Why speculate about the district by district delegates when the Cook Report has done it for you.

Give Obama the optimal 586-492, then split the 395 at large delegates 55-45, and you get Obama 803, Clinton 670. That'd be a pretty huge Obama victory, which seems unlikely to me.

Posted at February 5, 2008 9:39 AM in response to No Tuesday More Super

I'll add that Edwards coming in third in Iowa almost certainly finishes him. The same may be true for Obama, although I'm less certain.

Posted at January 3, 2008 7:17 AM in response to Happy Caucus Day!

As a practical matter, I don't think it can. Neither Edwards, Clinton or Obama can afford to finish third.

I think it's strikingly wrong to think that bad performances in any of the early primaries will kill Hillary. She's got tons of money and organization. She has the example of her husband, who lost five or six primaries and caucuses before winning one, and don't think she won't play that up. She's going to be a lot harder to take out than that, especially if it's really fucking close in Iowa, as it looks likely to be.

Posted at January 3, 2008 7:16 AM in response to Happy Caucus Day!

Er, just because they are both amendments does not mean they are equally important. The first amendment covers basic human rights that are incorporated into the constitutions of just about every other liberal democracy, and which are guaranteed by the United Nations Charter of Human Rights as well, I believe. The 2nd Amendment is a weird idiosyncratic American thing with pretty much no parallel anywhere else.

Freedom of expression and freedom of worship is a basic human right, whether or not it's expressed in the U.S. Constitution. The right to own guns is not a basic human right, whether or not that right is given in the U.S. Constitution. I don't care about the First Amendment because it's in the Constitution. I care about it because it's genuinely important, and would be, whether or not it was in the constitution. Likewise, I don't care about the Second Amendment at all, regardless of whether it's in the Constitution, because I think it's stupid bullshit, and doesn't even make any clear sense on its own terms.

Posted at April 17, 2007 6:49 PM in response to MY REACTION TO THE TRAGEDY AT VIRGINIA TECH

While there may be some who have been just elected who are populists (the NY Times makes a case for Tester today), in general, the newcomers are going to be just as beholden to business interests are those they replace.

Er, what? No they aren't. That's completely absurd. The Democrats may be beholden to business interests to a greater extent than we'd like, but they still represent organized interests (particularly labor unions) that are opposed to business in many ways.

More than that, the Republicans' involvement with business interests has gotten to the point where the two are almost impossible to disentangle, where big business is paying for the Republican Party, and vice versa.

The Democrats aren't great, but they're nowhere near as bad as the Republicans on these kind of issues.

Posted at November 13, 2006 3:41 PM in response to COME THE REVOLUTION, GONNA BE NO MORE LIMOUSINES

That Bush wants to privatize social security is not the same thing as being able to do so. Why should we think it's more likely this time than it was in 05?

That being said, this stuff is great campaign material for the Dems. Every Dem running in a tight race should be throwing this at their opponent.

Posted at September 9, 2006 3:01 PM in response to Social Security to be Phased Out in 2007

The Soviets would have declared war on the Germans if the Allies had done so, I think, in 1938. At least, that's what they were telling the Czechs. They wouldn't have been able to do much, though. But it might have resulted in a somewhat better initial situation. Perhaps no fall of France.

The German army in the west would have been a lot smaller than it was in 1939, but it seems unlikely the French would have actually used their opportunity to attack.

What might have happened, though, is that the military might have overthrown Hitler. Seems a thin reed to bank on, though.

At any rate, it's hard to say what would've happened because it was pretty blatantly obvious from the beginning that the British and French weren't willing to go to war in order to let Czechoslovakia retain the areas under its control that were poplated by Germans. Nobody much cared for Hitler, but I still think it's hard, from the perspective of someone in 1938, to see that it would be worth fighting a war to keep the Sudetenland under Czech control. The Sudeten Germans had made it abundantly clear that they wanted to be part of Germany.

Beyond that, i see no reason why we should assume that Chamberlain, Daladier, et al knew what was going to happen. Sure, Hitler might be lying when he said the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand. But he might not be, and if there's any chance of preserving peace, isn't it worth taking? Especially given that French and British rearmament wasn't complete, and they thought, at least, that another year would put them in a better position to fight the Germans, if it came to it. There was much to be gained from trying to see if appeasement would work, and little to be lost, save some dignity, and, well, the Czechs' right to rule over a bunch of Nazi sympathizers. And if fighting is going to happen, the Soviets will always be around to bear the brunt of it - after all, there's no way they can ever cut a deal with the Nazis.

Of course, all the assumptions they made turned out to be wrong, and it's at least arguable that the French and British would have been better off fighting in 1938. But they didn't have the advantage of hindsight, and it's unfair to judge them on the basis of that hindsight.

So I'm going to come to the unpopular position that, looking at things without benefit of hindsight, appeasement would appear to be the right thing to do. Chamberlain style appeasement, I think, was not - Chamberlain held out a lot more hope for appeasement than I think was warranted. But a cautious, pessimistic appeasement of the sort advocated by Halifax or Daladier seems definitely justifiable, and was probably a more realistic position than Churchill's, which, if you actually try to read up on the specifics, didn't make any sense whatsoever.

In essence, the problem with appeasement isn't that appeasement is evil. It's that in this instance, it didn't work, because Hitler did not want to be appeased. It usually does work, and most leaders aren't Hitler. That doesn't necessarily mean appeasement is the best option in most situations, but it does mean that the comparison with 1938 is almost always a bad one.

Posted at August 23, 2006 2:40 PM in response to Analogies

I've never heard the Ottoman army in World War I, under the command of German officers, described as "Jihadis" before. Nor, for that matter, are the armies of the Arab nations in the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 generally described as "Jihadis". Describing the Battle of Ctesiphon as a victory of "Jihadis" over British forces is distinctly misleading.

Posted at August 23, 2006 2:29 PM in response to Analogies

What about criticizing the idea of establishing an ethnic state by the forced expulsion of the previous population of a region? That's what's always seemed rather the most indefensible thing about Israel. On the one hand, one certainly has people who criticize Israel because they don't like Jews. This is clearly unacceptable. But people who criticize Israel because they don't like "the idea of a Jewish state" seems a more difficult question. If Matt means people who don't like the idea of a Jewish state because they don't like Jews, then Matt is kind of making a distinction without a difference. But what about people who don't like the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. Personally, in the abstract, I have a hard time sympathizing with the idea.

Now, saying that one thinks the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine which entailed the seemingly permanent forcible expulsion of a large portion of the previous inhabitants of the area was unjust, is one thing.

Saying that we should rectify this injustice by envisioning the permanent forcible expulsion of the current inhabitants of the area, most of whom personally had nothing to do with the founding crime of Israel, seems to be quite another. But envisioning, for instance, the establishment of a secular binational state in which both Israelis and returning (and remaining) Palestinians would be welcomed, seems more naive and unrealistic than racist in any way. All other things being equal, such an idea is a lot more appealing to me as a lax Reform Jew than a Jewish State run in some significant ways by Orthodox rabbis. Of course, all other things aren't equal, in the incredible amount of hatred which both sides have for each other at this point makes such a solution impracticable for the foreseeable future. But I don't see as it's morally repugnant.

Posted at August 8, 2006 2:00 PM in response to Racists Among Us

That was not Matt's point at all. Matt's point was why are hawkish Democrats complaining that Lieberman is getting a primary challenge for his views on the war, but at the same time leading the charge against McKinney for being "anti-Israel."

Posted at August 5, 2006 9:10 AM in response to McKinney