Weekend Update - March 1st

• Okay, the new American Embassy in Baghdad only cost us taxpayers $736 MILLION. Maybe John McCain's right. We ARE going to be there for 100 years.


• Due for a colonoscopy? Have Aetna Insurance? Ouch.


• What?! Gasoline is up to almost $4 a gallon? Someone tell the President! Please!


• Tim Russert's performance as a moderator of last week's debate has drawn widespread criticism. We think he's just a squinty-eyed MSMputz. Or to quote Uncle Bob: "Here is overwhelming evidence that Tim Russert is a right wing media clown who would not recognize the truth if Molly Ivins arose from her grave and bashed his fat face with it."


• And speaking of Molly Ivins....Molly Ivins, Elvis, and Obama.


• Dan Rather slamming corporate control of MSM newsrooms? Repent! The End Is Near!


• Uncle Bob writes: Of all the reminiscences I have seen about the late William F. Buckley, I like this one by New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson:
  'Buckley exists to wrap up people's base, greedy, bigoted, low-life, mean, and nasty views into high-faluting language so that they don't have to go around thinking that they are just mean, stupid, and nasty, but instead have a philosophy like Buckley's.'"

A Poll That Explains the Facts In Texas

Okay, there are polls of all Texas voters, polls of this, polls of that. Here is a poll done by Texans, for Texans, that picks apart demographic trends and preferences and then goes one important step further. They pick apart the data by region, then they list the delegate count for each region. Others have warned that the Texas system is likely to favor Obama, but this is the first poll to seek to quantify the effect.

Guess what? They show Obama leading in the Districts which have 88 delegates at stake, while Clinton leads in Districts where 39 delegates are in play. If this were a Republican primary with winner-take-all assignments of delegates this would be a landslide in terms of delegate "get" for Obama. In the Democratic primary what one can say is that it looks like a proportional win for Obama, which since Clinton needed to win delegates by something like a 65% - 35% margin, means the primary season would appear to end here. Even more so, as national polls come out citing Obama as ahead on national polling, or in head to head matchups with McCain. That electability factor (not polled for in this poll) may sway undecideds to vote for Obama. Public discussion abut how well Obama's fundraising is going and questions as to whether Clinton should step aside can't help either, for those paying close enough attention to hear about it.

If this poll is accurate, or even close to accurate, there is no statistical chance for Clinton to get a high enough delegate count in Texas to keep alive her hopes of winning the nomination. That being the case, it would appear to be time for Democrats to wake up to the fact that they have a new nominee, for better or worse. No candidate is free of flaws and negatives. Obama has fewer negatives than Clinton, fewer than the Republican Party, but now the slime machine is going to start up. Given the unpopularity of President Bush that may only serve to further damage the GOP, in a similar pattern of self-inflicted wounds that we saw when Clinton turned into an attack machine. When Obama turns negative he seems able to do it in a softer manner. The result has more impact, while generating less anger.

Arthur

Campaign Notes

If Obama gets elected it will be because he seems to have struck a chord with a certain age group across the country. One might scoff at the idea of finding good reporting in the Wall Street Journal, but while their editorials are written by wizened trolls with bad breath, their reporters often produce some of the best reporting around. But the reporters don't get to write the headlines, so at first glance the story looks as though it is going to be a predictable hit piece from the corporate right.

This is a good example: downbeat headline and leader, but a quite insightful and balanced article, telling a story that other news media are probably not going to get around to even thinking about until a year from now. If ever.
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And highlighting meta-trends for 2008, this article has some interesting facts:

1. 22 million Democrats have turned out for their primaries, only 14 million Republicans bothered. That is better than a 3:2 advantage. That's 61% to 39%.

2. The article quotes a GOP pundit as saying the Republican Party "Is going through a transition". Yes, so it would appear.

3. As a strategy to halt the slide in enthusiasm the GOP in Ohio has lists of gun owners to send mailings to. That's daring.

Arthur

Howard Kurtz Says It's Over

Whatever else one can say about this article, one can lay a safe bet that Kurtz will probably not be invited to the Clintons' Fourth of July party this year. Whether Kurtz is essentially right or is getting ahead of the story, what this points out is the dangers for a politician in lashing out at the press, though it is certain that all politicians and government figures would happily see them gathered together and kept locked in an isolate rural prison camp. For their own protection, of course...

I happened to catch the MSNBC bio on John McCain last night, or at least a part of it. A fascinating story, at least the parts that I saw. McCain comes across as a curious personality, prone to plane crashes, literally and figuratively. I can't get out of my mind the joking line from Pat Buchanan that if McCain was elected that he'd make Dick Cheney look like Gandhi. What an image. It also struck me that when McCain was lashing out at Obama yesterday he was speaking (if one can judge from the sound of the crowd) to a group of a few hundred or so, while Obama's response was delivered to one of his halls with five thousand or so.

Arthur

Coat Tails

I am liking Obama more the more I get to know him. But I would be lying to you if I did not admit to ulterior motives.

My primary one is seeing as many Democrats get elected as is humanly possible. Obama seems a far more appealing and less divisive figure than Clinton. Lots of Republicans have come to me to confess that they voted for him and intend to in the general election if he is the nominee. Most seem to both like him and dislike Clinton. The range of reasons WHY they dislike Clinton is dizzying. I will not dwell on them, but suffice it to say, she arouses powerful negative emotions in a surprisingly large section of the electorate. Some may vote for McCain in protest, some may just sit out the election, but it will be less favorable to us than running a candidate that people seem inclined to go out and vote for, to cross party lines to vote for, and to send lots of money to. Last night the list of individual donors to the Obama campaign crossed the One Million mark. The average of those donations has been $109. If one could tally up all the volunteers in the various primary states, the precinct captains, sometimes five or more in a precinct, the numbers compared to the other campaigns would be staggering. That's why Obama is going to win Texas and why he may also win Ohio.

But all of that just tells me something else. When Obama has been drawing more voters out of the woodwork to vote for him than vote in that same primary for ALL the Republican candidates combined, that looks extremely promising. When turnout exceeds any prior primary election in all of the states so far, something is going on. Yes, it is Clinton as well, but Obama seems to be drawing in apathetic and new voters, including independents and cross-over voters. What that means, I believe, is that in a general election many of those same primary voters, if not all of them, will find themselves in a voting booth with Obama on the ballot and a list of Democratic Party candidates further down the list. And a good percentage of those voters are likely to go ahead and vote for the Congressman or Senator in the same party as their candidate, in this case Obama. That's called coat tails. My sense is that if the election keeps powering along the way it has, those coat tails may be extremely long, long enough to permit a host of Democratic candidates to ride along on them in 2008. In this election cycle ALL of the Representatives are up for re-election. Democrats and Republicans alike. We enjoy a slight edge in Congress, my hunch is that will increase a good bit. In the Senate a third of the Senators are up for election in 2008, but more Republicans than Democrats, which means that we have more opportunity for pick-ups this year. If our candidate energizes the voters into coming out to vote. Obama seems to do a good job of that. I am not the only one to have this idea.

Arthur

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

(More from Uncle Bob concerning John McCain and his experience as a POW.)


I gave John McCain short shrift in my previous note, so here is more. My POW experience was nowhere near as excrutiating an ordeal as his. His lasted five and one half years, mine less than four. He was singled out for inhumane treatment bordering on torture which finally extracted a bogus confession which he took pains to bowdlerize so that all except his naive Communist interrogators would recognize it as bogus.

In contrast, I was a lowly Marine private, just one of the herd with no secrets to reveal to our captors, and was therefore never singled out for questioning.

To hint that McCain has been "brainwashed" or at least significantly mentally diminished by his POW experiences a la The Manchurian Candidate is a Hollywood scenario that would make a hell of a movie but has no connection with reality. McCain is no more "brainwashed" than I am.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! (Hysterical laughter!)

Uncle Bob

From Uncle Bob

(Uncle Bob responds to questions raised by Arthur in earlier posts. For those of you who are new here, Uncle Bob is a retired Marine Sgt. Major, a Wake Island Defender, former Japanese POW, Vietnam Veteran, and a pretty interesting guy to listen to after a couple of brandies. We digress....)

I was twelve when Franklin Roosevelt began his first term in office and twenty-four when the only president I had ever known as a teenager and young adult finally succumbed to the wear and tear of the presidency and was laid to rest in Arlington.

He was revered by families like mine who had lost all due to the depression. My father went to work for FDR’s WPA to put food on the table for his family and probably would have voted for his sainthood if asked to do so.

An interesting footnote to all this is the fact that in the early months of his presidency, FDR pushed through Congress the so-called "Economy Act" which reduced the pensions of government retirees and the salaries of all servicemen by twenty percent, thus ensuring that when I enlisted in the Corps in 1939 my monthly stipend as a private was $21 instead of the $30 it should have been. But that was before FDR surrounded himself with advisers who embraced the John Maynard Keynes notion that "deficit financing" may become necessary to salvage a national economy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy and out the window went "pay as you go" government, eliciting frenzied editorial shrieks and caterwauls from the fiscally conservative Republican establishment, which seven decades later, in a supremely ironic turnaround, embraces the deficit financing of the Iraq war, which even if it ends this year, will have cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars they have not yet earned.

The record of Roosevelt’s early days in office prove that noone becomes president knowing how to be a president, and some never learn, as the current incumbent has proven in spades. After seven dreadful years (why did we attack Iraq, and why are we torturing dissidents?), impeachment is the only answer, Nancy Pelosi!

My reading of the political tea leaves indicates that an intellectually agile Barack Obama may inherit the Rooseveltian mantle, and if he does, I hope that he follows the Rooseveltian tradition of surrounding himself with experts in all the fields that he knows nothing about, which notwithstanding his supreme title as the new President of the United States of America, I hope he understands will be essentially everything.

Yes, I know. There are experts and then there are experts. Let us hope, for the survival of the nation as we know it and want it to be, that he chooses the right ones.

.........

Has John McCain been so emotionally tainted by his imprisonment as a POW that he is unfit to serve as President of the United States?

McCain, according to press reports, when things do not go his way, occasionally erupts in what I can only describe as "hissy fits." I do not think that this has anything, or very little, to do with his imprisonment as a POW. It’s just McCain letting off steam.

My friend, whose POW experiences were almost identical to mine, blames the Japanese for his subsequent emotional problems and distress. In my view, he would have had these problems no matter where he had been, but the Japanese were a handy excuse.

Sure, John McCain's view of the world have been changed by his experiences. So have mine. So have yours.

Uncle Bob