Link Banana

You may have heard Mr. McCain’s unavoidable claim that the federal government “wasted” $3 million on a study of bear DNA. It turns out he’s misconstruing the study — and the amount of money:

Actually, it was a scientific and logistical triumph, argues Katherine Kendall, 56, mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project. […]

“There’s never been any information about the status of this population. We didn’t know what was going on — until this study,” Kendall said.

This was an astonishingly ambitious research project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain’s ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Congress in Montana’s three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in his reelection bid in 2006.

(via NYTimes)

Says Jeff Greenfield, and both Hillary Clinton and John McCain are Daffy Duck:

Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury. His response to bad news is a sibilant sneer (“Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!”). Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them.

The New Republic does the unexpected: asks what white supremacists think of Obama’s success and possible succession to the Oval Office. The answer: not much of interest, although there’s some fun speculation:

But there may be one more factor at work: hatred overload. It’s a testament of sorts to Hillary Clinton that, by virtue of her cartoonish image as a leftist man-hating shrew, she manages to arouse more vitriol among white supremacists than a black man. Meanwhile, white racists absolutely despise John McCain for his support of George W. Bush’s immigration reform plan, which they view as a dire threat to America’s European-based culture. “I don’t think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain,” explains Duke. “In fact,” he added, “we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights.”

… Who knows, maybe David Duke can form the oddest MySpace group of all time: Klansmen for Obama. Now that would be post-racial.

(via Slate)

If you were wondering — as I was — why there’s been little worth reading online, I think this is part of the answer. The punditocracy, and by extension at least half the “reporters” in this country are wasting time on topics like McCain’s maybe possibly affair and possible favoritism for a lobbyist. This is nearly as bad as the plagiarism row that has gotten far too many words this week.

In what The Page calls an “amazing wire story,” Libby Quaid explores Senator McCain’s reputation as a hothead for the AP.

“F — - you,” he shouted at Texas Sen. John Cornyn last year.

“Only an a —  —  — would put together a budget like this,” he told the former Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Pete Domenici, in 1999.

“I’m calling you a f —  —  — jerk!” he once retorted to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.

In an entertaining parody of will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video, the internets are proud to present people you don’t recognize singing along to the uplifting rhetoric of Senator John McCain.

(via Waxy)

Ross Douthat engages in what I must admit is one of my favorite acts: attacking out of touch political elites. Although he may not be completely correct, this does resonate:

The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college.

Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure.

This is about the machinations of Democratic party politics, so don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. Having said that, I found this very interesting (emphasis mine).

“Thanks to Zell Miller, there is a rule to deal with Joe Lieberman,” reports Mark Pazniokas of the Hartford Courant. “Lieberman’s endorsement of Republican John McCain disqualifies him as a super-delegate to the Democratic National Convention under what is informally known as the Zell Miller rule, according to Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo. Miller, then a Democratic senator from Georgia, not only endorsed Republican George Bush four years ago, but he delivered a vitriolic attack on Democrat John Kerry at the Republican National Convention. The Democrats responded with a rule disqualifying any Democrat who crosses the aisle from being a super delegate.”

In short, the “conventional wisdom” says that John McCain has won the Republican race, and nothing meaningful can be said about the Democratic race. Salon’s Walter Shapiro (in the title link) say as much, as does Slate’s John Dickerson. A growing number of people are claiming that Mr. Obama is actually going to come out ahead in the delegate count, but there’s not much consensus on that point yet.

David Brooks has some interesting and important things to say (as usual) about what McCain has to do to win the support of his party and the country come November.

Finally, McCain is going to have to beef up his domestic policy offerings. He has some excellent ideas, like his plan to control health care costs, which he doesn’t explain well. But he has not yet focused sufficiently on the group that is always the key to Republican success or failure — the suburban working class.

Picture a suburban townhouse community filled with families making $40,000 to $60,000 a year. Maybe there’s a single mother in one unit who hates her job but needs the benefits. Maybe there are immigrant parents with associate degrees watching their son drop out of school in another. The definition of being middle class has changed, as many have noticed. It used to be a destination. Now it’s an uncertain place. It’s a struggle just to stay there. Any candidate who can’t talk specifically to these concerns is doomed.

I wasn’t going to link to anything about Florida, as it’s a pretty straightforward story: Giuliani’s done and McCain’s win (and possible Giuliani endorsement) gives him a rather clear path to the Republican nomination. But then John Dickerson’s first sentence was an odd anecdote which became a useful — if still decidedly odd — analogy:

As a fighter pilot in Pensacola, Fla., 30 years ago, McCain and his exotic-dancer girlfriend dropped by the dinner party of some married ensigns and were greeted with “disbelief and alarm.” They left quickly. This week as he tried to crash his way into the nomination of a party from which he has often broken, his mother predicted Republicans would have to “hold their nose” to vote for her son.

David Brooks’s latest column is well worth reading.

But then a great tightening occurred. Conservative institutions and interest groups proliferated in Washington. The definition of who was a true conservative narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.

Slate’s John Dickerson always seems to offer the earliest coherent analysis to arrive in my feed reader after a presidential nominating contest. And though this is probably in part because I don’t like political sites that are overtly partisan (read: all of them), I can’t deny that he does a great job. On South Carolina:

Since 1980, every Republican presidential nominee has won South Carolina. This is the kind of rule Republicans would love to embrace in this topsy-turvy season to just to stop the motion sickness. But it’s too soon to call McCain the front-runner. His South Carolina victory makes the picture only a little clearer heading into Florida, where Rudy Giuliani has been camped out so long in advance of the primary on Jan. 29, he’s likely to greet his rivals wearing Sansabelt pants and a Tommy Bahama shirt. So: McCain is now battling Mitt Romney for the nomination, but Huckabee and Giuliani remain available to confuse everything. […]

McCain now looks like the GOP front-runner because his victories have come in the hard-fought contests in New Hampshire and South Carolina, but he can’t claim that title when it comes to delegate counts. Mitt Romney has more delegates. This probably feels like a mere technicality for McCain, and each time Romney asserts his numerical lead—which he’s likely to do every other sentence for the next few weeks—it will no doubt produce a string of expletives from the Straight Talk Express.

He also has posted a quite respectable summary of the Democrats’ Nevada result.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Steven Landsburg makes a valuable — even if moderately disjointed — point: in free trade, we should accept the bad if we want the good. It’s a very uncomfortable idea that deserves serious consideration.

I doubt there’s a human being on earth who hasn’t benefited from the opportunity to trade freely with his neighbors. Imagine what your life would be like if you had to grow your own food, make your own clothes and rely on your grandmother’s home remedies for health care. Access to a trained physician might reduce the demand for grandma’s home remedies, but — especially at her age — she’s still got plenty of reason to be thankful for having a doctor.

Some people suggest, however, that it makes sense to isolate the moral effects of a single new trading opportunity or free trade agreement. Surely we have fellow citizens who are hurt by those agreements, at least in the limited sense that they’d be better off in a world where trade flourishes, except in this one instance.

The Economist’s Charlemagne (Europe) column provides an interesting and useful summary of how the America’s election madness is seen on the continent.

VOTERS of America, well done: you are less racist (or sexist) than Europeans had feared. Remember, though, that you are rather naive: please try to pick a competent president this time. This dismissive summary, combining condescension with distrust, captures all too many European reactions to the duel between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in this year’s presidential election (and, given the gulf between most Europeans and the Republicans, this is the contest to be Europe’s preferred candidate as well—although a few Europeans retain a soft spot for John McCain).

Tonight, Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary. Slate’s John Dickerson does a great job explaining how. He also explains that this makes the Republican race even more wide open than it was:

So we’re back to square one in the Republican Party. Mitt Romney beat John McCain handily in Michigan, which means there have now been three major GOP contests and three different comeback winners. At this rate, Thompson will win South Carolina and Giuliani Florida. The GOP primary is starting to look like a Pee Wee soccer tournament: Everyone gets a trophy!

Also, in the completely irrelevant Democratic race, Hillary Clinton valliently fought off “Uncommitted,” her chief opponent.

I found this odd. Slate’s Jacob Weinberg had this to say about the relationship between the two men (emphasis mine):

But don’t assume that the common qualities or shared goals of McCain and Obama would result in a civil contest. In early 2006, McCain denounced Obama in an unusually nasty letter for a perceived betrayal on the lobbying reform bill. Obama responded (in a joking context, but still) that his goal was to learn how to be as much of a prima donna as McCain. The front-runners are enough alike to dislike each other intensely.

While David Brooks said this:

John McCain has cordial relations with Obama…

Someone’s lying, but who?