Contra Marc Ambinder, I’d like to think that “dollar bills” is an acceptable plural of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 dollar currency, otherwise I’m afraid Method Man is being ruled by a remarkably inefficient accumulation of paper money…

Matt Yglesias sees politics as a zero-sum game (a popular blogospheric notion):

The idea that there can be “bad news” for Democrats but “worse news” for GOP betrays a basic failure to understand the nature of electoral politics, namely that it’s a zero-sum competition for power in which only one candidate can win any given race and only one party can hold a majority in any legislative body.

If new polls show public dissatisfaction with Democrats but greater dissatisfaction with Republicans, that’s good news for Democrats.

But I’m not so sure that’s necessarily true.

I imagine if we lived a world in which the Democratic congress had approval ratings in the mid 60s, we’d see a lot more moderate to moderate-leaning Republicans crossing over on key Dem legislation in order to get in on some of that love (ie, perhaps enough to override an S-CHIP veto).

The way things are now (with both parties hitting the mid 20s) there’s just no incentive.

Politics may be zero-sum in each election (one party wins and the other party loses) but not when it comes to actually legislating.

Which should kind of be, you know, the point of politics

Why Barack wants to be President:

So when, exactly, did we outlaw being a spoiled and/or obnoxious college student? (Perhaps Mike Nifong could volunteer an answer…):

I’m all for stunting some collegiate self-righteousness, but this seems to be a pretty clear-cut case of a handful of campus police officers needlessly escalating a pretty non-threatening situation.

Though apparently that’s not a universally held reaction:

To me it’s really very simple. When a police officer tells you to do something — you do it. To do otherwise is just asking the officer to show you that they aren’t kidding. This jerk was lucky he was only tased…I say Taser him again for the heck of it.

Well ok.

And so we’ve got endless sympathy for a handful of unfairly prosecuted jocks, whose only offense was hiring a black stripper and calling her a nigger a bunch of times, vs. mocking outrage towards an obnoxious campus newspaper columnist, guilty of nothing more than acting like a douche bag to John Kerry.

Doesn’t seem fair; how else is one supposed to act toward John Kerry?

This is awesome.

Stephen Bainbridge, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, really dislikes New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina’s role in the presidential nominating contest:

How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states decide who gets to run for President? The notion that the Ames straw poll matters would be preposterous were it not so pernicious.

He also seems to imply that contemporary South Carolinans are sympathetic to the mid-19th century political climate that resulted in South Carolina’s racist secession from the union (including, it would reason, the black majority that makes up the Democratic nominating class).

Bainbridge is upset his home state of California doesn’t have a larger pull over the nominating calendar, given that California’s “population is over 37 million, representing 12% of the total US population. Indeed, if we were a separate country, our population would be larger than that of all but the 34 biggest countries in the world!”

Which is exactly the reason California shouldn’t have a large role in the nomination process. The smallness of the early states is exactly why they work; candidates are forced into small-scale, retail campaigning, connecting with voters directly and in person in order to garner support.

A leading Californian primary, on the other hand, would take place entirely over the airwaves, via incredibly expensive advertisement and tabloid-baiting media stunts, thus eliminating whatever semblance of pure democracy we have left in the whole sorry system.

George Will finds a lot to dislike in Barack Obama’s opposition to the nomination of Leslie Southwick to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, an opposition Will apparently sees as evidence of Obama’s (previously unacknowledged) propensity for race baiting and identity politics.

Obama had outlined his opposition to Southwick’s nomination three weeks ago, via a little noticed five-sentence press release, in which the Senator said:

Judge Southwick’s answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to excuse his disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict.

As Will argues:

Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.

‘Tis true, though it shouldn’t be surprising that a Democrat of any persuasion, “new liberal” or not, would find it troubling that, in a caseload that large, “the law” never sided with a disenfranchised plaintiff. This type of populist suspicion of potential judicial activism really shouldn’t be seen as running counter to the “freshness” Obama brings to the table.

But that’s not really the problem; what is more disconcerting is the way in which Will uses this press release to paint Obama as some sort of race-baiting extremist, one more politician in a long line of tired liberal promoters of stale identity politics.

Will indicates that he had hoped Obama “would be impatient with the ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation that degrades racial discourse.” It’s odd, then, that, in attempting to determine whether or not Obama has lived up to this hope, Will concentrates on this minor press release (one expressing relatively routine Democratic opposition to a conservative Bush judicial nomination), while ignoring the many, much more bold, ways in which Obama has spoken with fresh candor on race and politics.

Barack Obama has suggested scaling back race-based Affirmative Action; he repeatedly emphasizes to black audiences the need for personal responsibility in struggling black communities, highlighting the “strong values and character component of educational achievement.” The catalog of column-worthy examples of Obama’s departure from the “ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation” is long and deep. And yet Will ignores them.

Not being able to paint Obama as an extremist using the Senator’s words alone, Will resorts to linking him to a series of unnamed “liberals,” expressing unattributed disagreeable positions:

To some of Southwick’s opponents, his merits are irrelevant. They simply say it is unacceptable that only one of the 17 seats on the 5th Circuit is filled with an African American, although 37 percent of Mississippians are black…. [B]ecause he is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness.

Nevermind that Obama has never expressed these views, nor that his press release only cites race as one of five areas of disenfranchisement he suspected the potential justice of being prejudiced against.

I suppose in Will’s view, any black politician opposing a White judicial nominee is nothing but a stale leftover of the “long-running and intensely boring melodrama” of the legacy of the civil rights movement.

If only Obama were to have the racial cojones to release some more paradigm-challenging five sentence press releases. Anything less than that is nothing more than Al Sharpton genuflection.

I believe this Democratic exchange over our approach to terrorists in Pakistan may qualify as the highlight of Election 2008 thus far:

I don’t really follow Hillary Clinton’s line here:

“I do not believe that someone running for president should engage in hypotheticals.”

Oh really? Well here we are, the voters, doing our best to decide which one of these people we should lend our support to, a decision based entirely upon one giant hypothetical: how will this person perform as President of the United States?

Elections are hypotheticals, campaigns are hypotheticals. You, the candidates, are asking us, the voter, to hypothetically imagine what it would be like were you to be in charge of this country. If we’re not going to engage in hypotheticals then there’s no point in even having an election at all.

And perhaps that’s what Hillary Clinton would prefer. Clinton’s candidacy is based so heavily around her own apparent “inevitability”, she’s ended up running what essentially amounts to an incumbent campaign; simply act as though you are already the president, and thy votes shall come by default. Thus she can run such a tightly scripted, criticism-proof campaign, one in which the presentation of any sort of detailed policy is easily chastised as simply “unpresidential.” To be the president is to act the president.

Obama had a great line in response to this poo-pooing of hypotheticals, one that I think underlies an important aspect of American Democracy, an aspect Hillary Clinton’s role in national politics has certainly damaged:

“We’re debating the most important foreign policy issues that we face. And the American people have the right to know. It is not just Washington insiders that are part of the debate that has to take place with respect to how we’re going to shift our foreign policy.”

Wise words.

UPDATE:
John Dickerson at Slate made this same point a few days ago.

The soon-to-be presidential candidate demonstrates his impressive grasp over this most pressing issue:

NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.

…

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder.

So true, so true.

Former president Clinton making the case for Obama:

…And this is why I hate presidential debates.

Barack Obama says we should change current policy and be willing to meet with the leaders of rogue nations without strict “preconditions.” Hillary Clinton says strict preconditions are important when arranging diplomatic engagements as they prevent rogue nations from using meetings with the US President for “propaganda purposes.”

And yet this slight juxtaposition in foreign policy priorities doesn’t enter the blogo-punditsphere via a sober discussion on whose view may be right on the merits, but rather through a whole load of nerdy and useless political gossip over whether or not Obama made a “gaffe.”

All this brouhaha when both Clinton and Obama’s debate-time comments actually don’t really contradict each other—if anything, each answer represents a difference in emphasis; Obama would like to emphasize a drastic change in America’s approach to foreign policy and diplomacy, while Clinton looks to emphasize her experience on the nitty-gritty details of diplomatic engagements.

We should recognize that, as he himself says, Barack Obama’s not going to be inviting Hugo Chavez to the White House for tea and crumpets bright and early Wednesday January 21st, 2009. At the same time, Hillary Clinton, given the benefit of the doubt (not that I think she really deserves it), probably won’t abide by the same stifling “preconditions” as the current administration (ie we’ll only talk to you if and when you do everything we tell you to.)

There’s so much emphasis on “winning” in these things and yet winning has nothing to do with giving the most compelling arguments in support of your ideas, it’s all about “saying what you’re supposed to say” as part and parcel of a pre-scripted horse race. The first slight indication of a difference in policy thus becomes a matter of who made a “gaffe” and who didn’t, who “knocked one out of the park” and who didn’t, who manipulated the narrative well and who didn’t.

We go from substantive discussion on policy and judgement into an endless and obnoxious series of “gotchas” and gaffes, flubs and “slams.”

If this is politics, well then I freaking hate politics.

Moore calls truce on beef between he and CNN. This statement from the Moore camp is pretty spot-on:

CNN’s report attempted to challenge ‘SiCKO’ by arguing the film only used facts that backed up the movie’s thesis. In fact CNN, by creating confusion over the acceptability of using different reports and research, along with using a biased expert whose background was not identified, engaged in the very tactics it was attempting to accuse ‘SiCKO’ of using.

Of course, the glaring difference is that ‘SiCKO’ is a self-admitted opinion piece, whereas CNN is trying — in between the various ads for Cialis — to hide beneath the fig leaf of being an unbiased, neutral news reporting agency.

The true downfall of Gupta’s piece refuting SiCKO wasn’t the confrontational tone, the health industry-associated expert, or their oppositional facts, it was the self-professed notion that Gupta’s piece was the “objective truth” somehow above Moore’s opinion-based film. Neither piece can, or should, exist without the other, and both pieces “suffer” from the editorializing of information sources, as editorializing is the only way to tell a story.

No news report, documentary film, or non-fiction book can ever even hope to present “the whole story,” something which can only be collected over time through a variety of sources, of varying degrees of bias coming from a number of angles.

Good for Moore, good for CNN.