money. (On the other hand, I had no idea it was possible to run up $720,164.57 on one’s AmEx card. Not something I want to try at home.)

I was somewhat puzzled by Clinton’s statement, though. On the one hand, her campaign clearly took in considerably less than it paid out. About nine million dollars less. And that can hardly be good news. Moreover, she has a mass of debt: $7,576,700.48 worth, to be precise (not including the loan she made to herself.) Moreover, while some of it is large sums (over $2million owed to Mark Penn, for instance), there are a lot of pretty small unpaid bills to places throughout Iowa and New Hampshire. (Honestly, why not pay the $500.12 they owe to Premier Pizza in Algonquin, Iowa? Or the $615.25 they owe Depot Deli of Shenandoah, Iowa? Your average pizzeria or deli is not made of money, after all.)

The puzzling part, though, was that despite all this debt, the Clinton campaign has tons of cash on hand. Nearly $38 million at the beginning of January; a little over $29 million at the end of the month. That seemed odd, especially in light of those news stories about their being broke after Iowa. As I was scratching my head about this, I came across a story in Politico that explained everything:

“According to the reports, Clinton raised about $20 million in January, including her loan. She spent nearly $29 million during the month.

She reported a cash balance of $29 million. But more than $20 million of that is money dedicated to the general election. Her personal loan accounts for more than half of the remaining approximately $9 million, leaving just about $4 million in cash raised from donors. (…)

Clinton’s strapped financial situation in late January meant she couldn’t invest in all of the Super Tuesday states, particularly the expensive ground operations required in caucus states.

Obama won every one of those caucus contests on Feb. 5, opening up a critical lead among pledged delegates.”

That’s the fact I didn’t know: that these forms include money restricted to the general election. Which changes everything.

If Clinton’s receipts and spending for February match her receipts and spending for January, she will have blown through all the cash she has available for the primaries by the end of the month. Question: does anyone think that she will take in as much in February as she did in January? I don’t. For one thing, January included both the period after she lost in Iowa and the period after she won New Hampshire, either of which might have prompted people to send money. But by February, losses were no longer a shock, and for most of the month, there weren’t any victories. People want to back someone they think has a decent shot at winning, and after Maine, at least, Clinton’s donors have to have been wondering whether she can pull it out. Besides that, February has also been a month full of stories about the Clinton campaign’s ineptitude. If I were a donor, I’d think twice about giving to a campaign that had burned through so much money with so little to show for it, or that had declared Texas a must-win state without bothering to figure out its delegate selection rules.

I assume that the Clinton campaign has cut back its expenses. But there are limits to how far you can cut back expenses without seriously affecting your chances of winning, and if donations drop considerably, the Clinton campaign will reach those limits. Clinton can always make another loan to her campaign, but I imagine there are limits to the Clintons’ willingness to finance the campaign themselves. Which means that at some point, they are going to have to make some tough decisions. In their shoes, if I didn’t dramatically turn things around in Texas and Ohio, I would think long and hard before continuing to Pennsylvania.

Obama doesn’t have to make those choices: he has plenty of cash on hand, and took in over $6 million more than he paid out last month. And Greg Sargent reports that he’s on track to raise more money this month than he did last month. But Clinton will, I think, and soon.

(Cross-posted to Obsidian Wings)

An Iraqi Police Commando from the 1st Mechanised Battalion patrols the road leading to Baghdad airport on February 20, 2008. A massive blast of explosives and Katyusha rockets that killed 15 Iraqi police and soldiers in a Shiite bastion of Baghdad was a ‘well-planned ambush,’ security officials said today. By Patrick Baz /AFP/Getty Images.

by Reihan

James Hamilton seems to think that the spike in oil prices means the smart money is betting that a recession is not on the way.

Or you could try a line that to me seems a bit more natural: incoming data aren’t confirming the initial notion held by many that a recession began in December. If so, it means that the Fed’s easing will come to an end within a few months, and that the demand for oil, copper, and most everything else is going to be stronger than many of us had been anticipating as of a few weeks earlier.

Somehow I don’t think Nouriel Roubini is buying this line of argument. If Roubini is right, I’m planning on stockpiling enough emergency beef stroganoff to last me through the next two decades.

by Reihan

By demonstrating that he can unravel the tangled mess that is NBA trading, Josh Levin demonstrates that only he can extricate the United States from the tangled mess that is the Middle East. Unfortunately, he’s too busy trying to remember his bank security password.

by hilzoy

Last night, Texas State Senator Kirk Watson, an Obama supporter, was embarrassed on national TV when he couldn’t name any of Obama’s legislative achievements. (He wrote what I think is a pretty decent and disarming account of it here.) David Kurtz, for whom I normally have enormous respect, writes:

“I suspect this is a bit of a Rorschach test. Depending on your perspective, it’s proof that Obama is a lightweight, just goes to show what a gasbag Matthews is, or appeals to the same voyeuristic instinct that makes you slow down and gawk at a car accident.”

I think it’s only a Rorschach test for people who don’t bother to find whether or not Obama actually has any actual legislative achievements. If he does, then of course this just shows that this one supporter didn’t know what they are. If he doesn’t, it might show something more, e.g. that Obama is a lightweight. As it happens, Obama does have substantive legislative achievements. I have written more about them here. A few highlights, all of which became law:

* Ethics Reform: Obama was the Senate’s point person on ethics reform, and sponsored or co-sponsored the bills that made up what the Washington Post called “the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet.” I’m also a fan of this bill, which I think of as the Journalists, Bloggers, and Citizens’ Muckraking Empowerment Act: it creates a searchable database of recipients of federal grants and contracts.

* The Lugar-Obama initiative to strengthen the Nunn-Luger framework for securing loose nukes, and to extend it to securing and destroying stockpiles of conventional arms. (For instance, shoulder-fired missiles that could be used against passenger airlines, fired at our forces, or used to make any number of ongoing conflicts more deadly.)

* Various bills concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina, including an amendment putting strict limits on the use of no-bid contracts after disasters, requiring planning for the evacuation of people with special needs and senior citizens, creating a National Emergency Family Locator System, etc.

There are also a lot of good bills he worked on that did not make it, including the compromise immigration bill and a proposal to create an independent Congressional Ethics Enforcement Commission, and some that are on the Senate calendar now, like a bill to criminalize various deceptive election tactics, like deceptive robocalls, providing misleading information about where to vote or what conditions you have to meet to be eligible to vote, etc.

There’s a lot more. Honestly, there is. I wrote a summary here (and an earlier one here), and provided lists (1, 2, 3) of all the bills and amendments sponsored or co-sponsored by Clinton and Obama in the 109th and 110th Congresses, just so it would be as easy as possible for people to see for themselves. (Fun fact about each side’s legislative records: during the 109th and 110th Congresses (which is to say, the time that both Obama and Clinton have been in the Senate), only one sponsored a substantive bill that became law. Guess who it was? Hint: the bill concerns the ongoing conflict in the Congo.) Which brings me to my larger point:

I did this because I had heard one too many people like Chris Matthews talking about Obama’s alleged lack of substance, and I thought: I know that’s not true, since I have read about Obama’s work on non-proliferation, avian flu, and a few other issues. And if people are saying he lacks substance, then surely I, as a citizen, should try to find out whether I just hallucinated all this interesting legislation, or whether this talking point was, in fact, completely wrong. So I sat down with Google and Thomas and tried to find out.

But I’m just an amateur. I have a full-time job doing something else. Chris Matthews, by contrast, is paid large sums of money to provide political commentary and insight. I assume he has research assistants at his disposal. He could have done this work a lot more easily than I did. But he didn’t. He was more interested in gotcha moments than in actually enlightening the American people.

So here’s a challenge for Chris Matthews, or anyone else in the media who wants to take it up. Go over Clinton and Obama’s actual legislative records. Find the genuine legislative accomplishments that each has to his or her name. Report to the American people on what you find. Until you do, don’t accept statements from either side about who has substance and who does not, or who traffics in “speeches” and who offers “solutions”. That’s lazy, unprofessional, and a disservice to your audience.

Do your jobs. Don’t leave it to bloggers like me to do it for you.

by Reihan

While reading Jim’s post on Adam Shepard (who seems like a bit of a punk, but what a great idea for a book), I thought, “Could this have something to do with our role models?” James Heckman has argued that a big part of the poverty problem has to do with the uneven distribution noncognitive skills. The bourgeois virtues are an important part of success, and this insight is clearly at the heart of Shepard’s effort. There’s an obvious sense in which modeling the behavior of sober, responsible middle-class parents helps kids learn how to succeed. But what about kids who, for example, look up to crazy A-Rod? Consider his absolutely insane remarks about Andy Pettite.

“Andy is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met,” Rodriguez said. “I have two daughters — well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter, I would want ’em to marry Andy Pettitte. The age difference might be a little awkward, but in today’s day and age anything is possible.”

I don’t want this man anywhere near children, including his own. Oy, talk about a character reference. At least he didn’t say he would conscript his toddlers into campaigning against Barack Obama. But this is almost as bad.