Framed

329 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the trouble the Christian right seems to be having in fielding a credible candidate for the Presidency.  I had thought that they would coalesce around Brownback, Huckabee or Hunter, but that's not happening.  It may be that the Christian right is not as rich and powerful as we liberals sometimes fear:

Although each of the three had supporters, many conservatives expressed concerns about whether any of the candidates could unify their movement or raise enough money to overtake the front-runners, several participants in the meetings said.

In other words, they may enough power to put an already well-funded and well-known candidate over the top, but not nearly enough power to raise up a candidate from poverty and obscurity into front-runner status.

It may be too that the Christian right always imagined that somehow the House of Bush would continue on in office through brother Jeb, despite his denials. 

Either way, it is salutary to be reminded that the fearsome fundamentalists are not the 800-pound gorillas they are sometimes made out to be.

330 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Today's entry is a special Hillary Clinton roundup.

Kathleen Parker has a column documenting how Hillary draws on the old Clinton magic and how that renders her a force to be reckoned with.

Francis Holland has an entry at MyDD in which he argues that Clinton cleverly defeated a proposed Constitutional amendment to ban flag burning by proposing a statute instead, thereby splitting the pro-ban forces and giving Democrats political cover in the 2006 election.

R.H. Potfry breaks the story about Clinton being caught eating a small child and speculates that this incident might hurt her chances of wooing Republican voters to her cause.

Foreign Affairs

I've always told my kids that being a foreign policy wonk would give them the opportunity to make a real difference in the fate of the planet.  But now there's an even better reason to join the geopolitical geeks: hot babes.  The Council on Foreign Relations

has decided to admit actress Angelina Jolie, a U.N. goodwill ambassador who has taken more than 30 trips worldwide to advocate for refugees, AIDS orphans and disaster victims.

On Friday night, the council's membership accepted Jolie's nomination - meaning she will soon be rubbing elbows with other club members such as Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan.

*  *  *

"Bring her on," said Dr. Gordon Adams, an international-affairs professor. "The idea of having Henry Kissinger and Angelina Jolie in the same organization is dazzling."

Switchtease

The idea that Joe Lieberman could switch parties if the Democrats push too hard for disengagement from Iraq is the sort of thing that could keep a lesser man up nights.  Yes, he's promised "1200 times" that he will remain a "Democrat," at least to the extent of caucusing with them.  Still, one might imagine him saying that he didn't leave the Democrats, the Democrats left him, and that as a matter of conscience he cannot continue to support a party that advocates policies that weakens America's position in the Middle East and undermines the troops, and blah blah blah.

Don't panic.  Lieberman's power is not as great as it might appear.  Alba, blogging at Daily Kos,  notes that because the organizing rules of the current Senate do not contain a "kick-out clause," the Democrats would likely stay in the Senatorial leadership positions.  The current rules are different from those that were in place in 2001 when Jim Jeffords threw control of the Senate to the Democrats by declaring himself an independent who would caucus with the Democrats.

The most that a GOP-affiliated Lieberman could do would be to act as a spoiler of Democratic initiatives.  He is on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Armed Services Committee, the Environment/Public Works Committee, and the Small Business Committee.  If he was determined to vote with the GOP, he could conceivably prevent those committees from voting out legislation for consideration by the full Senate.

If Lieberman were sufficiently piqued with the Democrats to vote against them not only on Iraq-related issues but on a other issues as well, it could make it very difficult, if not impossible, for the Democrats to muster the majority needed pass legislation at all.  This would require a wholesale rejection of everything Lieberman has stood for in his political career.  Other bloggers, whose disdain for the Senator from Connecticut borders on the visceral, would not be surprised by such a move, but I would.  I agree with Greg Sargent, blogging over at Talking Points Memo, when he says that if Lieberman switched parties, he would render himself irrelevant, and "Lieberman doesn't want to think of himself as irrelevant."

All this notwithstanding, I have been disappointed that the Democratic leadership hasn't done more to persuade people like Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, John Warner,  Chuck Hagel, Susan Collins and Gordon Smith to switch parties.  Moving even one of these into the D category would make Lieberman's switchtease act irrelevant. 

331 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Tommy, we hardly knew ye:

This process has become to a great extent about money, a lot of money," Vilsack said during a late morning news conference at his campaign headquarters in Des Moines.

"And it is clear to me that we would not be able to continue to raise money in the amounts necessary to sustain, not just a campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire, but a campaign across this country," he said. "So it is money and only money that is the reason we are leaving today."

Well, that's one less candidate I'll have to profile.

It should be clear to everyone now that the post-Watergate campaign financing system is broken.  The ability to raise money has always been--and will probably always be--a big factor in politics.  Vilsack might have been the second coming FDR, but he'll never get the chance to prove it.

This idea has been floated before by various people, and I think it's a good one: since the airwaves are owned by the public (which merely permits broadcasting companies to use them), we the public should require radio and TV stations to grant candidates free airtime.  Let the people get to see a little of the candidates before the "money primary" eliminates people who might be terrific leaders but who lack name recognition.

Now the question will be who benefits from Vilsack's departure.  As of February 6, he was polling fourth with 12% in Iowa, behind Clinton, Edwards and Obama.  I don't claim to have my ear close to the ground in Des Moines, but if I had to guess, I'd say Edwards would benefit the most, at least in the short term.  With Clinton and Obama feuding, perhaps Iowans will be reminded of how much they liked Edwards and his more positive style of campaigning.

It's Friday . . .

. . . and the streets are ours.  Here for your listening and viewing pleasure is They Might Be Giants covering Phil Ochs:

Martial Law

Just when I was thinking that maybe the recent spate of books and articles about how the U.S. is drifting into totalitarianism is just a bunch of overblown lefty handwringing, I come across this in the New York Times (h/t to BlondeSense):

Making Martial Law Easier

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

*  *  *

[Under this provision,] the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”

I'm sure there's nothing to worry about.  Martial law will surely only be declared in a responsible way to protect the homeland.

Insulting

Yo, listen up:  Islam is based on fairy tales and a childish belief in an all-powerful imaginary friend named Allah.  It is digsusting in the way it institutionalizes the second-class citizenship of women.  It's so-called holy book encourages warfare, revenge killings, slavery, group punishment, and barbarity.  It is a foul cesspool of delusions, stupidity, blind rage and ignorance.

(In all this is differs little from Christianity, but that's not the point here . . . .)

Keep listening: Hosni Mubarak is a senile dictator whose only competence seems to be clinging to power.  He is an inept, ineffective ruler who keeps a more than a quarter of his population illiterate and his economy so stagnant that if the United States were to withdraw its foreign aid, the country would collapse.  His prisons and police stations are places were people are routinely tortured, and his black-pajamas secret police forbid any real expression of dissent.

Do I have your attention?  Because if Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil just got four years in prison for "insulting Islam and Egypt's president," then just imagine how much time I'll have to do. 

Murder

The phrase "defining deviancy downward" (originally coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan) has been used by social conservatives to explain how it is that behaviors that were once considered shameful, immoral, sinful or perverse eventually come to be accepted as norms.  The idea is really a species of the slippery slope: once we accept one small deviation from conventional morality, we then find it easier to accept another, and another, and another until we find ourselves  condoning all sorts of things that were once thought repugnant.

This is how we come to see Instapundit, a/k/a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, the uber-blogger of the right, suggesting that the United States should murder "radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists."  We've been led in a series of steps to this point, steps that include

--illegal warrantless eavesdropping by government agencies;

--the kidnapping of suspected terrorists;

--the degredation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Grahib;

--the indefinite imprisonment of Guantanamo detainees;

--the arrest and imprisonment of people without charges, the right to counsel, or access to the courts;

--the torture of terror suspects.

Once our government commits--and moreover, defends the commission of--kidnapping, extralegal imprisonment, and torture, then murder is only a hop, skip and a jump away.

I'm sorry to see Glenn Reynolds come to this.  His blog, Instapundit, was the first blog I ever read on a daily basis.  I enjoyed his quirky mix of politics, nanotechnology, cars, cameras and music.  I appreciated his advocacy of civil liberties.  Even though I disagreed with him on various political matters, I saw him as just right of the center, a kind of guy with whom I could probably find a lot of common ground.

Over the last five years, however, the center has been yanked sharply rightward by people who seem eager to embrace authoritarianism and discard the funadmentals of enlightenment democracy.  This redefinition of what is commonplace, acceptable and worthy of consideration has gotten Reynolds and others to the point where their advocacy of the murder of scientists and Islamic theocrats is no longer deviant and shocking.  In a country where we waterboard prisoners and lock people up without judicial review, murder no longer seems so terrible. 

332 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

That's a long time, so please, PLEASE, all you Democratic contenders, STOP this kind of petty sniping. The little spat between Obama and Clinton is right out of high school:

Like, David and Hillary used to be sort of friends with benefits, you know, and David was tight with Bill C, but then David got down on Hillary and started, you know, like hanging out with Barack and was all like what a bitch and a loser Hillary is, so then like Hillary got mad at Barack and told him he'd better stop seeing David, but Barack was all like, stuff it, and then Bill R., who used to hang with Hillary and Bill C. and really like wants to hook up with her again, told Barack he should apologize for what David did, but Barack was like like no way am I going to apologize for something someone else did, you know, and Hillary was all like don't mess with me.

Sheesh.