by hilzoy
What most of you already know:
"John Edwards will end his presidential bid today, a source close to his campaign confirmed, effectively narrowing the Democratic field to two contenders less than a week before the Super Tuesday round of primaries.The former North Carolina senator is scheduled to speak in New Orleans this afternoon, an appearance originally billed as an anti-poverty speech but now expected to serve as the platform for ending a White House run that has been five years in the making. (...)
Edwards launched his campaign a year ago, also in New Orleans, where the slow rebuilding following Hurricane Katrina formed a fitting symbol for the issues around which he built his campaign. He focused on issues of poverty and economic inequality, couched in language of the "two Americas.""
He fought the good fight. I wish him and Elizabeth well.
***
Meanwhile: so long, Rudy, and thanks for all the ferrets. America dodged a bullet today.
Alas, I'm still just me. Unless I became imaginary, like my spouse.
Posted by: hilzoy | January 31, 2008 at 01:57 PM
"i love the idea that you can count your spouse's work experience as your own."
Does it work if you just, say, lived intimately with a sweetie for a year or more?
In which case I'm a qualified engineer of two different sorts, well-educated in Middle English, a scholar of ancient Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and a variety of other languages, well able to speak on 19th century fiction, an expert on Georgette Heyer, and possessed of just strings of other talents, including gardening, plumbing, and having good sex with men.
Posted by: Gary Farber | January 31, 2008 at 01:58 PM
Hilzoy, setting aside my suggestion about living with a sweetie for a year possibly qualifying, you must surely also possess the talents of such virtual spouses as John Thullen.
Acceptance of virtual, or real, polyamory as relevant would complicate this cross-spreading of talents/skills quite a bit, I note.
Posted by: Gary Farber | January 31, 2008 at 02:03 PM
Sebastian: There was a two year bi-partisan investigation that didn't find much of use.
Given that the central fact around the 2000 election was public - the Republicans had got the count to stop and George W. Bush appointed - the main thing I wanted to know was why the US media cravenly ducked out of reporting, in October 2001, that the ballot count had established that if in Nov/Dec 2000, every ballot had been counted in accordance with the rules of Florida elections, then Gore had won and the guy who'd just let 9/11 happen had lost. It got reported in the UK: in the US, the only results reported were the ones that interpreted the data (skip this set of ballots, avoid mentioning the other) to say that Bush had, after all, won. Whatever that means procedurally that the election was known to have gone wrong, you'd have thought it would be news...
Posted by: Jesurgislac | January 31, 2008 at 02:13 PM
Man, I can't wait to get home and breast-feed!
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | January 31, 2008 at 02:28 PM
Jesurgislac, the problem with your response is that the count as requested by the Florida courts (at Gore's request) did NOT turn out that way. (At least as requested by some of the courts, there where multiple rulings with multiple different approaches, which was a huge part of the problem.)
"every ballot had been counted in accordance with the rules of Florida elections"
was a big problem at the time because "the rules of Florida elections" were stupidly all over the place and had multiple Florida court interpretations of how they should work.
Posted by: Sebastian | January 31, 2008 at 02:36 PM
deja vu, all over again.
Posted by: cleek | January 31, 2008 at 02:39 PM
This is flatly untrue (DWI, National Guard memos, etc.).
These were published (often on back pages) and ignored. There was a much bigger deal over whether CBS ran with forged memos (which was never really investigated, much less proven) than whether Bush was AWOL at a time when Kerry was involved in combat operations.
(Why all the veterans didn't rise up and storm the Republican Convention when they dishonored every single man and woman who had sacrificed for this country with their "Purple Heart Band-Aids" is something I'll never understand!)
=========================
Alas, I'm still just me. Unless I became imaginary, like my spouse.
You have an "honorary marriage" to many of us here. Which makes you pretty much omniscient. Which we knew all along!
(Or, sort of, what Gary said.)
Posted by: Jeff | January 31, 2008 at 02:47 PM
I worry about the drag caused when the mass of trivial things I know (safely compartmentalized and firewalled in my head) gets added to my wife's essential knowledge. Ball and chain takes on a new meaning.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | January 31, 2008 at 04:45 PM
Jes: Certainly it does, when the electoral machines can be rigged untraceably. When you use the gold standard of elections - paper ballots, hand-marked, hand-counted - the paper ballots are obviously the final answer to "who won".
I’m all for your gold standard. I doubt it is workable in this day and age, but bring it on. No complaints here. (And I’d say of course add to it a stringent ID law so that we actually know that every ballot can be tied to a legitimate voter, but that’s another thread.)
Which is why, in 2000, we can say definitely that Gore won and Bush lost.
Certainly it was a first for us, and it could have been handled better. Neither side covered themselves in virtue those few weeks.
Look, I could wail and moan every time Gore’s name came up about how he almost managed to steal the 2000 election. Between the D shenanigans to disqualify military absentee ballots and the media calling Florida for Gore 10 minutes before polls closed in the Florida Central Time Zone costing Bush an estimated 10,000-11,000 votes (people in line or on their way who turned around and went home) – he came damned close. So if you really want to place blame, blame the media. If not for them Bush would have had a clear and unarguable margin of victory and we never would have gone through all that.
But if I responded to you every time you throw it out there we would have the same argument in every thread. I try to avoid that, but every so often, especially with new people around, I figure that silence may be taken as acceptance of your statements – so I backslide and say something.
Bruce: Of course I am…
Your basic points are worth making, but you lose me when you equate us with Burma.
Posted by: OCSteve | January 31, 2008 at 06:43 PM
I doubt it is workable in this day and age, but bring it on.
Oh, it's workable. It's just a question of how much the US wants to run gold standard elections: at the moment, the answer seems to be that you want to have honest elections about as much as you want to have a good health care system. Both matter to a lot of people, but it appears most people are content to think of the US as having the best without actually comparing it to what people in other countries have and realizing that it's actually quite shamefully bad: and the people who are in a position to make the change, benefit by it being quite shamefully bad and so won't without extreme public pressure.
Neither side covered themselves in virtue those few weeks.
Ooh, the good old "Blame the side trying to get all the votes counted as much as the side trying to stop them!" Very bipartisan. Very fair.
Look, I could wail and moan every time Gore’s name came up about how he almost managed to steal the 2000 election.
You could. After all, it would only make you sound about the same as when you argue that the Swift Boat Liars were really trulio telling the truth about Kerry's war record.
Between the D shenanigans to disqualify military absentee ballots
Er, what? You mean the R shenanigans to try to get military absentee ballots that were likely to be Republican counted, no matter how invalid they were, while pushing to get military absentee ballots that were likely to be Democratic discounted, and of course lying their asses off and claiming that the Democratic opposition was doing what they were doing themselves? cite
You really want to get into that?
and the media calling Florida for Gore 10 minutes before polls closed in the Florida Central Time Zone costing Bush an estimated 10,000-11,000 votes (people in line or on their way who turned around and went home)
Woo hoo. You really weren't paying much attention in 2000, were you?
But if I responded to you every time you throw it out there we would have the same argument in every thread.
Well, it depends how often you'd need to be told that you've been misinformed. Slartibartfast and I used to have this go-round every time on the disenfranchised voters of Florida, which he declines to believe exist despite considerable evidence that, well, yes: Jeb and George W. Bush arranged to have a lot of voters who were likely to vote Democratic removed from the electoral rolls in Florida before the 2000 election. You don't like comparisons to Burma? Well, there was an inboxer joke circulating in the UK for a while post-2000 about how the US had proved itself unfit to govern yourselves so we'd take you back into the British Empire. The fact that Jeb Bush had handily got his brother the Presidency by rigging the Florida election did look bad on the surface: it was interesting that as we found out more about it, it turned out to be as bad as it looked.
As I said: it is astonishing to be that news stories that could really damage George W. Bush, no matter how well sourced, just don't appear in mainstream US media.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | January 31, 2008 at 07:10 PM
I’m all for your gold standard. I doubt it is workable in this day and age, but bring it on.
We'll know in Ohio for this upcoming primary, at least in my county, Cuyahoga. (Y'all might remember Cuyahoga County from the news in 2004. It was one of the problematic ones.) Maybe.
It's complicated, but essentially the Board of Elections split between continuing with touch-screen machines or going to optical-scan ballots, so the Ohio Secretary of State cut the Gordian knot and said we're going to use hand-marked and -counted ballots until better solutions can be agreed upon for the general.
That was that . . . until the ACLU filed suit and said that, since paper ballots, unlike touchscreens still being used elsewhere in the state, don't give voters the same opportunity to correct mistakes and don't notify them if they've left something blank or otherwise screwed up, they violate the Equal Protection clause. And because their impact will be disproportionately minority and poor counties, they violate the Voting Rights Act.
It's a real circus, and if the ACLU gets any favorable court ruling, it may delay the Ohio primary scheduled for March 4.
Posted by: Phil | January 31, 2008 at 07:16 PM
Once again, Jesurgislac demonstrates her lack of understanding of how elections are actually held in Florida, and elects to go with the fantasy version.
Which is fine, I guess. Points for consistency.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | January 31, 2008 at 07:17 PM
By the by, given how thoroughly Robert Kennedy's, um, "reporting" skills were demolished by his quixotic attempt to prove a link between mercury in vaccines and autism -- a link that has been thoroughly debunked -- I wouldn't rely on articles by him for proving anything at all if I wanted to be taken seriously. Others' mileage may vary.
Posted by: Phil | January 31, 2008 at 07:20 PM
Your basic points are worth making, but you lose me when you equate us with Burma.
Even before it was shown exactly how poorly the 2000 election had been run, there was good cause to to compare us to a banana republic.
If you think that the Dems "cheated" in 2000 (or any other year), you ought to be working to have good, fair election policies put in place so that no side can rig an election. Right now, it's far too easy to rig, and far too easy to claim rigging, to make us look like a country that doesn't need UN monitors.
Posted by: Jeff | January 31, 2008 at 07:44 PM
You really weren't paying much attention in 2000
Let’s see. I could keep this going or go watch the season premiere of LOST.
Decisions, decisions….
Posted by: OCSteve | January 31, 2008 at 07:53 PM
Let’s see. I could keep this going or go watch the season premiere of LOST.
Yeah, you're totally gonna miss out on the big moment where they reveal everything and clean up all the plot threads.
Turns out that Hanso is a cyborg and they're all trapped in a Philip K. Dick story. Oh, I ruined the surprise!
Posted by: Adam | January 31, 2008 at 08:43 PM
OCSteve: *giggles*
Posted by: hilzoy | January 31, 2008 at 08:45 PM
Dennis Kucinich has claimed voter fraud in New Hampshire, the Florida Democratic Primary is bogus and will not count for anything, unless the DNC changes its mind and Florida and Michigan in fact do count.
And you are still claiming that Republicans stole the 2000 election? That's funny!
Posted by: DaveC | February 01, 2008 at 12:46 AM
Dammit, OCSteve, you unleashed the Giggle of Hilzoy. That even trumps DaveC's flamebait.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | February 01, 2008 at 01:25 AM
Paul Volcker apparently doesn't share Jay Jerome's concerns about Obama and the economy...
Posted by: hilzoy | February 01, 2008 at 01:42 AM
OCSteve, I'm not trying to be flippant here: What is Burma doing that the Bush administration isn't? The differences are small.
The government isn't shooting protesters in large numbers at home and that is significant. There's no policy of "death to public troublemakers" or anything like that. At home. In Iraq, it's much more a matter of anything goes, particularly when it comes to the mercenaries.
The government is on the other hand, intimidating potential protestors and arresting some, on clearly bogus grounds, and doing a lot of locking up of allegedly public events.
As Hilzoy posted about just this evening, we have deterioriting quality of life for many laborers (and soldiers, and others), and obvious lack of interest on the government's part in fixing that. We started from a much higher baseline than Burma, of course, but we've used up a lot of it. The expectation of safe working conditions, like that of safe food, is for more and more American an unreasonable one, and the government's worked hard to close off channels of redress.
Setting aside for now the question of whether there's been major election fraud, it is unquestionably true that it would be hard to discover and prove such fraud now. Our electoral system is riddled with opportunities for systematic deceit, and getting worse. Large categories of potential voters are ruled off, verifiable ballots are way too scarce, and so forth and so on.
We don't, so nearly as I know, have a trade in children stolen or bought to be soldiers. We do have seriously mentally and physically adults pressed into continued service, however, and a growing tolerance for hardened criminals as soldiers.
I'm looking at the Human Rights Watch page on Burma, and a whole lot more of it seems familiar than should.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | February 01, 2008 at 03:24 AM
Let me rephrase one part.
Not all the differences are small. It's that the similarities are too large.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | February 01, 2008 at 03:26 AM
Slarti: Once again, Jesurgislac demonstrates her lack of understanding of how elections are actually held in Florida, and elects to go with the fantasy version.
Yeah, I do have this fantasy that in a democracy, everyone entitled to vote is able to register to vote, isn't struck off the electoral rolls by the governor because they might vote against the governor's brother, and when they vote, their vote is counted. As you say, that isn't how elections are actually held in Florida, but... I do prefer my fantasy.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | February 01, 2008 at 05:11 AM
Bruce: What is Burma doing that the Bush administration isn't? The differences are small. … Not all the differences are small. It's that the similarities are too large.
For the most part you answered your own question. We don’t (for the moment) have the military in control, raping women as an intimidation tactic, kidnapping children and sending them off to work in ruby mines or conscripting them into the Army, killing protesters, detaining thousands of protesters, annulling elections, attacking blue states and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, etc.
Not that there haven’t been calls for a military overthrow of the US government…
You do have legitimate points (as I noted). I’m disgusted at low we have sunk. But when you seriously compare us to Burma your points are lost on me. It’s just a stretch too far.
Posted by: OCSteve | February 01, 2008 at 07:27 AM
OCSteve: We don’t (for the moment) have the military in control, raping women as an intimidation tactic, kidnapping children and sending them off to work in ruby mines or conscripting them into the Army, killing protesters, detaining thousands of protesters, annulling elections, attacking blue states and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, etc.
...except in Iraq. You do, at the moment, have the military - both the legits and the mercenaries - doing everything you listed (aside from "sending children off to work in ruby mines or conscripting them into the Army": as far as we know children are only kidnapped by the US in Iraq to get their fathers to talk, not for sordid commercial reasons) - just not to Americans
In any case, the time to stop a slide towards fascism is at the top of the slippery slope, not at the bottom. Right?
Bush/Cheney is heading the US in that direction. The best you can say is Not As Bad As.
And if I were an American, I'd be worried about what happens when the Blackwater mercenaries come back after US forces are withdrawn.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | February 01, 2008 at 07:41 AM
Yes. We could also be compared with ancient Egypt. Or we could be compared with an ant colony; all with good cause.
It's a hat! It's a brooch!
Lots of people have that fantasy, but that's not what I was talking about. Where the fantasy comes in is when you start believing your own conspiracy theories, and then behaving as if they ought to be obviously true to everyone, even when you've, on occasions too numerous to count, failed to substantiate them.
As it is, lots of this is coming off like 9-11 Trutherism. Sure: things are unexplained. Explain them, and then substantiate the explanation. What you've got is a bunch of unsubstantiated hypotheses.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | February 01, 2008 at 09:10 AM
It's the Bolivian Navy on maneuvers in the South Pacific!
(Sorry, I just love that line.)
Posted by: farmgirl | February 01, 2008 at 09:18 AM
i can put her to work on that EXIF-from-RAW code i need to finish.
cleek,
OT, but do you work on digital imaging software, or do those acronyms have another life somewhere? (and why is RAW all caps?) Just curious.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | February 01, 2008 at 06:28 PM
OT, but do you work on digital imaging software
yep. ex.
and why is RAW all caps?
habit. all-caps and three-letters is the universal way to denote a file format: JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TGA, PCX, PNM, PBM, XLS, DOC, EXE, etc., so "RAW". even though "raw" in this case isn't a single standardized format, but is really a group of different proprietary formats that all do the same thing (let the user save the least-processed version of the image that the camera will allow), image processing software, and its typical user, tends to group them all together:
"can your program read RAW images?"
"why yes! $35, please!"
Posted by: cleek | February 01, 2008 at 06:46 PM
Slartibartfast: Where the fantasy comes in is when you start believing your own conspiracy theories, and then behaving as if they ought to be obviously true to everyone, even when you've, on occasions too numerous to count, failed to substantiate them.
We're back to your blank denial of any evidence I've ever provided actually existing, and, well: "Eppur si muove." Facts are facts, whether you believe in them or not, Slart.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | February 01, 2008 at 07:26 PM
Facts are facts, Jesurgislac. But I expect they're going to remain uncited, just as they've always been.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | February 01, 2008 at 08:26 PM
Ann Coulter endorses Hillary Clinton over John McCain.
Really.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 01, 2008 at 11:46 PM
A less lunatic conservative endorsement. Damned interesting, if you know who Jeffrey Hart is.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 02, 2008 at 12:11 AM