Midday Open Thread

• Jeff Lindemyer over at The Nukes of Hazard points us to a great article by John Isaacs, who is the executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Isaacs' article discusses the successful dismantling of the North Korean nuclear program, and the resulting wingnut meltdown. Just to get you hooked, here's an excerpt:

  The same neoconservatives who dominated the Bush administration for almost eight years are now screaming like stuck pigs over the administration’s latest moves on North Korea. You would have thought that the heathens had been let into the temple—or, even worse, that W. had appointed Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) or Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) to Cabinet positions.

  President George W. Bush announced on June 26 that the United States would take steps to remove the last remaining Stalinist regime from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. This step was in return for North Korea submitting a long-delayed official declaration about its nuclear program.

• Amazing:

  In a new report [pdf], the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reveals that the real similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is in the price of staying. In constant FY2008 dollars, the Vietnam war cost the U.S. $686 billion. The Iraq war, at just over five years old, is priced at $648 billion...

• The NYT describes how the Iraq war has been sanitized in the US media by the suppression of images of violence. It quotes Zoriah Miller, an embedded photographer whom the Marines sent packing after he posted a photo of bodies at the site of a recent suicide bombing:

  "The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing —which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working."

  - smintheus

• Tom S over at Rustbelt Intellectual has a moving and thoughtful essay about nostalgia, the racial divide and growing up in Detroit.

  -- SusanG

• Matt Browner Hamlin offers the definitive smackdown to the Ted "Tubes" Stevens campaign, which once again publicized ignorance of the internet when it sent out a fundraising letter with this tidbit of a "scoop" against Democrat Mark Begich:

  Just last quarter, the mayor raised more than $37,000 from just one liberal Lower 48 Internet campaign known as ActBlue

  -- SusanG

• Interesting stuff for poll nerds, compliments of DemFromCT:

  Rasmussen: the modest bounce continues

  For the first five weeks after clinching the Democratic Presidential Nomination, Obama consistently led McCain by five or six points. Then, in the two weeks leading up to Obama’s overseas trip, support for the Democrat softened and the race got a bit tighter (see recent daily results). So far, the impact of Obama’s trip has been to restore the five or six point lead he enjoyed after capturing the nomination.

  Gallup: Yo, tambien.

  By the way, for tracking poll addicts, read Alan Abramowitz:

  Here's what I found. Since the beginning of May, over 74 days of polling, the Gallup tracking poll has shown Barack Obama with an average lead of 1.6 percentage points over John McCain. During the same time period, the Rasmussen tracking poll, over 76 days of polling, has shown Obama with an average lead of 1.8 percentage points. But during the exact same time period, 38 other national polls have shown Obama with an average lead of 5.2 percentage points.

  It's not a huge difference. But given the numbers of respondents interviewed in these polls-about 60 thousand in the Gallup tracking poll, 75 thousand in the Rasmussen tracking poll, and 40 thousand in the other national polls-it
  is certainly a statistically significant difference. More importantly, the Gallup and Rasmussen results give a different impression of the state of the presidential race from other national polls. A lead of less than two points suggests a much tighter race than a lead of between five and six points.

  And for the best damn discussion of polling sites, see Open Left (and the comment by Charles Franklin, who doesn't get enough credit for his charts at pollster.com.)

  Check out Hotline TV for the poop on the battlegrounds and McCain's huge, huge electoral college bounce.
  

• A recent study shows that poor people are more likely to play the lottery. In other news, hungry people were more likely to eat.

  -- Scout Finch

• The FCC has finally approved the XM and Sirius merger, some 18 months after the deal was announced. Stay tuned satellite radio subscribers.....it is going to get interesting now.
  --Scout Finch