I woke up to beautiful, clear, smog-free skies this morning, went for a good hard run, and then saw this:

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey of Election 2008 shows Republican frontrunner Senator John McCain with single-digit leads over Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. McCain now leads Clinton 48% to 40%. He leads Barack Obama 47% to 41%.

How could this have happened?

In 2006, a Republican party tied to a sinking president and a dismal war was handed a well-earned electoral beating. The party's presidential candidates were dancing around and running away from Bush and Iraq, and the Democrats had strong candidates and an endless supply of fat, facty cudgels to beat their opponents.

In 2008, it looks like we may end up with a Republican president who is an unabashed warmonger, and who shamelessly changed positions towards large parts of the Bush legacy. What the heck?

It looks like internet-wide content filtering is being discussed already:

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the M.P.A.A. and R.I.A.A., for the last six months about carrying out digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

It sounds like it's still very preliminary, but I would bet this is coming sooner or later.

If only these people could think of a revenue model other than lawsuits. Maybe someone could start selling RIAA lawsuit insurance to distribute the cost of those out-of-court settlements over the whole population. We could call it "privatized taxation" to get bipartisan support.

Columnist C seems to have it in for candidate A:

And somehow many people believe that Candidate A is the true progressive -- he wasn’t really saying that Reagan was right -- and that Candidate B, despite the progressive talk, is just Bush the third.

I respect Columnist C; I too find some of candidate A's rhetoric distasteful, and don't see him as nearly the progressive some claim. When it was just a matter of comparing health care plans I thought C was contributing to the discussion, and not simply cheerleading for (or against) a single candidate. But at some point this seems to have become personal: How does contrasting cherry-picked quotes contribute to the debate?

It's starting to look a lot like China:

DRM on music may be dying, but network filtering of copyrighted material is alive and well. In fact, over the next few months, two different filtering initiatives from Big Content could both come to fruition, bringing the magic of Big Brother to colleges and ISPs near you. It's still a contested issue, but the situation has developed to the point where it is at least plausible to imagine ubiquitous network filtering in the US.

Once the telcos (and Universities!) start monitoring and filtering traffic, where does it stop? Should we also filter for "hate speech" and un-American activities? Disturbing stuff...

Update: It turns out that the original article is somewhat alarmist. As an update states:

"Neither of these two provisions is tied to a school's participation in the federal student aid programs in any way," we're told. "In other words, no school and no student will ever lose funding if a school doesn't make plans to address IP theft, or purchase any programs to do it. And no school will ever lose any federal aid because its students engage in illegal downloading or file-sharing, period."

So the RIAA can sue schools, but not jeopardize their federal funds.

I also looked at the RIAA's "university toolkit" monitoring application, and all it does is naive traffic monitoring, not content filtering. The documentation includes this laughable sentence: "The program cannot distinguish between legal and illegal activity and does not identify the titles of the files being passed across the network." So while they may be more aggressive in the future, they really have no idea what they're doing now.

This is unsettling:

And then Al From, the D.L.C. founder, said he was “very happy about the two candidates” Americans are considering.

i.e. stick your fork in Edwards and your finger in a Liberal's eye. I happen to agree that Edwards is cooked, but if the DLC says that's good, it must be bad. My impression has been that Obama is a sort of inverse Howard Dean: he sounds more conservative than he is, rather than the other way around. But Al probably knows more than I do, so maybe I'm being too optimistic...

At a town hall meeting in Iowa on Friday, Dennis Kucinich offered an eye-catching twist on his usual stump speech when he held up Hezbollah as a model for the effectiveness of using social services as a way to win hearts and minds. "Did you notice in Lebanon what Hezbollah did? Lebanon became a democracy some time ago. And while their government was getting underway, Hezbollah went into southern Lebanon and provided health clinics to some of the people there and schools, and they built their support by having done so," Kucinich said. "That kind of diplomacy is something that would help America become stronger around the world and help people understand that our interest is an interest toward modernity and goodness and freedom for all people of the world."

Oh, wait, nevermind... That would be Mitt Romney. Let's see how long it takes for the rest of the Republicans to mock him as an Israel-hating terrorist-hugger, hopelessly naive when it comes to foreign policy, and for Romney to come back with some kind of "all options are on the table" address.

I am always disgusted by the biennial spectacle of Democrats acting tough by giving "muscular", "hawkish" speeches. Maybe there's some image to be dispelled in the minds of pre-Vietnam generations, but all it communicates to me is cringing, calculated pandering. Everyone agrees that we occasionally have to kick ass rather than just chew bubblegum, so the only purpose of this rhetoric is to project toughness, and its main effect is to shift attention to violent solutions.

And perversely, the pandering may even start to be a political liability. Just as the country is overwhelmingly turning against Iraq in particular and militaristic foreign policy in general, the Republicans are (unsurprisingly) emphasizing soft diplomacy. Yet the Democrats persist in trying to appear "muscular." Isn't it ironic.

Rosa Brooks delivers a much-deserved smacking today:

There's something fraudulent about this eagerness to latch onto the grief of others and embrace the idea that we, too, have been victimized. This trivializes the pain felt by those who have actually lost something and pathologizes normal reactions to tragedy.

Most of us don't know anyone who died at Virginia Tech, or even anyone who knows any of the victims, which is why any so-called "grief" or "trauma" on our part is absurd and fraudulent. Call it the JonBenet effect.

Grief is an emotional reaction to an immediate loss, understandable when you have lost something or someone important to your life. While we all may be parts of the human continent, the loss of some distant peninsula is not a personal loss. We may be saddened by genocide in Darfur, or angered that our government is not doing more to stop it, but the proper response is a cold, determined, calculated effort to prevent future deaths, not demonstrations of "grief" for people we don't know.

With the quarter's fundraising details out now, it's interesting to poke through the contribution list, but perhaps even more interesting to look at expenditures. There's plenty of "what the heck?" to be found, in every sense of the phrase.

First, in the chuckling sense, we have Bill Richardson paying $31 to "Kum and Go" (who also donated $1000), Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama paying $5 and $4, respectively, to CheapTickets.com (what can you get for that?), Obama dropping $38 at "Sweet Mandy B's", and camp Clinton packing away $170 worth of pizza.

In the utter incomprehension sense of "wth?", both Obama and Clinton gave $65,000 to the New Hampshire Democratic Party, with Obama also giving $100,000 to the Iowa party. Is this to rent facilities and staff? Stranger still, Richardson gave $30,005 to Tom Vilsack's presidential committee, his third-largest expenditure. Do we now have an explanation if Vilsack drops out at the last minute to support Richardson?

Anyways, I'm sure there are plenty of other goodies in the list. Let me know what you find.

A recent NY Times weblog post (sorry, behind the select-wall) by Stanley Fish highlights the importance of the power of appointment, which we hear about occasionally prefaced by "Supreme Court" or "recess":

It is that consequence of electing a Republican president that should be stressed. Democrats should make the power of appointment the electorate's prime consideration. And they will be in a good position to do so because the Republican nominee, whoever he is (no "she's" in sight) will not be able to repudiate the appointments of the outgoing administration. He will have to answer for the sins committed by the incumbent's toadies, and he will have no answer. So the question shouldn't be what will this nominee do for the country, but whom will this nominee put in charge of the institutions that determine the quality of everyone's life, and why should we trust someone who comes from a party that has performed so disastrously in this area for so long?

I agree that appointments are one of the most important and underappreciated factors in choosing a President, and that Bush's have been singularly incompetent and/or corrupt. Any Republican President would appoint a few more pro-lifers, friends of the mining and timber industries, and union-busters, but that's not the argument at hand, because some people prefer these appointees. The claim is that a typical Republican would choose appointees of Miers-level incompetence.

Most people seem to agree that Bush is an exceptional President; if nothing else, his Nixonian poll numbers suggest that he's not just a typical Republican. So at least superficially, I see this as a specifically Bushian problem rather than a Republican one. Democrats don't suffer from an overwhelming toady gap compared to Republicans as a whole, and I suspect most people are reluctant to blame one man for the shortcomings of another's lickspittles.

But is there a case to be made that the flamboyant cronyism of the last six years is a Republican trait?

Update: It turns out there may be a Dem/Rep crony gap! From the piece Josh linked, Daniel Metcalfe, a long-time Justice hand, notes:

In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term -- and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.

I haven't seen anyone comment on the recent Crowley profile (sub. req., but everyone has to learn about bugmenot some day) of Hillary Clinton in TNR. For a long time I have viewed Clinton with mild, diffuse distaste; this is in addition to the stronger feelings engendered by her Iraq war support and her refusal to recognize that it was a mistake. However, in trying to explain her politically-counterintuitive refusal to admit a mistake on Iraq, Crowley manages to highlight the reason of my discontent. It comes down to three things: militarism, authoritarianism, and paranoia.

First, the militarism. At a speech to the CFR in October 2000, Clinton claimed that

There is a refrain... that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.

If nothing else, the last four years should have taught us to be wary of a leader who sets her sights on some "right thing" and then sends the military out to make it so, even if "we" (i.e. "they") find it hard. This crusading attitude is a recipe for stupid wars, and at this point our reputation, budget, and military can't take too much more damage. Oh, and then there's that phrase "splendid little wars." Should we maybe warm up on Qatar on the way into Iran?

Second, authoritarianism:

Clinton was arguing that Congress should have an innate deference to presidential authority in matters of diplomacy and war. As she explained to ABC's George Stephanopoulos in December 2003, "I'm a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."

Again, the last four years have taught us that we need a less Congress. The authority to make war (or "police action", "ballistic whoopee", etc.), which was once divided between the executive and legislative, seems to have come to rest almost entirely with the President. Now is not the time to move further in this direction.

Finally, the reflexive paranoia. As a young law professor, Clinton tried to volunteer for the marines during Vietnam, and was rejected for not meeting their physical standards (she had poor vision, for example). In his pathetic two-question interview slot with Clinton, Crowley asked her about her service. A sane politician would reply that she wanted to serve her country, an admirable and unremarkable explanation, and put the issue to rest. Instead, she responded as follows:

At this her eyes narrowed and she threw me a glare of mistrust. "I have very deep and quite broad relationships with people in the military," she said. As for the meaning of the recruiting visit, "I can't tell you," she said with a dismissive wave. "You go look at that."

Whoa.

Authoritarianism and paranoia can be explained by her experience in the Clinton administration and as one of the Ritalin Right's few constant public enemies. But to explain is not to accept, and I see no reason to accept someone this dangerous as our nominee.

Captain Obvious writes in to the Washington Post today to report that throwing technology at schools does little for education. The gist is that poorly-performing schools, afraid of failing standardized test requirements, thought they could skip the hard work of hiring and training better teachers by buying educational software. A bunch of more-or-less corrupt companies sprang up to sell it (does it surprise anyone that Neil Bush owned one?). Now the Department of Education has released a study finding that the software doesn't help.

Educational software, a $2 billion-a-year industry that has become the darling of school systems across the country, has no significant impact on student performance, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education.

The long-awaited report amounts to a rebuke of educational technology, a business whose growth has been spurred by schools desperate for ways to meet the testing mandates of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law...

[T]he industry has also been plagued by doubts over the technology's effectiveness as well as high-profile bribery scandals, including one that led to the resignation of the Prince George's County schools chief in 2005.

My own experience with educational technology has been that it's either fun but not educational (shooting bears in Oregon Trail was awesome), a corporate Trojan horse (Channel One), or quickly set aside (Sun Blades for the undergrad lab). That's not to say that educational software and other technology can't be useful. But the initiative needs to come as a solution to particular problems or a response to teachers' demands. Otherwise, it's like housing the homeless by handing out plywood.