Midday Open Thread

• Brian at Crooked Timber takes another look at health insurance mandates, using Australia as a comparison point.
• This is brutal. The Carpetbagger Report takes on McCain’s straight talk image by considering how many of his own bills McCain would now vote against.
  

  When he got to Congress, McCain was a rather conventional conservative Republican. After his role in the Keating Five scandal, McCain took on a reform-minded persona. By 1999, he was a self-described “maverick” and moderate, who would move the GOP to the center. By 2004, McCain was back to being a conservative again. By 2007, he had positioned himself as an establishment Republican, and when that didn’t work out, McCain decided he’d become some kind of hybrid of the various McCains of the recent past.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say McCain has very few core values, and is willing to shift with the wind to get ahead. It’s one of the reasons he’s flip-flopped all over the place throughout the campaign.

• Romney appears to have an early lead in the weird-even-by-caucus-standards Maine Republican caucus.
• Absentee voters in several NJ counties who voted for a candidate that subsequently dropped out can get a replacement ballot and try again.
• After Rick “man on dog” Santorum’s Mitt Romney endorsement, and in light of Romney’s other dog-related campaign moments, The Right’s Field proposes a new slogan: “Mitt Romney Does America: Doggystyle.”
• French President Nicolas Sarkozy got married today, marking the first time a French president has tied the knot while in office. - Scout Finch
• The $50 million delegate. - SusanG
• Apple is on a roll and analysts estimate that it will double its market share by 2011. - Scout Finch
• Obama gets another Kennedy endorsement. Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, issued a strong endorsement containing the coveted words “Barack is so like Bobby.”
• In a Q&A at BlueNC a few weeks ago the Democratic challenger in NC-03, Marshall Adame, described lawless Blackwater operations he witnessed in Iraq. The company VP alerted Blackwater employees, urging them to run the candidate “out of Dodge”. Since then, Adame has been getting hate mail from Blackwater people. - smintheus

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