Nothing important happened today

We talk so much about Bush III that we’ve perhaps paid too little attention to George III.

Shambling, fitful, and proudly belligerent, George III is the archetypal clueless monarch, always and stubbornly out of touch with reality. On July 4, 1776, he famously wrote in his diary:

Nothing important happened today.

That’s brought to mind for me almost every time John McCain speaks about Iraq. It’s as if to McCain the actual conditions in Iraq were as obscure and unknowable as the progress of an insurrection in the colonies had been to the Court of St. James during the eighteenth century – when news actually took weeks to cross the Atlantic. The disconnect is stunning.

To take just the latest example, on May 29 McCain once again painted a sunny picture of progress that bore little relation to the facts.

So I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet…

He was speaking on a day that saw a deadly suicide attack on police in Mosul and bombs directed against an American outpost in the city. At the same time, thousands of Iraqis were about to march in Sadr City and in Basra and other cities against the US occupation of their country. “Quiet” is just plain out of touch with reality.

And the utter cluelessness on display in McCain’s claim about troop levels has attracted ample derision. So ample that his campaign is reduced to complaining that McCain’s critics are nitpicking over verb tenses. Because in McCain’s world, today’s pipe dream just hasn’t had time yet to succeed. The present is always and forever the future perfect.

Nothing important will have happened today.

Like George III, McCain is defined by the gaps in his knowledge and awareness, by what he fails to perceive about his own signature war. Like George, he fancies that the war can be won simply by prolonging and intensifying the same failed policies.

One thing we should concede to John McCain: There’s plenty of evidence of tense-confusion. He never appears to be living in the here and now. Heck, even when he drops in to tour the war-zone McCain comes away with the same ridiculous preconceptions – almost as if he hadn’t been present at all.

Maybe we’ve been wrong to take McCain at his own estimation, that he’s a man of the 20th century. Sometimes he looks more like an 18th century emperor.

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Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Tonight’s diary rescue was made possible with a little help from our friends, namely the following rescue rangers: jlms qkw (who did double duty!); vcmvo2; dadanation; and avila (also pulling a double!) While dadanation got to drive the editor car for a few blocks, it was vcmvo2 who brought the whole thing home safe and sound.

To make a prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson — (1830 – 1866)

So now, on to the revery:

• Winter Rabbit’s Indian Boarding Schools: Cultural Assimilation and Destruction, is an eloquent and poignant must-read. (dadanation)
• azindy focuses on contract law and custom in What’s Love Got to Do with It? (jlms qkw)
• Tortmaster provides a welcome distraction from today’s RBC meeting with a challenge to a spelling bee of a diary, Taking English Back from Scripps and Webster’s. (Avila)
• AikidoPilgrim recounts how winning a peace prize for developing a summer camp program between Palestinian and Israeli youths got him Dissed by Free Republic – I feel so proud.(vcmvo2)
• Milos Janus Outlook ponders the Senate’s approval of a bill for veterans’ benefits and supplemental funding for the war in Iraq, sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb, in Help Me Sort This Out. (Avila)
• danps uses a Swahili phrase to describe our political reality in Bad Luck All Around. (jlms qkw)
• Gooch examines the significance of citizenship, slavery and immigration in the poignant and beautifully-written In Memory of Memorial Day. (Avila)
• Biodiversity in crisis: creepy-crawlies in the Amazon, is matching mole’s compelling photoblog about the impact of the careless destruction of the Ecuadorian flora and fauna. (dadanation)

jotter has High Impact Diaries – May 30, 2008.

carolita brings Top Comments 5-31-08 — Nominative Determinism Edition.

Oh, and one more pearl of wisdom from the Belle of Amherst:

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this Open Thread.

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Obama Camp Had Votes For Better Deal, But Didn’t Press

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd:

Per multiple sources inside the closed Rules and Bylaws Committee lunch, Obama actually had the votes to get a 50-50 delegate split out of Michigan — but by just a vote or two.

However, it was decided to go with the 69-59 split to win a larger majority. That measure passed 19-8.

Good move. In the end it doesn’t matter all that much, and the 19-8 vote was far more palatable to all parties than a very narrow decision would be. He comes out looking magnanimous, the Clinton camp comes out with something to crow about, everybody’s much happier.

These folks might just know something about politics after all.

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I’m wearing armor right now. And Harold Ickes was right

Harold Ickes, speaking on behalf of the Clinton campaign, came in for a lot of criticism for his remarks on the Michigan compromise, under which the pledged delegates were split 69-59 in favor of Clinton, but each getting only a half vote.

There was, perhaps, a little more hyperbole in his words than was entirely necessary, but as I outlined this morning, Ickes is basically right about the awarding by the RBC of any delegates at all to Obama.

Now, everybody knows that a substantial portion of the people who came out to vote for “uncommitted” in Michigan did so because they really wanted to vote for Obama, but he wasn’t on the ballot (which was his own doing, whatever you may think of his motivations for doing it). But the bottom line is that the consequence of that withdrawal is that the only facts that can be definitively stated about those votes is that they were for “uncommitted.” They could mean this. They could mean that. But they do mean “uncommitted.”

Or at least they did, until they were sprinkled with magic pixie dust over lunch this afternoon. Because when the RBC came back, they were magically transformed into votes that said, “Yes, we said ‘uncommitted,’ but we really meant ‘Barack Obama.’”

And maybe that was even true. The point, though, is that the RBC had no mechanism under the rules by which they are entitled to make that decision. No mechanism, that is, except one: the prerogative of the rules committee to say — provided it can muster the votes for it — that the rules can go jump in the lake.

And that’s what they did today.

Now, at one point today, the rumor was that the other presidential candidates who had withdrawn from the ballot in Michigan were being prevailed upon to agree that they would somehow assign whatever interests they may have had in their claim to whatever portion of the “uncommitted” might have been cast as a proxy for their names to Obama instead. I don’t know whether that happened, or by what mechanism that could even be accomplished (besides more pixie dust), but it didn’t rate any formal mention before the RBC if it did.

So Harold Ickes is right. This was a violation of the bedrock principle that a vote has to be counted as what it was, not what we wish, guess, or hope it was.

Unless, of course, we adopt a motion in the rules committee that says we don’t have to. Today.

A violation? Yes. But one that anyone who plays the “let’s parse the bedrock understanding of what it means to have rules” game — especially someone like Harold Ickes — has to know looms as a real possibility? Absolutely.

UPDATE: Some of you will get this easier than others, because I’m having to use a legal term of art to express it, but here it goes:

This is, I think, at the heart of what Ickes was trying to express: What the RBC did today, it did sitting as a court of equity. But the RBC does not, ordinarily, have jurisdiction to sit as a court of equity. It sits, to complete the analogy, as a court of law. That is, there are a set of rules to follow, and you follow them regardless of “fairness” if being fair requires a departure from the law. A court of equity is empowered to make its decisions based on the more vague “interests of justice,” even when the letter of the law would not ordinarily permit it.

Courts of equity are not invalid, where they are empowered to sit, just because they decide cases at equity rather than at law.

But the fact that their decisions are valid and binding does not mean the decisions they make were based in law.

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Eco-Diary Rescue 5.31

There’s bad ethanol and good ethanol, with the corn-based stuff topping the list when it comes to bad. Or so goes the conventional environmental wisdom. Unfortunately, one of the good ethanols, the one that is fueling a hefty portion of Brazil’s vehicles, has problems, too. But, as Tom Philpott at Grist points out, the sugar-cane crop underpinning that product has a bad history and a not-so-good present.

Sugarcane is a deeply ironic crop on which to hang a “sustainable energy revolution.” Historically, the spread of sugarcane in Caribbean islands and South America involved vast clear-cutting of coastal forests.

Socially, its legacy may be worse. To run the bustling cane plantations of the Americas during the colonial period, European powers relied on ruthlessly exploited African slaves.

Still a highly labor-intensive crop, cane evidently remains under the shadow of that atrocious past. Even today, Brazil’s much-heralded ethanol miracle is built on the backs of “forced” cane workers. From a Reuters story:

Amnesty International criticized poor working conditions and forced labor in Brazil’s fast-growing sugar cane sector on Wednesday, as the government tries to promote the cane-based ethanol industry as a way to reduce poverty. …

Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

I wish Thomas Friedman — next time he’s in Brazil chatting up cab drivers, development gurus, and ethanol execs — would go spend the night in one of these dreadful barracks, and then turn in a shift in a cane field (where he’d earn about a buck for every ton of cane he harvested, Land Research Action reports). The experience may add a bit of pique to his next gurglings about the genius of cane ethanol.

And keep Friedman away from WiFi for 24 hours. Which can only be a net positive.

Think about joining the DailyKos Environmentalists.

ANIMALS

A jelly fish sandwich? was the unappetizing headline on Pinko Elephant’s Diary: “Human beings can be destructive in the pursuit of profits or commercial activity. Certain forms of capitalism has no vision of the sustainable and has a nasty habit of exploitation of resources.  Overfishing is one example. You know there is the possibility one day in which instead of eating tuna fish sandwiches we might be eating jelly fish sandwiches. The occasion then was Daniel Pauly’s address to the World Fisheries Congress, in which the distinguished University of British Columbia researcher recounted how in Third World countries, consumers of seafood are turning increasingly to the lower trophic levels, meaning the likes of sea cucumbers and sea urchins – ‘stuff that eats dirt,’ as Pauly noted. In the not-too-distant future …such delectables could be commonplace, according to Pauly: ‘When we first presented this, it was a joke – you’re going to have a jellyfish sandwich. The journalists all ate it up – not the jellyfish, the quote. It was a joke, but now it’s real.’

juliewolf presented her Bird Blogging: Maine Trip Report: “This week, we took a few days to do some birding in Maine, staying in Wells and visiting a few nearby areas.  Some of our best looks were at Warblers, like this Chestnut-sided warbler, but we also had great looks at some other birds, including two new life birds.”  

lineatus took a look at feather fashion in this week’s Dawn Chorus Birdblog: Molto Bene: “If the world of birds and birding was like the human world, I’d be like a society section reporter, scrutinizing everyone’s attire (to see how well they’re doing) and checking on who’s aging well and who’s not. Fortunately, in the world of birds, there’s actually some justification for doing so.  I can just say I’m a molt geek, and let it go at that. … Birds need to molt to replace their feathers, which become less effective as they get worn by age and exposure.  Flight feathers lose their strength and body feathers lose their ability to keep the bird dry and regulate temperature.  Once or twice a year (or more, or less… it’s complicated) those feathers need to be replaced.”  

Some rare birds could be in deep trouble, according to Deep Harm in Developer gags condor experts: “The Associated Press reports that Tejon Ranch, a California development company, is co-opting the limited number of condor experts by paying them to ‘review’ its plan for condor preservation and requiring confidentiality as a condition of payment.  The company plans to build ‘nearly 3,500 luxury homes, condos and hotels on land used by the endangered California condor,’ writes AP. … Tejon’s Web site declares that the firm has ‘formed a partnership with The Trust for Public Land (TPL) to pursue the permanent conservation of up to 100,000 acres of important habitat lands.’ (Italics added) On its surface, the plan appears to be a death knell for local condors.  Tejon’s development plans would bring ‘more than 70,000 people to the area,’ a population density that seems incompatible with the condor’s need for vast, wild spaces.”

matching mole wrote another installment about his time in Ecuador called Biodiversity in crisis: creepy-crawlies in the Amazon: “Each fall for the last six years I’ve taken groups of undergrads on a field trip to a local patch of prairie.  These students are not biology majors and are mostly from the Chicago suburbs.  Some of them regard this as a trip to the wilderness.  Going to Tiputini made me realize that all of our perceptions of nature are determined by our experiences.  It made me realize how much the world had changed.
The other point of this diary is that discussions of conservation and diversity tend to focus on larger animals, mostly mammals and birds.  These organisms are a tiny fraction of the living things on earth.  One of my favourite things to do is take a walk at night through the forest.  An amazing array of tiny creatures will show up in your flashlight beam.”

bottsimons gave us some moving pictures to look at in Welcome to the Klamath Online Video Festival!.

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Clinton in VP Slot? Um… Not Likely.

A few of the TV heads were positing that what Clinton primarily wanted today is something that can give her claims of “winning the popular vote (minus all the other states that don’t count)” some degree of legitimacy, which she will then use to leverage Obama into giving her the Vice President slot.

I see absolutely no way that’s going to be happening. I keep hearing this theory and frankly, it continues to sound just as ridiculous each time. Even presuming Obama and Clinton still can even stand each other, and even presuming for the moment that we accept the nonsense of “popular vote” calculations that ignore caucus states, Clinton just doesn’t bring anything to Obama’s ticket.

One of Obama’s most vaunted selling points is that he represents a clean break from the past — a message that is resonating heavily, after eight years of Bush. Choosing a Clinton as Vice President steps squarely on that message of change, and presents a consummate insider ticket (McCain plus somebody) vs. another insider ticket (somebody plus Clinton). I’d have to think it would be a net loss of (a) excitement among Obama voters, (b) prospects among independents, and therefore (c) actual votes in November, compared to many other possible Obama picks.

Even if you did implicitly accept the disenfranchisement (to use a familiar word, today) of the caucus states in counting up your popular vote totals, winning the popular vote plus five dollars will get you a Starbucks coffee. There isn’t even such a thing as the “popular vote” in these primaries, since some states don’t even count up those votes.

Now, maybe the Clinton camp really is seeking the VP slot (personally, I expect it’s being overhyped by the pundits more than either campaign.) More likely, she’s just seeking to use this jury-rigged “popular vote” stuff to try to sway superdelegates — but Obama is so close to having the nomination locked up anyway that it wouldn’t do much more than delay the inevitable. She needs too many; he needs a relative handful, in comparison.

If the Clinton campaign has been looking to get anything from today other than a symbolic victory, they’d be really stretching. Though this has been a lot of ill will to sow for a merely symbolic victory.

And yes — this whole post feels like I’m just stating the transparently obvious. There’s been so much “spin” and questionable “momentum” lately, though, it’s hard to judge what the heck is obvious anymore. The most infuriating thing about this whole primary process was the insulting nature of much of the campaign spin, apparently all predicated on the premise that the voters (and even superdelegates) would believe pretty much anything you could force out of your own mouth without laughing.

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Strong Words:  Stubbornness or Strategy?

While much is being made about Harold Ickes’s statement that Senator Clinton reserves the right to take the delegate issue to the credentials committee, and while the Clinton campaign has reportedly just released a press release reiterating that threat, it’s noteworthy to point out that many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters on the Rules and Bylaws Committee voted for the Michigan and Florida allocations and delegate strength.  

Only eight committee members voted against the Michigan proposal.  No committee members voted against the Florida proposal.

I suspect that a lot of today’s defiance on the Clinton camp’s part is directly related to the fact that there are three more contests left, and promising to possibly appeal this decision is likely aimed at galvanizing her supporters in those states rather than taking the issue to the Credentials Committee.  After all, since even the Senator’s most ardent supporters voted for the compromise, that’s a pretty big signal that this thing is over.

NOTE: The chairs of the credentials committee are Alexis Herman and James Roosevelt — yes, the chairs of today’s RBC meeting. So I’m not sure where I’d put the chances of having a different outcome. Clinton’s camp isn’t likely to get a whole lot of procedural breaks in trying to reopen a case Herman and Roosevelt just presided over closing. [Kagro X]

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Net Impact

Yesterday, Obama needed 41 delegate votes to clinch the nomination; Clinton needed 244.

Today, Obama needs 64 votes; Clinton needs 240.5.

There are 291 delegates remaining.

So there ya go.

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“This is Barack Obama’s party now.”

Chuck Todd on MSNBC:

You know, there is a big thing we should be getting out of this party tonight, and that is the Democratic National Committee is not somehow controlled by the Clintons. Not by the Clinton campaign any more. We may have started this campaign believing that the Clinton campaign controlled, but this is Barack Obama’s party now. He’s already been winning the outside game, he now won the inside game. Yes it’s true that Harold Ickes can threaten this stuff about the credentials, but Don Fowler really did signal today by being for the Michigan compromise that, “Guys, it’s over.”

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Michigan Delegation to Be Sat at Half Strength

19 votes for, 8 votes against.  

Again, 69 pledged delegates to Clinton, 59 pledged delegates to Obama, each delegate gets a half vote.  

About two dozen Clinton protesters causing a ruckus, and they’re being asked to leave.

Update by georgia10:  What this all means:

The resolution increased the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination to 2,118, leaving Obama 66 delegates short but still within striking distance after the three final primaries are held in the next three days.

Obama picked up a total of 32 delegates in Michigan, including superdelegates who have already committed, and 36 in Florida. Clinton picked up 38 in Michigan, including superdelegates, and 56.5 in Florida.

Obama’s total increased to 2,052, and Clinton had 1,877.5.

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