BO pays off his political debts: "He was the guardian of his family."

Not only is this statement a ringing endorsement of the patriarchy. it is a bloody lie.

Anne Summers posted an interesting story by a 'young' Australian woman (no indication what 'young' means) who went to the NOW conference in Indianapolis in June.

Her comments on the advantages and disadvantages of national organization seem to encapsulate the current difficulties of the Left generally.

So let's see now, the Change is going to be all about appointing Ms Clinton to run the country's foreign policy.

The minor parties are a bit of fun. There are altogether 14 candidates who are on the ballot for President in at least one state and 12 of them are not going to get anywhere at all.

The least successful of these is probably the Reform Party, whose candidates are Ted Weill and Frank McEnulty (VP). They are only on the ballot in Louisiana (and write in status in Oregon) - though Ted hails from Mississippi and Frank is from CA. A few days out from the actual election, the Reform Party's website remains "under construction" There is some legal dispute over the Party's domain name!. However, you can click through to a Ted Weill's entry on Wikipedia (which mentions his support for Nader) or, alternatively, a page advocating Frank for President. Frank's page fails to mention Ted.

Next up in the confusion stakes is Ron Paul, who is on the ballot in Louisiana and Montana (write in: CA and OR). Ron's VP candidate is named "Various". Elsewhere it seems that Ron endorses various other candidates including Nader, Chuck Baldwin and Cynthia McKinney, all of whom are also on the ballot in Louisiana and Montana (although Baldwin only has write in status in the latter).

Alan Keyes is only marginally less confusing. He is on the ballot in California, Colorado and Florida. He is against abortions and therefore offers more policy than the previous two. His party intended to nominate Right To Life President Brian Rohrbough as VP. However, he had already nominated Wiley Drake who was in trouble with the IRS and it is not clear who, if anyone, is actually running for VP.

Charles Jay, of the Boston Tea Party, is on the ballot in Colorado, Florida and Tennessee. Charles is an interesting character who, in his words, "grew up around the gaming business, was raised in the boxing busines". On his blog he says "Ron Paul Revolutionaries Welcome". He also ran in 2004, for the Personal Choice Party, and his running mate was "adult film legend Marilyn Chambers". He was only on the ballot in Utah and he got a thousand votes! This time his Veep candidate is Tom Knapp whose blog reveals, more directly that Jay's, the fact that many of these third parties are really only splinter groups of the Libertarians.

Next, Gene Amondson of the Prohibition Party (nuff said?). He sounds kinda slurred as he wears his dog collar and proffers a bottle of wine on his home page. He and VP candidate Leroy Pletten have got themselves on the ballot in 4 states.

Brian Moore and Stewart Alexander of the Socialist Party are the first team to be on enough ballots (or write in) to be able, theoretically, to win 270 electoral college votes. They have at least a more professional website and Stewart Alexander's bio is very interesting.

The Socialist Workers Party seems to be a genuine Trotskyist organisation. Its leader is Róger Calero and the VP candidate is Alyson Kennedy. Calero is banned from running in quite a few of the 10 states where the party is on the ballot, so they've put up James Harris instead. This is a true sign of Trotskyism: they're not trying to win at all. Anyway they cannot garner enough EVs.

Socialism and Liberation is on 12 ballots. The leader is Gloria la Riva and the VP is Eugene Puryear (a student at Howard in case you're wondering about his experience!)

The Greens are represented by Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, the only all woman team. They're on the ballot in 32 states and you can write them in in all except Oklahoma and South Dakota. McKinney's website doesn't really mention anything green at all!

Then we come to Chuck Baldwin and Darrell Castles of the Constitution Party. They claim Ron Paul's endorsement, though he's also running against them in some places (as noted above).

Bob Barr (see the nice piece of dirt on him by Charles Jay). The front page of his website invites you to give him your email address so I suppose he's more interested in collecting data that giving out information about his campaign. His VP is a former TV personality (the plastic face on the sports and/or money show) who is the owner of an unspecified "small business". Oh yeah, and these people lay claim to the name Libertarian Party which is a bit of a blow for several of the other minor parties. But Barr used to work for the CIA (maybe that's why he doesn't like government?).

Ralph Nader. Another site where it's not easy to find out what the candidate is on about, although some of the others give him libertarian credentials. Passed his peak about 40 years ago. His VP is Matt Gonzalez who also ran for the Greens in San Francisco a few years ago.

Wondering why I've done this. They're really not very interesting, but I was struck by the sectarian splits.

So now go out and vote for Barack Obama. The rest of the world is depending on you

This is a beautiful picture (not least because it colours the left red and the right blue which is less confusing).

And this one, of Arizona, is quite amusing. Note the margin of error (MOE).

At the beginning of the primary season I picked on nine states that were marginal in the last election. If the Democrats didn't actually lose any of them (which back then seemed impossible), then they needed 19 more EC votes for the Presidency to change hands. The states most likely to switch sides were (with the number of EC votes at stake):
New Mexico (5)
Iowa (7)
Nevada (5)
Colorado (9)
Arkansas (6)
Virginia (13)
Ohio (20)
Florida (27)
Missouri (11)

The polls taken last Tuesday and on Sunday show Obama with a strong lead in Iowa and slight leads in New Mexico and Colorado. Between them they have 21 EC votes. Virginia has gone from a very slight pro-Obama position to a stronger one. Nevada, Florida and Missouri have remained as 'toss ups' - the poll results are close and statistically unreliable. Ohio has gone from a toss up to pro-Obama. Arkansas is consistently Republican.

In the last 4 days, Georgia went from being slightly pro-McCain to a toss-up and North Carolina and Indiana went from being slightly pro-Obama to a toss up. These states are not so important, but all in all Obama's lead has fallen over the past 4 days from 42 to 36 EC votes.

The only state that was in danger of going in the wrong direction is Pennsylvania and the polls are consistently showing a strong Obama margin.

There is no state that was at all marginal in 2004 that is showing a swing towards McCain.

Caveat: at lot of the most recent polls are from Zogby which is not very reliable (they predicted Obama's great victory in the New Hampshire primary).

As of Wednesday, the polls are giving Obama 312 electoral college votes. That's 40 more than he needs and it is not counting Florida and Ohio, which are classified as toss ups because although he's ahead the results are within the margin of error.

I'm holding my breath all the same.

One of the more interesting things that I've heard recently is that in the US there are still lawyers who turn up at voting booths in order to try to prevent people from voting. Whereas democracy is about enabling people to vote, there are people trying to prevent others from voting - including people who are registerd as voters!. In Australia, if you are a citizen who has registered to vote, I'm afraid that voting is mandatory.

Obama is going to win. We know this, so why are we even talking about it? Let's talk about something more interesting.

The South African High Court today rejected the corruption charges against Jacob Zuma. The judge, Chris Nicholson, in Pietermaritzburg said there was reason to believe the decision to charge him was politically motivated. I haven't followed this case very closely, but I was earlier very disappointed and actually unwilling to believe his innocence when he was acquitted of a rape charge last year. The trouble with the British system of justice and its offspring is that being acquitted does not actually prove your innocence. It only says that the prosecutor could marshal insufficient evidence against you. In the rape case, I remain convinced of Zuma's guilt - mainly because his statements revealed that he hadn't a clue what the word means and neither, for that matter, did the judge in the case. Worse still, Zuma apparently either has no clue or no sense of responsibility in relation to the spread of AIDS. He lives in a world in which nobody requires him to be responsible.

The latest ruling is different, however, because it doesn't involve the same kind of prejudices that are involved when a woman's testimony is put up against a man's. This world of arms dealing and corruption is the man's world in which people are actually accountable for their actions. It is the man's world of COSATU in which the South African working class is up against the companies that make profits from South African workers and the government that provides the conditions in which they can do so. Zuma v. Mbeke. I have to say that my attitude towards Zuma also changed when I heard him condemn Robert Mugabe. Mugabe is fundamentally a Maoist and the MDC began life as a trade union movement in Zimbabwe. Mbeke and Mugabe come from the national liberation struggles, Zuma and Tsvangerai come from the class struggle. I think that there is nothing necessarily progressive about national liberation - it depends on the context (Ngo Dinh Diem, for example, was a nationalist opposed to French colonialism).

So, Zuma is an absolute dead shit who happens to be on the right (i.e. left) side in politics? Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is a victim of incredibly sexist BS who happens to be on the utterly wrong side of politics, including sexual politics. That woman is so outrageous that it hardly bears comment. Some fake war hero rings her up and says I want you to be my VP and she thinks he's already her commander-in-chief so she doesn't blink (I heard her say it: "I didn't blink"). She says "yessir" without even wondering if she has any qualifications at all for the job. The problem I'm having with all this debate is that she has actually got more "experience" (if that's what you can call it) of foreign policy than George W. Bush had back in 2000 when he was elected, not to the vice-presidency, but to the actual Presidency. She has actually been outside the US. She is also older than John F Kennedy was when he was elected (but, he'd been a patrol boat commander in a war so he was really highly qualified in foreign policy, yeah).* Sarah's big problem is not so much that she's an idiot, but that she's a girl. If she was a bloke people would not be asking how on earth she could juggle 5 kids with being VP. They would be covering up, not querying, her lack of experience (unless, of course, she happened to be coloured like BO). The failure of the police commissioner to sack her ex-brother in law who tasered one of his kids wouldn't even be an issue because which true Alaskan Man would query the right of another Alaskan Man to taser his kids?

I'm tired. I think I could extend this further and make more sense out of it, but I can't right now.

* A patrol boat has even fewer people in it than Wasilla, AK.

67% of Australians who took part in this huge multinational poll said they prefer Obama and only 13% prefer McCain. Not as good as the Italians who had inexplicably voted for Berlusconi only a few months earlier. They were 76: 12 for Obama: McCain. (What have Obama and Berlusconi got in common?)

This picture of the Palin family can be found on the website of the Anchorage Daily News
It is the one used in the Daily Kos article to "demonstrate" the daughter's pregnancy. The photo (# 39 in the "Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gallery") is dated 2006 - a minimum of 16 months before the birth of the kid in question.

If anybody else wants to subscribe to Daily Kos garbage, please check this out first. The photos are presented with dates and links to the original.

Btw, an article by one of the Anchorage journalists links to a Wikipedia page about Desperate Housewives - a character called Bree.

I don't know why everybody is so surprised. I admit I haven't been following things at all lately, but McCain's decision didn't surprise me. The media are telling me that she's a complete unknown, which only goes to show that the media don't ever look at women (or maybe it's just that they don't know where Alaska is). I live in another country and I've heard of her before. She is all the things that the media have been advising McCain he needs since god knows when. In short she's a white, right-wing, christian, gun-toting, sport-loving, oil-drilling hockey-mom (only one house) whose husband fits the profile of Reagan democrat (apparently he isn't a registered Republican). She is older than the then Senator JFK (I mention this because so many people are saying she's too young) and with roughly the same amount of experience as Barack Obama.

I had to laugh at McCain's speech. What is this thing that Americans have about Washington? McCain, who has spent his entire career there (after he gave up war crimes, that is) puts it about that one of Palin's great virtues is that "she's not from Washington"! It's somehow a good thing that you're not from Washington when what you're aiming for is precisely to be part of Washington. Maybe he means that she isn't from one of those ruling class families whose names circulate over the generations in DC (or, like his, in the upper echelons of the military). Her dad was apparently a school teacher which is probably a bit more respectable in those circles than Margaret Thatcher's grocer-dad. Alternatively, he's telling us that inexperience is a virtue (which is funny given what he says about Mr Windbag - who isn't from Washington either). In a way it's a nice symmetry - two foreign policy hacks and two "ingenues" (which, of course, neither of them actually is).

The idea that she'll take Hillary-voters from Obama is absurd. The only things the two have in common is two X chromosomes and political ambition. I don't think women voted for Hillary because she is a woman, but because she is a Democratic woman.

Footnote: Daily Kos has a story accusing her of covering up the pregnancy of her teenage daughter. The photographs which they've used to claim she isn't pregnant do actually make her look pregnant and the photo of her "pregnant" daughter is clearly a photo of a not pregnant daughter. They should learn something about women's bodies before going with this kind of pathetic (and sexist) trash. Also she's got this daughter who, according to Wikipedia, isn't even 18 and if she didn't have a body-image problem before this piece of shit got going, I bet she's got one now!

When I was in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago I had a friendly argument with my old (Canadian/Australian) chum about Clinton v. Obama. Since both of us are outside the US it stayed friendly! He wrote to me today and said he thinks I was right and that sexism is so deeply rooted that "even a white female can't beat a black male" - by which he means, in case it isn't clear, that black men are above white women in the American social hierarchy. I've posted about this quite a bit over the past few months - looking at, for example, the low proportion of women in Congress relative to African Americans,* the fact that we're more likely to have a black president after only 4 decades since the end of Jim Crow, while it's almost 90 years since women got the vote and we still haven't managed to get a female nominee. In short, I have argued here that the progress of African Americans in recent decades has been far greater than that of American women.

As evidence of how bad things are for women, I have some anecdotal (not scientific) evidence.

• I've been expelled from the flist of somebody I knew (thought I knew) on LJ for over 5 years for suggesting - at least it was the trigger - that the issue of whether racism or sexism has been worse in America was moot, not settled. The same person had previously written that she wanted to thank me for my participation in the '70s feminist movement and the gains (such as they were) that we made. I replied that I didn't want to be thanked because I did it from self-interest. But the thing that really stuck in my throat was that it didn't occur to her to thank Hillary Rodham.


• Another LJ Obama supporter wrote, in the last day or two among the numerous post-primary post mortems, "if Hillary is a feminist, she wasn't treated any worse than average" (words to that effect). First, Hillary was probably a feminist before this person was born. Second, how would it look if I wrote "if Obama is black/coloured, he wasn't treated any worse than average?" Third, this person who is female and describes herself as feminist, thinks it's 'average' for people to make up puns on your name like Hildebeast, Hitlery, etc, have 'humorous' nutcrackers in circulation, get called a bitch and a C..., have your thick ankles and your cleavage classified as "inappropriate", then get blamed for your husband's behaviour and have people think it's funny when a couple of jocks tell you to "iron my shirt" while you're trying to be taken seriously as a candidate for President. The only suggestion I can make is that some people cannot see sexism, even when it hits them in the face.


• I reviewed Paul Krugman's book last week. He dates the rise of movement conservatism from Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980 and argues that movement conservatism was all about re-establishing the racial hierarchy after Johnson's Voting Rights Act. I commented in my review that Krugman didn't mention women very much in his book. Thinking about it subsequently, I came to the conclusion that this omission is a fundamental flaw in his entire analysis. The voting rights act was 1964. Second wave feminism, which broke out after Johnson left office, was one of the leading political movements in the US during the 1970s (along with gay rights). Reagan's speech, which no doubt DID target southern racism, was in 1980 - the location of its delivery is significant. But what is movement conservatism actually all about? It is not about the virtues of slavery. It is all about abortion, gay marriage and no fornication. In other words it is, above all, an attempt to roll back the gains of the feminist and gay liberation movements of the '70s. It is all about re-establishing the dominance of the patriarchy. Krugman's analysis of the origins of movement conservatism ignores an entire decade and a half of American political change!


• I have seen way too many versions of 'she fucked her way to the top' during this primary campaign. Mostly it takes the form of Hillary is some kind of marionette manipulated by Bill. It ranges from the notion that she should never have stayed with him after the Lewinsky business or the [insert female name] business, to the entire Democratic machine belongs to Bill and if she's elected he will really be the president. This kind of rot has been written by self-proclaimed feminists even. They have quite evidently never heard of the adage that "behind every successful man there is a strong woman." Let's be clear about something. Bill, who has no political pedigree at all, though he is apparently quite charming, married an articulate, activist, powerful and politically connected woman.


• There are loads of examples, among the detractors of Hillary, of assertions that Obama's policies are more progressive, even "way more" progressive. This is absolute BS. There is scarcely any difference between them on domestic policy - although Hillary's statements have tended to be marginally less neo-liberal and more social democratic. Then you have the blunders (or possibly alarming policy developments?) that Obama made during his campaign - he proposed invading Pakistan, he declared that Jerusalem is the "undivided capital of Israel" (does he actually know that the US embassy remains in Tel Aviv?) and he suddenly repudiated his minister of 20 years (who, by the way, receives true messages from his Sky Pilot). Hillary's big blunder was way back in 2003. I suppose it might be possible that both or either could or would learn from their mistakes.


• The latest load of rubbish is that she ran a bad campaign. Let's get our facts straight. The only reason that he is now the candidate and she is not, is that he won the caucuses. His victory is therefore entirely due to the voting system adopted by the Democratic Party. Some people appear to think it is unreasonable for her to have appealed the Party decisions on Florida and Michigan - as if no male candidate, even Saint Obama himself, would not have done the same. (He is, after all, from Chicago.) In reality, the caucus system favours male voters - caucuses are held at a time of day when the kids have to be fed and put to bed. They were obviously designed in an era when it was absolutely inconceivable that a woman would want to vote, let alone run. Certainly they were designed in an era when it was absolutely inconceivable that a man could stay at home and put the kids to bed, while his wife went out to do the important political stuff. I don't think that anybody believes that the rules should be changed in mid-stream. But now that we know women DO want to have a say, the caucus system has to go. How did it take so long to come to this realisation? Has anybody else realised this?


• Last, but certainly not least, is the view that there are any number of women that our fine feminists would have voted for, except the one who was actually running. Carol Mosely Brown, Nancy Pelosi, [insert name]. Well, hello! they didn't run. You can't vote for somebody who doesn't run. When you have to chose somebody who is running, then you have to choose somebody who is flawed because real politicians are flawed people.
  I should make this absolutely clear. I can respect somebody who wants to vote for Barack Obama for reason x, y or z. What I cannot respect is the efforts that have been made to denigrate the other candidate. It's like you're voting for Obama because Hillary isn't perfect, or, um, actually she's a bitch.

When I get too depressed and wonder "which female is going to dare step up to the plate next time?" I have to think that the problem is really the sheer invisibility of sexism in US society. Americans basically had a civil war over the fate of black people and they haven't yet got over it. So somebody like Krugman can think that movement conservatism is really about race, the 'Southern flip' was about race, when it wasn't really. It was about the white patriarchy.

Now I really need to get over this disappointment and move on.

* And, incidentally, that if it weren't for African Americans, the representation of women in Congress would be even more pathetic than it is. An interesting hypothesis to test would be 'that all of the progress made by American women in the past 3 decades has been made by African American women'.

Here is the conclusion of the New Statesman's North American editor on the recent primary race.

The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka "Hildebeast" and "Hitlery") from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever. But that creeping realisation has probably come too late, and many of the Democratic super-delegates now fear there would be widespread outrage and increased racial tension if they thwart the first biracial presidential hopeful in US history.

But will Obama live up to the hype? That, I fear, may not happen: he is a deeply flawed candidate. Rampant sexism may have triumphed only to make way for racism to rear its gruesome head in America yet again.

I think that the basic thing this article misses is the power that Hillary's campaign has given her. If she wants to shaft Obama she can, though she won't. A more likely scenario, in my view, is that the Obama crowd will not recognize the real power that Hillary has - precisely because she has consistently won the Democratic heartland - and will try some rubbish campaign based on winning Kansas and Colorado. However, an altogether more realistic take on the aftermath of this primary season is that the Democratic campaign will reflect this balance of power rather more than the peddlers of Obama hope would like.

PS: I hope they can start by shutting him up on the question of Jerusalem.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, Allen Lane, 2008

A friend in Adelaide lent me his copy of this book. I think he liked it as much for the anger with which it was written as for the content. I'm not sure that I'm quite as keen on it, but at least it isn't difficult to read.

Krugman's basic thesis is that the US has gone through a long politico-economic cycle. First, prior to the Great Depression was the Long Gilded Age in which inequality was massive and the poor were basically disenfranchised (the poor were the African-Americans plus relatively new immigrant populations - together comprising a quarter of the population). Next came the Great Compression - the era after the New Deal in which the elite had basically conceded the gains made by Roosevelt, the two parties pursued broadly similar agenda and the middle class expanded rapidly. After that we have the New Gilded Age beginning with Ronald Reagan and (hopefully) ending with George W. Bush. This is an era in which many of the gains of the New Deal are rolled back and inequality expands rapidly, with a minor slowing down during the Clinton presidency.

The middle part of the book is about how Reagan set in motion the reversal. I guess it's the most controversial part of his thesis since he is arguing that the shift back towards massive inequality (now vastly greater than in the Gatsby era) was not produced by global economic forces, but was part of a deliberate political strategy of the 'movement conservatives' - launched by Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi and explicitly appealing to American racism. He dates what he calls the 'Southern flip' (the shift from Democratic to Republican dominance) to this campaign. The Southern flip ended a 4-decade Democratic domination of Congress that had previously prevented any Republican moves to reverse the welfare gains of the New Deal.

Now, however, Krugman argues that we've reached a new turning point in which racism - at least of the old sort - has somehow lost its centrality in American politics (the book was originally published in 2007, but Barack Obama is mentioned only twice). African Americans are no longer so disenfranchised as before, but immigrants tend to remain so. Still, something like 20% of the population cannot vote. Health care is the key to turning back the tide (Both Mr Obama and Mr Edwards have health care policies).

I could have been fooled into thinking that the United States is a country almost devoid of women. Professor Krugman managed to get through 273 pages while mentioning only 12 women (Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, Michelle Goldberg, Claudia Goldin, Katherine Harris, Molly Ivins, Rosa Parks, Nancy Pelosi, Amy Windenour, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi). Apart from these, women in general are mentioned 6 times. (The index names 23 men before you get to the end of the letter B). One of the ways in which Krugman does mention women does perhaps provide a clue to this curious absence. On page 211 he discusses changing social attitudes and inter alia mentions that in 1987, 29% of people surveyed completely disagreed with the idea that women should return to their "traditional roles." By 2007 this percentage had risen to 51%. Which means that pretty much half of Americans don't completely disagree! One of women's "traditional roles" is that of being out of sight in books about politics. So Krugman talks about the health policies of Obama and Edwards...

According to a compilation of polls, Clinton seems to be more electable than Obama. Mind you, Obama will probably win, but it will be harder for him than it would be for her. That's assuming that people vote the same way they said they would in the last poll they took.

Clinton would get 247 electoral college votes, McCain 174 and 117 are too close to call.
Obama would get 228 electoral college votes, McCain 205 and 105 are too close to call.

More importantly, Clinton is clearly ahead of McCain in the polls in Florida, Ohio and Arkansas. McCain is ahead of Obama in all three. Assuming that no previously Democratic states go Red, either FL or OH would be enough. The only marginal state in which Obama is clearly ahead is Iowa. Not enough.

Polls taken 6 months out are not much use I agree. But this kind of thing must be weighing on the minds of those superdelegates who have yet to commit. If I were Hillary, I wouldn't be giving up yet either.

The CNN exit polls are infuriating because they don't ask the same set of questions each time, so you can't compare one state with another. Yesterday's question was whether Jeremiah Wright was important or not. About the same proportion of both Indianans and North Carolinans said he was, but what does it mean? Is he important because he's absolutely right (mostly my view except for the god-bothering part)? Is he important because he's undermining Obama? Is he important because he shows Obama's true colours? Or what?

Having asked people in previous primaries about their race, they decided not to do it this time. Now if I were an African American who wasn't voting for Obama purely on the basis of his skin colour, I could be worried about his repudiation of Wright. As a political observer (or if I was a superdelegate even) I'd really like to know whether the repudiation of Wright has had any impact at all on Obama's African-American vote. African-Americans could go two ways on this issue. They could see Obama as a Harvard white boy who committed a moral fraud in the earlier deep South primaries, or they could see him as a politician, doing what's expedient, but still basically on side (his wife would be helpful here because apparently she failed the 300% American Pride test). White people, on the other hand, might see Wright as exposing Obama's true, unpatriotic and morally reprehensible colours, or else they might say here's a guy with deep sympathy for African Americans so he goes to their churches and really tries to identify with them, and yet he's able to rise above all their silly stuff and heck we're gonna vote for him because the silly people like Wright are really trying to destroy him. I suppose I haven't covered all possible permutations of voters' positions on the Wright issue, but my point is really to ask why the question wasn't asked this time. Was Wright important to black voters or not? Was he more important to white voters, or not?

Another question they have decided to ask, at least in the last 3 primaries, is how people would vote in a Clinton-McCain general election. The results are pretty similar for each state. Approximately 7% of Obama voters would not vote for Clinton, but would choose McCain (6%) or not vote at all (1%). That's great. Really. Because it says that, in the remote chance that Hillary wins the nomination, she will beat McCain hands down. Idiotically, however, they haven't asked the same question about Obama - i.e., what will Hillary's supporters do if Obama wins the nomination? Frankly, this seems a far more likely scenario and also the one that will be exercising the minds of superdelegates in August because what they really, really need to know is, can Obama hold the "Democratic heartland"? Also, can Obama win not only Missouri and Colorado, but Pennsylvania in November. Can Obama win Florida? Can he win Ohio?

I suppose the Dems are doing their own polling. Does anyone have any knowledge of the results? It seems that Hillary appeals to a category called 'Reagan Democrats', although these seem to have garnered less criticism from his supporters than the middle-aged (Boomer) white feminists. The former seem to me far less likely to vote for Obama in November than the latter.

While we're on the vexed subject of Boomers, let me say that Obama seems to be quintessentially Boomer (even if he was born a year after the Baby Boom officially ended). I think the Obama-Clinton intersection is Saul Alinsky. Hillary wrote a very pre-60s dissertation rejecting Alinsky's view of the political way forward, while Obama embraced it. I read Alinsky in the course of my degree in politics in the late '60s too, but I was a Marxist so I didn't like it either. Mind you, I don't have a lot of time for Hillary's brand of politics, but I think that if you're going to run for President of the Empire you really ought to believe in it to begin with.

As of today, if you add up all the votes cast in Democratic primaries and caucuses, Ms Clinton has 73,000 more votes than Mr Obama (in a total of something like 30.8 million).

My impression is that it's going to end up pretty much like that. Her with more votes, him with more pledged delegates.

This kind of stuff coming from an African American is very sad.

US senator Barack Obama was widely hailed for his 18 March speech calming the media furor[e] about the sermons of his pastor for twenty years Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright's remarks, Obama said, "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

"Stalwart allies like Israel" - white European allies like Israel perhaps?

I have not read this famous speech by Obama. I have, however, read a fairly hilarious attempt by Melinda and Dahlia to parody it in Slate (it was so witty that it took two of them). The story is basically that racism came about because the slaveowners cheated on the slaves with other slaves. Obama The Brave, however, having altogether refused to be victimized by this cheating and being determined to Rise Above It, is more worthy of your votes than Hillary who complained about the base character of fellow-slave Gennifer, thereby failing to rise above sexism. Clearly the man who rises above, rather than repudiating, racism deserves to be elected President.

Did somebody mention soufflé?

Ms Power apparently resigned from Obama's campaign for calling Hillary a "monster." Apart from seeing Obama as a "messiah" (I quote her), she's a bit of a "monster" herself. Edward Herman's article focuses on East Timor, which doesn't rate a chapter in Power's book, but he could also have discussed at more length, the 800,000 Indonesians killed by Suharto, the half million Cambodian civilians killed by US bombing, the 3 million dead Vietnamese, West Papua and other places like Israel. As Herman says, Power's problem is that she thinks "the United States is the solution, not the problem."

It may seem odd to speak of a worthy-genocide establishment, with Richard Holbrooke and Samantha Power as notable members, but we are living in the Kafka era, when major genocidists and their friends and allies can get very passionate and even win Pulitzer Prizes for their denunciation of  some genocides and “problems from hell” while actually facilitating, ignoring and apologizing for others. Worthy genocides are those mass killings carried out by bad people, notably U.S. enemies and targets, and they receive great attention and elicit much passion; the unworthy ones are carried out by  the United States or one of its client states, and they receive little attention or indignation and are not labelled genocides, even where the scale of killings greatly exceeds those so designated, obviously based on political utility.

Read more about Samantha Power and see her admiring glance at Richard Holbrooke.

What is astounding is that Power’s book could win a Pulitzer Prize and that a thinker of  this caliber and with these biases would become an icon in great demand, even welcomed in The Nation and Le Monde Diplomatique.  But then we must recall that Thomas Friedman and George Will have won Pulitzers;  Claire Sterling and Paul Henze were media stars commenting on terrorism;  Joan Peters’ fraudulent From Time Immemorial received raves in the mainstream and Alan Dershowitz, literally plagiarizing the Peters fraud in his The Case for Israel, is still treated with respect;  and Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Richard Holbrooke are celebrated speakers, with Holbrooke honored by both the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Human Rights Watch.

Actually, these things are not so astounding. What is astounding is that a lot of people think that with advisers like Samantha Power and Richard Clarke Obama will do better than Clinton. I mean this is so much about "change" isn't it?