While the rising price of oil is quickly reflected in the dollars flowing into your gas tank, there's another energy source that's going up even faster than oil.  In fact, the price has gone is up 100% in less than a year.

Benchmark prices for some grades of electricity-generating steam coal are more than $100 for a metric ton, double September’s price. Metallurgical coal, the type used in steel making, has tripled in some contracts.

Only a year ago, it was eye-opening to see met coal contracts coming in above $100, but to see steam coal at this rate is astounding.  Little wonder that investors are ecstatic about the coal industry.

Year to date, shares of Arch Coal Inc. are up 41%. The biggie of the industry, Peabody Energy Corp., has waxed 24% -- and 94% from its August trough. ... Kohler rates Massey Energy Co. a buy for its concentration in metallurgical coal, the sweet spot of the market.

You may remember Massey Energy from the number of mine deaths, from their toxic flood 25x the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and for having the CEO take a supreme court judge on vacation to the Rivera while his company was waiting for a decision on a $76 million judgment.  Regardless, as far as the investment community is concerned, Massey is a "buy."

Nothing like that disconnect between dollars and damage.

But while the cost to the consumer hasn't been as obvious as the cost of oil, sooner or later (probably sooner) that cost is going to show up in your electric bill.  And, like oil, it'll show up in the cost of everything manufactured using electricity, which is... pretty much everything.  

And of course, when it comes to coal, the cost isn't all in the bill.  

What we are paying up for is the dirtiest fossil fuel in the ground, infamous for wielding a heavy hand in the planet’s warming. In Beijing they wear surgical masks to ward off the soot from coal-fired plants, which then drifts across the Pacific to further foul the air over Los Angeles. That’s not all. Black lung disease, mercury and sulfur emissions and the ravaging of Appalachian mountaintops are part of the legacy that keeps our lights on.

The only good thing about prices this high is that it should help to encourage the rapid expansion of solar and wind.

In a speech today, John McCain will declare his new plan for Iraq.  Except it's not a plan.  It's new ideas.  Well, maybe not so much new ideas.  It's a vision, a vision of Iraq 2013.  The dreamy future you can only secure by voting for J. Sidney McCain III.  

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.

Okay, so most US troops are home and violence is better than it is today.  In other words, the Iraq war has been "won," but only for certain, extremely odd, definitions of won.  Not quite the kind of accomplishment most of us might want out of the next four years.  But wait, there's more.

Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders.

Huh.  Kind of makes you wonder who will still be causing the violence, when all the bad guys are gone.  Oh, and why there's still a US military force in place if the Iraqi military and government are so competent.   Of course, keeping plenty of troops in Iraq means no one can say this isn't keeping with McCain's dreamy vision for 2108 -- that we'll still be fighting in Iraq.

What else has John McCain seen in his crystal ball?  

"The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated.  U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda.

So in his dreams for the future, al Qaeda is still around, the US is still fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and we're still wrestling with the Taliban.  All this will happen if we just stay the course with McCain.  Gee, throw in a set of rusty steak knives and a dose of bubonic plague and we're sold.

Way to dream big medium.  

There is one more vision shining from McCain's magic mirror.

The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants.

That's going to happen because?  Because in looking glass world, Pakistan suddenly puts our interests ahead of their own and produces him for us while we continue to devote our attention to Iraq.  

That could happen.  After all, it's only a dream.

You might think that the "business friendly" GOP would be a shoo-in to get the nod from Wall Street types.  However, after seeing what's happened in this round of "creativity" in the financial markets, three former SEC chairmen have decided to endorse Barack Obama.

Former SEC head William Donaldson, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, joined Arthur Levitt and David Ruder in backing Obama, who leads rival Hillary Clinton in the number of delegates necessary to become the Democratic White House nominee.

Levitt was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, while Ruder was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican.

How much must it sting in McCain land to see that SEC appointees from Bush and Reagan don't want him sailing the ship of the economy?  

In the statement they praised Obama's "reasoned approach" in analyzing "the current financial crisis and the need for balanced regulatory reform."

The former chairs liked Obama's reasoned approach and sensible policies, as opposed to McCain's economics of delusion.

Q: Are Americans better off than they were eight years ago?

A: You could argue that Americans overall are better off, because we have had a pretty good prosperous time, with low unemployment and low inflation and a lot of good things have happened. A lot of jobs have been created.

...

A: I think we are better off overall if you look at the entire eight-year period, when you look at the millions of jobs that have been created, the improvement in the economy, etc.

How has the economy really done during the Bush administration?  

• Record levels of family debt.
• Flat wages, with only 1.4% growth in seven years.
• Oil prices up 400%.
• Higher prices for necessities.
• Record foreclosures.
• Fewer people with pensions.
• Fewer people with health care.
• The dollar at record lows.

Can the American economy stand another term of McCain's "pretty good prosperous time?"

Bears.  You know 'em, you know the threat they pose.  But I'll bet you didn't know that bears are to blame for high prices at the pump.  Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute explains why providing endangered species protection to polar bears is a threat to mankind.

The first is the possible wide geographic reach of the global warming argument. The snail darter almost killed a single dam. The polar bear could, in theory at least, stop everything. ...

The second impact of this ruling is that it will likely end all Arctic exploration for oil and gas, at least in the U.S. Given surging world demand for oil, increased supply is the only thing standing between us and $200-a-barrel oil.

You hear that?  It's not conflict in the Middle East, instability in US financial markets, or the rapid growth in India and China that's causing your gas bill to go up.  Hand over the bears, or prepare to pay one million dollars to fill your SUV.  

But wait!  There's really no conflict.  Hassett and his fellow AEI fellow, Kenneth Green, don't believe that the polar bear is in danger at all.  Granted, both of them are known for backing oil drilling at all costs, and couldn't be counted on to say a bad thing about drilling if it used nuns and orphans as lubricant.  And Hassett admits that biologists are convinced the polar bear is in decline because of melting ice.  But they have a professor on their side, as well.

For example, professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently told Science Daily that "the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions."

There you go.  Scientific evidence that the polar bear is doing great, from J. Scott Armstrong, Professor of Marketing.  Plutonium Page predicted that Armstrong's already well-debunked baloney would become the go-to "study" for those who can't wait to destroy the last tiny fragments of wilderness.

My forecast is that it will be quoted over and over again throughout the deniersphere.  

As the saying goes, "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with..," well, you know the saying.

It was obvious that AEI would be at the front of the line since being the firstest with the mostest BS is their standard practice.  It's less obvious why the mainstream media keeps providing AEI and their unsubstantiated nonsense with a platform.  Does even a business-friendly publication like Bloomberg's really benefit from associated with such noxious fiction?

Hassett's last appearance in the pages of Bloomberg was when he warned that it was bad for business when CEOs weren't allowed to "defend themselves" by spreading unsupported rumors rather than making testable public statements.  At least AEI seems to live up to that standard.  "Rumor" is the nicest word for any evidence that Hassett puts forth.

Oh, and as McCain starts to put forth his environmental recommendations today, it's well worth noting that Kevin Hassett is an adviser to the McCain campaign.  So there you go.  The "straight talker" gets his environmental and economic advice from this guy.

Bush's official statement for Mother's Day.

Laura and I want to wish everybody a happy Mother's Day. It's just a special day to give thanks to our Moms; appreciate the hard work that Moms do. And I understand that for some, however, Mother's Day is a sad day for those who lost their lives in Oklahoma and Missouri and Georgia because of the tornadoes, are wondering whether or not tomorrow will be a bright and hopeful day.

Well, if you lost your life, you might have good reason to not be all that hopeful, but I suppose today isn't going to get any worse.

John McCain had the eager press lined up on this one for weeks.  He was going to take a stand and differentiate himself from Bush by offering his solution to climate change.  And today was the momentous day.  McCain made his speech and no less than the New York Times dutifully trotted out an article titled McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change.

Senator John McCain sought to distance himself from President Bush on Monday as he called for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. ... In what his campaign promoted as a major speech on climate change, the Arizona senator renewed his support for a "cap-and-trade" system in which power plants and other polluters could meet limits on greenhouse gases by either reducing emissions on their own or buying credits from more efficient producers.

The plan that McCain offers turns out to be an extremely weak one, one that's even less effective than the completely inadequate Lieberman-Warner Bill.

Mr. McCain is the only Republican presidential candidate this year to call for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, but his target for reducing those emissions over time is lower than that of his Democratic competitors, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and even lower than that in a bill proposed by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia.

So what is in McCain's proposal that differentiates him from Bush?  Not much.  In fact, the same article notes that McCain's positions puts him "slightly right of center" on the climate change issue, which apparently means that McCain is willing to admit that climate change is a problem, but not willing to make any substantive suggestion on how to address the issue.  

What the Times article doesn't mention is that back in 2000, candidate Bush also said the climate change was an issue and pledged to regulate CO2.  It wasn't until after his election that that cuddly, caring, compassionate conservative Bush's positions gave way to the standard GOP line.  

Under strong pressure from conservative Republicans and industry groups, President Bush reversed a campaign pledge today and said his administration would not seek to regulate power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that many scientists say is a key contributor to global warming. ... As recently as 10 days ago, Christie Whitman, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, had described Mr. Bush's campaign promise as if it were already policy.

So what's the difference between Bush and McCain?  One is a Republican who is already in office, the other is a Republican running for office.  Far from making him different from Bush, McCain's empty promises make him exactly the same as the man whose administration he's running to extend.  

What evidence is there that McCain would break Bush's flip-flop record if he gets the chance to sit in the Oval Office?  How about this: McCain is being advised on these issues by Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, who just this morning put out an op-ed explaining how we can't let the environment get in the way of cheap energy.  And of course the proposals McCain put forward today don't align very well with his other big push for a gas tax holiday.

But since he started running for president last year, McCain has largely downplayed climate change. He hasn’t declared support for a tougher and more detailed bill, proposed by Senators John Warner and McCain ally Joe Lieberman. And his top domestic policy recently suggested that McCain might not even stand by his own weaker bill, telling a reporter: "He wasn’t so much committed to the bill as to an issue."

So, McCain proposes a weak, pointless bill.  One of his advisers suggests he won't even stand by that proposal, while another argues that cheap energy trumps environmental concerns.  Boy, that sure is different.

As has already been demonstrated time and again, "maverick" McCain's difference from the hard right extends as far as his words, and stops well short of his deeds.  Coming from McCain, any promise on climate change is nothing but hot air.  

Remember Virgil Goode?  Goode, whose name is pronounced like spreading goo rather than doing the right thing, entered Congress as a Democrat, but jumped to the GOP side when he feared being in the minority.  Once on Team Bush, he remade himself as the man who is afraid of Muslims

During today’s House debate on Iraq, virulently anti-Muslim Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) said supporting the anti-escalation resolution would "aid and assist the Islamic jihadists who want the crescent and star to wave over the Capitol of the United States and over the White House of this country."

very afraid of Muslims

"I fear that radical Muslims who want to control the Middle East and ultimately the world would love to see 'In God We Trust' stricken from our money and replaced with 'In Muhammad We Trust.'"

very very afraid of Muslim immigrants

I believe that if we do not stop illegal immigration totally, reduce legal immigration and end diversity visas, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world.

and afraid of Muslim congressmen

I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America...

Doesn't it seem like someone ought to give Mr. Goode the chance to escape the horrors of Washington and hide from scary Muslims in the safety of own basement?  

That someone is Tom Perriello.  

Perriello has launched a program to take out Virgil Goode, for good, by  doing good for his community.  

With events in Danville, Collinsville, and Charlottesville, the Perriello for Congress campaign launched its volunteer tithing initiative, unprecedented for a political campaign. The campaign will tithe 10% of all its volunteer hours to community service projects around the district. The campaign has logged more than 1,700 volunteer hours in total; over the weekend, volunteers kicked off the initiative by tithing 42 volunteer hours and moving forward, will tithe 10% of its hours.

This idea, of putting campaign efforts into doing work for the community, is one that I've been pushing for some time, and I'm extremely excited to see the Perriello campaign making this move (though I don't think for a second that they got the idea from me!  After all, the Dean Corps followed much the same plan).  I'm betting that time spent on actually helping out around the district will be much more valuable than more hours on phone banks or another commercial on local TV.  If you're a local, you could help make that prediction come true by volunteering.  If you're stuck at a distance, there's always the Perriello Act Blue Page.

While Virgil Goode talks about defending his values from scary Muslims.  Tom Perriello wants to show his values not through fear, but in service to others.

"I was raised to believe that a strong faith is a lived faith that must be made clear by our deeds. I want my campaign for Congress to reflect those same values," said Tom Perriello. "That is why we are asking our campaign team to commit 10% of their volunteer hours to local charities to reflect the value of service to community and to country."

What Perriello is asking from his volunteers is only an extension of what he's already asked of himself.

After receiving his law degree from Yale University, Tom accepted an assignment working to end atrocities in the West African countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone, which had suffered long civil wars fueled by blood diamonds. Tom’s work with child soldiers, amputees, and local pro-democracy groups in Sierra Leone played a significant role in the peace and reconciliation process that ended twelve years of violence in that country. ... He has worked inside Darfur and twice in Afghanistan.

Here's hoping that other campaigns also make this commitment.

Race tracker wiki: VA-05

One of the greatest threats that the world faces today goes by the name of "rust."

What's at stake isn't the wheel wells of your Ford Falcon, it's the global food supply.  A old threat that has long been dormant, wheat stem rust has returned.

Biologists warned Thursday that a virulent new strain of a previously controlled plant disease had emerged in East Africa and could wipe out 10 percent of the world's wheat production if its spread is not halted.  The disease, wheat rust, caused huge grain losses and even famines in the first half of the 20th century.

Is America the world's greatest country?  Well, consider this list.

The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American.

Sure, none of these things is really an important measure of a nation, and even taken as a whole the Ferris-Wheel/Shopping Mall Index isn't likely to convince anyone that America has really slipped.  But the point that Fareed Zakaria makes in his Newsweek column is that all these things -- and the list could be a lot longer -- are indicators of a new status in world affairs.

But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

With something like 195 nations in the world, 65% of them have been growing at a rate faster than the US.  The next set of "world companies" are emerging in nations that Americans have, and still do, looked on with disdain.  Whether it's finance or science, health care or education, America isn't leading the way -- it's not even pointing the direction.  Instead, we're on the sidelines, trying to squeeze the grip of our still considerable military leadership ever tighter, only to have more and more of our influence slip away.

There are directional changes that could have been made to make America a moral and intellectual leader in this new structure, but instead we've been running on bluster and bombs.  Now, for the most part, America is simply being ignored.

Zakaria's right to say that this is not the disaster it might seem.  First of all, though from the cable news pundit point of view this world looks suddenly scary and dangerous, it's actually a lot less frightening that it was in decades past.  If we notice more terrorism, it's only because we're looking for it and reporting on every incident.  It's because we have an administration that makes sure to pin the word terrorist on everyone who ever contemplated running a stop sign.  It's the same phenomenon that makes us see a surge in crime because a child who goes missing in Salt Lake City gets immediate 24/7 coverage in Des Moines and a college student lost on vacation becomes the centerpiece of national news.  There is no enormous threat out there.  There's no organization, no nation, and no coalition that threatens to contend with the United States.  Terrorists can do in the United States.  China and Russia simply aren't interested -- they're too busy selling us electronics and oil.

As the GOP works hard to scare us to death (and gets assistance from the ringing of 3AM phones) we are as safe right now as we are ever likely to be -- even though the actions we've taken as a nation might justifiably be seen as a kind of death wish.

But while Zakaria is quick to point out that the Republican fear mongers are blowing gun smoke when it comes to the threats we face on the battlefield, he's equally quick to join the hallelujah chorus when it comes to defending the economics of globalization.  The US has lost jobs, lost skills, lost whole industries, and become debt-bound both at the national and personal level.  Somehow, this is taken as a good thing.  

Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining depth and breadth. America has benefited massively from these trends. It has enjoyed unusually robust growth, low unemployment and inflation, and received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. These are not signs of economic collapse.

That same period, and the last seven years in particular, have seen stagnation in the median wage, a loss of nearly two million jobs, loss of real purchasing power for the average consumer, and sharp rises in the cost of basic commodities.  It would be nice to think that the "rising tide" was sweeping in to lift all boats, but for many people it seems that the tide was actually stored in an American bucket -- a bucket that's been shot full of holes by our economic and diplomatic missteps.

Low, low prices at the local big box and trading manufacturing jobs for those that include the phrase "do you want fries with that" do not a great economy make.  Over the last weekend, anyone visiting one of my favorite places in LA, Dutton's Bookstore, would have found that it, like the US, was in the midst of furious activity, with all hands on deck and customers pouring through the door to enjoy low prices.  It might have been the very model of the US economy that Zakaria describes.  Unfortunately, it was a going out of business sale.  

On top of the troubles that are plaguing us now is the knowledge that we do not enjoy an unbounded system.  Food riots in two dozen countries, and $123 oil are only the first signs of what will happen as more and more contend for less and less.  These fights may be handled with Euros now, but when it comes to basic commodities, it's doubtful that the pocketbook alone will rule.  There's also the secondary effects generated by increasing demand -- global warming, increasing desertification, general pollution.  These problems are likely to be cause of future conflicts, and globalization makes them all kick harder.

What's more, the happy talk of millions lifted from poverty into the waiting arms of consumerism is really little more than talk.  That worldwide tide hasn't exactly been coming in evenly.  In most countries -- hell, all countries -- what's been happening is that more and more of the resources are being accumulated by a very small percentage of the people.  As in the US, the average wealth has increased, but the median wealth is a very different story.  Around the world, inequality between the richest and the poorest has been moving sharply higher.  Historically, that's been a big flashing red light on the road to instability.

Finally, if the last twenty years have proved anything, it's that capitalism is not the exclusive partner of democracy.  Authoritarian governments have shown that they too can play the greed game.  Western exploitation of Africa has long demonstrated that bribery and cronyism can actually out compete regulation and law in the marketplace.  Governments unconcerned with such non-monetary concepts as safety, workers rights, and the environment have done quite well.  Globalization has been placed in the service of governments with no interest in democracy, who have discovered that consumerism can be a far more effective means of controlling the populace and squeezing out opposition than any propaganda film.  

That America has no current or dawning military threat is to be cheered.  That some number of people across the planet are no longer bound to poverty is to be celebrated.  That the United States no longer sets the rules in the game must be accepted.  But globalization seems to be providing rapid increases in demand, rapid increases in inequality, rapid increases in prices, and no matching increase in freedom or democracy.

Rather than being worried about the arms stored in distant caves, we need to be more concerned about the food available in distant kitchens.  The latter will have much more to say about the future security of America, and the storm of globalization that we've unleashed may well be more dangerous to our survival than every militant on Earth.

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission—globalizing the world.

So the "great historic" accomplishment of the United States turns out to be not acting as a beacon for freedom, or demonstrating the worth of democracy.  It's teaching the rest of the world to consume as we do.

If that's true, it would be better for all of us if that tea had never gone into Boston harbor.

This late in the game, there are a good number of states already in the bag and a lot of polls have come and gone.  This seems like a good time to check on the performance of the various polling organizations so far in state level Democratic contests.

For the results on this table, I've consulted the final results from each state as well as polling data from Pollster .com and Real Clear Politics.  I've only included primaries that were polled by at least two of the major pollsters.  I've dropped results from pollsters who didn't poll a significant number of states (more than a couple), even when that meant bumping Gallup or CBS.  And I've only included polls that happened in the last week before the election.  Here are the results.

In the center of this table is the actual results for that state.  Of example, in Iowa Senator Obama won by a (rounded) 8% while in New Hampshire, Senator Clinton won by 3%.  The values indicated for each pollster are for their relative performance vs. the actual results.  In Iowa, Strategic Vision said that Obama would win by 3, but he won by 8, so their prediction was 5 to the Clinton side of the line.  In New Hampshire, Rasmussen predicted that Obama would win by 7, but Clinton won by 3, so they were 10 to the Obama side of the prediction.  In several instances (including Iowa) several predictions fell on the same spot, so I've bumped a poll one space left or right just to make it visible.  I've tried to randomize these moves so that everyone got treated fairly on a visual basis, and when it comes to the numeric analysis, I used the raw numbers so this nudging has no effect.

One thing that's immediately obvious is that the "polls show more votes for Obama than he gets" effect does not seem to exist when polls for all states are considered.  If anything, more polls lean toward Clinton in the run up to election day than Obama.  This is aided by pollsters like Mason-Dixon, which has been "pro-Clinton" in their analysis for every state but one.  Strategic Vision erred to the Clinton side of the line in every contest but New Jersey.  Insider Advantage had numbers that were more pro-Clinton than the actual results in every state.  Rasmussen and Survey USA both come in close to neutral, but still lean to the Clinton side.  Among the pollsters examined, only Zogby tended to give a more pro-Obama number than the actual results.

Pollster	Avg. Err%	Leans Toward	States Called
IA	10.1	C + 10	6/6
M-D	9.2	C + 5	4/5
Ras.	8.0	C + 3	12/18
SUSA	4.7	C + 3	11/13
SV	9.1	C + 7	4/4
Zogby	9.8	O + 3	6/9

Comparing the average error between last prediction and actual results, the "lean" of the poll toward one candidate or the other, and the rate of prediction of winners gives some interesting results.  

Insider Advantage leaned toward Clinton on every prediction and had the highest error rate in predicting final results.  However, they still managed to pick the winner in the six contests for which they had data in the final week.

On the other hand, Rasmussen, while much more neutral when it comes to leaning toward a candidate, managed to miss in 6 of the 18 contests they called -- a 33% error rate in selecting the winner, and that's generous considering that among the states they called were such gimmes as Illinois and New York.  

Only Zogby managed to match that final result for awfulness of prediction.  In fact, as anyone who has watched the results this year might have noticed, Zogby has been miserable both on the numbers and the results. They've managed to miss in 1/3 of the primaries (to give them some credit, their correct picks aren't bolstered by New York or Illinois) and come close to Insider Advantage in the overall error percentage.

Survey USA has been close on the numbers in almost every case.  One of their misses came in the close contest in Texas, where they called it Obama by one.  The only real screw-up of the year for SUSA was their call for a big Clinton win in Missouri.  Were it not for that that call and (like everyone else) underestimating Obama's landslide in South Carolina, SUSA would be sporting an amazing batting average.  The number of states where SUSA has been extremely close to the final result shows that in many cases their model of the electorate was dead on.

So, how does all this apply to the upcoming contests in Indiana and North Carolina?

North Carolina has been tracked by Survey USA, Insider Advantage, Rasmussen, and Mason-Dixon.  Here are the values as they stand and adjusted to reflect the "lean" indicated in previous contests.

Pollster	Actual	Adjusted
SUSA	Obama +5	Obama + 8
IA	Obama +3	Obama + 13
Zogby	Obama +8.0	Obama + 5
Ras	Obama +9.0	Obama + 12
M-D	Obama +7.0	Obama + 12
Avg.	Obama + 6	Obama + 10

Indiana has fresh numbers from fewer sources, which is surprising considering the closeness of the contest.  In any case, here are the actual and adjusted values.

Pollster	Actual	Adjusted
SUSA	Clinton + 12	Clinton + 9
IA	Clinton + 4	Obama + 6
Zogby	Obama + 2	Clinton + 1
Avg.	Clinton + 5	Clinton + 1

Do I believe the adjusted numbers?  Well, since Insider Advantage and Zogby have the highest error percent and Survey USA has the lowest, I'd personally give it extra weight.  Call it Obama by 8 in North Carolina, and Clinton by 4 in Indiana.

Now I'm going to sit back and hope that SUSA used the same model for predicting Indiana that it used in Missouri.  If it's any comfort, the SUSA/Zogby numbers on Indiana look very much like the Missouri prediction on Super Tuesday.  So maybe this will be the second time SUSA took a hike into the weeds.  Don't hesitate to check the numbers.  Any time I'm allowed to do this much math in one sitting, it's an invitation to disaster.

Every person injured, every person killed, has a mother, has a father, has siblings, has uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends.  And they all have memories.

That's one good reason why 100 more years of this is 105 years too long.  

The U.S. military on Saturday fired missiles at a target about 50 yards away from the general hospital in Baghdad's Sadr City district, wounding more than 20 people and destroying ambulances, hospital officials said.

Of course, the military was aiming at a building occupied by "a criminal element," and by all accounts that building was destroyed.  The building happened to be a chapel used by the hospital workers.  

But does it matter that there was no intent to hurt civilians?

This kind of incident certainly isn't new.  It's hardly even news.  Air strikes in this conflict have by now taken out weddings and schools, convoys of government officials on their way to a conference, and a countless individuals that just happened to live in the wrong neighborhood.  Of course it's accidental.  of course it's regrettable.  But if it was your family, would that matter?  Would it matter if your children?

The ugly daily fight for ground in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City unfolded Saturday at a small mosque next door to a hospital, damaging the hospital and all its ambulances, and near a group of children who were injured by the violence as they gathered tin cans to sell for salvage.  

The first hit came after a night of clashes in the neighborhood, when the Americans fired at least three "precision-guided munitions" in the area of the Sadr General Hospital at 10 a.m. The target was a small building next door to the hospital that neighbors said was used as a rest house and place of prayer for hospital employees, pilgrims and neighborhood residents.  ... Doctors and nurses ran screaming as the blasts blew out hospital windows and shook the building, said one doctor, who asked that his name not be used.

About an hour later, at the front line between the southern part of the neighborhood that is held by the American and Iraqi military and the northern section that is held by Shiite militias, the group of children was hit, according to a child and one adult who was injured there and brought to the Sadr hospital.

Remember Silvio Berlusconi, Bush's Italian pal?

Bush: We welcome the Prime Minister as a good friend ... He understands the history and the values that our two countries share."

Well, yes, it does appear that Silvio has an interest in history, in particular a fascination with the 1930s.  Now that Berlusconi's conservative party has once again taken control of Italy, they've been sharing their history lessons with the country.  First, there was the election of one of Berlusconi's lieutenants as the new mayor of Rome.

On Monday night, the area around Rome's city hall rang to chants of "Duce! Duce!", the term adopted by Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German "Führer". Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

Does Godwin's Law still apply if people are proudly waving the banner of fascism?  While one Berlusconi lieutenant was celebrating his mayoral victory, another was reminding the opposition that not following the new government didn't mean just getting a beating at the ballot box.

The prime minister-elect's closest ally, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League leader, kept up the intimidating rhetoric, arriving for the first session of Italy's parliament warning of violence if the centre-left did not go along with his plans for federalism.

"I don't know what the left wants [but] we are ready," he told reporters. "If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand."

And if there was any doubt at all about where this is heading, Berlusconi put his signature on the official fascist embrace.

Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy's leap to the right by declaring: "We are the new Falange." Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters. The original Falange - the word means "phalanx" - was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, which supplied Francisco Franco's dictatorship with its ideological underpinning.

Once again Bush has demonstrated the kind of keen human insight that he got from peering into Vladimir Putin's baby blues and discovering him to be "straightforward and trustworthy."  It's clear that in sitting down with Silvio, Bush partnered with a man who's determined to bring fascism back to Italy, even if it requires violent suppression of opposition. Either Bush was completely taken in by two men who were determined to put in place non-democratic nationalist governments run by threat and cronyism, or he was sympathetic to those positions.  Neither choice is particularly comforting.

Earlier, Bush had bragged of his partnership with Berlusconi.

The people of the United States and Italy love freedom. And we know that freedom must be defended.

We also understand that defending freedom requires cost and sacrifice.

Having helped to secure a foothold in Europe for neo-fascism, what future sacrifices might be needed to ensure that Italian freedom is retained?  

I hear there's a good beach at Paestum, down in Salerno.

In his classic popular science series, "Connections," James Burke looked at how events and people were linked together in unexpected ways.  Generally, these events were spread out over centuries and continents (such as how the discovery of a certain kind of slate in Middle Eastern rivers led to the atomic bomb), but in one instance, Burke focused on an event that happened in a matter of minutes.

It happened on a November evening just as people were filing out of their offices in cities along the East Coast.  As millions started for home, something that seemed very tiny happened inside a small metal box 400 miles from New York City.  Inside that box, two small pieces of metal came into contact.  Within twelve minutes, 80,000 square miles of the most densely populated areas of the US and Canada were without power.  Thirty million people were affected.  

What happened was the closure of a single single back up relay, at a single power station, on the Canadian side of Niagara falls.  It wasn't really a "failure," just a miscalibration.  The relay tripped because power demand had momentarily spiked on a line leading into Toronto, and when it tripped power was pushed onto another line, causing that line to overload, which pushed still more power down the next line, and so on, creating a cascade that left some people in the dark for more than 13 hours.  People hundreds of miles away died because someone at that power plant hadn't properly calibrated that breaker to handle rising demand on the system.  

That was in 1965.  In some ways the system today is better.  In some ways it's much, much worse.

What happened that evening illustrates how systems that are enormously costly and massive, can still be incredibly fragile and subject to the failure of a single part.  There's a famous antecedent that John Glenn, moments before he was about to become the first American in orbit, realized that he was sitting on a billion dollars worth of low bids.  It's good for a smile, until you realize that what was true for Glenn then is even more true for all of us today.

Whether it's a bridge in Minnesota or body armor in Iraq, we live in a world constructed by low bid.  That's not just true for items built by government contract.  For decades, business has focused on efficiency, on the elimination of all redundancy, on "right sizing," on "just in time" on "zero inventory."  One of the economic indicators we've been trained to look for each month is the measure of labor productivity, the amount of output achieved for each man-hour of input.  In the United States, productivity has soared over the last decade, as automation, outsourcing, and just-in-time have worked together to make US workers much much more productive.  

Want to know why corporations are able to sit on huge sums of money, but the average worker's pay hasn't increased?  It's because they can get by with fewer of us and still get what they need.  Not more than they need, of course.  Just enough.  Corporations have been proudly "cutting the fat."  Flexibility and robustness are not the goals for a corporate society that rarely glances beyond the end of the current quarter.

The trouble is, fat does something other than cause unsightly bulges in your favorite outfit.  Fat is storage.  If bears were to "cut the fat" before heading into hibernation, they'd be really thin -- as in skeletons -- come spring.  

There's a familiar fable from Aesop about an industrious ant and a fun-loving grasshopper.  All through the good times, the ant toils away, packing food into the larder.  While the ant works, the grasshopper goes whistling along, frequently making fun of the hard-working ant.  Then the ant sneaks up and slices the lazy bastard's head from it's thorax with one clean... wait, that's not how it goes.  It's more like this:

"Why don't you blow off work today and come to the beach?," says Grasshopper.

"I'm putting away food for times when food is short," says Ant, "you should too."

"Screw that" says Grasshopper.  "We have plenty of food, and if we ever run short the magic invisible hand of the market will make sure that more appears."

In the story, hard times come -- as they always do -- and Grasshopper's empty hindgut causes him to repent his slug abed ways.  The end.  Or he might hire Blackwater to shoot Ant and occupy his hill in the name of peace, democracy, and capitalism.  

Considering the amount of work we do, we might well sympathize with the ants, but societally, we're grasshoppers.  In fact, we've built a whole "Grasshopper Planet" in the name of efficient global business.  It's a system that glorifies short-term profit over long term planning.  It's a fat-free, no plan for a rainy day, system, and it's supporting six billion grasshoppers.  Though you wouldn't know it from looking at American waistlines, globalization has shaved the fat from planet Earth.

Like a metal bridge slowly being eaten away by the passage of water and time, the supports of this system grow more delicate by the day -- on purpose.  Competitiveness and fragility have become synonymous.  

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich brought together many of the threats then facing society in his book, The Population Bomb.  Ehrlich looked at humanity through the lens of the same dynamics that limit the population of deer on a plateau, or  the number of fish in a pond.   Though the population of human beings has doubled since Ehrlich's book first appeared, no species can expand forever.  Sooner or later the population will be controlled, perhaps by choice, and if not then by war or disease.  Or famine.

Famine is one of those words that these days only seems to appear in Sunday School and on the early morning commercials run by charities who can't afford a slot in prime time.  Thanks to the "Green Revolution" that drastically increased the productivity of farm lands between the 1940s and 1960s, the amount of food produced across the planet is enough to support a population that's grown from three billion to closing on seven since The Population Bomb appeared.  When famine occurs, it's usually a demonstration of greed and idiocy (such as that shown in Hubert Sauper's award-winning 2005 film, Darwin's Nightmare in which fish are being exported to Europe and America from a lake surrounded by starving people), rather than a real lack of input to the world food system.

Real famine -- the kind that acts as a check on that ever-growing population, the kind that lays waste to whole regions -- can't occur these days.  Not so long as our fat-free, just-in-time, right-sized food distribution system works perfectly.

Oh, and not only does that system have to work perfectly, but the other systems -- the one that supplies oil to the agricultural nations, the one that provides shipping, the political systems -- they all have to work perfectly, as well.  All these systems are so intricately intertwined, that tipping a pebble anywhere can start unanticipated avalanches.  

Say for example, you decide to put some percentage of corn into the production of ethanol.  It sounds like a good idea.  There's the possibility of reducing dependence on oil, of reducing greenhouse gases, and of providing a market to corn farmers many of whom are already getting trimmed away by that "fat reduction."  Only putting corn into ethanol can limit the amount that's exported and increase the price world wide.  And if farmers are encouraged to put more land toward corn, they put less toward wheat and soybeans.  So an increase in corn prices can ripple across the food supply, causing an increase elsewhere.

Or say you're newly arrived in the middle class and for the first time you can afford to eat just a little more meat.  Meat that puts ten or twenty times the strain on the system as delivering that same food energy in the form of grain.  When a lot of people reach this point in a short period, as is happening in parts of Asia, systems that have long provided "enough" start to fall behind.  

Or say that the currency used in most of these commodity transactions, the standard by which prices are set, starts to become unstable.  Prices for future international trade are no longer predictable, as the factors of weather, pests, supply, and demand are joined by a simple inability to determine what the dollars being delivered in return for grain are really worth.

When things like that happen, countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, which have long exported rice elsewhere, put a ban on exports.  Things like that can result in food riots in 37 different countries in the space of a month.  

When it comes to the world food supply, it's not one little "box" that's overloading, it's several at the same time.  And all this is happening as increasing population is already straining the limits of the system in many countries.  The result is a crisis.

In those countries where people spend 15% of their cash on food, a doubling of prices means you get a little grumbling, and some restrictions on how many bags of rice you can buy at the local big box.  It also means  less available for other things, resulting in an economic slowdown.  Every dime that goes into basic foodstuffs, is a dime not being spent elsewhere.

In those countries where people spend 30% of their cash on food, a doubling of prices means real hardship.  It means kids go to work instead of getting an education.  It means businesses fail and houses are lost.  It means that people make the kind of decisions that will echo through generations, limiting their ability to rise above poverty.  It means the arrow of economic progress is thrown into reverse.

In those countries where people spend 60% of their money on food, a doubling of prices means that children go hungry.  If it goes on long enough, people starve.  It means famine.  Famine not in midst of plenty, but famine in the midst of "just enough."  Only that just enough is just too far away and just too expensive.

Of course, famine is not the end of the chain.  This is the fortieth anniversary of The Population Bomb, but from famine can come war, disease, and all those other limiting factors that Erhlich wrote about way back when.  All the systems are interconnected, all the systems are fragile, and if we think that the effects of any disaster can be limited to somewhere "over there," we've not just cut the fat, we've cut the sense.

On Grasshopper Planet, every day is just-in-time for collapse.

Update [2008-4-27 17:7:28 by Devilstower]: in the comments, Fatherflot pointed out that much of the Connections series can be viewed on YouTube.  Thanks.

Prices for homes are down again, and the decline shows no sign of stopping.  But not all homes are equal in the falling market, and there's a new factor that's helping to determine which areas fail and which areas thrive.

But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.  The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

As President Carter came out his meeting with Hamas, there were varying opinions about whether his visit had made significant diplomatic process.  However, one thing was very clear.  When asked, Jimmy Carter said that the administration had not warned him against meeting with Hamas.  Then Condoleeza Rice said that he had been warned.  

Rice said in Kuwait on Tuesday: "We counseled President Carter against going to the region and particularly against having contact with Hamas."

Today, Carter had an explanation for this discrepancy: Rice is lying.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of not telling the truth about warnings she said her department gave Carter not to speak to Hamas before a Middle East trip.

No matter what you think of Carter's visit, there's one thing that indisputable.  Jimmy Carter tells the truth, even when -- maybe even especially when -- it's politically dangerous.

On the other hand, Condoleezza Rice has a record of twisting the facts way, way, way past the breaking point.  Her demonstrated integrity involves eight years of misdirections, misstatements, and outright lies.

"No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him (Carter) to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President (Bashar) Assad or leaders of Hamas," [a statement from the Carter Center] said.

Is there still anyone, anywhere this side of Bill O'Reilly who is silly enough to believe Rice over Carter?

It's no longer news that oil is above $100 a barrel.  In fact just yesterday the New York Times had an article on how oil had topped $116.  By the end of that same day, it had edged up to almost $120.  And the big news is there is no big news.

What was striking about this latest milestone was what didn’t happen: there was no shortage of oil, no sudden embargo, no exporter turning off its spigot.

Odds are the slope will continue up from here.  However, there's a fair degree of speculation and concern over international stability built into the current price, probably something on the order of $25 a barrel.  Just think of it as the Iraq War Oil Tax.  That speculative cost could collapse suddenly.  Oil prices just might even fall to $70 or lower -- a price that itself would have seemed high a very short time ago.

But it won't happen for long, it won't mean that those predicting peak oil are wrong, and it won't mean that we can joyfully go back to our SUVs.  Not only are there environmental and national security concerns of continuing our dependence on oil, oil prices will go higher.  Why?  Because there are so more straws being jabbed into the pool.

Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

"This is the market signaling there is a problem," said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, "that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies."

Here's an important point: don't expect any announcement of "huge new oil fields" to solve this problem.  

First, most new fields fizzle.  Putting one or two exploration wells into a formation and projecting a zillion barrels of oil does not make them actually exist.  The largest oil field ever discovered... gets discovered about every six months.  So whether it's off the coast of Brazil or freshly exposed by melting ice in Greenland, the truth is none of these fields is likely to live up to its publicity.

But let's say they do.  Let's say someone discovers the next Ghawar.  Problems solved?  Not at all.  it will take years to bring any new field into production.  By that time, many existing fields -- such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and Mexico's Cantarell (and maybe even the actual Ghawar in Saudi Arabia) -- are likely to be out of business.  Oil fields come and go quite rapidly, and the truth is that the rate of discovery now is way down from where it was a few decades ago.  Much more production will be moving out of the market than will be moving in, and unless trends are drastically reversed, demand will continue to increase.

We can not drill our way out of this problem.  We can't refinery ourselves out of this problem.  We can't produce ourselves out of this problem.

So we build nuclear plants, right?  A few new nukes and crisis averted.  Only we can't solve this problem that way.  Not by building nuclear plants, or coal-fired plants, or even sowing a thousand wind farms.  Oil is a transportation issue, not an electricity-on-the-grid issue.  To reduce our need for oil, we need to reduce the number of multi-ton vehicles used to shuttle individuals between homes and offices.  

And that's the very good news.  Because consumption of oil is, at its heart, a social issue.  There's no Second Law of Petrodynamics that states every human being must have 20 gallons of high test to get through the day.  Sure, it will be great to have plug-in hybrids and full bore EVs on the road, but we don't have to wait until then to tackle this problem.  We can choose to end the oil crisis, and it involves no technological breakthroughs at all.

The solution lies in making choices as boring as picking up that fluorescent light bulb.  The answer is conservation.

• Drive less.
• Take public transit.
• Walk.
• If it's too far to walk, use a bike.
• If it's too far to bike, and there no public transportation, car pool.
• If you can't car pool, use a smaller, more efficient vehicle.
• If you have a long commute, move closer to work.
• If you can't move closer, take a closer job.
• If you can't get a different job, see if you can telecommute.

It really is that simple.  Which of course, doesn't mean it will be easy.  We're accustomed to jumping in our personal battleships and cruising the highway at speeds just less than supersonic every time we get a craving for a Slurpee.  Making significant changes to oil consumption requires a sacrifice of one of the things Americans value most: convenience, and no one -- not government, not industry -- can really do as much as you can by simply parking it.

Sure, it's going to be painful.  There's a big temptation to deliver a nah-nah-nah, since many groups (including our own Energize America) advocated for an increase in the gas tax back when gas was much cheaper, with the resulting funds to be put directly to development of public transport and addressing issues that would reduce the need for oil.  Even on Daily Kos people screamed that not one penny was acceptable.  Now gas is closing on $4, the economy is being squeezed, and every dollar is going to Exxon instead of a solution.  Plus you have J. Sidney "Whiplash" McCain III suggesting that the existing gas taxes be suspended, so we can enjoy an infrastructure debt that makes the Iraq War bills seem laughably small.

There's a lot left to do.  We have to rethink a delivery network that's focused on trucks, even over distances where there are more energy-efficient alternatives.  We have to get serious about the use of rail transport for both goods and people.  We have to break the habit of flying for meetings that could be done over the phone or on the web.  We have to put leaner, greener, lighter vehicles onto the road in place of the heavy oil burners we use now.  If, sometime far down the road, we actually have enough electric vehicles out there to affect demand on the grid, we might even need to build a power plant.  But not yet, and certainly not first.

If you've been waiting for that call to sacrifice, the one that Bush never gave after 9/11, here it is: drive less.  Want a good starting target?  With gas rationing during World War II, each family was allowed four gallons a week.  Let's start there.  See if you can ration yourself -- before the price at the pump does it for you.

Hendrik Hertzberg's New Yorker article has what may be the best summary yet of ABC's miserable debate performance.  

Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.

ABC has defended the issues raised as being of "real importance."  After all, it's not as if anything else was going on, right?

If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come. In the seven weeks since the previous Clinton-Obama debate, the death toll of American troops in Iraq had reached four thousand; the President had admitted that his "national-security team," including the Vice-President, had met regularly in the White House to approve the torture of prisoners; house repossessions topped fifty thousand per month and unemployment topped five per cent; and the poll-measured proportion of Americans who believe that "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track" hit eighty-one per cent, a record. Yet for most of the next hour Gibson and Stephanopoulos limited their questioning to the following topics: Obama’s April 6th remark about "bitter" small-towners; whether each candidate thinks the other can win; the Obama family’s ex-pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.; Clinton’s tale of sniper fire in Bosnia; Obama’s failure to wear a flag lapel pin; and Obama’s acquaintance with a college professor in his Chicago neighborhood who, while Obama was in grade school, was a member of the Weather Underground.

Even though in his conclusion Hertzberg credits McCain with more sense of honor than he's demonstrated over the last eight years, the whole article is worth a read.  ABC?  That's worth a miss.

Not can a "smart person" be president, but an intellectual.  There's a difference.  Bill Clinton attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, but no one would have pegged the McDonald's-munching Clinton as an ivory-tower egghead.  George W. Bush attended both Harvard and Yale, but I think we're safe in saying that the word "intellectual" could not be attached to him with all the barbed wire in Texas.  Flipping backwards through the list of presidential candidates, the last guy who had the sign "intellectual" hanging from his neck was probably Adlai Stevenson.  Kennedy probably deserved it, but I'm assured that the "dreamy" factor offset any tendency toward sustained Latin discourse.

But after several rounds of selecting presidents by the beer test, can we instead vote for a candidate who doesn't hide her/his smarts?  Megan Daum has a discussion of the downtrodden intellectual in her LA Times column.

With political discourse reduced to screaming contests and actual news eclipsed by exclusive and shocking footage of celebrities without makeup, we've become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can't be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.

What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas ("complicated" now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the "elite."

Most of the vitriol being levied at Obama these days boils down to his shocking refusal to mouth the standard phrases all politicians are supposed to say, the ones that seem to make up 110% of John McCain's vocabulary.  Listening to Obama requires that you engage more than political cruise control and actually think about what he's saying.  Can we put up with that?

But even if Obama is not an intellectual in the classic sense, there's no doubt that he's absorbed the trappings of erudite rhetoric. He offers up ideas that don't lend themselves to sound bites but require some sustained attention. And according to the media and the political spin machine, that's proof he's snobby and out of touch.

One of the things that strikes people who've spent any time in Europe is that Europeans tend to be almost universally bookish.  By that I don't mean they travel around with a copy of Proust tucked under one arm, but if they've read past the cover page of Remembrance of Things Past they're not afraid to toss their own two euros into the discussion.  That doesn't mean for a moment that Europeans are one neuron smarter than Americans, only that they don't seem convinced that knowledge is something you should feel bad about.

America suffers from a national schizophrenia on education.  Everybody thinks it's a good idea to get an education, but displaying that education is looked on as a sin.  Knowing how to do a better job for the country and explaining it with clear and thorough reasoning, rather than offering up ignorance spiced with tired stock phrases and pithy platitudes, may ultimately turn out to be disqualifying.

Fortunately this isn't true at Daily Kos.  Intellectuals aren't afraid to show their light here.  For example, within five minutes, someone will be along to explain how I misused schizophrenia.