Wednesday night, post-Zizek-lecture links.

* President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Probably the best of a bad set of options.

* How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology. I have to confess they have my number on Chinese/Japanese/Thai, not eating fast food, and delicious, delicious Samoas—but my love of pizza and PB&J proves that beneath my leftist facade beats a deeply reactionary heart.

* Already linked everywhere: Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer.

* Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster. Related: Steve Benen, Harold Meyerson, Kevin Drum.

* GOP Death Spiral Watch: Lindsay Graham censured by the South Carolina GOP for acknowledging the existence of climate change.

* Salon: Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl is possibly the best movie about family, community and poultry thievery ever made.

South Carolina state house Republicans are meeting this weekend to discuss “what it would take to force the Republican governor out and how the process would work.” Amazed he's held on this long.

Infinite linkdump Thursday, just politics.

* The Mark Sanford story grows stranger by the day, with 19 South Carolina politicians now on the record calling for his resignation. (TPM reports that Senators DeMint and Graham have gone to Sanford to prevail on him to resign.) Today he backed off a pledge to release his travel records, which suggests more trouble may be brewing for him.

* Who could have imagined that Exxon-Mobil would lie about its continued support for climate-change "skepticism" advocacy groups?

* Highlights from the first day of the Al Franken Century.

* Democrats can now "hijack elections at their whim": just another responsible, measured, and most of all empirically provable claim from RNC chairman Michael Steele, truly our country's finest elder statesman.

* But it's not all craziness: Michele Bachmann is facing criticism from the GOP for her weird lies about the Census.

* What caused the financial crisis? Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via MeFi) points to bubble economies nutured and created by giant investment firms, pointing the finger especially at Goldman Sachs. An Oklahoma lawmaker says it was "abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery." I report, you decide.

* Malthusianism and world history: a chart from Conor Clarke.



It's clear these growth trends can continue forever.





* Ezra Klein has a new Washington Post column on the politics of food.

Late night Friday.

* As expected, Waxman-Markey passed the House earlier tonight, despite the usual deranged opposition. (Voting breakdown from FiveThirtyEight.) Ezra and Matt pour over a chart that demonstrates just how little this will cost, despite what Republicans are claiming, while Grist considers whether cap and trade has ever actually achieved its stated goals. I'm disappointed with the bill and terrified about what the Senate will pass.

* MoveOn will target Kay Hagan for her opposition to the public option. Good.

* Froomkin's last column at the Washington Post takes the media to task for completely failing us over the last few decade.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

* But I think Ezra Klein makes the point more strongly:

I think that analytically honest political commentators right now should be struggling with a pretty hard choice: Do you try to maximize the possibility of good, if still insufficient, outcomes? Or do you admit what many people already know and say that our political process has gone into total system failure and the overriding priority is building the long-term case for structural reform of America's lawmaking process? Put another way, can you really solve any of our policy problems until you solve our fundamental political problem? And don't think about it in terms of when your team is in power. Think of it in terms of the next 30 years, and the challenges we face.

* Posthumously cleared after twenty-five years. Via MeFi.

* We had to lie about Sotomayor because we're still mad about Robert Bork. Right. Of course.

* More on how Obama forced Mark Sanford to shirk his responsibilities and flee the country. This is politics at its worst.

* I'm with Joe Strummer: If you don't like Springsteen you're a pretentious Martian from Venus. Via Shankar D.

* And of course we're still coming to terms with Michael Jackson:
Web grinds to a halt after Michael Jackson dies. Secret library of 100 songs could be released. Google mistakes the explosion of searches for an attack. Spike in SMS traffic outpaces 9/11. Will Bruno face a last-minute edit? (Some of these via @negaratduke.)

Bad advice from Alec Baldwin (via Kottke, who gets this wrong too):

Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.

Kottke goes on to criticize Huffington Post and TPM for diving so wholeheartedly into the mud on this. And he's right—sex scandals are non-stories and should be treated as such. (Olbermann's glee, for instance, was actively painful to watch last night.) But that doesn't mean the Sanford story isn't important or that the man shouldn't resign. Though the media seems strangely uninterested in this fact, Sanford skipped town (skipped the whole country!) for a week without telling anyone where he was going, and in fact actively misled his staff about his whereabouts. There are powers that only governors can exercise; it's wildly irresponsible for him to pull a stunt like this no matter what's going on in his personal life, and if that's the level of judgment he exercises when dealing with the state's business he obviously needs to resign. Governing a state is serious business, and a serious responsibility; Sanford blew it off, and so he needs to resign or else be impeached. That's the only aspect of this story that's newsworthy and the only one we should be talking about, no matter how salacious the details or egregious the apparent hypocrisy.

UPDATE: But don't take my word for it; even "Chainsaw" Charles Krauthammer says Sanford has to go.

Mark Sanford's political career is ending at the press conference going on now. It's painful to watch: after an awkward introduction that sung the praises of the Appalachian Trail, he segued into apologies to (so far) his kids, wife, staff, political supporters, parents-in-law, and the people of South Carolina. He hasn't said yet what he's apologizing for, but it's not looking good.

UPDATE: Yeah, he's been cheating on his wife. But that's the B-story—he ran off for a week without telling anybody on his staff what he was doing or where he was going. He's obviously got to resign the governorship. Hopefully the reporters have the sense to ask the right questions here, not just the salacious ones.

UPDATE 2: So far the reporters have stuck entirely to salacious questions about his marriage and his mistress. Well done, fellows. What about the state responsibilities he shirked? Can we get some real questions here?

UPDATE 3: Okay, finally we're getting some real questions about the fact that he lied to his staff about where he was going. (He admits he did.) And it's at that moment he runs off the podium, to audible questions about whether he will resign.

UPDATE 4: The coverage on MSNBC has been amazingly bad. We've had a parade of Republicans and political analysts with deep solemnity praising Sanford's "honesty" and explaining that no one should try to "make political hay" out of this. (Quoted language was obviously in the distributed talking points.) The man was caught at the airport by a reporter after changing his flight plans to try to avoid the press, after lying to his staff and ditching his official responsibilities for no good reason. To turn this into some morality play is soap opera coverage at its absolute worst. The adultery is irrelevant and the "honesty" a joke. It's about the job he was elected to do.

When will we get a real press corps?

UPDATE 5: According to the Kos thread, even Fox is handling this better:

11:55AM: Fox's Bill Sammon just layed down the law, all but saying Mark Sanford was done. Given Sammon's influence over Fox political coverage, that's pretty much a political death sentence even in the land of wingnuttia.

UPDATE 6: Someone at MSNBC must be watching Fox; Tamron Hall just called bullshit on everything MSNBC broadcast over the last hour and did a great job doing it, explicitly downplaying the soap opera in favor of the job issues in the process.

UPDATE 6: And of course Fox hardly deserves full marks.



Another accident! What are the odds? Curse the luck!

You'll be glad to know South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been found. He was, of course, in Argentina. Edge of the American West sums it all up:

What he was doing there remains unclear. The governor claimed he was simply driving along the coast line in Argentina. The Appalachian Trail, his original destination, proved unattractive:

The Republican governor told the South Carolina newspaper he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country. The governor says he had considered hiking on the Appalachian Trail but wanted to do something “exotic.”

So he flew to Argentina to drive the coast. The problem, as the Associated Press pointed out, is that driving the coast in Argentina is not all that easy:

Trying to make such a drive could frustrate a weekend visitor to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, the Avenida Costanera is the only coastal road, and it’s less than two miles long. Reaching coastal resorts to the south requires a drive of nearly four hours on an inland highway with views of endless cattle ranches. To the north is a river delta of islands reached only by boat.

TPM wants it made clear that Sanford and his staff didn't "come clean" about this; Sanford was caught coming off a plane after a reporter received a tip. ThinkProgress wants to know why they lied in the first place. Weirder and weirder.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention this in the original post, but as Neil points out in the comments, of course it's winter there.

Monday late night politics.

* Strange things are happening in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford has been missing for four days. Reports are that the governor has made contact, but the governor's office won't confirm that's true. (UPDATE: The governor's office is now saying that Sanford is on the Appalachian Trail, a mere 2000 miles long.)

* Waxman-Markey Watch: In the comments Alex drops an A-bomb to describe one of the key antagonists on this bill, Colin Peterson. Apparently the bill is unlikely to be debated this week. Yale e360 had a roundup of opinions on Waxman-Markey that's worth reading, with Climate Progress providing a roundup of the roundup. Krugman (also via CP) had a recent column on the bill, too, coming out in favor of it.

* Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of drugs. Good.

* 'Eco-Friendly Meat Could Begin With Mini-Cows.' Gross.

* Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill's got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don't think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.

* And Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a reality check regarding Martin Luther King. (NB: He's already walked the post back.)

The Obama administration has rejected South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's bid to waste $700 million in stimulus spending on debt repayment, as derided previously.

Miscellany.

* Republicans have successfully transitioned from passively rooting for Obama to fail to actively sabotaging the economy. Well done, fellows.

* Views from the other universe: Ricky Gervais v. Elmo.

* Lots of people are linking to "the fifteen strangest college courses in America." Maybe this just demonstrates how far out of the mainstream Duke Lit is, but most of these seem perfectly cromulent to me.

* The economics of March Madness: how excessive spending on sports is a money-loser for nearly every Division I school. Marc Bousquet was right!

Sunday morning politics linkdump. Sorry for all these linkdumps, by the way—it was a busy week. Next week should see a return to a little bit more sustained commentary (including the exciting return of debate liveblogging!).

* There have been some interesting debates about poll biases lately. Ron Fournier (grumble) at the AP covers a study that argues Obama would be further ahead were it not for racial animus, by as many as six points. FiveThirtyEight throws cold water on this, as well as looking closely at the possibility of a "cellphone effect" in the polls. If Obama does 2.8% better in polls that include cellphones, that suggests a shifting map like the one below, turning Virginia light-blue and strengthening small Dem leads in Ohio and Colorado.



* A study from political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that Obama will win, when all is said and done, with 54% of the popular vote. That he's naively comparing historical models with this year's unprecedentedly diverse tickets in both camps shows how seriously we should take this analysis.

* A new PPP poll shows North Carolina tied. Other recent polls show South Carolina within six, West Virginia within four, and MontanVoteRonPaula within two.

* There's evidence of a "Palin effect" in Florida driving undecided voters to Obama.

* The Spine tries to get a handle on Obama's early-voting advantage, beginning as early as this Friday in Virginia. The second link has some stats of interest for Dukies and Durham residents:

In addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting Oct. 16.

* The McCain camp has successfully demanded the VP debate rules be changed to protect Sarah Palin.

*Judge orders Cheney not to destroy his VP records.

* SNL mocked McCain this week. He also preemptively mocked himself with an article in Contingencies arguing (for reals) that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Straight out of the Dept. of Bad Timing. Obama's already taken aim at this.

* Will Obama raise my taxes? A helpful widget.

* And American Stranger has a long post on ideology that seems to take as one starting point my post on Slavoj Žižek, Obama Supporter. Essentially Ryan takes aim at the various binds the Left finds itself in with regard to political action, and I largely agree with what he says—though I certainly hope I wasn't in mind as his example of sell-out "liberal 'pragmatism' a la The New Republic." My point, both in the earlier post and now in this one, is simply that the U.S. President has a tremendous ability to make life better or worse for real people with real lives, all over the world, many of whom (believe it or not!) do not have cushy long-term contracts with elite universities. Naderite "Oh, they're all the same!" negativity only makes sense to people who are inoculated by class and privilege from the consequences of that power.

The mere recognition that the perfect not be the enemy of the good doesn't quite throw my lot in with TNR, I don't think, and certainly not so long as we also keep in mind that the good not be the enemy of the better. Our discomfort with pragmatic compromises—and we should be discomforted by them, every time and in every case—isn't by itself a reason not to be pragmatic.

Like a lot of people I noticed how Clinton stumbled a bit in the immigration question at the last debate:

8:40: Here comes immigration. The question is oddly phrased—How would you address unemployment, low wages for African-Americans related to immigrant labor—but Obama gets a good round of applause by rightly rejecting the terms as scapegoating. Clinton responds that some amount of scapegoating is appropriate before going to once again repeat the points Barack had just made.

but I'm not sure anyone in the blogosphere or the punditocracy really appreciated at the time how significant that stumble seems to have been. Along with her very bad answer on Iraq, it seems to have become one of the more politically important moments of the otherwise relaxed debate. I'm not as certain that this moment was as decisive in the La Opinión (L.A.'s largest Spanish-language newspaper) endorsement as one of Matt Yglesias's commenters, but it may well have been.

The real reason for this post, though, is for your dose of Saturday morning Obama porn, an unofficial viral campaign video linked by that same commenter. Exceedingly strange, it's his South Carolina victory speech set to music, with appearances from celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Cousin Ashley, the deaf actress from Weeds and Jericho, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I imagine something like this could be quite popular with the young people; I'm given to understand they like both music and celebrities.

The cable networks call it for Barack literally ten seconds after the polls close. More later, including a handful of pictures from today—for now feast on the results, including exit polls that hint at a huge victory for Obama and trouble for Clinton as the race goes on...

Be back soon.

UPDATED: Just jumping back online to say that everything tonight cuts against the race narrative the Clintons have spent the last three weeks building. Marc Ambinder notes that not only was Obama "close enough" in the white vote, but it also appears that he and Edwards Clinton tied for white males. Meanwhile turnout was apparently massive, with many new voters. This is all very, very good. I don't know how the Clintons right the ship this week, though I imagine whatever they attempt will be disgraceful.

UPDATE 2: Thank God Edwards hasn't left the race yet.

UPDATE 3: As Shankar pointed out regarding the already-infamous Jesse Jackson remark in the comments, the Clintons have basically decided to just come out and admit their plan:

Clinton campaign strategists denied any intentional effort to stir the racial debate. But they said they believe the fallout has had the effect of branding Obama as "the black candidate," a tag that could hurt him outside the South.

I was talking about this earlier today, and I really think that the race-baiting strategy is at the point where it now begins to boomerang on them. Here's why: very few people in America want to be racist. Race-baiting in politics can be effective when it's subtle and deniable; be too blatant about it, though, and you begin to incentivize voters to vote for Obama just to prove they (and the country) aren't racist after all. If the Clintons weren't already past that point, I think they blew by it tonight.

The margin of victory is hovering around 2-to-1, by the way; at 95% reporting it's 55 to 26. The delegate margin may be even higher. This is another unbelievably historic night.

UPDATE 4: Here's the text of the victory speech, another home run. Here's YouTube:

We're in Wilmington tonight, on our way to South Carolina tomorrow to volunteer for the Obama campaign. So posting will be light all weekend. I wrote an article for the Indy this week on a new book about the African liberation movement, No Easy Victories—other than that I'll be back full-strength on Monday.

PS: This is utterly outrageous, and exactly what I was afraid might happen, though I thought it would take a little longer. (The Clintons must agree with this Kos diarist that Obama will have a big delegate take tomorrow.) The scorched-earth primary continues and continues...

After badly blowing the public relations battle in both New Hampshire and Nevada, Obama's people seem to have finally caught on to how to play the expectations game. Beyond merely trying to set expectations low, I have to think the potential Edwards surge I blogged earlier has something to do with the Clinton camp's renewed under-the-radar efforts in South Carolina—they absolutely don't want a third-place finish going into Super Tuesday.

Zogby's daily tracking poll has Edwards spiking sharply in South Carolina—probably partly on the strength of a very good performance in Monday's debate—with indications that he could even finish ahead of Clinton on Saturday.

Edwards, meanwhile, has had his second good day since the Monday night CNN debate, in which he delivered a strong performance. He hit 19% support on Tuesday alone and then 27% support on Wednesday alone. And, on Wednesday alone, he pulled ahead of Clinton overall. He has pulled ahead among whites.

This result would throw a major monkeywrench into the Clinton plan to spin away what is likely to be a big victory margin for Obama in South Carolina by claiming he only won the state on the strength on the black vote.

I welcome this greatly.

It's been a bad week for the Clinton campaign overall, I think, with way too many stories about Bill, and Obama finally just coming out and saying what everybody already knows:

Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything, and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page.

Meanwhile, as one of my commenters noticed last night, The Onion reports that Bill has decided to go ahead and run himself.

Today in Barack Obama news, South Carolina's largest paper endorses him for the presidency, saying exactly the thing I wish more people were saying:

The one most significant difference between them can be found in how they would approach the presidency - and how the nation might respond.

...

The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare. That is not all Bill and Hillary’s fault - but it exists, whomever you blame, and cannot be ignored. Hillary Clinton doesn’t pretend that it won’t happen; she simply vows to persevere, in the hope that her side can win. Indeed, the Clintons’ joint career in public life seems oriented toward securing victory and personal vindication.

Sen. Obama’s campaign is an argument for a more unifying style of leadership. In a time of great partisanship, he is careful to talk about winning over independents and even Republicans. He is harsh on the failures of the current administration - and most of that critique well-deserved. But he doesn’t use his considerable rhetorical gifts to demonize Republicans. He’s not neglecting his core values; he defends his progressive vision with vigorous integrity. But for him, American unity - transcending party - is a core value in itself.

Can such unity be restored, in this poisonous political culture? Not unless that is a nominee’s goal from the outset. It will be a difficult challenge for any candidate; but we wait in the hope that someone really will try. There is no other hope for rescuing our republic from the mire.

Via TPM.

Ugh, looks like Clinton won. My prediction for next week is still a significant Obama victory in South Carolina—hard to see that not happening—followed by Edwards dropping out and presumably endorsing Obama, for whatever it's worth.

No clue at all how this affects the possibility of a Gore endorsement before Super Tuesday, which is Obama's other major potential ace in the hole...

UGHDATE: Double ugh.

UGHDATE 2: Watch this story: the Obama campaign is talking about widespread election irregularities.

We currently have reports of over 200 separate incidents of trouble at caucus sites, including doors being closed up to thirty minutes early, registration forms running out so people were turned away, and ID being requested and checked in a non-uniform fashion. This is in addition to the Clinton campaign’s efforts to confuse voters and call into question the at-large caucus sites which clearly had an affect on turnout at these locations. These kinds of Clinton campaign tactics were part of an entire week’s worth of false, divisive, attacks designed to mislead caucus-goers and discredit the caucus itself.

True or not, this seems like exactly the wrong thing to say after a close loss—but what do I know. In any event, it looks like maybe he doesn't want to be vice president after all...

Quick links for Tuesday morning:

* Can't stand waiting to see how Super Duper Tuesday will turn out? poblano at Daily Kos has a huge diary that tries to crunch the numbers. I can't say that there's much truth to any of it, but for my part I found the numbers encouraging—Obama already has significantly more strength in Super Tuesday states than I thought he did, and his prospects for a big bump after winning both South Carolina and Nevada are quite good. (By the way, the bogus Michigan primary is today. Go Uncommitted!)

* Peter Saunders argues in Policy capitalism is good. Marxists, Leftists, environmentalists, and rabble-rousers of all stripes, be advised.

* I'm definitely tucking this awesome Flickr photo away for future use. For now, it'll have to serve as this week's blog icon—I forgot to change it yesterday because of the semester changeover.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Green explains how to get a delegate in the South Carolina primary (if you're Stephen Colbert). I'm in favor of this stunt, but only because (and only insofar as) I don't think it will significantly hurt Obama's chances of winning the state. Via Matt Yglesias.