Matt Yglesias points out the recent Pew polls that show (among other things) wide Jordanian and Egyptian support for an Iranian nuke. (and a majority believe it will be used on Israel).

This is, of course the fault of the neocons.

I think you’re seeing here the poisonous fruits of the “clash of civilizations” dynamic that we’ve been drifting toward for years now. And suffice it to say that this is very bad news. When people’s level of dislike for American hegemony is growing so intense that they start looking on things like Iranian nukes as a positive development, we have a problem. In part, it’s a serious problem for our Iran policy. In part, it’s a symptom of an underlying issue that’s going to create problems for us all over the map.

Now, some of us might have suggested that the problem was here in, say, 1988. But no one was paying attention back then, and no one was talking about “a clash of civilizations” yet (Huntington, 1993).

Once again, everything flows from our actions; there is no one out there except shadows cast by our helpless might.

My old buddy, Jim Moran, has a kind of … traditional … view of politial office:

Democrats win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November, U.S. Rep. Jim Moran said he would use his position in the majority to help funnel more funds to his Northern Virginia district.

Moran, D-8th, told those attending the Arlington County Democratic Committee’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on June 9 that while he in theory might oppose the fiscal irresponsibility of “earmarks” – funneling money to projects in a member of Congress’s district – he understands the value they have to constituents.

“When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I’m going to earmark the shit out of it,” Moran buoyantly told a crowd of 450 attending the event.

Colorful language and campaign hyperbole aside, Moran has a lot to gain if Democrats topple the GOP’s 12-year control of the House. His relative seniority of eight terms would make him a powerful member of any Democratic majority.

I’ve been following the career of Jim “the Jooos” Moran (D-MBNA) for a long time, beginning with this 2002 post:

WHY MY OSTENSIBLE PARTY, THE DEMOCRATS, WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE BUSH’S CORPORATE HISTORY AGAINST HIM

From today’s NY Times

The bill, which has been vigorously opposed by consumer-rights groups, had long been the top legislative priority of credit card companies and some banks, which insist that many debtors abuse the bankruptcy laws to escape debts they should be able to pay. The companies sharply stepped up campaign contributions to members of Congress in recent years as they promoted the legislation.

Among the biggest beneficiaries would be the MBNA Corporation of Delaware, which describes itself as the world’s biggest independent credit card company. Ranked by employee donations, MBNA was the largest corporate contributor to President Bush’s 2000 campaign.

The company has also recently acknowledged that it gave a $447,000 debt-consolidation loan on what critics viewed as highly favorable terms to a crucial House supporter of the bill only four days before he signed on as a lead sponsor of the legislation in 1998. Both MBNA and the lawmaker, Representative James P. Moran Jr., Democrat of Virginia, have denied that there was anything improper about the loan.

Right. Then there was this gem:

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 10, 2003; 3:22 PM

Jewish organizations condemned Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) today for delivering what they said were anti-Semitic remarks at an anti-war forum in Reston, in which he suggested that American Jews are responsible for pushing the country to war with Iraq and that Jewish leaders could prevent war if they wanted…

Which got me going here, and more here.

Here’s the news about his stepdown from a minor committee post, and more about his sterling character.

He’s up for re-election this year. And while I’m generally favorible to Democrats in the national Legislature, I’d gladly make an exception for him.

If you’re like me, you typically spend $8 – 12 daily on lunch when you’re at work. Figure that’s $50/week.

If you’re like me, you could stand to lose a few pounds (I’m down 10 with 10 more to go to get to 180), and skipping lunch or taking a yogurt and banana from home is a good way to do it.

Then you’re left with the problem of what to do with the extra cash.

This week, I’m going to point you to two places:

Prosecutor Patterico is directing people to the fund for paralyzed LAPD officer Kristina Ripatti, who was shot by a genuine Bad Guy (note Patterico’s earlier post). You can PayPal him funds to patterico*at*gmail*dot*com (I just sent $25 over) and he’ll pass it along.

And BlackFive is asking for donations for new voice-actuated laptops for wounded troops through Project Valor-IT. I just sent them $25 as well.

So go look in the mirror and ask yourself – wouldn’t you feel better if you were 5 pounds thinner? And wouldn’t you feel lots better if the money went to – as BlackFive calls it: “Caring For The Defenders”?

Chutzpah is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The word derives from the Yiddish khutspeh…

(from Wikipedia)

So I’ve been following the diminishing aftershocks from RFK Jr.s pathetic swing and whiff on voting at Rolling Stone (my original dismissive comments on his efforts are here).

Now please note that I believe that electoral integrity is critically important, and at risk. I don’t believe that recent elections are significantly more at risk than elections have been here in the US (in, say Chicago or other machine cities), but they are more at risk than is acceptable and that needs to change.

But my argument keeps getting undercut by these clowns.

Now I get led over to Salon (where I launch a lame Flash ad while checking my son’s homework), in order to read a defense of Jr’s claims by Steven Freeman, who authored a book that – Freeman claims – supports Kennedy’s claims.

I hope like hell his book does a better job than his Salon piece, though – but I doubt it.
Here’s Salon:

Are exit polls usually accurate?

Yes, they are. On Nov. 2, 2004, Manjoo’s source Mark Blumenthal, the Mystery Pollster, had this to say: “I have always been a fan of exit polls. Despite the occasional controversies, exit polls remain among the most sophisticated and reliable political surveys available.” Properly done exit polls are highly accurate. Given the large sample size in U.S. exit polls, they ought to be accurate within 1 to 2 percentage points of the official count.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have nasty habit of actually clicking on the links people put in their web writing. So I click on over to Blumenthal, and read a post that opens with this:

Is RFK, Jr. Right About Exit Polls? – Part I

Late last week, Rolling Stone published an article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. that asks provocatively, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” While it covers many topics involving alleged suppression and fraud in Ohio, the article disappoints in its discussion of the exit poll controversy, because on that aspect of the controversy Kennedy manages to dredge up nearly every long-ago discredited distortion or half-truth on this subject without any acknowledgement of contrary arguments or the weaknesses in his argument. It is as if the exit poll debate of the last eighteen months never happened. With this two-part post, I want to review the article’s discussion of the exit poll controversy in-depth, for it provides a good opportunity to learn something about what exit polls can tell us — and mostly what they cannot — about whether fraud was committed in the 2004 elections.

But then goes on to say this:

And yes, if you look back at my first post on exit polls on Election Day 2004, I too described exit polls as “among the most sophisticated and reliable political surveys available.”

However, I have certainly learned a great deal about exit polls since then, and calling them the “most reliable” of surveys ignores a host of other practical challenges. Exit polls generally sample a larger number of voters than telephone polls, but they do so because the “cluster sample” technique used on exit polls– which first selects sample precincts and then voters at those precincts — has more sampling error than comparably sized telephone poll samples. Exit polls also miss the growing number that vote by mail or cast absentee ballots.

[emphasis added]

…and this…

…one of the most blatant omissions from the Kennedy article: U.S. exit polls have been wrong before. In fact, according to the Edison-Mitofsky report, they have shown a consistent discrepancy favoring the Democrats in every presidential election since 1988. And while the 2004 discrepancy was the highest ever, they were almost as far off in 1992. More specifically, the “within precinct error” (WPE) reported by Edison-Mitofsky showed differences favoring the Democrat of 2.2 points on the margin in 1988, 5.0 in 1992, 2.2 in 1996, 1.8 in 2000 and 6.5 in 2004 (see p. 34).

Go back and watch the classic political documentary, The War Room — or easier, go back and read my post from January 2005 — and you will see that that leaked exit polls on Election Day 1992 provided as distorted a view as those leaked in 2004. The difference was that the leaked exit polls in 1992 were known mostly to insiders and served to exaggerate the size of Bill Clinton’s eventual victory. Clinton won by less than those early exit polls suggested, but he still won the election, so there was little lingering outrage.

So – our intrepid author has – I can’t even use the work Dowdified or cherrypicked – done what generations of movie publicists have done – and simply edited a useful quote out of a review which says quite the opposite. Blumenthal – a professional pollster – clearly set out in his piece an argument for why the exit polls a) were not as wrong as RFK claimed; b) showed error that was not atypical for U.S. elections; and c) were not as accurate in the German elections as claimed.

At that point, I stopped reading the Salon piece – it’s dinner time – and I’m not sure I’ll finish. The staggering dishonesty of his quote has left me thinking that this is not the best way to spend my time.

Note that he’ll probably turn this into “Armed Liberal says: ‘…this is…the best way to spend my time.'”

He’s just an ellipsis away.

Marc Cooper points me at an interview with Fred Halliday, historian and one of the former editors of the New Left Review.

Halliday’s journey – from the ‘indecent’ to the ‘decent’ Left matters, as does Norm Geras’ (and mine, for that matter), because the tropes we hear on the news are pale reflections of the ideas we read in places like TAP, which are in turn less-strident reflections of what is being said in the Academy. Which are echoes of what was said there a generation ago.

Just as the project of creating an environment for reform in the Islamic world is a generation-long one (read Thomas Kuhn if you’d like to know why), the process of recapturing the Western, Social-Democratic Left from the place where it fell off the tracks in the late 1960’s will take a generation as well.

Halliday:

The issue of rights is absolutely central. We have to hold the line at the defense, however one conceptualizes things, however de-hegemonized, of universal principles of rights. This is how I locate my own political and historical vision—it is my starting point. What this means very practically, to cut a long story short, is the issue of intervention. It seems to me that certain interventions in defense of rights are justified—Bosnia and Kosovo, to take two obvious examples, or the defense of the Kurds in Iraq in 1990-1991. The New Left Review and others on that wing of the Left attack not just these particular interventions, but the very concept of rights—and are consistent in doing so. My fundamental disagreement with the Review, and with Tariq, is really about this.

Once you start talking about defending individual rights, you are fundamentally talking about some variant of Enlightenment liberalism. That’s a good thing, in my view, and deserves to be encouraged. Read the whole thing, and be happy that this change is starting to happen.

Sadly, the new film “Cars” doesn’t, and that whiff of patriarchy and Castrol Type R has sent NY Times movie reviewer Manohla Dargis careening ’round the bend in writing her review.

To watch McQueen and the other cars motor along the film’s highways and byways without running into or over a single creature is to realize that, in his cheerful way, Mr. Lasseter has done Mr. Cameron one better: instead of blowing the living world into smithereens, these machines have just gassed it with carbon monoxide.

…

Even stranger, the film turns Detroit’s paving over of America into an occasion for some nostalgic historical revisionism. Surreal isn’t the word.

…

“Cars” is rated G (General audiences). Everything is clean but the fossil fuel.

Read the whole thing, it’s charming in it’s West Hollywood/Manhattan insularity.

Actually, it’s too bad Manohla didn’t study her urban history better; in the idyllic cities she so obviously misses, the biggest hazard to human health was the tons of horseshit that were left in the streets.

I’ll leave the snarky comment to the readers…

I’ve been having some weird behavior on the site for the last few days – the columns resize when I click on any ofthe links (not in the ways I’d expect). Anyone else seeing this? Please note what browser/OS you are using, if so.

An interesting day yesterday, Debra Bowen won her primary – which is great news – and an interesting mix of election results otherwise.

I biffed my election-day post favoring Bowen, but will try and make up for that in the next few months.

Meanwhile, a LA Times sidenote.

Steve Lopez – who is, I have to admit, frustratingly good sometimes, and frustratingly thick others – has one of his thick columns up today.

He’s lauding the LA Times coverage of the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls:

Whatever the results of Tuesday’s hold-your-nose primary for governor, this much is true:

Democrats Steve Westly and Phil Angelides were both gutted and fileted by this newspaper over the past several weeks. I mean that in a good way.

Readers learned, primarily from reporters Dan Morain and Evan Halper, that Westly and Angelides were anything but the upstanding, straight-talking crusaders they claimed to be. It was this newspaper, let’s remember, that pointed out the absurdity of an Angelides TV ad blasting Westly for donations from “a corrupt Chicago businessman.” As Morain and Halper discovered, Angelides himself had tried to tap the same guy.

The Times deserves the attaboy. But then, S-Lo steps off the cliff:

I almost hesitate to mention any of this, because there’s nothing surprising or unusual about the way Westly and Angelides were knocked around by The Times. That’s a newspaper’s job: Hold candidates up to public inspection, study the viability of their promises and slap them around as needed.

I’m just wondering why the paper hasn’t gotten huzzahs from the professional gas bags who worked themselves into a frenzy three years ago over our equally tough reporting on a candidate named Arnold Schwarzenegger. As that doddering shill Hugh Hewitt put it back then, The Times was “an organ of the Democratic Party” with no interest other than “agenda journalism.”

I was one of those “gas bags” in my post here. here’s what I said then:

…what I think torqued me off as a consumer of mass media – and I think others as well – was the LA Times blindness to the fact that it is a part of a larger ongoing dialog, and that the stories on Arnold’s sexual – I’m not sure how to characterize this – behavior clearly would have an impact, and were in fact reported to have an impact, by Carroll’s own admission.

I’ve said all along that what matters is that the paper act with at least the appearance of impartiality, or as my pet journalist said, ‘fairness’. Had the Times wrapped its Thursday piece in an explanation that made three simple points:

1) We’ve been working on this full-bore since August 6, we wish we’d run it sooner, but we didn’t believe it was right not to run it before you voted;
2) We understand the problems this presents for Arnold and his campaign, as well as the appearance it gives that we’re ‘hitting’ him, and we’ve given him and his campaign space to respond;
3) We devoted equal resources trying to dig into rumors about Davis’ behavior and been unable to come up with enough solid, sourced information to make a story out of it.

I’d have been mildly unhappy, but certainly not angry, and would have had no cause to be angry.

But the Times didn’t so any such thing.

What was the point?

That the Times had erred in running a thinly-sourced last-minute slam on Schwarzenegger the Thursday before the election.

And, that the public perception of the Times’ positions could be looked at by looking at the positions of it’s paid columnists – who were uniformly opposed to Ahnold. (As an aside, in the Calendar section today, there’s an article titled “Unity, yes, but still no anthem” with the secondary headline (the one after the jump) of “Wanted: a song that will rally the immigrant rights movement”. Imagine if you would the Times leading with “Wanted: a song that will rally the border-security movement” – having trouble? So am I)

I absolutely think the Times should be critiquing candidates – including the incumbent.

I just don’t think they should be doing it, out of the blue, on the weekend before the vote. That looks more like a campaign tactic than valuable reporting.

And if Lopez doesn’t understand that difference, he should step back from writing about electoral politics and write more about homelessness and the local politics about it. In fact, I can seed him with some good stories on the subject.

Work and election stuff all day, and off to an election-eve event.

But I saw something while scanning the blogs I thought more people should see.

Via Global Voices, I got linked to the blog of Palestinian Daoud Kuttab, who discusses the internal implications of the referendum being called by Abbas.

Abbas’ referendum has exposed a simmering split within the Islamic resistance movement, which Hamas tried to keep behind the scenes. It has shown at least three different positions vis-à-vis recognition of
Israel. Ironically, it turns out that the most moderate position within Hamas belongs to those in prison; those in the bigger prison of occupation and siege are not as moderate and those completely free in Syria are the most radical.

A deeper look reveals the obvious. Everyone knows that the balance of forces is not in favour of the Palestinians. So the differences of opinion are often focused on accepting a compromise now or waiting for the possibility of a better deal later; optimists hope the balance of forces will redress in the Palestinians’ favour. The more restrictive the conditions people live in the more they see the need for short-term relief and not just long-term dreams.

Hamas’ leaders in Damascus can wait for a long time because their daily lives are not affected by occupation, siege and imprisonment. There is an appropriate Arabic proverb. “Those who are feeling the whip are not like those counting the number of flogs.”

There is an even more important reason why prisoners and those under occupation have a more pragmatic point of view. A quick look at the Palestinian and Arab positions over the past half a century does not give much hope that things will be any better in 10 or 20 years. On the contrary, an honest look will show an erosion of the political programme. What we accept today (the 1967 borders) we rejected some time ago, and so on. Therefore, prisoners, whether behind bars or behind checkpoints, are not willing to waste their lives waiting five or ten years for their leaders to accept what they are rejecting now.

Interesting, and a blog worth keeping track of.

[Update: I wrote this post while doing nine other things and failed to make elementary arguments supporting my claim that voting for Debra – or getting your friends to vote for Debra – will make a massive difference in how voting is handled in the U.S. (hint: it will; go see Brad Friedman at HuffPo – and remember that he’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist while I’m a committed debunker of those theories and we completely agree on this) and see my letter below.]

As an aside, if you live in California and are a registered Democrat or Independent, the most important thing you can do to improve voting is to vote tomorrow for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State.

There’s been an interesting and long (if thinly populated) comment thread on my post regarding RFK Jr’s risable Rolling Stone article.

Note that while I’m passionate about improving voting systems – meaning improving the accuracy, auditability, transparency, and trustworthiness of the systems (meaning human, physical, and technical) we use for voting, I’m very dismissive of Jr’s claims.

I’m dismissive because my biggest concern is building the political will to make the changes we need to make to get us where we need to go. And as long as the argument is framed as “we need to fix the system to keep your side from doing all the bad things you do” – which is fundamentally the position of two of the commenters – two things happen. Instead of a bipartisan reform movement (the only way it will succeed), we get a wedge issue. Worse, instead of an issue where we can calmly agree on facts and work outward to plans, we get a conflicting array of unproven (and unprovable) assertions which quickly degenerate (as the thread has) to “did so!” and “did not!”I’ll make my position clear – again – in saying that both sides have and do game the system, and that I do not doubt that both sides have committed fraud. If you’re a Democrat, you should want to fix the mechanics of voting to make sure that Ohio can’t happen again. If you’re a Republican, you should want to fix the mechanics of the system to make sure Washington State doesn’t get done to you again.

I think it is highly unlikely that there has been ‘massive’ organized fraud in recent elections. That doesn’t mean that elections – local and national haven’t turned on votes that were a) from people who shouldn’t have been able to vote; b) that never were placed, because of people who were unfairly kept from voting; c) that were – at a retail level (i.e. in the hundreds or thousands but not tens of thousands). Like bad calls in baseball games, I tend to see them as averaging out.

But the game is being watched more closely – there are cameras that can secnd-guess the umpires’ calls – and there is more at stake.

So we need to work together to determine what it would take to have a system in place that both sides – that all Americans – can trust.

As I noted at the top of this post, tomorrow there will be an election in California where we have a chance to mark the low point in electoral trust in this country, and to begin – not in arguments on blog pages, but in reality – to build a system that we all trust.

We’ll do it by voting for Debra Bowen. If this issue matters to you, and you live in California and can vote for her, do it.

If you can’t, find your friends who can, and tell them to vote for her.

That way we can turn this argument from sniping to building, and start debating the ways that we can build a system that each of us will trust.

That’s Bowen for Secretary of State.

[Update: Here’s the email I sent to 1,200 people in my address book. I got about 100 positive replies and about 50 dinner invitations…

I’m sending this to everyone I know in California, and asking you all to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

To everyone, please understand that I wouldn’t send this if I didn’t think it was vitally important. Thanks for taking a moment to read it. Feel free to contact me with questions – this is obviously important to all of us.]