A Second Hand Conjecture

Here’s a neat little test shinobi showed me in the QandO chat today. It’s supposed to try to measure your subconscious preferences and compare them to your stated preferences. I can see how this would be an interesting thing to study with the reports of exit polls, other polls and caucuses showing more support for Obama than actual primary election results. It’s changed a little since Matthew Yglesias took it back in Jan.

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My thanks to Gay Patriot for today’s two excellent links.

Presidential support for liberating Iraq.

Yes we can! The original.

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Ryan Perrilloux has been suspended indefinitely from LSU. I am constantly glad he decided to de-commit from Texas and go to LSU. More here, and the rumor that broke the story here.

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In my most recent post, I referred to the cool cash that at least one of the Democrat candidates is spreading around her community.

Cash abounds in the Democratic world! My liberal friends squeal about the money that they believe transfers from Republicans to big biz. It’s true - and that is part of why many of us who want small government desire such. If the money doesn’t come in, it can’t go anywhere.

If you think that Republicans are the only ones who like to throw money around, however - please quickly be disabused of this notion.

Many of the superdelegates who could well decide the Democratic presidential nominee have already been plied with campaign contributions by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a new study shows.

“While it would be unseemly for the candidates to hand out thousands of dollars to primary voters, or to the delegates pledged to represent the will of those voters, elected officials serving as superdelegates have received about $890,000 from Obama and Clinton in the form of campaign contributions over the last three years,” the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reported today.

About half the 800 superdelegates — elected officials, party leaders, and others — have committed to either Clinton or Obama, though they can change their minds until the convention.

Obama’s political action committee has doled out more than $694,000 to superdelegates since 2005, the study found, and of the 81 who had announced their support for Obama, 34 had received donations totaling $228,000.

Clinton’s political action committee has distributed about $195,000 to superdelegates, and only 13 of the 109 who had announced for her have received money, totaling about $95,000.

My thanks to Duane at Black Informant for the link.

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Cross-posted to Registan.net

It is difficult to say anything useful about either of these books: after all, both have been read and discussed to death—Dupree’s because, 35 years after its publication, it remains the definitive source on Afghanistan, and Rashid’s because, eight years after its publication, it remains the best source on the Taliban’s origins, and the U.S.’s and Pakistan’s complicity. But there remain a great deal to learn from both, especially when considered together, for they form the bookends on the worst era in Afghanistan’s recent history: first the Soviet invasion, then the civil war, then the Taliban, and now the civil war again.

(more…)

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..don’t quite work:

photo: Alan Chan

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Are you one of those who says there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republican and Democrat candidates?

If so - well, viva la difference.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure more than $340 million worth of home-state projects in last year’s spending bills, placing her among the top 10 Senate recipients of what are commonly known as earmarks, according to a new study by a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.

Working with her New York colleagues in nearly every case, Clinton supported almost four times as much spending on earmarked projects as her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), whose $91 million total placed him in the bottom quarter of senators who seek earmarks, the study showed.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the likely GOP presidential nominee, was one of five senators to reject earmarks entirely, part of his long-standing view that such measures prompt needless spending.

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photo: Alan Chan

The Clinton campaign’s effort to brand Barack Obama as a plagiarist, for borrowing some lines from his friend Deval Patrick, is truly sigh inducing. Even worse is Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson’s tacit acknowledgment (in the midst of the attack), that Hillary has been borrowing language from Obama himself. Wolfson alleges that this doesn’t matter, because “Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric.” Carpetbagger Report agrees with him: “Senator Clinton is running on the strength of whatever bogus attack she can come up with to attack Obama with every day.” Yup.

Supplemental: Is That Legal? amusingly notes that many of Deval’s own lines were “stolen.”

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When we are young, life seems to stretch out in front of us, seemingly forever.  Concepts like wrinkles, aches and pains, chemotherapy, hip replacements and the like are almost unfathomable.

Yet, time does not stay in a bottle.  Unless we are one of those who perishes young, that which we cannot imagine in youth eventually visits.

When I was much younger myself, my perception of death and loss was so unlike what it is today.  I would look at older friends who lost parents, at “advanced” ages like 70, 75 or even 80… and I would think, “Well; we do not live forever.  Death at an old age is expected.”  The older I become myself, however, and the more mortality for those I most love - and myself - marches closer to reality, the more my sentiments change.  I realize that there is no “good” time to lose those for whom you most care.  When a parent dies, it matters not whether they were 68, 80 or 100.  It’s a loss.

This past week, one of my close bridge friends lost his dad.  His father also happened to be a good friend of mine, too.  The “political-bridge” lunch bunch met for some 15+ years, arguing, shouting and railing about politicians and policies, bridge hands and bidding.  A lot of emotion and a lot of disagreement - but, underneath it all we were all friends.  Tough to see the group diminished so.

Another dear friend of mine sits at her mom’s bedside, waiting.  Her mother is an astounding 103+ years old ….  Though my friend and I knew she would never last forever (despite it seeming at times that she would!), the letting go is still so hard.  My friend is someone full of courage, spirit and fight - and all the exceptional qualities of my friend clearly were inherited from her mom.  My love is with both of them as they face these final days together.

I am lucky.  My parents still reside in their sunny Florida home, enjoying delicatessen, theatre and friends.  Although serious health issues do now face them, our family looks forward to celebrating their 60th anniversary (!!) soon.

They no longer look like the lovebirds they did the day of their wedding.  And, to hear some of their battles, you’d wonder if they would make it to sixty years without a knock-down, drag out fight!  Everyone’s love is individual, though, and with all its flaws, theirs still works.

None of us can keep time in a bottle forever.  While you have it though - be sure to appreciate it.  When it is gone, no power on earth can return it to that flask

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Great song, great actress, great film.

Enjoy!

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My post about why the cartoons must be published from two years ago.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate today.

He makes the same point, but I make it better.

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Backwards.  Behind the times.  Ah - the shame of it all, living up here in the prehistoric northwoods.

Finally, however, civilization comes to the Twin Cities!

Naked sushi is hitting the Twin Cities. Nyotaimori / Nantaimori - eating sushi off a naked (or nearly) naked woman or man started in Japan and made its way to Berlin, London, Paris, New York, Chicago and L.A. - a fad that was even highlighted in an episode of “CSI: New York.”

Now Tom Pham has scheduled a naked sushi night at his downtown Minneapolis restaurant, Temple, on March 8 from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m.

“We have everything in Minneapolis except one thing and that’s naked sushi,” says Phan, who booked eight models - six women and two men - for the event. These models have everything to do with whether naked sushi (aka body sushi) is viewed as sexy, tacky or just plain gross. “They have to be flawless and absolutely hairless,” says Phan. “That’s why we need to book more than we’ll need - just in case one of them gets a pimple.”

Lying on a table with only a few flowers and banana leaves in strategic places while diners pluck tuna and salmon nigiri sushi from your body also requires skill. “They’re in training right now,” says Pham. “They have to learn to lie still and breathe in a different way.”

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There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.

Karl Marx

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The Man of System…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section II, Chapter 2 

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The Bayesian Heresy tipped me to a profile of economist Ben Olken, who has published a couple of papers on the effect of political leaders on economic and political development:

Olken wonders whether economic devel­opment and the path to democratization are shaped more by broad historical forces or by the actions of specific leaders—be they demo­cratically elected prime ministers or thuggish authoritarians. With the assistance of his fre­quent research partner Ben Jones, an economist at Northwestern, Olken has challenged broadly held assumptions by publishing a pair of papers asking how heads of state affect economic out­comes and democracy.

In “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” Olken and Jones looked at the effects of political assassination, using a strict empirical methodology that takes into account economic conditions at the time of the killing and what Olken calls a “novel data set” of assas­sination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, between 1875 and 2004.

Olken and Jones discovered that a country was “more likely to see democratization follow­ing the assassination of an autocratic leader,” but found no substantial “effect following assassinations—or assassination attempts—on democratic leaders.” They concluded that “on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy.” The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.”

Needless to say that kind of outcome is not likely to comfort those who believe that stability of leaders, negotiation and other foreign policy establishment tropes are the path of wisdom in dealing with autocrats. I find it both oft putting and unsurprising. Please don’t shoot the messenger for inconvenient and unpalatable evidence.

In “Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth since World War II,” Olken and Jones explored whether “individual political leaders make a difference in economic growth.” This is tricky business for the researcher because, as Olken explains, a country’s economic situa­tion can affect the election of a leader: when the economic outlook is good, for instance, presi­dents are more likely to be reelected. So Olken and Jones looked at 57 leaders who died in office from accidents or natural causes and “found big changes in growth when autocratic leaders die in office—both positive and negative,” but no sub­stantial change when democratic leaders died in office. “The results suggest,” they write, “that individual leaders can play crucial roles in shap­ing the growth of nations,” provided they are ruling with minimal or nonexistent checks and balances to their power (think Augusto Pinochet or Robert Mugabe).

I think this dovetails rather well with Tyler Cowens recent piece on the likely economic impact of our next election as well.

Olken has research on many other areas relevant to development which are worth perusing as well, especially on corruption, so read the whole thing.

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Hillary is Tracy Flick.

HT: All of it

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Last week?

…but I can no longer stand idly by and watch the media and independent voters continue to throw themselves at the feet of John McCain.

Because I’m trying to remember anyone swooning over McCain and I’m not having much luck at all.

The John McCain they fell in love with in 2000 — the straight-shooting, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may maverick - is no more.

Oh. EIGHT YEARS AGO. Now it all makes sense.

But… I have felt fondly for McCain. It happened when I saw this:

McCain sings Streisand.

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