Baby needs a new pair of paid for years of tuition?

Ok, I’m not going to say that Josh didn’t work his butt off at TPM for the past several years and his US Attorney stuff was pretty good (of course, his readers did a lot of the leg work). But lately, Josh has gone down the toilet with his uncritical Obama coverage. I never thought I’d see Josh act like such an airhead. Wait, I take that back. He bought the WMD crap too. Jeez, you’d think a smart guy like Josh would see through that. *I* did and I don’t even have a PhD.

Anyway, he’s doing pretty well for a blogger. From a NYTimes article we learn:

Mr. Marshall, who has a young son he occasionally writes about on the sites, would not disclose the financial performance of the business. Asked about his salary, he said, “I make a better income than when I was freelancing,” then when pressed added, “I probably make in the neighborhood of what successful political journalists make.”

That’s some serious moola. Well, tending to a blog is a lot of work, no question about it, even if your commentary does turn out to be stupid. Now, if he could only pass on some of his secrets so I could pay this private school tuition payment for the next couple of years…

Polling in Texas- ARG

From gqmartinez:

Quick update on Texas:

ARG has a new poll out showing Obama up by 8 points. There aren’t many useful internals. SurveyUSA will have a poll out tonight and I’ll give my take on that later. One thing to note, the last SurveyUSA poll had Hispanics making up 32% of the electorate and Black voters at 18%. ARG has 24-23 split. The other thing is that the SurveyUSA poll has Hillary winning Dems 55-41 and making up 78% of the electorate. SurveyUSA was dead on in CA because they nailed down the demographics. It will be useful to compare the new SurveyUSA numbers to the previous and to see if that reinforces the ARG numbers.

More later…

Sometimes a hijab is just a hijab

Muslims are people too.

Why is Barack being so fricking sensitive?

All Roads Lead to Ted

Geraldine Ferraro wrote an Op/Ed piece for the NYTimes today about the role of superdelegates that is bound to stir up some controversy. The piece, Got a Problem? Ask the Super, challenges the conventional wisdom about why the superdelegates were created. It was not intended to put an end to Children’s Crusades to win the nomination for George McGovern in 1968, though the superdelegates might have mitigated that situation as well. No, the superdelegates were created to prevent the kind of highjacking that Senator Ted Kennedy tried to pull off in 1980. It tore the party apart and lead to Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan:

After the 1980 presidential election, the Democratic Party was in disarray. That year, Senator Ted Kennedy had challenged President Jimmy Carter for the presidential nomination, and Mr. Kennedy took the fight to the convention floor by proposing 23 amendments to the party platform. When it was all over, members of Congress who were concerned about their re-election walked away from the president and from the party. The rest of the campaign was plagued by infighting.

Ahh, yes, I remember it not so well, but I *do* remember it. It was the first year I was eligible to vote in a presidential election and George Bush had visited Pittsburgh that campaign season. The cold, arrogant and brusque way he handled that appearance told me everything I ever wanted to know about Republicans. First impressions and all that.

But that Democratic convention was no picnic either. There were bad feelings all around capped by Jimmy Carter standing on stage after having clinched the nomination, extending his hand to Ted Kennedy and Ted, just barely mustering the most insincere handshake imaginable. The two sides couldn’t have been further apart after all the bitter feuding and behind the scenes manipulations. The superdelegates were created to provide cooler heads and prevent that from ever happening again.

Now, here we are in the midst of another contentious party battle. And whose name keeps popping up in the news? None other than that uniter himself, Ted Kennedy. He endorsed Obama last month along with Senator Kerry. The bulk of the Kennedy clan piled on, in fact. Obama and his wife, who have been compared to JFK and Jackie, have been re-packaged accordingly. The Massachusetts connection continues with Obama ripping some of Deval Patrick’s campaign scripts although it is not clear that this repackaging comes with Kennedy’s stamp of approval. But for those wondering how Obama could have racked up so much money to start his campaign, Kennedy and Kerry campaign donor lists would not be an unreasonable place to start. So, Kerry says he just gave Obama his lists only recently. So, he might be fibbing a little. (Should be easy enough to prove with a little cross checking of Obama’s early donors and Kerry’s lists from 2004)

But let’s get back to these superdelegates. Kennedy has demonstrated his reluctance to aim for party unity before. Why start now? He has a Kennedy legend to protect. He wasn’t able to get to the Oval Office in his brothers’ footsteps but, by golly, that doesn’t mean he can’t get there through back door means, right? And here we have a virtual tabula rasa, so spotless. No record, no votes to worry about, no accomplishments. Just a fresh, clean palette. Less a Teflon than a tofu candidate upon which the dreamer in all of us can cast our favorite flavor of Democrat. As long as he stays soft and amorphous, he can be the carrier for all of our tastes. Perfect!

And why worry about those pesky superdelegates. Just lean on them and threaten them with primary challengers as Ms. Ferraro intimates and they’ll follow you everywhere. Because, after all, Obama’s got powerful friends with lots of connections in the liberal end of the pool who could make things very trying indeed. “Nice congressional district you got there. You wouldn’t want anything to *happen* to it, eh?”

So what if your activist nutcase supporters show up in droves to the caucuses, overwhelming their civic minded Democratic regulars with their displays of haka-like intensity? So what if you pad your delegate count with low hanging fruit from states your party doesn’t have prayer of winning in November? You *do* want to win, right? Just threaten to tear the party apart and people will be so scared, they’ll give in to you. “Nice chances of winning the Oval Office in November. You wouldn’t want anything to *happen* to it, eh?”

Like in 1980, you mean?