Josh Marshall Wins Polk Award

Now this is cool. The blog that you (all both of you) may have noticed I link to most often just won a Polk award for its involvement in reporting and uncovering the recent U.S. Attorney scandal.

Talking Points Memo is one of the most important web sites on the many internets. It is different from the better-known Daily Kos because it features legitimate, high quality journalism to complement the editorial nature of regular blogging. TPM was also involved in pushing back Bush's social security privatization attempt awhile back.

Marshall now has his sites set on combating the GOP slime machine. He has a post up now wondering aloud how a smear from a blatant GOP dirty trickster can wind up becoming an Associated Press article, and then a CNN front page article, and now, a CNN poll. I will be keenly following whether Marshall is able to affect the process in any way. Already, he has clearly caught the attention of the mainstream press. If he continues to harp on them for allowing stupid GOP dirty tricks to waltz onto their front pages, maybe they will catch some flak for it.

Ye Olde GOP Slime Machine

Beginning to get into gear...

Apparently, Barack Obama isn't patriotic. Also, he refuses to say the pledge of allegiance.

The former claim is especially frustrating. The Associated Press lends credence to this crap. The AP's source for Obama's alleged lack of patriotism? A guy named Roger Stone who makes Ann Coulter look calm and credible.

This is undoubtably the tip of the iceberg. oy

Obama at Reunion Arena

This post has been a long time in coming. I attended the Obama rally at Reunion Arena last month and took some pictures with my iPhone.


This line was seriously long. It poured out the back of the Reunion parking garage, and, once inside, wrapped up the ramps all the way to the roof, and then back down again. I was highly skeptical that we would be able to get in.

View of the line from the roof. The speech was only a few minutes from starting at this point. Luckily, there was nearly an hour's worth of introductions.

Heading back down again. We're on the second-highest floor here.


A look at the line , several floors below us...


To my great shock, we actually got in. Turns out, the Obama staffers thought it would be a good idea to have everybody go through one doorway.

We got in just as Obama started to speak. Unfortunately, we missed Emmitt Smith's introduction which would have been fun. Oh, well... c'est la vie.

Here Come the Rangers!!

Anyone got a problem if we field a sexagenarian closer this year?

Shenanigans in Washington State

Now here's an interesting story. The Republican Party in Washington state is having a hard time counting all of the ballots from their caucuses the other day. With only 87% of the ballots counted, and with McCain nursing a lead of less than 2% over Mike Huckabee, state GOP chair Luke Esser declared McCain the winner. Here is a brief rundown of the night's events, courtesy of Josh Marshall of TPM.

Maybe calling an election off with only 87% isn't enough to make you think there's something fishy in these degraded times of ours. Maybe this will.

This was based on my recollection. But this afternoon we went back and checked our election night notes (remember we report results in real time). And here's the progression of events.

According to our records (and I would strongly suggest other people with information check this against their data), the first report came in at roughly 9:30 PM eastern. With 16% of the vote, McCain ahead 27% to 26%.

Then at 10:15 PM, with 37% of the vote in, Huckabee moves ahead 26% to 23%.

Then there was an hour delay until the next update. That comes shortly after 11:15 PM, with 78% counted, McCain has moved ahead -- 25.4% to 23.8%.

Then there's another delay of an hour and twenty minutes. Shortly after 12:35, they get to 83% of the vote and now it's McCain 25.6% and Huckabee 23.8%.

The next update comes at 1:30 AM eastern. By this time they've counted a whopping 4% more of the vote. And with 87% reporting, it's McCain 25.5% to 23.7%.

So just to summarize here's basically how this works. We start out with McCain ahead. Huckabee jumps ahead with a 3% margin with almost 40% of the vote counted. Then everything slows waaaaay down. And we don't see anything else until about 40% more of the votes been counted and McCain is back in the lead. Things then proceed a glacial pace with Huckabee a little less than 2 percentage points back until 9% more of the vote is counted. And then they decide to declare McCain the winner. Not quite as cut and dry as the conclusion of a Scooby-Doo episode. But pretty close.

Sound fishy to you?

Anyway, Huckabee thinks things are fishy and has hired a bunch of lawyers to head up to Washington to look into the results.

But what really got me interested in this was a quote from an article Esser wrote in 1986 while he was in college. Remember, this is the guy who is in charge of counting people's votes:

Like any sport worth its salt, in politics you have adversaries, opponents, enemies. Our enemies are loudmouth leftists and shiftless deadbeats. To win the election, we have to keep as many of these people away from the polls as possible.

Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.

Many of the most successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings, etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by busybody judges.

The only means of persuasion left available to us are Acts of God, who we know is exclusively on our side. I’m talking about seriously inclement weather. I want Biblical floods and pestilence. I will settle for rain, sweet rain. The deadbeats won’t even go out in the rain for their welfare checks (they send one of their social workers to pick it up). There’s no way they’ll vote if it’s raining.

Busybody judges, eh? Wouldn't it be better if we went back to the 19th century when we just killed black people for showing up at the polls? That's a damn effective way to stop someone from voting as it has the added bonus of preventing them from trying again in the future.

Wow... and this isn't like we're talking about Strom Thurmond here. It's not like Esser wrote this back in the Jim Crow era. He wrote this in 1986. How in the world did this guy get elected chair of the state GOP? Yikes.

I will be following this story with great interest as it continues to develop. If you want to follow it as well, Talking Points Memo is following things pretty closely.

Update: Huckabee is now demanding a recount.

Update #2: Turns out, Esser is a close political ally of state Attorney General Rob McKenna who helped get him appointed as Washington GOP chair. McKenna is the chairman of the McCain campaign in Washington.

Fry's

I have had some pretty lousy experiences at Fry's over the years, but the kind folks at the Plano Fry's seemed determined to take the cake this afternoon. I had finally diagnosed the problem with my home theater PC today: bad power supply. So, I took off for Fry's, knowing exactly what I wanted and where in the store I wanted to go. In and out... I was not in the mood for browsing the aisles. I walked in, grabbed my power supply and two gigabit ethernet switches, and headed towards the checkout line.

Now, the checkout line at the Plano Fry's resembles the line for a ride at Six Flags more than your average retail store. It has switchbacks, is nearly half the width of the store (and this is a *very* large store), and merchandise lining both sides of the aisle. Today, they had all of the switchbacks open, and the line spilled out the back, nearly half of it sticking out of the normal area. Straightened out, this line would have gone around more than half of the store's outer wall.

Naturally, I didn't have a cart with me, so I was forced to carry my merchandise (power supplies aren't all that light) for nearly an hour waiting to check out. Apparently, their POS server was down or something... (Here, POS may stand for "Point of Sale" or something else, you decide)

You know... Fry's ran CompUSA out of business by giving people a better selection and offering competitive, up-to-date pricing. Someone else needs to run Fry's out of business by running a store that doesn't take a giant crap on the customer every third time he shops there.

Attorney General Mukasey: It's Legal If My Department Says It's Legal

Well, if you were wondering whether Michael Mukasey would be any improvement over Alberto Gonzalez, we got our answer today. When asked whether he would investigate whether waterboarding was a crime, or if he would investigate the administration's warrantless wiretapping, Mukasey responded that both programs were legal because they were signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

More here.

Worst. President. Ever.

Also, I would like to hear what Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein have to say about this. Those two were the main Democrats that caved and let the Mukasey confirmation go through.

Shaq to Phoenix?

Wow.

I really think the Suns are underestimating how much they will miss Marion. This trade is a big step back for their perimeter defense. Meanwhile, Shaq has given very little indication that he will be able to stay on the court. He is clearly not the same player he was two years ago -- and he was already well off his peak then.

If Shaq can get over his various injuries, the Suns will still be a good team. Even fat, old Shaq will score some points with Nash setting him up. I just don't think this will make them any better than they already are. Plus, by this time next year, Shaq will be chasing criminals for Miami PD and Marion will still be in his prime.

Not sure what Steve Kerr was thinking there...

Health Insurance

Paul Krugman wrote a column that ran in the Times this morning that has created a bit of a firestorm. Krugman has been harping on Barack Obama's health care plan for some time, and now, just before Super Tuesday, he seems to have hit on some nerves.

I am almost always a big Krugman fan, though he does write with a fairly blunt instrument. If you care about the health insurance implications of this election, I highly recommend reading Krugman's column, and a couple responses:

Clinton, Obama, Insurance, by Paul Krugman

Krugman Wrong on Obama and Mandates, by Dean Baker

Dean Baker is Wrong, by Paul Krugman

An Open Letter to Paul Krugman, by Harold Pollack

I think, of these, Pollack makes the best point:

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that everything you say is right. President Obama gets himself elected. He successfully enacts health reform, but he leaves out an individual mandate. Indeed, let's suppose that we later discover that too many people fail to buy insurance coverage or try to free-ride. We would have to address these problems.

In the meanwhile, all we will have accomplished would be:

1. to bar insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions;
2. to provide significant financial subsidies to millions of low-income people to help them buy coverage;
3. to prevent people from losing their homes because they are diagnosed with cancer;
4. to cover all children;
5. to make safety-net providers (and the local governments that run them) more financially secure because they no longer bear the burden of treating 47 million uninsured people.

I'd be pretty darned happy with this outcome--although I (like you) would ultimately prefer "Medicare for All" or some other version of a single-payer system.

This really is a question of incremental progress. Clinton's plan is more aggressive than Obama's. But, obviously, the new president will not be writing any laws; that's Congress's job. The best plan may not be the one that looks best on paper, but rather the plan that will be the most painless to get passed through Congress. Once either of these plans is passed, we will set in motion a march towards real universal health care: a single-payer system. Clearly, the current state of our health insurance system is abysmal, but it is unrealistic to expect it to become perfect overnight. If the next president can at least get the ball rolling, the public will stop seeing universal health care (or "privatized medicine," as the health insurance industry calls it) as an albatross.

The insurance companies tell us that "privatized medicine" means that we will have exorbitant wait times at hospitals, that we won't be able to get prescription drugs, and that the sky will fall. When people realize that universal health care won't stop the planet from turning, we will really turn the tide against the health insurance industry and better laws than either of the plans proposed by Obama and Clinton will be possible.

Yikes

Can we hold the election tomorrow? We can't get these anti-privacy fetishists out of power soon enough.

Great Infield or The Greatest Infield?

Dayn Perry of Fox Sports details the worst every-day position players in MLB, by position. Amazingly, the San Francisco Giants managed to take top honors at three out of the four infield positions. Nicely done.