As West Virginians go to the polls, reader (and former resident) Akbar Jenkins looks at some of the state's demographic and cultural history, as well as its probable effect on voting patterns.

Robert Feinman argues that the military might just as well be considered the fourth branch of the government at this point, which I think is a fair assessment of a not necessarily novel phenomenon. The military's ever-increasing, and increasingly political, role in the country's affairs dates back to the transition from the WWII to the Cold War framework.

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Imagine a society that lets its automakers oversee crash tests on new models, allowing the industry to report results, as it sees fit, to government and consumers. Sometimes, an automaker might not reveal the outcome of a test that turned out badly, deciding that the dummies in the vehicle were too short--no wonder their chests were crushed!

In other cases, a company might postpone reporting on crash test results for a year or two, hoping that later trials would turn out better. In these cases dozens of trials might be required in order to achieve the desired outcome. The car maker would, of course, pass along the additional cost, in the form of higher sticker prices. In this society, crash tests are not run and paid for by an independent entity like our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (funded by taxpayers) or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (funded by auto insurers). Instead, the auto industry itself finances and controls the trials. Automakers also provide most of the funding for the government agency that rules on car safety. Finally, under this system, head-to-head comparisons of cars in a similar weight class are frowned upon. Such trials would create winners and losers--and who wants to be a loser? Instead, each company tests its own cars, and when outcomes finally are published, they tend to be excellent.

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There's something distasteful about this whole need for Barack Obama to assure us that he is, indeed, the best friend Israel could ever have. Jeffrey Goldberg has been beaten up some, but I've enjoyed much of his work. Indeed if you want to see how great reporting can be prescient read this piece, and pay close attention to the section of Missouri Dems, Claire McCaskill and Hillary Clinton. But it's amazing how much of Goldberg's Q&A is dedicated to Obama proving that he does believe in Israel's right to exist--as opposed to, I guess, believing Israel deserves to be destroyed in a downpour of hellfire. 

But Obama, labors under the burden of being a presumed Hamas agent, and thus twice he has to weigh in on whether "justice is on Israel's side." Given the nature of people, I don't even know what that means. Hell, I bleed red, black and green, but I'd never presume that justice was on black folks' side--at least not as a post-25-year-old. Indeed, these days, I'm much more concerned with getting black folks on justice's side, as the saying goes.

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One of the most controversial findings in Unequal Democracy is that the incomes of middle-class and working poor families have grown much less robustly under Republican presidents than when Democrats are in the White House. The Census Bureau's Historical Income Tables show that, since 1948, middle-class incomes have grown more than twice as fast under Democrats, while the incomes of working poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. Only families near the top of the income distribution have done about equally well under both parties. Skeptics have suggested a variety of reasons to doubt these figures. Here are a few - and the reasons why they are not compelling.

1. The pattern simply reflects the fact that Democrats held the White House for most of the high-growth period before the mid-1970s, while Republicans have mostly been in charge in the more recent slow-growth era. While it is true that income growth has slowed considerably, especially for middle- and low-income families, the partisan differences in income growth appear in both periods considered separately. Allowing for shifts in income growth patterns unrelated to partisan control, oil price shocks, changing levels of labor force participation, and other potentially important economic and social conditions leaves the partisan differences in income growth patterns virtually unchanged.

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I previously referenced this interview in my Cafe piece on Joe Lieberman's smear about Obama and Hamas.

But I want to comment on it independent of that silliness.

This is a great interview about Israel. That is not because Obama says the kind of things I would say about Israel and the Palestinians. I would be far more critical of Israeli policies than he is and far more sympathetic to the legitimate needs of the Palestinian people.

But this is a very different statement than one sees from most candidates. And I'll tell you why.

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One very foolish meme that's made it's way into the primary is this notion that black people voting for Barack in large margins is the equivalent (or on the scale of racism, arguably worse) of white people breaking for Hillary in similar margins. I doubt that anyone who reads this blog thinks like that, and truthfully, I haven't seen it in any of the blogs I read. It's one of those notions that you hear from beefheads like Joe Scarborough or in the Huffington Post comment section. I know, I know, those sources are roughly equal in credibility, but I just want to venture a quick response.

Blacks have been voting for whites for president since they've gotten the vote. There is no question about black people's ability to vote for a white man for president. Even in cases when blacks have a so-called black leader in the actual race, they still--in crucial times--have voted for the white guy. This is why it was patently foolish to infer that Latinos voting for Hillary were racist, when in fact Latinos had supported black candidates on several occasions.

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Hey all. My name is Ta-Nehisi Coates. I'm a struggling writer (is there any other kind?), novice blogger, the father of a lovely baby boy (he's seven, guess I better stop calling him "a baby."), and an admitted member of the Obama for sainthood cult. Anyway, the great folks here at TPM have invited me to cross-post some of my stuff here. I promise to try to keep the references to Robotech, intelligent swords and Wu-Tang Clan to a minimum. But bear with me, the ghetto nerdiness runs deep in this one.

Mother's Day has come and gone, but not the needs of working mothers--or, we should say, working families. Questions of sick leave, flexibility, fair pay, and mandatory overtime, and all the rest affect not just mothers but children, fathers, mothers, nieces, older people--really, everyone in the economy who has to care for, or be cared for, at any point in our lives. Which includes us all.

Here's my own experience with this: I am unspeakably grateful that while my father was dying this past year, my boss insisted that I take whatever time I needed, whenever I needed it, to fly to Florida to be with him. As a result I was there once a month in his final months, in the room with him during his last five days, held his hand while he literally gasped his last breath, and stayed with my stepmother and siblings while he was buried -- without worrying for a second about my paycheck, my amount of vacation or bereavement leave, or my annual review. I did not have to choose between caring for my family and keeping a roof over my head.

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So now Lieberman is putting out the line that a Hamas "endorsement" of Obama is the same as an Obama endorsement of Hamas.

I'm not going to argue about the illogic of Lieberman's statement. Or its sheer obscenity. If Obama is such a Hamas man, why did Lieberman demand (and get) his endorsement over Lamont in lhis 2006 primary.

It's a stupid, ugly and obscene statement.

But the worst thing about it is that it hurts American Jews and Israel. Joe Lieberman is the most prominent American Jewish politician. He is the only Jew to have ever been nominated on a national ticket. He is, by definition, a national figure.

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I'm delighted to be at TPMCafe and I'm looking forward to this week's discussion of Unequal Democracy. The book focuses on escalating economic inequality in contemporary America and the ways in which partisan politics and public policy have contributed to it. However, my aim in writing it was broader - to use the politics of economic inequality as a starting point for a more general examination of how American democracy really works. Here are some of the things I think I've learned.

1. Ordinary citizens' policy preferences are often only loosely connected to their beliefs and values. For example, upward of 85% of Americans agree that "our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed," but support for specific policies that would promote equal opportunity is much more modest. One problem is that many people are too inattentive to grasp connections between values and policies. Among people with strongly egalitarian values, those who were highly informed about politics opposed the highly inegalitarian Bush tax cuts by a four- to-one margin, but those who were least informed were more likely to support the tax cuts than to oppose them.

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Progressives have generally sought to promote affordable housing. We usually think that it is a good idea that moderate income people can buy or rent good housing. However, Congress seems determined to go on the opposite path, striving to keep house prices out of reach of tens of millions of families.

At least this is how the NYT describes the story. According to the NYT, a major purpose of the housing bailout bills before Congress is to keep house prices from falling.

There was a housing bubble in the United States over the last decade. After just keeping pace with inflation for a century, house prices rose more than 70 percent after adjusting for inflation over the years from 1996 to 2006.

Have the NYT editorial writers not noticed this bubble or do they think the housing bubble was a good development that the government should try to foster?

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Why is the Hillary camp talking up the possibility of her being Obama's vice president. The admirable and talented Liz Caputo touted the prospect on cable two nights ago; voluble Terry McAuliffe did the same on Larry King last night.

Perhaps the Clintons feel that if she were the Vice President, and Obama lost, then she'd be the presumptive nominee in four years, whereas if someone else were the vice presidential nominee he or she would be the presumptive nominee. But losing vice presidential nominees don't have that status. Indeed, the Clintons must know that if an Obama-Clinton ticket lost, both the top and the bottom of the ticket would more likely be regarded as akin to Dukakais, the man who lost an all too winnable election.

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We had an interesting discussion yesterday about the tendency we all have to choose information that validates our beliefs and reject the information that doesn't. The conversation focused mostly on the politics of the moment, both the conservative/liberal divide and the Obama/Clinton divide. Certainly, we can see in some of the discussions that devoted supporters of both sides have a tough time digesting bad info but love to trumpet good info. That's an important thing for us as a community to contemplate.

But it's also essential, I think, to broaden the focus from just our little world of debate to the whole world itself. In fact, I think Obama has pointed us in a direction that encourages us to break out of these mindsets even beyond our partisan politics.

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Jeremy Ben Ami, the founder of the J Street Project, has a piece in Sunday's Washington Post about what it means to be pro-Israel.

Not surprisingly, Jeremy -- who is an American but from a very prominent Zionist family in Israel -- believes that the cranks who are always calling people "anti-Israel" for supporting negotiations are not themselves pro-Israel at all.

I don't believe that various segments of the lobby have Israel's interests in mind. Nor America's. Their interest is in power, power for its own sake and for the sheer joy of making powerful politicians grovel. That is why Yitzhak Rabin told the lobby to take a hike when he became prime minister in 1992. He wanted Israel to deal with the US "government to government" without the lobby playing the role of intermediary. But that would have put the lobby out of business (no wonder they couldn't stand Rabin).

In any case, take a look at Jeremy's piece. I am delighted that it it is Sunday's Washington Post which means that all the lobby's Congressional bud's will see it.

I just posted some instructions over on the reader blog posting page. Check them out and let me know what you think, what I should change, if I've horribly misspelled any words, etc.

I've tangled with some bullies in my life, but Harvey Weinstein is surely at the top of my list. When I sold the film Shine to one of his rivals, he hunted me down at dinner in Sundance and put me up against the wall. He doesn't like to be on the losing team and his long time relationship with the Clintons has him staring defeat in the face. So what does he do? He threatens Nancy Pelosi to cut off the money to the DCCC unless she personally embraces his plan to privately finance a new primary for Florida and Michigan.

Since Harvey and Bill Clinton's other patron (who are they, Bill?) are going to finance this little oligopolistic fiasco, I assume they will also be in charge of counting the votes. General Pinochet would be proud.