GADFLY

An interesting piece written by a Yale 1L on the lack of nice people at top colleges. Is this one of those things that everyone notices but won’t mention? Feel free to share your experiences.

Seriously.

The disability pension is paid by the U.S. Navy to the tune of $58,000/year. The best part? It’s tax free.

Seriously.

The Pennsylvania primary has been called for Clinton, 54-46 with about half of districts reporting.

The media has its own narrative which is, of course, full of holes. Here they are:

1. A few weeks ago she had a thirty-point lead. Where did it go? The change in the polls over the past few weeks speaks to a larger trend in this primary season: the more people see of the two of them, the less they like her and the more they like Obama.
2. The blue-collar thing: Why is no one mentioning her tax returns? She is far richer than the “elitist” Obama.
3. She threw everything she could at him; he screwed up on his own; media handling of Obama was less than glowing for the first time; still, nothing stuck — he still gained.
4. This afternoon people were talking about a double-digit victory for Clinton, as high as a twenty-point spread. Now we’re looking at an eight-point spread. This afternoon a double-digit victory was a necessity; now eight points is enough to be “significant.” What changed?
5. The disparity between her bizarrely right-leaning statements during the Pennsylvania primary and her made-for-TV acceptance speech has gone unmentioned.
6. For all the harping on Obama’s spending, no one is mentioning that all his money has come from a record number of individual donors, far higher than Hillary’s count.
7. Even though she has technically “won” in Pennsylvania, the delegates will be split; she’s nowhere closer to winning the nomination today than she was yesterday. What is this accomplishing? The only way she can win is for the superdelegates to overrule the voters, and they won’t do it. It would be fatal for the party. If that’s the case, then why is she still in the race? Her only possible avenue of success is impossibly blocked, and the cost of continuing is astronomical. The only plausible explanation is that she’s willing to destroy Obama’s — and the party’s — viability in 2008 to preserve for herself a chance for 2012.

The media, as usual, has drank the Kool-Aid; a Hillary “come-back” is a better story. But it isn’t quite the truth, and that’s supposed to matter.

– PETER C. MULCAHY 

“I think that they played the race card on me,” Mr. Clinton said without elaboration. “We now know, from memos from the campaign that they planned to do it along.”

“Played the race card”? Seriously?

I can’t believe how out of touch Bill Clinton has appeared throughout this campaign. “Playing the race card” was an OJ trial buzz-phrase.

I also can’t believe he’s playing the “playing the race card” card.

As someone born in the mid-eighties — hazily remembering the golden Clinton era while living the harsh reality of the Bush era — I have always looked at Bill Clinton with relatively uncritical admiration. Let’s just say that the scales have fallen from my eyes.

Click.

This article in the Washington Post — about a young man looking for a way to help other Muslims and find meaning, only to get tangled up in al-Qaeda — got me thinking. Keep reading →

On nuclear power. Read it.

He sounds terrific — measured, reasonable, humble, all the things you look for in a good public servant. I’ll be interested to see how things go for him.

Because we are the world’s worst blog, we have yet to comment on the Spitzer scandal at all. Here’s my main comment: remember when we were all mad about Deval’s drapes? This kind of throws that into perspective.

– PETER C. MULCAHY

From Aaron Wherry, at The Commons. Yes, this actually happened:

Clarification of the Day. On Friday, following that day’s Question Period, Jason Kenney rose on a point of order and volunteered an apology to Garth Turner for something heckled in the Liberal’s direction. Absent from QP in this case, I was not privy to the exact nature of Kenney’s heckles and e-mailed Turner to clarify the matter. Turner responded that Kenney had referred to Turner as a “scumbag.” (Turner was, at the time, reading into the record allegations that the Prime Minister had spoken ill of [deceased former MP] Chuck Cadman behind closed doors.)

Today, writing up a short note for the magazine on the exchange, I realized that I had not confirmed Turner’s version of events with Kenney’s office. An e-mail was sent and Kenney’s spokesman, Alykhan Velshi, responded quickly that he would look into it. A short while later, an e-mail arrived with the following clarification:

“For the record, I want it noted that Minister Kenney didn’t just call Garth Turner a ’scumbag.’ He also called him a ‘liar’ and a ‘graverobber.’ His apology after Question Period should be treated as encompassing these descriptions too.”

So there. Let it never be suggested that this government is not entirely without transparency.

I’m homesick.

— ADAM GOLDENBERG

“Let he without sin…”

Below the fold, my column in today’s Crimson. It’s a profound meditation on my peers’ dismay at Harvard’s choice of Commencement speaker.

— ADAM GOLDENBERG

Keep reading →

Mark Ambinder of The New Republic has calculated Hillary’s chances — and they’re looking slim. Like, really slim.

I can only figure that the media still take her candidacy seriously out of deference, or, conversely, fear of the appearance of bias. Either that, or they’re afraid of putting too much trust in the polls, which have been embarrassingly unreliable indicators for results this year. (No one wants to be on the wrong side of the Clintons, especially if they win.)

Seriously though: 65% in Texas and Ohio and counting Michigan and Ohio? Unlikely. That would be quite a comeback — even for Mrs. Comeback Kid.

Click.

A friend and I were having a discussion about this the other day. Two criteria: a) the span must be no longer than 150 years, and b) must be centered somewhat around the same city. Here’s what I have thus far.

1. Periclean Athens, 5th to 4th B.C.: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Diogenes, Gorgias, Protagoras, Democritus, Antisthenes.

2. Renaissance Florence, 15th-16th A.D.: Pico (1463-1494), Machiavelli (1469-1527) Ficino (1433-1499) Bruni (1369-1444), Campanella (1568-1639), Valla (1407-1457), Da Vinci, Michelangelo (1475-1564), Donatello (1386-1466)

3. Philadelphia, 1750-1850: Jefferson (1743-1826), Franklin (1706-1790), Paine, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Monroe, Henry, and so on.

4. Paris, 1750-1850: Bayle (1647-1706), Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Montesquieu, Quesnay (1694-1774), Condorcet (1743-1794), Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)

5. Fin de Siecle Vienna: Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Jung, Schoenberg, Mahler, Egon Schiele, Kafka.

6. St. Petersburg, 1760-1860: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Herzen, Chekhov, Gogol, and so on.

7. Edinburgh, 1750-1850: Hume, Smith, Reid, Burns, Ferguson, Hutton, Hutcheson.

8. Rome, 100 BCE to 50 AD: Virgil, Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Sallust, Lucretius. (Tip: PCDM)

Several problems. First, it is obviously not complete. Second, there is a Western bias, and a presentist one too. I would welcome more suggestions from antiquity and the middle ages, as well as examples from different cultural traditions. Third, a great many thinkers are omitted for not having been associated with a specific city or for not being in geographic proximity to great cities, ie. Kant’s Konigsberg is a university town, but not a centre of great intellectual activity at this point. Where too might we place Locke, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Burke, Newton, Liebniz and Spinoza, Mill, Marx, List, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and so on? Fourth, there is no period in Roman history where I am sure there ought to be. Fifth, Some of these obviously overlap, ie. Franklin was part of both the French enlightenment and the constitutional project in America. Sixth, Vienna may not be ferment-y enough, and many of the founders did not live in Philadelphia, etc.

Suggestions are appreciated. I will modify the list as they come in.

-SKM

A great little article in the New York Observer about the effect of early voting in the primaries.

– PETER C. MULCAHY