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No time to blog today. Here are some things you should be reading in my absence:

+ Obama picked up 8 more Super Delegates today. I'm expecting the flood to come next week. Obama will clinch things a week from Tuesday, so joining the bandwagon after that point will produce no tangible benefits for the Supers. Therefore, most will almost certainly move before then.

+ Google and YouTube are looking to force their way into the presidential debate process. If they succeed, it will be very, very good news for our democracy.

+ Barack Obama is simultaneously rebuilding and transforming the Democratic Party. Why this worries progressives is beyond me. Why this worries the Clintons is beyond clear: if he wins, their era is over.

+ Obama's campaign has a huge advantage that I think hasn't been very widely recognized: not only is their McCain response team quick, they are pretty damn funny, too. That may not matter much to voters, but within the world of the elite media its likely to play a fairly big role.

+ Obama now has the lead among the Super Delegates.

+ Publius has a must-read post on why Iraq doomed the Clinton campaign. All of what he writes is true, but it is missing one thing: in the absence of a better alternative to Clinton, even with Iraq its likely she would have run. Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for us, she happened to find herself in a situation not all that different from many future NBA Hall of Famers in the 1990s - no matter how good they were relative to the rest of the league, they just couldn't beat Michael Jordan's Bulls. Had Charles Barkley or Patrick Ewing played in any other era, for example, they likely would have won at least one championship. But in the Michael Jordan era? It was just impossible

+ Cindy McCain says she will never - never! - make her tax returns public. Her husband built a reputation as a campaign finance reformer, but no matter. Those rules are for other, less honorable people. St. John don't need no stinkin' rules!

+ Mr. Super is Ed Espinoza, a former field director for New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's presidential campaign. The information I received last week appears to have been part of an RSS-based disinformation campaign designed to hide his identity after a previous RSS-based slip-up. Oh, and he's just endorsed Obama.

+ I really wish Krugman would stick to writing about economics. When he writes about the primary process, he turns into a hack. And not even a very good hack.

+ It never ceases to amaze me how even very educated people in the country have no idea what socialism actually is.

+ At least he finally made it explicit. The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb says that we need not concern ourselves with the impact of our policies on terrorist recruitment. So long as we keep killing them, recruitment is irrelevant, because eventually they will give up. Yes, that is precisely what human history tells us about nationalism and religious extremism, isn't it?

Some things I didn't have time to blog about yesterday...

+ Matt Yglesias has the cover story in this month's American Prospect, and its an absolute must-read. You want a primer on McCain's foreign policy history. This is it. McCain says he hates war, but as his nearly 3 decades of public service shows, he doesn't mind promoting it.

+ Pew just confirmed something that I've noticed on my own college campus these past few year: the next generation is very, very Democratic. In 2004 when I started at BU, Pew put the national gap at 11%. 51% of adults age 18-29 held a Democratic Party affiliation, and 40% held a Republican affiliation. Now, just 4 years later, that gap has spread to 25%! Marc Ambiner calls it a "generational time bomb," and he's right. It might be conventional wisdom that people get more conservative as they grow older, but decades worth of polisci research tells us that just ain't true. Rove promised us a realignment, but I really don't think this is what he had in mind!

+ McCain has announced the details of his oddly decentralized, yet nevertheless top down, regional campaign structure. There will be 11 separate regions with 11 separate managers. My prediction: this will be a disaster. Thanks to the Internet, multiple messages in multiple locations doesn't work anymore as a campaign strategy, and sooner rather than later this will lead to a PR crisis that pits managers against one another. Worse, the division of states doesn't make a lot of sense. Southern VA, for example has much more in common with NC than it does Maryland, but the entire state of Virginia is part of a region organized around Washington DC. And Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin are split into three separate regions, which makes almost no sense to me. I'm telling you... a disaster.

+ McCain released his tax returns awhile back, but given that he's hid virtually all of his assets in his wife's accounts, they told us next to nothing about him. I'm not sure what's more shocking: that he tried to get away with this, or that so far the media has let him get away with this. More here.

David Freddoso, over at NRO, writes:

I've been linked by some conservative bloggers on this topic, and I've gotten a lot of emails that blame liberals for ethanol. I have to say, that's not exactly right. The Left is partly to blame just because they labor under the illusion that state planning can bring about better economic results. If ethanol is bad, then they might say we're just not subsidizing the right thing.

But today, liberal environmentalists are not the ones pushing ethanol. It's Agribusiness, all the way. Most reputable liberals believe ethanol to be a big joke -- an enormous corporate welfare subsidy with no real benefits and many downsides.

On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left -- to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol -- to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar -- and once you've started giving a handout, it never ends.

I'm so tired of this. "The left" is not what it once was. This isn't 1975, for god's sake. When will these people wake up?

I can only speak for myself, but as a member of the left I have no interest in using "state planning" to "bring about better economic results," nor do I know anyone on the left that does. Those ideas died many, many decades ago. Not that the people on the right bothered to notice.

Do I believe that government has a role to play in setting energy and environmental policies? Yes, of course. But that makes me no different than Milton Friedman, a man no one would ever describe as anywhere near the left. Both modern liberals and more traditional conservatives agree on this: the question is not if government will get involved, but how.

Markets cannot do everything on their own. Some problem are failures of collective action beyond the reach of the magic of markets to solve. This is why governments exist: to provide us with the institutions and structures necessary to solve problems that we could never solve on our own.

Here is but one hypothetical example. Imagine that tomorrow all of the world's car manufacturers simultaneously announced that they had created a low cost, zero emission, hydrogen powered vehicle. Imagine too that they announced these vehicles were ready to put into immediate production, and that by the end of the decade tens of millions of cars would be ready to be sold.

Sounds great, right? A simple, easy, and quite significant step that would simultaneously reduce our dependence on oil and drastically reduce our carbon footprint. It would be something close to a miracle, right? Yes, but....

All of our infrastructure is based around gasoline. There are hundreds of thousands of gas stations in the United States, and not one of them sells hydrogen. Without gas stations, no one will buy the cars. But unless someone will buy the cars, there is no reason for them to be produced. Chicken, meet egg; egg, meet chicken.

This would be a classic collective action problem. Over time - decades perhaps - it is possible that the market might solve this on its own. But we don't have decades to wait. We need the cars now.

The only solution in this instance would be for government to get directly involved in converting the nation's infrastructure from carbon to hydrogen. There quite literally is no other solution. Would it be inefficient? Yes. Would there be waste, fraud, and abuse? Of course. Might it be immense? Yes. Might there be sensible things we could do to minimize it? Yes. Businesses are inefficient, too, and they are often full of waste, fraud, and abuse. The world is not perfect, but we live our lives nonetheless. We muddle through. It is often the best and only thing we can do.

Government isn't always the solution, but it isn't always the problem, either. It is just like everything else we humans create: imperfect. We over here on the left already know that. We aren't the problem. It is conservatives that are the problem.

They are the ones who create offices of faith based initiatives. They are the ones who ignore and suppress science when its findings are inconvenient. They are the ones who launch wars and depose regimes in the belief that entire societies can be transformed through the actions of the state. They are the ones "laboring under illusions," not us.

Were conservatives to come to their senses, then perhaps we might be able to work with them. But so long as they are convinced that we on the left are either secret socialists and/or terrorists sympathizers, I have no interest in even trying to find common ground. They and their misguided ideas are a danger to our nation, and so long as that is true, we must continue to fight to marginalize them. Reconciliation can and must come eventually, but not yet. Not even nearly yet...

[H/T: Andrew Sullivan]

UPDATE: As if on cue...

Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.

Wassmann, 40, was among a group of information management employees at West Point who had to prove that they could do their jobs better and more cheaply than a private contractor. If they could not, they were told, the work would be outsourced. It was all part of President Bush's government-wide plan to reduce costs by inviting contractors to bid on about 425,000 federal jobs that could be considered "commercial" in nature.

The West Point competition dragged on for more than two years. In the end, Wassmann and most of his co-workers won, but only by agreeing to downsize from 119 employees to 88. And the mood has never been worse, he said.

"Tensions are at an all-time high," he said. "We have to cut ourselves to the bone to win these bids. . . . And morale is just destroyed afterward."

The public-private face-off at West Point illustrates just what Bush envisioned when he proposed the "competitive sourcing" initiative in 2001 as part of his management agenda. It turned on a simple idea: Force federal employees to compete for their jobs against private contractors and costs will decrease, even if the work ultimately stays in-house.

But as Bush's presidency winds down, the program's critics say it has had disappointing results and shaken morale among the federal government's 1.8 million civil servants.

Private contractors have grown increasingly reluctant to participate in the competitions, which federal employees have won 83 percent of the time.

The program fell short of the president's goals in scope and in cost savings. Between 2003 and 2006, agencies completed competitions for fewer than 50,000 jobs, a fraction of what Bush envisioned.

Moreover, the Government Accountability Office found that the administration has overstated the savings from some competitions by undercounting the costs of running them. Collectively, they cost $225 million, or about $4,800 per job, according to White House figures.

"The competitive sourcing initiative did little to improve management, produced a ton of worthless paper, demoralized thousands of workers and cost a bundle, all to prove that federal employees are pretty good after all," said Paul C. Light, a professor of government at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Their ideology told them that markets were magical, and magic is good! Magic must be spread everywhere and always! Never mind the decades worth of data and theory that have been developed by political scientists and policy analysts. Fact, who needs them? If we just believe in the magic of markets, all of those theories and analyses will just disappear!

Or not.

Alan I. Abramowitz is one of the most well respected voting behavior scholars around. So when he writes, you must read:

According to every known leading indicator, 2008 should be a very good year for Democratic candidates at all levels. There are many factors that point to an across-the-board Democratic victory in November, including the extraordinary unpopularity of President Bush, the deteriorating condition of the economy, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and the fact that Americans prefer the Democratic position to the Republican position on almost every major national issue. However, the most important Democratic advantage, and one that has received relatively little attention in the media, is the fact that for the past six years the Democratic electoral base has been expanding while the Republican electoral base has been shrinking.

Since 2002, according to annual data compiled by the Gallup Poll, the percentage of Americans identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party has increased by about seven percentage points while the percentage identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party has decreased by about six percentage points. Fifty-two percent of Americans now identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party while only 39 percent identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.

A surge in Democratic enrollment across the country has pushed the party far beyond its competitor in many of the key battleground states: There are now about 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania, for example. And even in states without party registration, such as Ohio and Virginia, the fact that turnout in the Democratic primary dwarfed turnout in the Republican primary suggests that a similar movement has been taking place. As a result of these gains in Democratic identification, the 2008 election could see a number of formerly red states, such as Virginia, move into the purple column, and several formerly purple states, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, move into the blue column.

The fact that Democratic identifiers now decisively outnumber Republican identifiers means that in order to win, Democrats only have to unite and turn out their own base. If Obama wins the national popular vote by even a single percentage point, it's worth remembering, he'll almost certainly win the electoral vote as well. In order for John McCain to win, on the other hand, Republicans not only have to unite and turn out their own base, which they have been fairly successful at doing in recent elections, but they also have to win a large majority of the small bloc of true independents and make significant inroads among Democratic identifiers, which they have not been very successful at doing recently.

Political commentators often assume that Democratic voters are inevitably less motivated and united than Republican voters--that they either won't turn out or, if they do turn out, they will defect in large numbers to an appealing Republican candidate like John McCain. Leaving aside the question of just how appealing John McCain will be in November after undergoing several months of withering attacks from an extremely well-funded Democratic campaign, this image of Democratic voters is badly outdated.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was very difficult for Democratic presidential candidates to hold their party's diverse electoral coalition together. That was because Democrats were ideologically divided and Republican presidential candidates like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan found it relatively easy to pick off conservative Democratic voters when they were running against liberal Democratic candidates like George McGovern and Walter Mondale. Since the 1970s, however, the American electorate has undergone an ideological realignment with conservative voters strongly loyal to the Republican Party and liberal voters reliably pulling the lever for the Democratic Party.

Today, there are very few conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans left either in the leadership or the electorate of the parties. The result is that national elections are fought between two ideologically cohesive parties. In this type of electorate, the party that does a better job of uniting and turning out its supporters usually wins. In 2002 and 2004, that was the Republicans, but by 2006 it was the Democrats who had the advantage. Their advantage has continued to grow in the past two years.

A big part of the reason for the growing Democratic edge in party identification is the fact that Democrats now enjoy a large advantage among voters under the age of 30, as well as among African American and Hispanic voters. All three of these groups have been turning out in record numbers in the Democratic primaries, and there is no reason to believe that they will not also turn out in large numbers in November. Based on the early indicators of voter interest, the 2008 presidential election could very well witness the highest turnout of eligible voters in the postwar era, and that can only be good news for Democrats. With a unified Democratic Party, a clear message of change, and a strong grass-roots effort at mobilizing the Democratic base, on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will be taking office as the head of a unified Democratic government. And John McCain will still be a member of the minority party in the United States Senate.

UPDATE: NPR has a similar story today. Maybe people are starting to realize that this long primary, as annoying as it might be for us junkies, is actually quite healthy for the party over the long term.

Interesting. McCain has promised to bring "every pressure to bear" to stop that anti-Obama ad from running next week in NC, and word was earlier that he had succeeded. Apparently that word was wrong.

I have to admit, Linda Daves, chairwoman of the North Carolina Republican Party, sounds convincing in that interview, but I still don't buy it. It's just too convenient for McCain. He gets to take the high road and the low road simultaneously. If he's serious about this, he's going to need to do more than just send an email and ask his surrogates to make some phone calls. He's going to need to do much more.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall:

If John McCain can't stand up to the North Carolina GOP swift-boat freaks, how can he stand up to al Qaeda?

UPDATE II: Only they can't find a TV station that will air it. Still not buying it...

This story is absolutely amazing.

Tony Zirkle is a candidate for the Republican nomination in Indiana's 2nd Congressional district . Over the weekend, he gave a speech to American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP). The occasion? The 119th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth. ANSWP, you see, is the American version of the Nazi Party, a fact Zirkle apparently knew well in advance.

During the speech Zirkle stood "at the podium in front of the larger-than-life portrait of Hitler, flanked by an American flag on one side and a Nazi flag on the other. Swastika banners hang on the wall, and other head-table guests are wearing swastika arm bands." You really have to see the picture to get the full impact.

When asked why he would do such a thing, Zirkle had three brilliant responses. First, that he would "speak before any group that invites me," and that "If you want to witness to people, if you want to share your message with people, you have to talk to them. By not taking a risk and going out there and addressing issues that your enemies can paint you as a racist or a bigot, then we're never going to address them." Ah yes, the classic "I don't want people to think I hate the Nazis" defense.

Second, Zirkle claimed he doesn't "know enough about the group" to say whether he agrees with their ideology. For a man who has previously suggested that "the United States should debate segregating by race," that's a bit odd, no?

And third - and this really is the best part - despite not knowing anything about their ideology, he nevertheless thought they would be an ideal group to hear his anti-pornography message. Why? I'll let him once again speak for himself:

An account of the gathering on www.Overthrow.com says "Zirkle spoke on his history as a state's attorney in Indiana, prosecuting Jewish and Zionist criminal gangs involved in trafficking prostitutes and pornography from Russia and the Zionist entity.''

...Zirkle said he feels he was misunderstood. His real mission, he said, is to rid the country of pornography, and that's what he was saying at the ANSWP gathering. So how did his comment about Jews fit in?

"Most of the male porn stars were Jewish at the beginning," Zirkle explained.

Now the male porn stars are mostly black, he claimed, and the women who appear in pornographic works tend to be "young, white, Christian women."

If people think he is targeting the Jews, he said, they are misinterpreting his position. He is targeting, Zirkle said, the "porn dragon" that inspires Jews to get involved in pornography.

Jewish men are culpable for running the business end of the pornography business, he said, but young white women are guilty of starring in it.

He spoke at the ANSWP program, Zirkle said, to educate and inform the gathering about Christian virtues. If we don't learn from history, he said, we will repeat the mistakes of the past.

The references to prosecuting Jewish and Zionist gangs, Zirkle said, come from his days as a deputy under former St. Joseph County Prosecutor Chris Toth.

Toth took a pornography case against the Little Denmark adult bookstore to a grand jury in February 2001. The grand jury handed down a 19-count indictment against the owner of Little Denmark, but a jury trial later in the year acquitted him.

Community standards were at issue. Zirkle said he thinks the judge erred when he instructed the jury that if a community tolerated an adult business, that meant the community was accepting of it.

"I don't think it's a settled issue for our community,'' he said.

Curious about how someone could be so clueless, I decided to look up Zirkle's website, and it is really quite amazing. There is a section, for example, all about "The Great Porn Jihad War Tax: Prolific Porn Mule Serial Woman-Womb Slaughterers," whatever that might be. I read it, but I cannot say it made any sense. And I tried to keep going from there, but then I realized I didn't need to procrastinate that badly, so I stopped.

Anyway, hate tip to ThinkProgress for pointing out this bizarre story. I would expect full coverage tonight on Countdown!

No, not really. But she obviously thinks it is bad for her.HuffPo's OffTheBus has another big scoop, this time complete with audio:

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the "activist base" of the Democratic Party -- and MoveOn.org in particular -- for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had "flooded" state caucuses and "intimidated" her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.

"Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] -- which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."

How dare those activists engage in the political process! Just who do they think they are, citizens or something? My god... Hillary is most certainly right. If only the most committed members of her party would stay home so that she could win without them, the skies really would open, wouldn't they? Who needs activists anyways? They're always getting involved in things, demanding that they change. The horror!

In a statement to The Huffington Post, MoveOn's Executive Director Eli Pariser reacted strongly to Clinton's remarks: "Senator Clinton has her facts wrong again. MoveOn never opposed the war in Afghanistan, and we set the record straight years ago when Karl Rove made the same claim. Senator Clinton's attack on our members is divisive at a time when Democrats will soon need to unify to beat Senator McCain. MoveOn is 3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers who are an important part of any winning Democratic coalition in November. They deserve better than to be dismissed using Republican talking points."

Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign, verified the authenticity of the audio. When asked if Clinton's statement suggested dismay over high Democratic turnout and elevated activist energy, Wolfson replied: "I'll let the statement stand as is." But he elaborated on Clinton's charge that these same party activists were engaged in acts of intimidation against her supporters: "There have been well documented instances of intimidation in the Nevada and the Texas caucuses, and it is a fact that while we have won 4 of the 5 largest primaries, where participation is greatest, Senator Obama has done better in caucuses than we have."

In fact, the Nevada caucuses occurred prior to MoveOn's endorsement of Obama, and when Clinton made her remarks, the Texas caucuses had yet to take place.

The disclosure of Clinton's statement disparaging the prominence of party activists in the caucus process comes after she repeatedly suggested that Obama's electability had been compromised because he had allegedly offended other key Democratic constituencies.

Will someone please hurry up and make this thing end? I don't think I can stand much more of this. Hillary Clinton clearly does not care if she destroys the Democratic Party. The emergence of the Netroots is a the kind of shift that takes place once every 40-50 years. It doesn't just have the potential to remake politics, it is already doing it. But because it isn't propelling her to victory, she think it is a bad thing? I mean... wow. Does she care about anything beyond herself?

UPDATE: I usually like Ambinder's analysis, but this makes no sense:

But doesn't MoveOn.org, which was formed in response to Republican attempts to impeach President Clinton, represent (for Obama) the type of polarized pressure group that Obama seems to decry when he talks about moving beyond the traditional encumberances of Old Politics? (General Betray Us? etc. etc.)

MoveOn didn't initially begin as a partisan organization. Their very name is a reminder of that.

MoveOn.org Civic Action was started by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Although neither had experience in politics, they shared deep frustration with the partisan warfare in Washington D.C. and the ridiculous waste of our nation's focus at the time of the impeachment mess. On September 18th 1998, they launched an online petition to "Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation." Within days they had hundreds of thousands of individuals signed up, and began looking for ways these voices could be heard.

Over the years, they became more partisan as a reaction to the partisanship of the Bush administration, but it isn't something that is a core part of their goals or beliefs. I could be wrong here, but I suspect that when the era of Bush ends, MoveOn will move back towards its original model - a bottom up, activist citizens group dedicated to progressive causes, not partisan politics.