Since the Democratic campaign has, inevitably, descended into a dreary verbal assault by the two campaigns, jazzed up by a bleary media's sporadic attention to unlucky hanger-ons who have gotten hung up on a phrase or two, it behooves we rational blog-friendly folks to list the Clinton assertions that seem to need some real vetting, because after all we want the election to be based on facts and reasonable discourse.

I will let someone else do the same for Obama's assertions.

Here goes:

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The primary season is showing both the strength and weakness of organized labor. In states like Ohio where traditional labor issues like trade loom large (as they will in Pennsylvania), Hillary Clinton has done well too. But this says as much about where the labor movement is today as it does about where the two candidates are.

The labor gap is part of today's generation gap in the trade union movement. The amazing energy that has been generated especially by young voters for Obama has to be harnessed by Labor to make certain that any progressive movement takes hold. That means that workplace issues--and there is a long list: right to organize , job security, pensions, health care, job-work balance, income inequality,--all of these need to be as important to young voters as cleaning up the environment, ending global warming and freedom on social issues.

In an earlier era, the labor movement played a critical behind the scenes role for fueling a progressive movement.

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It now appears that this election year is truly historic. Never mind the politics of race and gender in the Democratic primary; never mind the rarity of a presidential election involving no incumbents from either party. No, I’m talking about something far more profound.

I’ve been using the Google all week to try to find out if a Democratic candidate for the presidency has ever praised his (or her!) Republican opponent on national security at the expense of his (or her!) opponent in a heated Democratic primary. Specifically, I’ve been trying to find out if there was any point in 1984 when Walter Mondale said, “I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, President Reagan has done that. And you’ll have to ask Senator Hart with respect to his candidacy,” or any moment in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey said, “I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Richard Nixon has done that. And you’ll have to ask Senators McCarthy and Kennedy with respect to their candidacies.”

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The American people are getting a chance to see how unprepared Barack Obama’s team of advisors are to help lead this country through the minefield of foreign policy problems that await the next President. Thank God Barack’s advisors are not allowed to carry firearms. They have spent the past week metaphorically shooting themselves in the feet and other delicate areas. Just imagine the damage they would do with real bullets.

We started with the Austan Goolsbee flap. You know, Barack’s senior economics advisor who told the Canadians essentially that Senator Obama’s public comments about NAFTA did not reflect his true feelings. Poor Austan did not understand that foreign governments take notes and file reports with their counterparts back home.

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The recent drama about NAFTA demonstrates that Barack Obama cannot effectively run against Hillary Clinton without criticizing the Bill Clinton administration.

At times it has seemed as if Obama wanted to identify with the 1992 version of Bill Clinton who was approximately the same age Obama is now and now was the last Democrat to actually win.

But Obama needs to differentiate himself from Bill Clinton as much as he does from Hillary Clinton. To the extent that voters want a third Clinton term there is no rationale for denying Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination. It is not plausible to depict her as having been a typical First Lady who merely did ceremonial work. She was an integral part of the Clinton administration. That is both her asset and her liaibility. Obama needs to take the bull by the horns and should take another line form John Kennedy's 1960 playbook: ”We can do better.”

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Despite the incredible role that mortgage brokers have played in steering families into unfair loans they could neither afford nor understand, the Washington Post reports that the National Association of Mortgage Brokers succeeded in having a provision that would function to deregulate the industry included a bill that passed in the House last year. Rep. Gary G. Miller (R-Calif.) authored and co-sponsored the provision, which would end the requirement that mortgage brokers be audited annually in order to deal in mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The Senate did not include this provision in its version of the legislation but the final bill is still being negotiated and, according to the Washington Post, congressional aids said that whether or not the language will be included is “up in the air.” The current requirement constitutes some of the only federal legislation regulating mortgage brokers, whose unethical manipulation of hundreds of thousands of families has contributed directly to the current sub-prime meltdown. The fact that the mortgage brokers would have the audacity to ask for this provision isn’t nearly as horrifying as the fact that the House actually included the provision. The Senate should not under any conditions cave to similar special interest pressures.

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In response to the commenters from yesterday, I thought that I would use my last day here at Table of One to talk about young people and policy. Typically, politicians don’t talk about youth-centric policies. It was even a running joke among some old Music for America colleagues that John Kerry would go to college campuses in 2004 and talk about Medicare (or whatever the “hot” issue was during that media cycle). It was the use of students as props for the latest talking point, not as a constituency to be taken seriously in itself.

This is something of a chicken/egg problem. Politicians don’t talk about youth-centric policies precisely because it is their belief that young people don’t vote, and young people don't vote because they don't hear anything relevant to their lives in the policy discussion. This week I’ve focused largely on the new infrastructure that exists to get young people to vote precisely because I think it’s up to us to break this vicious cycle. If we turn out, politicians will take notice and our issues will be addressed. I agree with the commenters that thanks to the campaign of Sen. Obama, who made young people a priority from day one, this problem is now being attacked from both sides, but it remains to be seen if Obama’s campaign template will become a model or an aberration this cycle.

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Samantha Power, superstar intellectual and Obama foreign policy guru, has resigned from the Obama campaign after calling Hillary Clinton "a monster" who would stoop to anything to win.

Seems to me this is mostly a political/media event, not a change in the underlying reality. Power isn't going to stop advising Obama, and I doubt the Republicans would make an issue of him giving her a job if he wins on account of her having said mean things about Hillary Clinton.

It's all about the politics. With that, the floor is yours.

With all the talk about the collapse of the mortgage market these days, it's easy to overlook some troubling patterns in the credit card industry. Marketing is out of control, tricks and traps increasingly dominate contracts, and the industry has quietly overturned a number of consumer protections.

I wrote an op-ed today about a bill that has been proposed in Maryland to take on a common trap, one called universal default. A couple weeks back, the Washington Post had a good article about this effort. New York and Nevada have also sought to take on universal default, and hopefully more states will soon take similar action. Putting pressure on the credit card industy and influencing Congress to act make a great deal of sense, so kudos to Del. C. William Frick, who's led the effort in Maryland!

Well, now that Samantha Power has resigned for her truly unfortunate and inexcusable remarks (tactfully and gracefully, too), I have a procedural question. Is the Clinton campaign going to devote some time and media-attention-generating energy to the fact that the McCain campaign has solicited and embraced the support of a far-right religious fanatic who calls the Catholic Church "the Great Whore?"

Or would that be a breach of protocol? I understand that once a candidate has crossed the Commander-in-Chief threshold, as Clinton and McCain have, certain questions of professional courtesy come into play, and candidates agree not to go after the unfortunate and inexcusable remarks of each other's supporters.

This is one of those times when the Israeli-Palestinian situation seems to be in a free fall. Yesterday’s terror attack at a Jerusalem yeshiva followed the Gaza incursion which followed the shelling of Sderot and now Ashkelon. It is becoming hard even to recall the few years, only a decade ago, when Israeli-PLO security cooperation had reduced terror in Israel to virtually zero and Israeli bargain hunters and day trippers flooded the Arab towns of the West Bank every weekend.

And yet here we are.

Israeli leaders clearly do not know what to do about Hamas-run Gaza. Obviously, they cannot permit Hamas and the other extremists to perpetuate a reign of terror on Sderot and beyond (Ashkelon, which some of the rockets are now reaching is a city of 120,000). Obviously, they have to do something. But what?

Fundamentally, Israel has two options, both bad, but one is better than the other. The first is military. The IDF can go into Gaza, as it did last week, and try to take out the terrorists. Last week’s incursion is considered a success (although two Israeli soldiers and over 100 Palestinians, mostly civilians—including 25 children under 18 -- lost their lives).

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In what is the most recessionary jobs report since the last official downturn in 2001, payrolls fell 63,000 last month, and were down 101,000 in the private sector, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment actually ticked down slightly, from 4.9% to 4.8%, but this was wholly due to labor force withdrawal. Employment in the more volatile survey of households—the one from which the unemployment rate is drawn—fell over 250,000.

The payroll contraction was the largest loss in almost five years.

The report is replete with evidence that the troubled, if not contracting, economy has reached the job market:

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Are now two sides of the same counterfeit coin of bad political analysis, constant spin for their favorites (McCain and Clinton), faux analysis, and poor advice for voters and candidates. Just my view.

I have heard the leading lights of the economics profession speak contemptuously of farm price supports and trade protection for the last three decades. According to these great minds, we would have overhauled our system of agricultural price supports 50 years ago if not for the power of the agricultural lobby. It is easy to use a simple economic model to show the waste and inefficiency of farm programs that keep the price of wheat, corn, and other farm commodities above market-clearing levels.

The same models can also be used to show the foolishness of trade barriers that are designed to protect the jobs of steel workers, textile workers or other manufacturing workers in the United States. That is why all right-thinking people are against such protectionism.

Since such views are so deeply held among mainstream economists, it is hard not to be amused by the support of several leading economists for a program of house price supports.

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If we could all just for a second avert our gaze from the never-ending election, it does appear that our government has so far failed to calm the financial markets. In fact, it appears that the government is not even thinking of acting with the scale and scope necessary to bring order to the business of lending and borrowing and investing and saving.

It should be no surprise to discover that our current government is not up to the task of managing complex events, sad and alarming as that may be.

And Hoover wasn't up to the job of dealing with 1929.

1. Michigan and Florida are going to have delegates sitted in convention and voting. Somehow that is going to happen.
2. Obama will be able to run a much broader campaign than Clinton in the fall; he really is the instigator of the 50-state future for the D's; she is the do-over of Gore and Kerry.
3. The battle for the Democratic nomination is the most drawn-out, vigorous, compelling story of a nomination in the history of America. Anybody who thinks this is bad for America or Democrats is missing the big picture. It is however a enormous test of composure, character, and resolve for the two candidates. I admire both of them for their sheer ability to soldier on with courage, wisdom, and even wit and good cheer.
4. If either of the two candidates wins all or virtually all of the remaining voting, on a state by state basis, he or she will get nominated. But if the battle swings back and forth, then see point one above.
5. Obama won Iowa; Clinton NH; Superduper Tuesday was a draw; the next stretch went to Obama; last round to Clinton --- this in the finals at Wimbledon; this is one of the really great Super Bowls; this is the Lakers and the Celtics in the 80s. If you love contests, if you love life, you gotta love this. The candidate who loves it the most will probably win.
6. There are no dirty tricks at this stage; in other words, fight fiercely folks.

The latest numbers are out: One in ten homeowners has no equity in the family home. The data show that about 15% will be below water if prices continue to slide, owing more than their homes are worth.

So what's the plan here? One in ten homeowners could just walk away right now. Indeed, most of them, if they were the rational maximizers so prominently featured in classical economic analysis, would stop paying now, put the money in a savings account, and wait the 90 days or two years or whatever until the lender could force them out by foreclosure. In non-recourse states, they could just pocket the money and walk away free and clear. In other states, they might need bankruptcy or a last-ditch deal with the lender for a short sale. The economics shift when the homeowner has no equity to protect.

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There's been lots of debate following Tuesday night's primary votes, much of it having to do with the Clinton camp's "kitchen sink" strategy. And I will say that the majority of the posts have tended to favor of Obama (or, at least, not in favor of Clinton's latest tactics).

First, articleman serves up, with a healthy dose of sarcasm, the Clinton spin of the results from Texas's "Unholy Primacaucus." (For more top-notch snark, see Hillary has the TRUE claim to bipartisanship.)

Of course, when the primaries are discussed, the image that comes to mind is that of a steamy and illicit romance. The Zaftig Redhead dissects The Democrats' Love Triangle.

More after the jump. . .

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On these SUSA polls Josh and David have been dissecting.

Chris Bowers over at Open Left digs up a striking trend that might go unnoticed if you only look at topline numbers. He breaks each race into a solid or lean win for either candidate, or a strait toss up:

Against Obama, McCain's "solid" and "lean" states only add up to 123, while Obama's add up to 229. In a matchup against Clinton, the "solid" and "lean" states are of equal size: 201 for McCain, and 203 for Clinton. In other words, while McCain and Clinton appear evenly matched, McCain is only able to keep it close against Obama by running up a series of narrow wins in the toss-up states.

You should check out the full post to see the raw numbers and caveats, but it's a compelling case that while Obama and Hillary may be essentially even in this snapshot, Obama has an ability to quickly grow his margin of victory (or pad losses) that Hillary doesn't.

Thanks to Alegre for an insightful video clip that summarizes succinctly the inept incompetence of the Obama foreign policy team. Susan Rice, a senior Obama foreign policy advisor, who served on the National Security Council and later as the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs at the State Department under Bill Clinton. We don’t know for sure what Barack or Hillary would do with a “3 a.m.” phone call, but we don’t have to wonder about Susan Rice. She sits on her hands doing nothing.

During her time on the National Security Council, as the senior person responsible for giving the President policy options on Africa, Rice reprised the role of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. She sat by while more than one million Rwandans were butchered in a bloody genocide. She let the phone ring and declined to offer any answer that would have saved lives. And she is one of Barack’s key advisors.

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Continuing where we left off yesterday, the [dot] Org Boom produced dozens of new organizations dedicated to engaging young voters and matching the leadership development pipeline of the conservative youth factory. As more organizations tried varying strategies, new best practices emerged (and continue to emerge), the number of groups in operation was whittled down, and the movement began to professionalize and specialize.

Thanks to the progressive bent of the Millennial Generation and the successes of the progressive youth movement in recent years, the Democratic Party is on the cusp of a windfall of support that could sustain the party well into the 21st Century. The potential is exciting, but the outcome is far from determined. Despite our many successes thus far, this new youth infrastructure – still in its infancy – has many holes. The gains we have made are fragile and tentative, and could easily evaporate. There are also whole swaths of the electorate that are still underserved by the current youth infrastructure. These constituencies need to be engaged if the movement is to reach its full potential.

Today I want to talk about what some of those holes are, and what the significance of all this is for the Democratic Party.

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It hasn't been a great year for Comcast so far. Comcast denied throttling and then admitted BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications and then got caught. Comcast denied, and then admitted, stuffing the room at the Federal Communications Commission’s Feb. 25 hearing on network management with paid seat-holders who stayed for the hearing while legitimately interested observers were kept out.

And now a new chapter, albeit somewhat smaller in scale, was written in Annapolis, MD.

In March 4 testimony to the Economic Matters Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates whether broadband companies should disclose to consumers where their services are deployed and where they aren’t, Comcast lobbyist Sean M. Looney invoked the Giuliani defense: consumers can’t be given information about broadband in their neighborhoods because of… 9/11. Yes, in yet another misuse of that tragic occurrence, Comcast invoked that same all-purpose shield perpetually invoked by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in his presidential campaign.

Here’s the background.

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Yesterday, George H.W. Bush's partners at the Carlyle Group were unable to make a margin call on a bunch of Mortgage-backed Securities. They've decided to walk away from a house that's "underwater" saying the security prices "are not representative of the underlying recoverable value of these securities."

Nothing like setting a good example for a nation experiencing a "jingle mail" epidemic of homeowners mailing the keys back to the bank when their mortgage is higher than their home value.

When his mom turned away he whispered in my ear. He said, "Take me with you."

I'll never forget it.

Will you?

Part 5 of Good Magazine's documentary on the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles broadens the view to city housing policy, and the failure of LA to make any progress in the last thirty years (Part 4 on God here, Part 3 on drugs is here, Part 2 on kids is here, the introductory episode is here).

Although I have supported Barack Obama in the primaries, I would not be devastated if Hillary Clinton should turn out to be the Democratic nominee. What does upset me, however, is how Clinton is employing the politics of fear and how much she emphasizes national security in order to mobilize support for her campaign.

The politics of fear worked wonders for Bush and Cheney. I'm genuinely saddened that Hillary Clinton would reach out to tell us, "be afraid, very afraid." Her ads warn us about our children's 'safety at 3 am in the morning and do nothing more than employ the politics of fear. Her relentless assertion that only she will be a strong commander-in-chief makes my blood boil. In response, Barack Obama must rejoin her attacks and convince us that he, too, would be a fine commander who can deal with crises and war.

Excuse me, but is this what we want from Democrats? Fear mongering? Haven't we had enough from the Bush administration?

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Obama may not have clinched the nomination last night, but he continues to ride a wave of youth support. Last night young voters in Ohio chose him 61 to 35 percent over Sen. Clinton. In Texas, he won the youth vote 58 – 42 percent. The youth vote is up in every contest thus far – sometimes double, triple, and even quadruple the levels we saw in 2004. In most states, the number of young voters participating in the Democratic contest outnumbers their Republican peers 2 – 1. Obama is riding this wave – and certainly he is amplifying it – but he did not create it.

We’ve talked about the Millennials and about the conservative youth factory. Now it’s time to take a look at the last five years and see just how Millennials altered the playing field to match their conservative counterpart. This is a Cliff's Notes version, to be sure, as this post covers in 1000 words what takes three chapters to describe in my book.

I would argue that the growth of the progressive youth movement thus far has come in two stages.

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Hells if I know. You tell me. (In other words, this is an open thread.)

Obama aides stressed that the campaign will not be drawn into a fight for Pennsylvania on Clinton's terms: an expensive, all-out battle focused on her. Instead, the campaign's main target will be McCain -- a point underscored by Obama when he declared himself "ready to start a great debate about the future of the country with a man who loves his country and served it bravely."

Maybe such aides don't want that "battle focused on her" but that's the battle they must fight.

It's understandable that every Democrat wants to engage with McCain. But the nomination turns on whether Clinton continues to build the momentum she captured in the last few days. She did it by attack -- allegations of unpreparedness for crises and doubletalk on Nafta. These allegations foreshadow what McCain and his cohorts will do this fall, so meeting them now is a useful and necessary test for Obama.

Even more important, going on the offense against Clinton is not only Obama's only way to win the nomination, it also is the only way for either Democrat to win this fall.

New data from the IRS ($$ from Wall Street Journal) indicate how much cash the extremely wealthy are making-- and how little they are paying in taxes compared to middle class families. Progressives need to consistently emphasize this reality and the fact that all the priorities we care about-- health care, transit, jobs, energy independence -- can be funded just by making the very wealthy pay their fair share.

How bad is it? Just the highest-income 400 taxpayers by themselves made $86 billion in income last year-- an average of $213.9 million in income apiece in just a year. And they paid just 18.23% of that in taxes-- far below the 30% they were paying back in 1995. That means that increasing the taxes paid from the over $70 billion in after-tax income of this tiny group could fund a range of priorities just by itself.

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While you're waiting for election results tonight, take a minute to read some over this week's recommended reader blogs.

Anna S takes a look at the long history of torture, and some of the crude notions that still justify its use today as they did in the time of Athenian democracy.

Matthew K. Johnson makes a thoroughly reasonable argument about Obama's Israel Comments and the Politics of Absolutes.

logical1 notes that Clinton's NAACP scorecard rating is higher than Obama's.

More after the jump. . .

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The gravely ill Louis Farrakhan's endorsement of Barack "Hussein" Obama was buried so rightly in the avalanche of commentary anticipating the vote in Texas and Ohio that I'm speaking almost out of turn in educing one more reason why it was stupid to try to tie part of the Jewish community in knots over this story.

But I doubt we've seen the last of such efforts. Even though Hillary Clinton looked silly pushing Obama about the Farrakhan endorsement in the last debate, and even though John McCain may well not mention it himself, it'll be back, in some form, as long as Obama remains a contender. The irony is that something about Farrakhan's Million Man March of 1995 in Washington, DC. showed the folly of black vs. white race-card playing as nothing had before.

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I just hate to give this Charlotte Allen nonsense (See J. Goodrich's post, below) even one more syllable of attention. Andrew Golis has it right: being inflammatory--about women especially--is a very successful marketing tactic. Over at CJR, Megan Garber explains this marketing approach in more detail, adding that "I, for one, am already looking forward to the paper’s upcoming eyeball-grabbers, “Asians Can’t Drive,” “Jews Are Cheap,” and “Old People Smell.” They’ll all be tongue-in-cheek, of course." (Let me add my favorite: Short people got no reason to live. Wait, that's been done.)

But here's what is particularly galling to me about this tactic: I wrote about it last year--for the Washington Post Outlook section, in a piece called "The Mommy War Machine." There, drawing on Caryl Rivers' and others' research, I outlined the cynical technique: Get women anxious or outraged, and it sells.

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This week, Congress sets out to craft a "budget resolution" – a blueprint for government spending and tax policy for the 2009 fiscal year ahead and an institutional reply to the proposed budget for the year that the president submitted to Congress last month. The House and Senate Budget Committees take the first step in the coming days, beginning debate on a draft budget or "mark" produced by the budget committees chairs, in the painstaking task that they hope will result in the FY09 Budget Resolution.

What is a Budget Resolution? Does it produce any meaningful results? What does a credible, useful Budget Resolution look like? Will we get one this year? Here's what we should look for in the Budget Resolution process this year.

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Yesterday we talked about the Millennials – who they are, what they believe, and the characteristics with which demographers and generational theorists attribute them. Today I want to talk about the political playing field onto which Millennials emerged in 2002 and 2003.

There’s a saying that if you are under 30 and conservative you have no heart, but if you are over 30 and liberal you have no brain. The implication is that people’s political ideology changes as they grow older. This is a nice bit of conventional wisdom, but like so much other conventional wisdom it’s also false. Partisanship is a habit instilled early in life, which is why reaching out to young voters is so important – it builds the base of your future coalition. Unfortunately, during the late 1970s through the beginning of this century, Democrats almost completely ceded the playing field to conservatives.

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At OpenLeft, Chris Bowers notes this fascinating coincidence:

So, the Canadian conservative prime minister is calling Barack Obama two-faced on NAFTA at the exact same moment that John McCain is indicating that Canada might pull out its troops on Afghanistan if we make too much a stink about NAFTA? That strikes me as more than a little suspicious. In fact, it strikes me as a directly coordinated attack by McCain and Harper to neutralize McCain on trade during the general election. It wouldn't be the first time Harper and Republican leaders have coordinated, given that Harper uses Republican pollsters and the conservative movements in both countries are deeply intertwined.

There's another coincidence. While McCain is ingratiating himself with his right-wing Canadian friends, who returned the favor by accusing Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee of making a side deal with them over Nafta, Hillary Clinton is declaring that like her, "Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

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In recent days, compelling evidence that the Clinton campaign can move quickly and decisively to outmaneuver Barack Obama on NAFTA have made me reconsider my allegiances in this election. I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference between Clinton and Obama on NAFTA, actually, and even the Joseph DeMora memo, which the Clinton camp is treating as some kind of smoking gun, suggests as much:

On NAFTA, Goolsbee suggested that Obama is less about fundamentally changing the agreement and more in favour of strengthening/clarifying language on labour mobility and environment and trying to establish these as more "core" principles of the agreement.

That's pretty much where Clinton stands, as well. But because this memo’s botched description of an unofficial conversation between an Obama adviser and a low-level consulate official has been transformed by the Clinton campaign into proof positive that Obama is all (duplicitous) talk and no action, I’m now convinced that the Clinton campaign has the vital experience necessary to pull off an effective “kitchen sink” attack on a progressive Democrat. That’s precisely the kind of experience that the new president will need in 2009 and beyond in order to triangulate with American and Canadian conservatives to marginalize dangerous, charismatic, and naive challengers who step out of line or try to jump the queue.

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I am dim. I faint and shriek. I can't add 2 and 2. I can't drive or parallel park. I can't do three-dimensional mental rotations to save my life, and this will doom my life to one of concrete thoughts, intense emotions, illogicality and the one correct sphere for someone with those flaws: To stay at home and to be solely responsible for the teaching, care and safety of the frailest among us: little children.

So Charlotte Allen tells us women in her Washington Post column "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" She must be writing satire, both because her conclusions are too preposterous to take seriously but also because if she was serious about us dim-bulb-women, surely she wouldn't have been allowed loose on the opinion pages of an august and objective newspaper?

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Alright, the work goes on getting things settled technologically here at Cafe. We've put together a first draft of a Frequently Asked Questions that we hope will help, and we have a long list of tweaks and bugs that our tech team is working at diligently.

Check out the FAQ and let me know what we should add.

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A quick meta point on this absurd Charlotte Allen business.

This and a few other particularly silly pieces in otherwise august publications have made me wonder if the major newspapers have realized that in the networked public sphere creating fodder for conversations-- i.e. getting that essential link from blogs all the way down the long tail -- is one of the best ways to drive traffic. And therefore, if you're trying to live on a big budget from the old days, maybe you should just publish a bunch of link bait to "provoke." The Allen piece can't have been good for the WaPo's reputation as a serious publication, but it's probably been good for their bottom line.

Update: 243 links and counting.

A moment of clarity. John Pomfret, the editor of the Washington Post's Outlook section, explains that the piece by Independent Women's Forum blogger Charlotte Allen on the stupidity of the female gender was actually "tongue-in-cheek." And now, suddenly everything makes sense. Conservatism, it turns out, is a tongue-in-cheek movement. The Wall Street Journal Editorial page, Liberal Fascism, Rush Limbaugh, The Project for a New American Century, and even the Bush administration itself have just been yanking our chain all along. LOL!

It’s a little bizarre these days, writing about the youth vote. Ever since Sen. Obama’s upset in Iowa the youth vote has dominated the news, and that is a change to be sure. I’ve been working in or writing about youth politics since 2003, and for five years it has been an uphill battle to convince people that we really are seeing a sea-change in youth participation. Fast forward less than two months, and what was once an impossibility is now a given. The genie is out of the bottle, but most people still don’t understand the significance of what is happening, and even fewer understand where it came from.

So that’s what I’d like to do with my time with you here at Table of One. Over the next five days, I’d like to talk about the history of the youth vote, why Barack Obama is just the very visible tip of the iceberg that is today’s rising youth participation, what it all means for the Democrats, and how the broader progressives movement can capitalize on this youth wave to secure a progressive future majority far into the 21st Century. This will be, in miniature, the same argument I lay out in my book, Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority.

I’d like to begin by sketching out a portrait of young voters themselves – the Millennials. Who are these young voters that are shaking up Democratic politics? Where do they come from and what do they believe?

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"My heart just, just bled when I came to Skid Row and saw the things that I saw.

A level of compassion rolls in me in such a way that I knew that this is where I had to be."

Part 4 of Good Magazine's documentary on the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles focuses in on the drug trade (Part 3 on drugs is here, Part 2 on kids is here, the introductory episode is here).

Success has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan. In the LA Times this morning, Mark Penn distances himself from all the big decisions of the Clinton campaign.

As the campaign faces a make-or-break moment, some high-level officials are trying to play down their role in the campaign. Penn said in an e-mail over the weekend that he had "no direct authority in the campaign," describing himself as merely "an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me."

"I have had no say or involvement in four key areas -- the financial budget and resource allocation, political or organizational sides. Those were the responsibility of Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes and Mike Henry, and they met separately on all matters relating to those areas."

Howard Wolfson, the campaign's communications chief, answered that it was Penn who had top responsibility for both its strategy and message. Another aide said Penn spoke to Clinton routinely about the campaign's message and ran daily meetings on the topic.