Politics

So, how’d I do on predictions? Arizona I said it’d go Kerry, Clark, Dean in that order. It did. Missouri I said Kerry, Edwards, Dean. Yep. Oklahoma I said it’d go Clark, Edwards, and Kerry in a tight race. (Polls had Kerry ahead of Edwards for second.) Yep again. South Carolina Edwards won it pulling away, as per prediction. Delaware I said Lieberman would come in second to Kerry and then quit; I was right but only by a couple of hundred votes. Edwards nearly beat him. Lieberman did quit. ...

Welcome to your handy guide (biased and slanted) to today’s primaries. We have seven primaries today, which will greatly affect the chances of three and a half candidates. (If Kucinich, Lieberman, or Sharpton win any of the primaries, that will have an effect as well, but I’m dubious about their chances. Which is a shame, at least in one case.) Dean’s strategy is to spend all his money on Michigan and Washington in an effort to win both of those states. Winning Michigan would put him solidly back in the race. However, he’s not expecting to win anything today. ...

Just as a reminder: Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? ...

Bush neglected to add funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to the budget. Again. That’s a little unfair of me, since in the one case we’re talking military funding and in the other we’re talking human aid. Still, either way he’s avoiding the true cost of the war. “The White House expects to cover the war costs with supplemental funds after next fall’s elections.” Indeed.

Westwood One Radio Network is owned by Infinity, a subsidiary of Viacom. Viacom’s other properties include CBS. CBS just refused to run issue advertisements during the Super Bowl. Oddly, on the Westwood One pregame Super Bowl show, I just heard two advertisements for LDS Family Services. I didn’t find either of them objectionable; they were both pro-adoption ads designed to encourage people to give unwanted children up for adoption. I’m pretty sure they both counted as issue ads. ...

Suicide bombers killed or wounded 200 Kurds today in Arbil (original). The targets were the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. No news yet on the affiliation of the bombers. This represents a significant step towards civil war. The question is whether or not the Kurds get to run Kirkuk and Mosul, the big northern oil cities. The Kurds would like to be in charge of these important resources; the Sunnis tend to disagree. ...

If the base political form of mockery known as fisking was generally of this quality, I’d be all for it. James Fallows, a former presidential speechwriter, goes over the State of the Union line by line. He’s partisan, but it’s not a partisan set of annotations. He’s coming at it from the point of view of a craftsman. (Via ceej (original).)

Hey, these pro-family folks want to know what you think about gay marriage (original). Kind of them to ask all of us. You know what to do.

If you start here (original) and read forward, you’ll get an elegant insightful view of the Democratic nomination battle from January 14th to the current moment. Al Giordano predicted Kerry’s surge ages ago, and he was dead on accurate. His insight into the surge as it happened was fascinating.

You don’t really need to go any further than the first paragraph of this story (original) (via Talking Points Memo (original)) to get pissed off: Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. Apparently the Republicans have forgotten Watergate. Stealing memos, as it turns out, is wrong.