Clinton must know how to work the press, because her sudden “outrage” at an Obama flier (which has been out for some time) is getting big play in the media, it seems. She claims Obama is misrepresenting her stand on the NAFTA issue. “Shame on you, Barack Obama,” she chides condescendingly.

The problem: Hillary has rather spectacularly misrepresented Obama’s stand on several issues. Remember back in South Carolina, when she made the patently false claim that Obama approved of Reagan’s policies in the 80’s, actually having the gall to say, “We can give you the exact quote,” knowing that she wouldn’t have to right then, and that the exact quote would show her to be wrong. Just a few minutes ago, I wrote a post on how Hillary is making crap up about how many millions of people will be “left out” of Obama’s insurance plan, when that is also patently false. Then there’s the whole “plagiarism” charge, how he “lifted whole passages”–even though she does the same thing, but that’s OK and Obama’s bad because Obama’s campaign is “all about the words” and nothing about substance, according to her.

In short, despite the relative civility of this campaign, Hillary has been the one stooping to Rovian tactics, not Obama. For her to express such obviously self-serving “outrage” at the Obama flier comes across as extraordinarily manipulative and hypocritical–but only if you are aware of her past actions in the entire context of the race.

Again, this is not the kind of thing I want to see in a Democratic candidate. If it were possibly the work of someone on the team and not the candidate herself, maybe it could be overlooked–but in each of these cases, it’s Hillary herself generating attacks that are clearly baseless, obviously untrue. You don’t get to do that and then express such outrage when you claim to catch the other candidate doing it.

Addenda: right after posting this, I came across this quote by Clinton:

In her criticism of Obama, she asked, “Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal health care?”

Immediately I thought, “hey, she just got through lambasting Obama on live TV about his lack of mandates!” Then I read the next line, where Obama’s response was given:

Obama had a ready reply to that. “Well, when she started to say I was against universal health care … which she does every single day,” he said.

Yep. Pretty much.

Tapper’s blog on ABC has a pretty good rundown on the whole matter.

Something else I may be missing: Hillary constantly attacks Obama for “leaving 15 million Americans uninsured” (see PDF of her mailer claiming this).

As far as I understand it, the difference being referred to is that her plan forces everyone to get insurance, while Obama’s doesn’t. So the decision is made by each individual.

How does that “leave” millions of people uninsured?

Also, where does the 15 million number come from?

Forgive me for saying so, but it sounds like the Clinton campaign is pretty much just pulling this stuff out of their rear ends. If you want to argue about people gaming the system, fine; Obama says he’ll debate that, and the topic was covered in the Texas debate. But the 15 million claim is total fiction. Unless, as I said, I am missing something.

By the way, Japan has a system that works a bit like Obama’s: it’s possible to stay off the insurance radar, simply by moving out of your city and establishing a new address, and not signing up for insurance. But if you get sick later and try to get back on insurance, you pay a penalty–usually the amount of fees you would have paid had you stayed on the insurance plan.

What puzzles me is that nobody’s suggesting a plan to start a true national health insurance program, one that is rated to income. Again, unless I misunderstand things, the plans both candidates are pushing are really just regular insurance plans, but people have to buy into them. Yes, they lower costs this way and that, but as far as I can see, people who make very low incomes don’t get much of a break. It would work a lot better if it was actual socialized medicine, and not a half-assed compromise. Maybe that’s just not possible, but to me it’s the only solution that would really make sense.

Something happened a few days ago, I haven’t gotten around to blogging on until now. The Japan Times has a new feature, the Japan Times Blogroll, and I’m their feature this week:

Someone who works there knows about my blog, and so they asked me to participate. They sent me a questionnaire and gave me an answer limit of 900 words, which I reached exactly. They said that I would appear in the print version of the paper in the coming week, though the web story went up a few days ago. Not a big deal, but it’s always fun to get mentioned in the media. I even got link/plugs in for Paul and Sean.

It looks like the feature in general will be interesting to keep an eye on. They’ve already got What Japan Thinks, Japan Economy News & Blog, and Konbini Life on the roll. Maybe you can suggest a site you like to the editor using the link. Or I have an email connection with the JT guy who arranged things with me, I could pass any suggestions you have on.

Only one nit I have: the photo is credited to “Felicity Hughes Photos,” whoever that it. The problem is, Sachi took that photo, and I resized it for them. The image on their site is the exact same size in pixels as the one I provided, and is 24,028 bytes, where the original was 24,023 bytes. I don’t know who this Felicity Hughes is, but I don’t think she can claim full credit for tacking on five bytes somewhere.

I watched some CNN this morning and quickly grew sick of it. It was a news-like discussion of why the charges against McCain are completely baseless and are nothing but “left-wing bloggers” trying to assassinate his character. They focused only on the affair part of the NYT story; they showed McCain’s “I’m not going to talk about this anymore” statement in full. They reported that Huckabee trusts McCain. They concluded that nothing would come from the story.

Not a single mention of the lobbyist side of the report, which is the real story. Not one mention that McCain indeed did favors for lobbyists back then. Nor that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists now, around 30 on his campaign, more than any other campaign. Nor that McCain has been caught in at least one and maybe two major lies in the story. None of that–just a clean sweep of “McCain’s completely innocent” claptrap.

What’s with this? In a little while, I’ll be posting a post-debate summary of the Texas “showdown” between Obama and Clinton, where CNN was the host–and showed a similar tendency toward rather overt bias.

Okay I’ve got a question. Supposedly the drop in violence in Iraq is due to The Surge™. That’s all we’ve been hearing for the past several months, with even many moderates and liberals giving credit to Bush’s strategy for bringing down violence in Iraq.

And yet, in the same media stream, we get news that Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army militia to continue a cease-fire for another six months over the six that have already passed. When reporting these stories, the cease-fire is quite correctly credited for the sharp drop in violence, with success in Iraq hinging on al-Sadr’s decision and his ability to make it work.

So here’s the question: if it is so clear that the al-Sadr cease-fire is the reason for the drop in violence in Iraq, why is The Surge™ so universally credited with the same thing elsewhere, when there is no real evidence that it had any real impact? The greater number of troops may have helped after the cease-fire began, but if you look at the numbers, the surge didn’t really show any results–the drop came after the cease-fire.

To me, it comes across as a meme that was conceded to and accepted, like the one that says Republicans are strong on the economy, or that they are better at holding down government spending.

Or am I missing something?

Remember back in last year, when the Republicans disabled the FEC in a political power game? Well, it may be coming back to bite them in the ass now.

I blogged on this last October: the Federal Elections Commission is down to just two commissioners, far short of its normal six. Bush and the GOP want to put a political stooge, Hans von Spakovsky, onto the commission. This nominee has been implicated in the US Attorney scandal, is sharply partisan, and so was seen as completely unacceptable by Democrats, led by Barack Obama and Russ Feingold. But Republicans wanted von Spakovsky on the commission badly, so they said that either von Spakovsky gets approved, or nobody gets approved. They refused to consider the other three nominees if their boy was not seated. They probably thought they were being ever so clever: either seat a Bush stooge on the elections commission, or have no commission at all, either way allowing for all sorts of GOP hanky-panky leading up to November.

And so there was no confirmation, and the FEC remained understaffed, with only two commissioners; as a result, the quorum of four cannot be made and the commission cannot function.

That doesn’t mean the commission can’t be inconvenient, however. The way Republicans have set things up, they may wind up completely disabling the McCain campaign for the next six months:

The nation’s top federal election official told Sen. John McCain yesterday that he cannot immediately withdraw from the presidential public financing system as he had requested, a decision that threatens to dramatically restrict his spending until the general election campaign begins in the fall.

You see, McCain opted into the program for the primaries, but did not yet take federal funding that would lock him into it. And now that he’s all but won the nomination, he wants to opt out, as he’s reached the top spending limit for anyone in the program.

Here’s where the irony comes in. If you’ve opted in to public funding, you can only withdraw if the FEC votes to let you leave. But since Republicans have left the FEC with only two commissioners, they can’t do that. Like I said, sometimes dirty tricks can come back to bite you in the ass.

But even if the FEC were to be re-enabled, McCain still might not be able to leave. Why not? Because of McCain’s sweetheart deal to get a $1 million loan from a bank in order to keep his struggling campaign afloat before the New Hampshire primary. In getting the loan, McCain had to promise the bank that were his campaign to flounder, he would opt for public financing to pay back the loan. In short, he used public money as collateral for the loan. And that, according to FEC rules, is the same as accepting federal money, and locks you into the system.

So McCain might be locked into public financing from two different directions, which means that he is not allowed to spend more than $54 million until September, when the primary season ends and the Republican convention is held. But McCain already spent $49 million by the end of January–which leaves him a paltry $5 million to spend over the next six months, money he may have already spent in February.

McCain’s solution seems to be to take the Bush route: break the law and then insist you didn’t break it. McCain’s lawyer is already claiming that McCain is somehow magically no longer tied to public financing. Now, he may be able to get away with this, but even if he does, it’ll be a big blow against him politically. He has been running as Mr. Clean, using that image to bash Obama for even considering to reneg on an oral pledge, not even legally binding, to use public financing for the general election later this year. But now that McCain is probably going to knowingly violate campaign finance laws himself, it would appear as extremely hypocritical for him to go after Obama on this.

In fact, Obama could use McCain’s actions to get him out of his pledge. Obama never made a statement that he would break his pledge, and his pledge was not to use public financing, but to “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” But if McCain breaks the law on public financing, Obama could say, “I can’t trust any deal with someone who so cavalierly violates campaign financing laws,” thus dealing McCain a double blow–Obama gets to raise huge amounts of money in the general election, and paints McCain as a hypocritical scofflaw on campaign finance at the same time.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops in the press over the next few weeks, especially after McCain’s trouble with the lobbyist connection. All in all, not a good week for the Republican nominee apparent.

Addenda: The McCain-lobbyist story is now morphing from a sex scandal into a lobbyist scandal, and rightly so. As a sex scandal, it’s more juicy for the press, but McCain could deny it more easily. But as a lobbyist scandal, he’s in real trouble. First, John “Mr. Campaign Finance Reform” McCain has admitted that his campaign staff is riddled with lobbyists, and second, McCain has been caught in a lie concerning his involvement in the Iseman/Paxson favoritism scandal.

I’ve got a little technical problem, if anyone out there knows the solution please let me know. Here’s the situation: when I give my students tests in MS Word or PowerPoint, I usually have them open the app they’re being tested on, carry out a set of tasks, and then save the document as their exam work. For safety’s sake, I ask them not to close the document window until I have successfully copied it and determined that they saved the document correctly. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’d rather not take even the smallest risk of losing an hour’s work by a student.

Using Office 2000, this was not a problem. The students saved their documents on the server’s shared folder and waited with the file open while I copied it from that folder to my computer’s hard disk. But after we put in Office 2007, that became no longer possible: every time I try to copy a .pptx or .docx file that is still in use by the student, it gives me an error message and won’t let me copy it until the file has been closed. I am guessing that this is because of the new XML format, which uses a package file with many components.

I came up with a kludgy workaround: I can zip-archive the open document, then copy the archive, then un-zip it on my computer. It works, but it takes several steps, and is not something I’d like to repeat 20 times every class period. It also suggests that there is really no technical problem in making a copy of an open file (else why would archiving work?), it’s just for some reason Office 2007 won’t let you.

Any ideas for a better work-around?

CNN just ran a piece that on the surface seemed to go after McCain for the recent lobbyist story, but wound up being a puff piece that seemed almost eager to clear his name. After first going over the charges, they repeated again and again how he denied, denied, and denied the charges. Played video of him denying the charges. Then emphasized how he denied the charges, repeating how he said they just weren’t true.

But no mention was made about the documented facts that the lobbyist had urged McCain to send a letter to the FCC to press them to quickly approve a TV deal for the lobbyist’s clients–and McCain fired off two letters quickly thereafter doing exactly what the lobbyist asked for, letters which were so ethically questionable that they drew a rebuke from the FCC chairman.

Then CNN did a bit on McCain’s history as a reformer, going over bills he passed that were supposed to clean up campaign finance. Why they did this was unclear to me, but they gave the impression that McCain was above reproach on this issue.

What they did not mention was that McCain became a ‘reformer’ only after being implicated in a campaign finance scandal, where he became known as one of the “Keating Five,” for being a paid stooge of a man whose S&L was one of the biggest to fail in the collapse of that industry in the 80’s. Nor did CNN report on the many ties McCain has had with lobbyists or the times he hedged on or even broke with the campaign finance reform he is the poster boy for.

If CNN keeps going this way, they might find themselves being “fair and balanced” some day.

By the way, McCain announced:

At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust.

Apparently, in McCain’s world, the Keating scandal never took place. Or, in his eyes, did not constitute a betrayal of the public trust.

Update: Okay, CNN apparently just remembered the Keating Scandal–they mentioned it briefly before again lauding McCain’s “reformer” persona. Still no mention of all the other questionables aside from simply airing McCain’s press conference.

Time Kane, long-time and very thoughtful commenter on BlogD, has an excellent analysis of why Obama is doing so well despite having started so far behind Clinton:

When I was growing up I had a friend who said there were two kinds of people: Salesman and Accountant types. A salesman never let’s cost get in the way of doing something or buying something, he just figures he’ll have to go out and sell more stuff to pay for it: they tend to be optimists. Accountants, on the other hand, are belt tighteners by nature. If they see something or want to do something they either for go it, forgo something else or look around elsewhere to save costs. My friend was the former of the two, and not by a small margin. Though an electrician, He could sell ice to Eskimos.

Myself, in a similar vein, I think there are two kinds of mindsets: strategic thinkers and tacticians. Strategic thinkers take the long view, they don’t want to swim against the current, they’d rather try to figure out how to make the current work with them as opposed to against them. They are along the lines of Sun Tzu’s ‘all battles are won before they are fought’ types. Tactical thinkers are the opposite. They’ll swim against the current, they’ll fight for fighting sake, they see everything as contest, and their human relations are often dominated over who will be the dominate person in the relationship. I am definitely one of the former. Perhaps I’m merely pointing out the difference between deductive and inductive thinking.

I think what you point out here is that Hillary is a tactician. She’s a great fighter. She’s probably a hard worker and was a great lawyer. She’s also a pretty good campaigner. From what I’ve seen of her campaign, she’s lacking good strategic judgment. Everything she does is tactical.

Here’s the thing. I think Obama is a both-er: he’s got good strategic and good tactical skills – and he’s got good judgment for balancing the two off of each other – and on top of that he’s got good oratorical skills, no doubt a function of being a both-er. He’s like a guy who sees things at street level and top down like a map, simultaneously. In a dead even street fight, Hillary might be able to take Obama by simply out-working and out-hustling and out-fighting him. But she’s not in a dead even street fight. She’s in a fight that involves equal amounts of strategy and tactics and oratorical finesse. Hillary, despite having the obvious advantages going into this campaign as the virtual incumbent, constantly finds her self in a tactical struggle, swimming against the current where she is increasingly battling against greater odds. Meanwhile she keeps bumping into Obama and each time he looks as if he’s hardly broken a sweat.

As the campaign drags on, I think Hillary is becoming a better tactical fighter but she can’t overcome her strategic shortcomings, causing her to take bigger strategic risks which increasingly results in tactical set backs. Perhaps this is becoming more and more evident, at least on an intuitive level, to the electorate.

Obama isn’t perfect. But he’s a naturally gifted as a politician. First, He’s got the booming vocal chords, and he knows how to use them. He’s got both good tactical skills and good strategic skills and importantly, he seems to have good judgment in balancing the two off of each other. Obama obviously has the skills for becoming president, and the way he has run his campaign, it looks like he has the skills for being President as well. Increasingly it looks like we will find out.

Meanwhile we have to cross our fingers and hope that Hillary doesn’t go nuclear and undermine the entire Democratic party in her tactical struggle to become president.

Read the report:

“It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit and run smear campaign,” McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said in a statement.

“McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

“Americans are sick and tired at this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career,” the statement said.

So, according to McCain, the New York Times is out to politically assassinate him with a smear campaign, playing gutter politics? That’s a bit of a stretch. But maybe that’s the only thing McCain can say right now. Denying the affair is easy: unless there’s a confession or some visual record, there’s slim to no chance that an affair will be proved. But the really damning stuff would be the simple association with a lobbyist, and the public record that McCain indeed intervened on her behalf.

Notice that McCain does not address that point. They just issue a general denial, claiming that the story shows nothing to suggest that he violated his principles. Really? Intervening on behalf of a lobbyist in such a brazen act of engendering political patronage that he was publicly rebuked by the commission he tried to sway in her favor:

In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.

Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.

For a man who sells himself as the champion of campaign finance reform and a bane to lobbyist, this hard evidence certainly does sound like it’s a betrayal of some principle or another.

For the past month or so, any comments made by visitors have been posting OK (or so it would appear to me), but I have not received any of the email notices that usually come for them. I couldn’t figure it out, but assumed it was a problem with my blog script. I tried to change it, but nothing happened. No biggie; I still got comments through the blog control interface, and I could sort out the problem later.

In the Computer class I teach, I use a web page test on one of my domains that uses the formmail script to generate emails; the students fill out the answers on a web page and an email gets sent to two of my accounts (one main, one for backup). About a month ago, it stopped working. I added a third email account, and that worked–but I could not figure out why the original two did not. I figured that something had gone wrong in the formmail script, that certain domains were not being properly accepted. No biggie; I could just rely on the email address that did work, and fix the problem later.

I also did not receive any email in general sent to certain accounts, but did not notice it because I have so many accounts on so many domains, and never heard from anyone saying, “I sent you an email, didn’t you get it?” There were the other problems, but with my busy schedule, I kept putting off trying to correct them.

Then today, I started to write an email while my students take their midterm, using one of the accounts that is supposed to get the test results but is not. I thought, hey, maybe the account is full. Sometimes that happens, even when I set my email accounts to delete retrieved messages from the server. But the accounts were nearly empty, with lots of room to spare.

Then I did something I should have done a while ago: I checked the history of the email connected to certain domains sharing the blogd.com web hosting account. And indeed, none have gotten any new email for a whole month. And that just happened to be when I had demanded my web host move me to a new server when the old one had constant outages.

Apparently, when they moved me, they neglected to activate the email. I should have seen this right away, but I (a) trusted the web host to do the elementary tasks correctly, and (b) chalked up the other problems to scripting errors, which show up enough in truth.

Swell. So now I’m waiting on a helpdesk ticket to get things back up and running. But it shows you how easily you can lose a big chunk of your service if you’re not vigilant; it also makes me wonder, how do most people get along supervising their web sites? I mean, I’m no supergenius hacker or anything, but I do have a lot of experience and some very elemental web admin skills. What about people who really don’t know much about this kind of thing and depend on their web hosts to handle it all right? Man, that must be hairy for some people… I mean, if I can lose email for a month and not notice, what must some other people be living through?

On the other hand, perhaps, maybe people who don’t handle scripting up close simply yell to their web host for help whenever anything goes wrong. Had I done that, I wouldn’t have suffered with this so long.

Just as McCain has tied up the Republican nomination, this out from the New York Times:

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Ouch.

A lot of people are calling this a non-story, but I’d say that remains to be seen; once reporters get through with it, if all that there is is rumors, then I’ll agree. Or, if they mean that it should be considered a non-story until something tangible comes up, I’d go along with that as well. But if the story is true to any degree, then it is anything but a “non-story.”

If the story does come to anything, it’ll be a double threat: not only would McCain (already divorced after committing adultery in his first marriage) be guilty of adultery again, but he’d be in bed with a lobbyist–Mr. Squeaky-clean I’m-against-lobbyists campaign-finance-reform John McCain. Literally in bed with a lobbyist, and he even wrote letters to government regulators on behalf of this lobbyist/mistress.

Even if the adultery part is not true, then the showing-favoritism-to-a-lobbyist part should be somewhat damaging all by itself.

But in all fairness, it’s refreshing to see a story like this take hold on a Republican the same way it has on Democrats in the past; from a fairness perspective, if Dems get smothered by the press when stories like this come out, then Reps should get the same treatment. Bush has been, for some reason, unusually exempt from this kind of scrutiny. And this while McCain is calling Barack Obama “deceitful”–if it turns out to be true, then McCain deserves to be walloped big-time. Some even suggest that this is actually a slam from the right–from Republicans who don’t want McCain to be the front-runner. Whatever the case, it should focus more heat on McCain than on Obama for the whole public-financing non-issue McCain has been trying to push lately.

Some days, you kind of have to wonder at the blessed political life Barack Obama enjoys; he seems to catch all the breaks.

Wow. What Obama did yesterday was less of a win and more of a rout. He was supposed to be in danger in Wisconsin, with a few polls giving Hillary a lead. Obama came away with a 17.4-point landslide, almost double what even the most optimistic poll results were for the candidate. And Hawaii? A 52-point win? Okay, it’s a small state, mostly “minority” (Asian-Pacific Islander, though), and is Obama’s birth state. Still. 52 points.

And Obama is gaining in pre-Wisconsin polls in Texas and Ohio, getting to within a few points of Clinton in Texas and halving Clinton’s lead over him in Ohio over the past week. Two big unions just endorsed Obama, which will probably help him big in Ohio, and we still haven’t seen any polls that show what the score is after yesterday’s big wins.

People are already starting to call this one for Obama. I’m still waiting for it to become more definitive; even after a Texas and Ohio loss, Hillary still may not quit, even if Bill says it’ll mean they lose. Hillary could still launch a movement to count the non-counted Florida and Michigan primaries, messy and probably fruitless as such a move might be.

For all people have talked about Hillary’s experience and how she’ll be “ready from day one,” there is evidence that she’s less a sharp operator than people have presumed. Her campaign fumbled badly–maybe fatally–by not preparing for a post-Super-Tuesday challenge, assuming they’d simply walk off with the vote. Part of that showed up when Hillary did not even get all her delegates on the Pennsylvania ballot in time–something that won’t cost her any delegates if she wins the vote there, but which shows up a lack of organization and discipline. She supposed to have her act together.

Her attempts at attacks have all failed; setting Bill on Obama in South Carolina backfired badly, and the latest plagiarism ‘scandal’ is being more or less universally dismissed as trivial and meaningless. Mark Penn, her senior strategist, has been a lead weight around her neck, coming across as Rovian at times; when he said that states which don’t vote for Hillary “don’t matter,” it was seen as yet another snub-like gaffe by this political operator. And just recently, a Hillary campaign officer actually told a reporter that Hillary would try to steal Obama’s pledged delegates–a move which not only reeks of desperation, but is seen as underhanded and dishonest. That, along with most of her senior staff quitting or being fired, and having to loan herself $5 million, all adds up to make Hillary seem a lot less slick and experienced than we’ve been led to believe.

In the meantime, Obama has done pretty damned well up to this point. He has organized smartly and out-raised Hillary by as much as a 2-1 margin. Their 50-state strategy has been paying off handsomely, and despite shared language with a friend who shares the same campaign manager, despite “little experience,” despite everyone thinking that he’s “just about words,” he has made an incredible come-from-behind steamroller campaign happen and happen big.

For a guy who is supposed to be inexperienced and not ready for big-time politics, he has so far run the best campaign out there, has made the fewest mistakes, and has won the support of the most people, generating historic turnouts and massive excitement.

In a candidate for president, I’ll take that over a long Washington career.

As the new front-runner, Obama is now taking some beatings from both sides, but he seems to be weathering them just fine, while still staying on-message. The attacks seem substantial from the outset, but then tend to die from anemia.

McCain tried to attack over the public-financing pledge, for example. Both campaigns made early pledges to use public financing, but now, Obama has proven very adept at raising money, and is hedging on his earlier pledge. The thing is, the public financing pledge is intended to show that the candidate isn’t beholden to special interests–but Obama’s strength is in raising money through small donations from regular people, something that’s even better than public financing. So while there’s no getting around that he made the pledge, he would have to be an idiot to give up the advantage of his popular tidal wave of low-end contributors. McCain’s being sly here–he knows that Obama’s not selling out, but he can make a few points by trying to paint Obama as a flip-flopper, or worse, as corrupt.

But there is a way out. First of all, since the campaign finance route is a way to avoid politicians being bought by special interests and fat cats, Obama could make a reverse offer: that both campaigns hold contributions down to $200 or less. While this would not get Obama off the hook for reneging on his pledge, it would be a counter-offer that would force McCain to refuse something that is just as reasonable, and would stifle McCain’s claims that Obama is getting special interest funding. McCain would have to reject it, because outside of public financing, his strength will be with the fat cats. Keep it to $200-or-less contributions, and I’m guessing that Obama would wipe the floor with McCain. Others have different ideas for Obama to argue.

Second, Obama can point to McCain’s own troubles with supporting public financing. McCain voted against it in 1995 when it suited his interests, and just recently, it was revealed that McCain has a sweetheart deal with a bank that loaned him big bucks on the condition that he switch to public financing if his campaign faltered. So McCain is hardly snow-white on this issue.

And it seems that over the past few days, the issue has kind of sputtered out. Still, it could come back later–but McCain might not be taken as seriously next time.

The latest attack against Obama comes from his other flank: Hillary is accusing him of plagiarism, because he used almost exact lines from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in a speech without giving attribution. Again, it sounds kind of bad–this kind of thing has sunk candidacies in the past, after all–but there is growing recognition that this is not quite so much of an issue as it may seem.

Why not? Because Obama and Patrick “regularly” borrow from each other; they are friends and seem to have an agreement about this. If you and I agree to write and share each other’s material, is it plagiarism if we don’t footnote every use? That would be a hard argument to make. Not to mention that most of the words and phrases that were “stolen” have been uttered by a lot of different politicians over time; it is less plagiarism and more of a common type of rhetoric.

Furthermore, there are shades of hypocrisy in Clinton’s charge: her campaign would not guarantee that Clinton never “borrows” lines from others herself. Their explanation: our campaign is not about the rhetoric, so it’s OK for us to steal, but not for Obama.

Um. Yeah, okay.

I don’t mean this in terms of what his successor does or doesn’t do, but rather in terms of how this affects American politics. Cuba is far too important for the groups that have gained over it to be abandoned. Republicans get too much swing from pandering to the anti-Castro population, and the anti-Castro population has too much power being pandered to. Were Cuba to become a non-issue, a strong power relationship would dwindle–one that frequently shapes U.S. politics at its highest levels. So I would expect this to pretty much stay the same, as they seem to be doing.

I though February was still supposed to be a good birding time. Not so much, it seems. I went to the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park on Sunday, and the main areas were pretty much empty. Not that I couldn’t spot any birds, but for a bird park, it was pretty light going.

Grey Herons are really beautiful birds, but they are also pretty common; you can see them around pretty much all the time. But, like I said, lovely birds. Beautiful plumage.

I also got a few unusually nice shots of a Great Tit. Again, very common birds, but they flit around so quickly, it’s often hard to get shots as good as this.

Another common bird is the Great Cormorant; these guys are all around. Ugly birds, too. But it is cool to see them standing out there with their wings out, getting them dry (they don’t have the same waterproofing as other birds do).

And sometimes you can catch them in rather epic struggles.

The more interesting birds: in the distance (as birds of prey usually are), there was a Common Buzzard (Nosuri) hanging about:

One of the first things I saw was this young but colorful Bull-headed Shrike (Mozu):

And fully unexpected was a Daurian Redstart (Joubitaki). Not that Redstarts aren’t seen in the park, but this one was hopping around on the ground in the mud flats; previously, I’d only seen Redstarts in the trees and shrubs, and aside from the occasional Wagtail or Thrush, just Sandpipers and other shorebirds in the flats. But this one was happily foraging around in the mud, not far from the only Common Sandpiper (Isoshigi) I could spot in the entire park.

And, just to close things up, a few extra pictures. Enjoy.

Here I was, happily working on the re-design for my school’s English-language web site. I was using PNG image files pretty liberally for the first time, allowing me to create beautiful transparencies in 24-bit color. I was very happy with result; it looked great.

Now I’ll have to trash all those graphics. Why? Because half the world still uses the crappiest browser around, Internet Explorer 6 (for no better reason that Microsoft forced it and no other browser on everyone’s desktops, and they just use it because it’s there), and IE6 cannot handle PNG transparencies. So if I want masked images with transparencies, I’ll have to use 8-bit GIFs which will be hard as hell to get to work right–I’ll probably have to abandon even those, and use JPGs, which means there will be small disconnects with the background images and things will look funky.

In short, Microsoft just ruined a lot of hard work I’ve done and made it a lot harder to do my web site the way I want to, the way I can, the way it should be done–because MS foisted a giant turd on the world and it’s stuck.

Thank you, Bill Gates.

If you bought an HD-DVD player and/or recorder and some HD-DVD titles, then it looks like you’ve got a nice, new Betamax machine on your hands. That’s right: Toshiba has apparently thrown in the towel as Blu-ray takes the prize as the winner of the new high-capacity DVD battle.

The turn came when Warner Brothers made the switch to Blu-ray. This kind of surprised me, because over the past few years, there were all kinds of dips and turns in the battle, where each maker seemed to suffer big setbacks, but then charged back later when the tide turned. When Warner–just one studio of many–announced their switch, there was a lot of buzz that this was some momentous turn. Beats me as to why–a variety of studios had been turning this way and that for a while now, and it never seemed to change anything.

Toshiba fought back, primarily by slashing prices on their players, which had always been cheaper and had come out earlier than Blu-rays. But that didn’t seem to work. Vendor after vendor decided to go Blu-ray, until the lethal blow came with Wal-Mart deciding to drop HD-DVD. That signaled the end that had begun with Warner’s move. Toshiba has not made its formal announcement yet, but it seems pretty much set:

A source at Toshiba confirmed an earlier report by public broadcaster NHK that it was getting ready to pull the plug.

“We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,” said the source, who asked not to be identified. He added that an official announcement could come as early as next week.

And here I was, figuring that it would last until somebody came up with a hybrid drive, like they did with the DVD±R/RW format. For a long time, people thought that the plus-minus wars would produce a single winner, but now everyone uses optical drives that allow for both types (although it’s getting harder and harder to find “plus” disks; “minus” seems to be the anti-climactic winner there).

Instead, everyone who bought an HD-DVD player will start to find it harder and harder to get disks to put into their machines, and eventually will have to buy a Blu-ray device.

The competition was good for at least one thing: it drove prices down a lot faster than might have happened otherwise, and spurred development and releases. Hopefully, that trend won’t slow down too much now that Sony can take a breather and relax, its dominance assured.

Oh, and guess who championed HD-DVD? Microsoft. And who picked Blu-ray from the start? Apple.

The only downside I can see: now we have to get used to a weird format naming system. Until now, it had been simple: everything was -ROM, -R, and -RW, and the initial letters made sense–CD and DVD. For some strange reason, Sony decided to go with “BD-R” and “BD-RE” for the recordable and re-writable formats. One would have expected “BR” (for Blu-Ray) to be the initial string instead of “BD” (for Blu-ray Disk), but when you think about it, that would have made the full designations “BR-R” and “BR-RW”–which sound a bit “chilly.” But “RE”? Apparently, that’s for “RE-writable,” instead of the long-used “Re-Writable” (“RW”). Why Sony changed that, beyond the desire to confuse people, is anyone’s guess.

But what really blew me away was this map:

Those are Blu-Ray regions, as in the DVD regions that have created so many headaches for international travelers. Just last night, I got an email from an old student who was having trouble getting American DVDs to play on his Japanese computer. That’s because Japan uses Region 2, strangely aligned with Europe, but not with America, which uses Region 1. But look at the new map: Japan and America use the same region. That means we can use American BD-videos in Japan! Which means that potentially, I could buy films from Amazon.com for movies that are only just coming out in theaters in Japan, and for a price which is less than the two movie tickets Sachi and I would have to buy here. That’s nice. (Although it should be noted that HD-DVDs were region-free–oh well.)

So, what will you be in for with a Blu-ray upgrade from your old DVD? Well, for starters, Blu-Ray has a minimum of 5 times the capacity–25 GB vs. the old DVD’s 4.7 GB (though I find a DVD-R will only take 4.3 GB when you actually want to record something). However, multi-layer discs are becoming available; you can buy 50 GB Blu-rays now. There is talk about BD’s with up to 10 layers, or 250 GB of storage on a single disc. No news on when those will be out, though. Blu-Rays, having so much capacity, will take longer to write; currently, it’s supposed to take a half hour to burn a 25 GB BD-R with the fastest available writer.

Blu-ray movie discs should have a more powerful and varied interface, allowing for more features the user can control. Let’s just hope they did away with that idiotic you-can’t-skip-past-these-ads “feature.” BD’s also sport a much thinner but tougher plastic coating, supposedly resistant even to scrubbing with steel wool.

So, should you buy your Blu-ray today? As always with computer equipment, it depends–future equipment will always be cheaper and/or have more features. Drives bought today might not be able to handle higher-capacity discs released in future years. On the other hand, optical disc drives do have a tendency to crap out after a few years of steady use; there’s no telling how long the new machines may last. And by the time those better-featured machines come out, prices may have dropped to a level where you might not mind buying a new machine so much.

Me, I’ll have to wait until I get a Hi-def TV. However, they do sell Blu-ray drives for computers, and I do have this nice, big, HD-ready 24-inch iMac screen… but looking at what Yodobashi Camera is selling, their cheaper units seem to only work with Windows PCs–ironic, since Apple supports the Blu-ray format, and Microsoft went HD-DVD. Figures.

The Friday Gallup Daily National Tracking Poll is out, and it shows a complete reversal from eight days before; then, Hillary was ahead by 7 points, 49% to 42%; today, Obama leads by that exact amount.

There are a couple of significant details to be found here. The last time Hillary was this far down (January 29th), she was still ahead of Obama by 6 points. This could lead to two interpretations, neither one good for Hillary. First, it could signal that Obama is capturing all of the undecideds while Hillary virtually stands still; or second, it could be that Obama is slowly siphoning off Hillary’s supporters and putting them in his pocket.

The second interpretation is more likely, once you account for the anomalous stretch between January 29 and February 2, where both candidates gained 5-6 points with neither losing any. This period represents Edward’s pullout from the race, where his supporters split between the two candidates almost equally. Other than that time, every Obama gain matches roughly to a Hillary loss. If you split Edwards’ supporters between Clinton and Obama from the start, the trends come out more clearly:

Even the mutual Clinton/Obama gain in early January can be matched to a 4-point loss by Edwards. What this all means is that, at least since early January, this has really been a fight between Clinton and Obama; Edwards lost his relevance some time before then.

And as an Obama-Clinton race, Obama has been doing very well; in the last month, despite a few one-day hiccups, he has been gaining steadily on Clinton. Now that he is ahead by a touchdown, it’s looking much better for him.

Of course, a lot of Obama’s new-found support is coming from states which have already voted; those switchers don’t matter in this race any more. So, the question becomes, how is Obama doing in the key future states–Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania?

Ohio:

Texas:

Pennsylvania:

Now, you’ll have to note not only the trend lines, but also the dots which represent the actual poll results. Ohio and Texas give a fairly accurate trend line, but notice that in Pennsylvania, Obama has closed the gap between himself and Hillary much more significantly then the trend lines would suggest. There also is no poll for Pennsylvania for the past week, a week in which Obama has made big gains.

While Obama does not exactly seem poised to take away all of these states, he could easily win Texas, and nothing is sure about Ohio or Pennsylvania. And remember, Hillary has to not only win these states, but win them by a comfortable margin. If she loses Texas, that could be big; while Ohio and Pennsylvania have 161 and 188 delegates respectively, Texas has 228. A loss in Texas could offset gains in Ohio and Pennsylvania, especially if Obama makes up more ground in those states.

And if that happens, Clinton will go into high gear to fight for Michigan and Florida delegates to be seated–using their current voided-primary numbers, which favor her considerably. This will probably be viewed as questionable, considering that Obama pulled out of Michigan’s race and Hillary did not, as well as because the states were duly warned (though it was Republicans in Florida that made the decision to violate the DNC’s rules) and alternatives offered. In fact, the DNC still has an open offer to fund caucuses in both states, which could be arranged for as late as June this year. If Hillary fights for both states to be counted, it is likely that the DNC will agree–but only in the form of later caucuses, which are by no means unprecedented: in ’96 and ’00, Delaware violated party rules and then held make-up caucuses, as D.C. did in 2004. And although party heads in both states are speaking negatively about such prospects, I feel it is much more likely that the DNC will be comfortable with not seating the two states’ delegates so long as they offer a viable alternative. After all, if the DNC caves, how likely will it be that their rules are followed in the future? Clinton may be out of luck on this one.

Hillary might also not be able to count on the super-delegates; already, some key delegates have either abandoned Hillary or fully switched over to the Obama side. GA Rep. John Lewis, a former civil rights leader, has been a key supporter of Clinton; he is now reportedly ready to back Obama, though there has been some fence-sitting involved, and nothing is clear yet. But a trend for the supers to lean to Obama is clearly in progress; it has been noted that the supers are the kind of people who like winners, and that seems to be Obama right now.

It’s official!

“If the House had nothing better to do, this futile partisan act would be a waste of time,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. “The ‘people’s House’ should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers.”

Well, maybe not me, probably they’re referring to Josh Marshall. This is about the House vote to hold presidential chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt for not responding to subpoenas issued by the House compelling them to testify under oath.

The background is familiar over the past few years: the Bush White house fired nine US Attorneys and apparently pressured a great many more for reasons that are completely improper. The attorneys were pressured to pursue election fraud charges against Democrats even if the attorneys felt the charges had no merit, and they were similarly pressured not to pursue legitimate cases against Republicans. In the investigations that followed, the Attorney General and other White House officials made misleading and false statements under oath to Congress, and the White House has refused to surrender documents and has “accidentally” destroyed mountains of evidence, much pertaining to this case.

The White House refused to allow Miers and Bolton to testify on the grounds of “executive principle,” which is a code word for “we want to deny the checks and balances guaranteed under the Constitution.” Bush offered to allow them to testify, but only if their testimony were not under oath–of course, the only reason to make this demand is if there is an intent to lie to Congress. When House Democrats voted for the contempt charges, the Crybaby Republicans stomped their feet and held their breath, staging a walkout–as if it were the height of impropriety to investigate massive corruption, if the focus of the investigation were Republican.

If anything, the Democratic Congress has been far too soft in its investigation, letting the White House drag its heels and show utter contempt for Congress’ authority for the past year. The move to hold the White House officials in contempt is, quite frankly, very late in coming. The intensity and depth of political corruption in this White House far exceeds that in any presidency in U.S. history, and deserves far more scrutiny and investigation.

Worse, since the Bush White House controls the enforcement of laws, it simply refuses to honor any charges held against it. It is exactly as if a prosecutor were a serial criminal offender, but was put in charge of the prosecution of the cases against himself–and simply declined to do anything. In any other such case, there would be a higher authority that would step in and clobber the scofflaw–but here, we are dealing with an executive branch that has no higher authority than the Constitution, which they hold in contempt and refuse to follow. There being no higher corporeal authority, there is not much else that can be done.

The Bush White House’s legacy will have been to establish that the president is above the law, that he can violate any statute, make any ethical breach, and get away with it.

Theoretically, the next president could reverse these decisions and release any documents not shredded or deleted by this administration (which will probably be very few by that time), and allow justice to be realized. But if a Democratic president tried to do so, he or she would instantly be attacked in fury by conservatives, accusing the new president of “wallowing in the past,” not allowing “bygones to be bygones,” and of “abusing the power of the presidency to exact partisan political retributions.” In short, the claim will be that a president can break any law, refuse to prosecute himself, and then enjoy immunity the day after he leaves office.

After all, this is the presidency that promised to “restore honor and dignity” to the White House.

We’re still waiting.