Someone I've long dismissed as a naive pick (the pick being naive, not the person). And he's not warm, which would be a big plus. But if he'd take the job (and I think he could be persuaded for the good of the country and the world) Al Gore would actually be a very good choice.

He's already proven he can act as a loyal #2 while not seeming like a lackey with no virtue other than loyalty.

I think he has enough faith in Obama to play that role again, likely with his heart even more in it than last time. Though he didn't endorse in the primaries, so I can't be sure of that.

I'm not a fan of Tim Kaine's. But the way I see it, the Obama campaign has correctly identified Virginia as a takeable state that McCain can't afford to lose.

Mark Warner is far more popular in Virginia than Kaine. Choosing Kaine by himself would likely just give one more data point to the usually correct notion that VP candidates don't make much difference in their home states. But with Warner setting him up the day before, Obama is telling Virginians in capital letters that they matter. And he's tying the popular Warner, who'll be on the ballot for Senate himself, to the emotional context in which Kaine will be seen by Virginians.

You may have noticed that over the last 25 years, there's been a revolution, called sabermetrics, in how some people think and talk about baseball. It started as a completely outsider phenomenon (to which I was a contributor) but it's so demonstrably right in many ways that it's now guiding the management of more and more major league teams.

Sabermetrics is, in essence, checking out ideas about baseball by using logic, data, and a little bit of math.

It seems natural that the same should be done for politics. And I'm not the first to think of making sabermetrics (whose name comes from the Society for American Baseball Research) into polimetrics. If I didn't already know polimetrics was a natural idea, I would now, because the domain names polimetrics.com and polimetrics.org are already taken. We have polimetrics.net.

Cross-posted from Blue Jersey

1. Banning handguns in urban areas would be a very good idea.
2. The conservatives on the Court are absolutely right that such a ban is unconstitutional.

If I tell you that because the moon is made of green cheese, I'm going to give you a million dollars, I've promised to give you a million dollars. Debates over the existence of lacto-celestial orbiting bodies, like the debates over the meaning of a well-regulated militia, are immaterial.

The Bill of Rights was passed during an unusual time in history. The strength of a military is a combination of the number of soldiers (and sailors, etc.) in it, the training those soldiers have undergone, and the expensive tools of war given to them to use. In the age of muskets (and to some extent until the development of rugged machine guns) the relative value of men was much higher than usual, with the value of the money that went into training and material being correspondingly comparatively lower.

With Obama's probable nomination, will come a 'generational' changing of the guard of the behind-the-scenes Democratic leadership. The people who've been there for a long time are like a cohort of singles bar aficionados, who pride themselves on being masters at sealing the deal. But their obsessive focus on the mechanics of seduction always ends up preventing the sex from being as satisfying as they imagine it will be.

An effective political party is not merely a vehicle for individual candidates who happen to share some policy goals. The party must be an instrument of a movement that brings together people who share some values, then determines what policies will best represent those values in government, and recruits and elects candidates who will support (and ideally, further develop) those policies.

Like most voters in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, and like both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I'm an American Liberal. That is, I believe the rules by which our society's natural abundance is distributed must be crafted so that everyone can attain some minimum reasonable standard of living and so that power disparities, if not disparities in creature comforts, are minimized. I believe that worth is not measured simply in wealth, and also that the incentive of wealth should be made to better comport with other thing we value, such as our physical and ethical environments. I believe that while government rightly gets involved where we infringe on others, government must not infringe on our rights to shape our own lives when that does not directly infringe on others, even if most others think we are unwise or set bad examples. And I believe America's foreign policy should reflect all of Americans' values, not merely our desire for plundered bounty and ego gratification.

I believe John Edwards would have been the best nominee. But Like Senator Edwards, I realized it was not to be.

Had he stayed in the race, we faced the prospect of a nominee who lacked the support of a majority of the primary electorate. And even if it turned out that a majority of us found the nominee acceptable, there would be many on the losing side who would not believe that. By allowing Senators Obama (my choice) and Clinton to enter a two-person race, Senator Edwards has done the party a great service, increasing our likelihood of bringing sanity, legality, and compassion back to the Presidency, no matter who is our candidate in November.

I was explaining Daily Kos to someone not from here, and I think I stumbled upon the right explanation. It's not radically different from what's been said, but I don't think I've seen IMO the right analogy before.

Imagine a corporation where the board of directors and top management have not been serving the shareholders' interests. That's the Democratic Party and many big, issue-oriented advocacy groups on the left. Daily Kos is about organizing the shareholders.

Maybe Markos already used the analogy in Crashing the Gate and I'm having memory problems, but as far as I do remember, I haven't seen it put that way.

So what's your definition of Daily Kos?

Many enemy movements are intractable. But many of their members, and sometimes even their leaders, are not. and unless you're planning a shooting war, it helps not to have a huge number of individuals who foster multi-generational worldviews of being suppressed, waiting for redemption and revenge.

Case in point: As the Civil War was ending, Lincoln was the only politician who on the one hand saw the need for radical restructuring of the South, but on the other wanted to avoid as much suffering as he could, even on the part of the gentry, while the society was being revamped. With the finally popular Lincoln's death, the country was led (despite Andrew Johnson) by people who wanted to punish the South for punishment sake, and to steal whatever they could—and then by those who had had enough of the suffering and the expense of occupation, and let the status quo fester.

(also posted on Blue Jersey) The cars-only lanes on the New Jersey Turnpike and other highways exist, in large part, because many drivers of cars find the decreased visibility of driving with trucks to be less safe and comfortable. Yet drivers of vehicles that block vision of what's in front of them almost as effectively as semis do are allowed. I'm talking about those SUV, pickups, and in rarer case minvans that are so big they get emissions and/or tax breaks for being trucks.

I need to do more research before I'd absolutely commit to this position, but I think if you're big enough to get perks for being a truck, you don't belong in cars-only spaces.

That's not a position politicians can lead on. It might get majority support, but at least at first, those opposed would likely to care a lot more. So if a change is to happen, we need to push from the outside.

Ecuador wants the world to pay it not to develop oil fields in rain forset. They say they want half the revenue they are forgoing, which the President said might be $350,000,000 per year.

I don't think the model is necessarily bad, but the rest of the world had best be careful. The oil would stay in the ground, available to be mined when the price of oil goes even higher, in the future. The economic value that Ecuador is forgoing, as opposed to the revenue, has to be figured after discounting the saved immediate expenses in drilling and the retained value in the ground.

Presumably, the oil is cheap enough to get at that Ecuador really is giving something up by not taking the cash in hand. And maybe in the future, there will be less intrusive economically feasible methods of extraction than there are now. So it probably does make some sense for the world to pay something to keep the area intact. But Ecuador's offer to take half is much more favorable to them than it seems.

Continuing the series started yesterday, when I wrote:

The poll system at Daily Kos is too limited, because we can only choose one answer to one question. I think we'd benefit from knowing more about how we collectively feel about the presidential hopefuls.

So I'll start this off by asking about HRC. If other people add similar diaries with polls on other candidates, I'll edit and link to them. Ideally, we should have the same wording on question and answers for each candidate.

It's Richardson's turn. To express your opinions of other candidates, go to the other diaries to vote on Clinton, Edwards, Clark, Obama, Gore, Kucinich, and Vilsack. We still need polls on Kerry, Biden, Dodd, and Warner.

The poll system at Daily Kos is too limited, because we can only choose one answer to one question. I think we'd benefit from knowing more about how we collectively feel about the presidential hopefuls.

So I'll start this off by asking about HRC. If other people add similar diaries with polls on other candidates, I'll edit and link to them. Ideally, we should have the same wording on question and answers for each candidate.

EDIT:
You can vote on Edwards here.
You can vote on Clark here.
You can vote on Obama here.
You can vote on Gore here.
You can vote on Kucinich here.
You can vote on Vilsack here.
You can vote on Richardson here.

He's smart, funny, quick, and right about most of the things he talks about. But

1. he's not as good as people think he is, because his charisma causes folks to assume he agrees with them on things he doesn't talk about—and we don't all agree about those things, so we can't all be right about him
2. he's a long way from showing that he can withstand the flows and eddies of an nearly interminable campaign.

But before he has a chance to show that he can't withstand the ordeal, he may suck the wind out of the campaigns of everyone else who could beat Clinton for the nomination.

This is from correspondance with a long-term friend. A close friend of my brothers, less so of mine, but still someone I like and have known for over 20 years.

I don't think I did as well as could have. I'm looking for advice and a community discussion on how to approach people like this.

Am I correct in my assumption that you grew up in a family that either had someone in the military in harm's way while you were young or that had someone within the past few generations die in a war? I have never met anyone who actually saw combat be as irrationally protective of the holiness of every military adventure the US undertakes. But I have frequently seen in among families who feel that by doing so they are upholding the honor of fallen and/or imperiled relatives.

In the first Reagan Administration Congress, the House was nominally Democratic, but was effectively controlled by a coalition of Republicans and Boll Weevils, Democrats who consistently allied with the Republicans. One Boll Weevil, Phil Gramm, stuck his neck out further than the rest of the insects by leaking Democratic Caucus information to the Republicans.

Speaker of the House (and therefore head of the Democratic operation in the House) O'Neill was angry, but he also saw it as an opportunity to make an example of one of the Boll Weevils, without completely alienating all of them. He stripped Gramm of his Appropriations Committee assignment.

I know that school scheudes vary, but here in the Northeast, most schools end their years in the last third of June. I'm a math teacher in Newark, NJ's schoold. I'm sure I'm not the only teacher who couldn't got this year because of that. I'm giving finals this coming week, and was leading reviews last week. No way could I take personal days, and even the weekend was needed for end-of-year work.

I see a strong physical resembelence (as well as a common family name) between old-time New Jersey Republican U.S. Senator William Warren Barbour and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. But I can't find any record of them being related. Does anyone know if they are? (pictures and poll below the fold)