Inevitably, it’s happened again: another reported rape of a teenager by an American serviceman in Okinawa. By “inevitably” I do not mean to suggest that American servicemen are predisposed to rape teenagers, what I mean is that in any population of a certain size, there will always be all manner of crimes committed.

Naturally, the Japanese press is going nuts with it. Stories on the news are almost as constant as the poisoned Chinese gyoza story. And the politicians are using it as a reason to call for the U.S. forces to leave.

First, let me set some items straight lest you misunderstand. I do not approve of, trivialize, or excuse in any way, shape, or form any act of rape by anyone against anyone else. I do not claim that this specific accusation of rape is true or not true; it is an accusation at this time and not judged in a court of law. And I do not offer judgment here about whether or not U.S. bases should or should not be in Japan.

What I am saying is, it is unreasonable for the Japanese press to stoke up stories like this for jingoistic and xenophobic purposes, and for politicians to use them for unrelated political arguments.

Here’s the fact: rape happens, and it’s not just American servicemen doing it. You can be certain that there is at least as much of that crime being committed in Okinawa and everywhere else in Japan, by Japanese men. But that is rarely if ever reported, and certainly is never used as an issue to push for any Japanese rapist’s affiliated organizations.

Consider the situation in reverse; with so many Japanese living in the U.S., there are bound to be rapes by Japanese men against American teens. If a rapist worked for Sony, for instance, should that be sensationalized in the U.S. press and then used to suggest that Sony should be made to pack up and leave?

I guess the reason I mention this is because I get nervous when these things are blown out of proportion by the Japanese media. (Again, not that rape should be trivialized, but rather that only rapes by Americans against Japanese are sensationalized. If anything, this kind of misplaced emphasis devalues the perceived importance of other rapes; by placing emphasis on who commits the crime rather than on the crime itself, it suggests that rapes committed by others are not as objectionable, or not as important.) It brings back the specter of the 1980’s and the rampant xenophobia and its resultant discrimination brought out. I am reminded of the Yoshi Hattori case, an event also blown way beyond any reasonable proportions, especially relative to similar events happening within Japan.

And even today, Japanese politicians, especially the ultra-nationalists like Tokyo’s Ishihara, have a habit of singling out crimes by foreign populations, exaggerating them, and frightening the domestic population with scare stories about them. Just like American nationalists do on their turf, and it’s just as reprehensible.

If the politicians want American bases out, then fine; but that argument should be made on its merits, and not in a way that creates and encourages disproportionate fear, anger, and discrimination.

Just my two cents on the issue.

Obama, after his sweeps in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland by high margins (wasn’t Clinton supposed to be fighting hard in one of those states?), now claims another prize: his first lead over Hillary in the Gallup Daily National Tracking poll. It’s just a 1-point lead and so a statistical tie, but it follows a trend where Obama again gains a point a day while Hillary loses one. Just a little more than a week earlier, Hillary had been ahead by 13 points after a strange post-Super-Tuesday bounce. But now, with no good news for Hillary for at least three weeks (she is expected to lose in Wisconsin and Hawaii by similar margins), and possibly not even after that (with so much time and money, Obama is bound to make up some distance in Texas and Ohio), the trend will probably keep going for a bit. For the first time, Obama is considered the front-runner, a freight train with Hillary’s name on the… ouch, on second thought, I don’t think I want to use that metaphor.

What Obama has to watch out for: the expectations game, which has hurt him a few times in the past. Still, it comes down to a numbers game now: many are saying that Hillary’s Giuliani-like big-state-firewall strategy of winning Texas and Ohio is risky–that Hillary will have to not only win the states, but win them by several touchdowns in order to come out ahead in this race. And with Obama coming down the stretch with momentum, a truckload of cash, and seeming inroads into Hillary’s base, he stands a good chance of reducing Hillary’s critical leads in those states.

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans cut McCain a break today: on the anti-torture bill, had they tried (yet, yet, yet again) to filibuster, they would have put McCain in a difficult position of having helped stop the bill. Or he would have been in an equally difficult position of having helped pass a Democratic bill. So they helped him weasel his way out: they did not try to filibuster, but instead let the bill pass, with McCain voting “no.” While that violates his conscience and principles, as well as his past words and actions, it appeases the right wing base–and McCain’s vote is supposedly less meaningful because he did not stop the bill. That’s the key–McCain is kinda screwed on this any way you look at it, so for him, apparently, the least harmful path is simply to say, my vote didn’t matter.

So, all McCain lost today were his principles. But he kind of gave up on those when he started this campaign and started kissing up to the people who smacked him around good in 2000. McCain, a victim of torture himself and a lifelong advocate to ban such practices, today voted to sustain the use of torture so he could win a few more votes. When it comes to the crunch, it seems that “Straight-Talk” McCain will abandon his principles and suck up to anyone who can get him what he wants.

And notably, the “liberal media” is hardly touching this story.

Yep, our favorite conservative slimeball is at it again, this time in an interview with the BBC:

[Scalia] said it was “extraordinary” to assume that the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” – the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment – also applied to “so-called” torture.

“…Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?” he asked.

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?”

Where to begin? Scalia is interpreting the Eighth Amendment here to mean that “punishments” which are cruel and unusual are only unconstitutional when they are meted out as punishments for a crime committed–meaning that it’s perfectly okay to be cruel and unusual in all other aspects. Scalia’s explanation in full:

[The Eighth Amendment] is referring to punishing one indefinitely, would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime. But a court can do that when a witness refuses, or can just commit them to jail until you will answer the question, without any time limit on it, as a means of coercing the witness to answer, as the witness should. And I suppose it’s the same thing about “so-called” torture; is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles, is prohibited by the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the Eighth Amendment in a prison context, you can’t go about smacking people about. Is it obvious, that what can’t be done for punishment can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to the society?

Again, so many concerns. The Eighth Amendment only refers to the length of incarceration? And Scalia sees even that as being obviated in certain contexts? Does any right truly exist in Scalia’s eyes? What he’s saying here is that it’s okay to be cruel, so long as it does not take on the very specific form of incarcerating someone indefinitely, and even that’s OK if the witness isn’t answering questions like you want them to–in other words, no restrictions at all.

And what about the Fourth Amendment? If we believe that someone is a criminal and they have information we want, surely the revealing of this information will incriminate them. I’m not saying that’s it’s not an attractive trade-off in immediate terms, but torturing someone to reveal self-incriminating information is also in violation of the Fourth Amendment–but Scalia doesn’t even bat an eye here, does not even refer to the Fourth Amendment. Like I said, in immediate terms one would think, “of course I’d violate one person’s rights to save the lives of others”–but in constitutional terms, it’s not so easy. What Scalia is doing is stringing together rationalizations and justifications that allow him to assume what he wants to assume, with the Constitution being cut up and rearranged to suit his whims.

The interviewer brings up a very cogent point: the idea of a nuclear explosion being imminent and we happen to have the mastermind in custody and all we need to do is torture him, this is as unlikely a situation as to be imaginable. Sure, it’s fine for Jack Bauer (Scalia’s a fan, as you can guess–note his reference to a “bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles”), but in real life, it ain’t gonna happen. The worry: that what might be reasonable in a fantasy situation could lead to an approval of torture that is used commonly in far more questionable circumstances. Scalia’s response: it’s perfectly reasonable to ask the fantasy-scenario question to open the door, and then “once you acknowledge that [torture is OK in that scenario], we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?” So, according to Scalia, you can use the unlikeliest of scenarios to open a door which can then be used to do constitutionally questionable actions in a variety of contexts, so long as you suss them out in a way that sounds reasonable to you personally. The problem is that any action could be justified by dreaming up the most bizarre and extreme scenario possible; using Scalia’s metric, just about anything could then be rationalized as within constitutional grounds.

You can also see Scalia making excuses for torture even beyond his legal maneuverings; he speaks of “so-called” torture, characterizing it more than once as “smacking someone in the face,” as if smacking someone in the face in any way characterizes torture; this demonstrates a willingness to trivialize the infliction of horrific pain in order to further justify it. And if you look closely, he even violates his own principles: he’s willing to judge specifically how cruel you can be, after having said that the Constitution doesn’t apply. Isn’t that “legislating form the bench”?

In short, Scalia is doing what strict constructionists do best: using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law, and then weaseling with definitions to allow for a reconstruction of law to read into it a conservative dream of what should and should not be allowed. If you read the Bill of Rights, it is impossible to come away with the impression that the founders felt it was hunky-dory to torture criminal suspects for information. Everything there is carefully constructed to protect the rights of the innocent, and even in many cases the rights of the guilty; to assure that criminal suspects are not mistreated, that all care is taken to assure justice is being carried out fairly, and that the government is not doing anything questionable or harmful.

To parse the Bill of Rights to such extremes as to allow for torture is a clear violation of the spirit of the Bill of Rights. Of course, as a strict constructionist, Scalia spits on the spirit of the Constitution. Understand that, and you can understand the context of Scalia’s statements.

This is Bush’s rationale on why taxing the rich won’t work:

Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat party is going to field a candidate who says I’m going to raise your tax.

If they’re going to say, oh, we’re only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We’ve had — we’ve been through this drill before. We’re only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

It is obvious: if you raise taxes on rich people, rich people get stuck with the bill. That’s why they fight tax cuts like crazy.

Bush’s theory is that if you tax only the rich, somehow that tax will only affect people who the tax is not applied to. Huh? So if we make a law that raises the Alternative Minimum Tax for people making over $200,000, exempt everyone below that line, do not allow for special exemptions above that line, and anchor the tax to inflation, somehow rich people will not pay a penny more but people making under $100,000 a year will end up paying these taxes? Wow! Rich people must be magical!

Of course, it’s all a sham. The AMT was created to make sure rich people paid more taxes, and while I’m no expert, it appears to have worked. Not perfectly, of course; it needs to be tagged to inflation, some more loopholes closed, and it needs to be applied more to the super-rich, but overall, it prevented exactly the kind of thing Bush was talking about.

It is also hard to understand why Bush, on multiple occasions, either cut or tried like hell to cut, again and again, in way after way, taxes for rich people. He sees rich people as dishonest deadbeats, elite bastards who hire accountants to evade paying their fair share–so he rewards them by making it easier for them to avoid paying taxes? Interesting.

Really, what Bush is trying to say here is the same simple right-wing message: don’t tax the rich, and Democrats who say they want to tax the rich just want to raise your taxes. Boogah! Boogah boogah!

The tactic is simple. Use lies and scare tactics to get the middle class to vote against their own best interests, and support a massive welfare system for the rich.

Side note: have you noticed how Bush never uses the proper adjectival form “Democratic” to describe the Democratic Party? It’s way beyond an occasional misspeaking–he uses the conservative-created pejorative term “Democrat Party” virtually every time he names the party. He did so three times in the Wallace interview quoted above.

When Bush gave his State of the Union speech in 2007, he used the term–which was seen as the depth of political partisanship, to use that kind of a partisan slam in such a formal occasion. Soon after, he tried to blame it on “poor diction.” (His diction affects written scripts?) However, he only “misspeaks” when referring to the party. He uses the term “Democrat” liberally, and when he uses the word in adjectival form, he uses it correctly to refer to “Democratic leadership,” or “Democratic Senator,” and so on. But when speaking of the party, it is virtually always the “Democrat Party.”

Either this is from him simply being so immersed in a crowd who are so politically biased and entrenched in spiteful partisan politics that he never hears a different term, or it is a conscious decision by Bush to attempt to control the language to malign the opposition party.

Wow–not only did Obama win all the races this weekend, but he pretty much crushed Hillary in most of them. Especially Maine, where Hillary was given a fair chance of taking the state. The closest state this weekend was Maine, where Obama won over Clinton by 18% of the vote. That’s not just a win, it’s a blowout–and it was the closest race over the weekend. Here are the five races this weekend and their results:

Most people are ignoring the Virgin Islands vote, and probably with just cause–there are only six delegates, and though Obama gets all six, each one only counts as half a vote, so Obama only gets three from them. But that’s OK–Obama won a lot more delegates elsewhere. He also got enough big wins to make even an 82% margin not all that necessary to tout. I mean, look at those results–he won Louisiana and Maine by margins of about 20%, and Washington and Nebraska by margins close to 40%. That’s pretty impressive.

In fact, although Hillary has won most of the big states so far, Obama has won almost every state he’s gotten by 10%+ margins. And while Hillary had a big win in Arkansas, that 43% margin was the only one she got over 25%; Obama, meanwhile, has won ten states by a 25%+ margin:

Clinton (10)

Arkansas +43
Oklahoma +24
New York +17
Massachusetts +15
Tennessee +13
California +10
New Jersey +10
Arizona +9
Nevada +6
New Hampshire +3

Obama (19)

Idaho +62
Alaska +50
Kansas +48
Washington +37
Georgia +36
Nebraska +36
Colorado +35
Minnesota +35
Illinois+32
South Carolina +32
North Dakota +24
Louisiana +21
Maine +18
Utah +18
Alabama +14
Delaware +10
Iowa +9
Connecticut +4
Missouri +1

So far, a strong new start for Obama, and a terrible one for Hillary. She needs some kind of win this month, and though she’s got the expectations game on her side, it’ll be tough slogging. She reportedly has started a do-or-die fight for Maryland, something to break Obama’s February sweeps. But bad news keeps dogging her campaign, making her look more like a loser–lending her campaign $5 million, losing the fundraising war to Obama by a 2-to-1 margin, having her staffers work without pay, and now she’s fired her campaign manager.

It’ll be interesting to see how this affects the polls, especially in Ohio and Texas.

After yesterday’s heavy snowstorm, I took the opportunity on this clement day to visit Kasai Rinkai Park on Tokyo Bay to see what the birds were doing. The results: there must have been some popular bird event elsewhere, because Kasai Rinkai was virtually void of any avian presence. Yes, there were the inevitable Winter ducks, but just the usual collection. I did get a few shots, the best of which I’ll share first: a Mozu, or Bull-headed Shrike, happened to land on a close perch as I arrived at the park.

The same shot, full-sized:

And I even caught a nice shot of it flying away (larger image on click):

Other birds included a fair number of Mejiro (Japanese White-eyes) flitting around the park, scavenging among the reeds:

Again, a nice close-up shot, with larger image on click:

Early on, I saw several Black-faced Buntings in the trees, but they danced and flew far too fast to catch a good shot; however, I did get a view from a distance to confirm they were indeed the right Buntings:

There were also the ubiquitous Brown-eared Bulbuls–noisy, unafraid, and disappointing as always… but I did get a fairly close shot, so what the heck, here it is:

Along with all the ducks were the always-attractive Green-winged Teals. There were also some Coots and even a Moorhen among the ducks.

And what bird park is complete without a hungry feline?

As I left the park on my scooter along Wangan Boulevard, I was witness to a near-accident: a car passed at more than 100 kph–and then, when trying to merge left, the driver lost control and spun out in a rather spectacular fashion. He first served right and spun about ninety degrees, then the same in the other direction, and eventually almost did a 360. I kept expecting the car to lose its footing and start tumbling end-over-end, but it would seem the car’s engineers were far more in control than the driver of the car; eventually he straightened out, and then immediately slowed to under the speed limit. Still, the smell of burning rubber was thick in the air behind him.

After a minute or so, as he was now driving especially cautiously, I passed him… and saw that the driver was a man, and the woman and child in the back were presumably his family. What the hell he was thinking by driving that way with his family in the car in the first place is beyond me.

Okay, this is somewhat of a small thing, perhaps irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. But is anyone else in Japan (or anywhere else where they do this) tired of how cashiers in stores hand stuff to you at the end of the checkout process?

I have noticed that in most such situations, the clerk will hand you your member’s card (if you have one), your change in bills, your receipt, and your change in coins, all in one pile at one time. Does anyone else here hate that?

It seems dumb. First of all, you usually are holding your wallet in one hand, so you only have one hand free. They put all that in one hand when all else is finished, so while they go on to the next shopper and you’re supposed to move on, you must somehow (a) put the member’s card back in your wallet, (b) but the bills back in the wallet in a different place, (c) put the receipt wherever you need to put it, and (d) put the coins back in your pocket or in your change purse, all while both hands are full.

It’s even more dumb when you realize that it’s not necessary–while you are just standing there with your hand out, the clerk could hand you the card back first, and while you put that away, they could get the bills and hand them to you, and when you’ve put them away, they’d be ready to hand you the coins, and by the time you’ve put that away, the receipt would finally have printed out and perforated, and they could hand that to you, and you walk away ready to go.

Instead, you stand there for 10-15 seconds with your hand out ready to go, while the clerk picks up the card, counts out the bills, picks out the change, and then sits there waiting for the receipt to print out–and then they give you the whole pile, where you get to put four things in four different places with one hand.

Who thought up that stupid way of doing things? And why don’t they figure out more or less immediately that it’s the dumbest way to do things? I would try to explain it to the clerks, except (a) it would take a few minutes and they would just stare blankly at you or nod and then keep on doing it, (b) it would be tiring to take the time to explain this to five clerks a day, and (c) you know that they’d just do it again the next time anyway.

Some clerks do it right–hand back the card, then count out the bills for you, then give you the “komakai” (small) change, and then hand you the receipt. They did that for me today at the 100-yen shop, it worked smoothly. Then I go to the Pororoca supermarket in my building and they give me the hands-full, you-sort-it-out-magically solution.

Like I said, a trivial, irrelevant thing. And I know you’re not supposed to sweat the small stuff. The thing is, I really hate inefficiency like that. Kind of like the traffic lights that are timed to alternate so you get stopped at three red lights in a row when there’s no traffic-sense reason to do so. Kind of like in a shop, when they take a box you just bought which already has individually-wrapped pieces in a plastic sleeve inside the box, and then they wrap it in paper, put it in a bigger box, then put that in a bag for you. Or why more shops don’t use a common feeder line instead of making you try to guess which line will go fastest, or why Japanese supermarkets have no Express lane.

This is not the kind of stuff that takes a genius to figure out that it’s stupid as hell–it is plainly evident. That makes it all the more frustrating, especially when you see it several times a day.

If you recall, in July 2007, there was a story in Computerworld magazine that used cherry-picked data to make it look like Vista was a winner and the Mac OS was failing. The report said:

Windows Vista’s share of online users has increased every month this year, while rival Mac OS X — to which Vista has often been compared — has shown little, if any, growth, a metrics company reports. … Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30 … Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22 percent in January and hit its high point of 6.46 percent in May, but it slipped back to 6 percent in June.

This chart shows the cherry-picked data points:

As I pointed out, the Mac data was carefully chosen to give the impression of a declining market share, when in fact, historically, Mac market share had a tendency to flatline in Winter through mid-Summer, but to shoot up in late Summer through the beginning of Winter. I predicted in July of 2007 that the numbers would start to rise in “the next few months”–and I was right. In fact, the trend has just now begun to reach its full peak:

If it continues to match the trend, the market share has either peaked or will peak in February (perhaps March), after which it will stay level until July or August again. So far, my predictions have been almost spot-on; I predicted a rise to just over 8% by the beginning of 2008; while that is still possible, right now it is at just over 7.5%–not too far off, and certainly a hell of a lot more accurate than the paid prognosticator over at Computerworld.

I also pointed out that Vista sales were “increasing” only because (a) Vista started at zero, (b) is being sold by default with new computers, (c) and has a 90% market share to fulfill. In fact, relative to where it should have been, Vista sales were sagging, and people were asking that a 6-year-old OS (XP) be installed on their computers rather than a brand-new one (Vista), and that certainly held true. There is now a petition with nearly 80,000 signatures demanding that Microsoft abandon plans to stop selling Windows XP after this June, and with so many businesses refusing to switch to Vista, Microsoft is in the embarrassing position of actually having to consider keeping an old product alive and thereby admitting that their new product is a complete failure. Even the much-awaited Vista SP1, which was supposed to fix so many of the bugs in Vista and make it at least bearable, is failing to impress early testers. Analysts are now telling Microsoft that they should keep XP alive and on store shelves until 2009–when Vista’s successor is slated to arrive. (Though you shouldn’t bet the farm on that promise!)

All this probably explains why, as the Mac market share expands, Windows market share drops:

Ooo, and look! Microsoft’s market share is dropping exactly as Apple’s is increasing! What a coincidence!

Sure enough, Vista’s share expands only as new computers are sold to suckers who don’t know they can and should demand and get XP, so Vista’s market share continues to grow. But it’s anemic growth, at best: after one year on market shelves, Vista is only at a pitiful 12%. At this rate, it should reach 50% in only 3 more years, in March 2011–by which time, the next version of Windows will be two years overdue. How pathetic is that?

Following various trendlines, the Mac market share by early 2011 could be anywhere between 12% and 20%, probably landing somewhere in the middle of that. (My prediction: 15% by January 2011. That’s pretty realistic, and yet still allows for the possibility of the far-reaching prediction I made of 30% market share by 2015. But few trends stay that true for that long.)

Long story short: Me right, Computerworld dead wrong, Vista bites big hairy donkey balls. Not that this makes me Nostra-freakin’-damus (anyone could have crunched the numbers), but it might suggest that Computerworld should stop paying the hack they have on their payroll and instead mail his paycheck to me for writing this blog.

In a perfect world, that is.

It should be interesting to see what happens to McCain’s and Huckabee’s numbers now that Romney has unexpectedly pulled out of the race. Are Romney people the more religious segment of the party? How many are people who simply won’t accept McCain? How will Romney’s numbers be split between the two remaining candidates? It’ll be three days before the Gallup daily tracking polls have a full sampling on the split, but it should be interesting.

Also interesting is the sheer vehemence of the Republicans who simply cannot accept McCain. Several conservatives have already stated publicly that if it’s McCain vs. Hillary, they’d vote for Hillary. When McCain spoke at the conservative CPAC convention (where Ann Coulter last year called Edwards a “faggot”), the audience booed McCain–even though they were explicitly instructed not to boo him. Just the fact that they felt it necessary to admonish the crowd not too boo their front-runner in the first place is pretty telling of how much open revolt there is to his candidacy.

And that in itself is pretty amazing, considering that McCain is pretty conservative. He’s moderate on the budget and on immigration, but is firmly anti-choice, likes strict constructionists, is anti-union, anti-gay-marriage, anti-civil rights, pro-death penalty, is a hawk on war issues, and is the man on Iraq… so why do conservatives hate him so much? Do they look back to 2000 and think that he’s a liberal in conservative clothing? If so, they’re wrong–he was no more liberal back then than he is now, that was just an image of moderation, without actually being too much of a moderate.

To see just how conservatives see John McCain, see the “accidental” caption that Fox Noise put on McCain’s video clip (look at the party affiliation):

That’s the caption they put on Republicans who are exposed as sex offenders. Um, okay.

The more analysis that comes out about the results from Tuesday’s election, the more it becomes clear that this was a fairly clear victory for Barack Obama. The press has treated it pretty much as a tie, which is a bit grating–they were quick to call defeats for Obama when he did not meet exaggerated expectations, but they won’t give Clinton the same scrutiny. The fact is, Obama won Super Tuesday–in more ways than one.

First of all, despite Hillary’s taking the big states like California, New York, and New Jersey, Obama picked up 49% of the popular vote vs. Hillary’s 47%, and–it seems–roughly the same percentage of delegates. In other words, Obama won. Strange that this isn’t the story out there; when Hillary beat Obama in New Hampshire 39 to 36, it was a “stunner” because polls in the day or two before the primary had Obama ahead by a few points. Well, before Super Tuesday, Hillary was ahead in the polls more than Obama was in New Hampshire, and he beat her in a result that was much more stunning–but the media yawned, and called it a “wash,” or even sometimes a Clinton “victory.”

The fact is, Obama was playing catch-up, and down to the last minute, was down in most of the polls, especially in the Super-Tuesday states. See this post by Kos, showing polling data right up to the day before the election, which showed Obama momentum, but also that the polls had Hillary with a clear lead. He should have lost, by all expectations–and needed to stay within a few hundred delegates behind Hillary to stay in the race. Super Tuesday was supposed to be Hillary’s chance to knock Obama out of the race altogether, and yet Obama actually came out ahead. How is that, by any measure or stretch of the imagination, a “victory” for Hillary?

One should note also that Obama actually exceeded expectations more than Hillary did; where the polls called for them to get a certain amount of the vote, Obama gained more than the polls predicted more often and more strongly than Clinton did:

Some call Hillary the winner because she has more delegates–but only when you count the “super-delegates” into the equation. However, these were not votes “earned” on the day of the election, rather votes granted to her by a few powerful people some time ago, when Hillary was way out in front, and considered to be the shoo-in for the candidacy. One can hardly count that as part of Tuesday’s elections. If you count only the delegates earned, on the actual election day, then Obama comes out ahead.

Add to this the fact that Obama is poised to win 6 out of the next 7 races in February, and rack up a lot more delegates, and Hillary’s “victory” appears even more hollow.

Furthermore, while Hillary won the big states (except for Illinois) on Super Tuesday, she won fewer states than Obama, and the states she won, she won by more shallow margins:

Of the 9 states with a Clinton lead, all save for one (Arkansas) were taken with less than 60% of the vote. Of the 13 states Obama won, only 5 were taken with less than 60%; 5 more were won with 60~70% leads, and three were won with a 70~80% majority landslide. This helps explain why Obama got more delegates.

What’s more, Obama is raking in the money, while Clinton is having a hard time scraping together enough to pay the bills. She had to “lend” herself $5 million (money on loan from her senatorial coffers), and on top of that, was forced to ask her top staffers to go without pay. Obama out-raised Hillary in January by a two-to-one margin or more. And despite a big push by the Clinton campaign to get as many donations as possible, she has raised only half of what Obama has generated since the polls closed on Tuesday–Obama has gotten over $7.5 million, while Hillary has raised somewhere between $3 and $4 million in the same time period. Obama raised $5 million of that in less than 24 hours–the same amount that Hillary loaned to herself.

On a side note, there is a Hillary development that is troubling me: Hillary seems to have made a friend out of Rupert Murdock, the ultra-conservative media magnate who founded Fox Noise and has worked to wreck the progressive cause. In 2006, he hosted a fundraiser for Hillary, donating money to her campaign himself–in 2007, she got $40,000 from Fox News executives. And now she’s double-dog daring Obama to a Fox Noise debate.

If you recall, John Edwards spearheaded the boycott of Fox News as a debate host earlier last year, and Obama and Hillary jumped on board. The principle is sound: don’t put yourself in the hands of the propaganda machine of your political opponents.

Except now, Hillary is tossing progressives overboard and hopes to score some points with a political maneuver which smacks of party betrayal.

One can only assume that the dirty campaigning she tried in South Carolina is not exhausted yet (she’s just getting smarter in how to carry it out), as things get tight for her campaign and she faces a month-long stretch in the doghouse.

You know how the RIAA whines about how downloading music of the Internet is really hurting the artists? How it’s not so much about the greedy, parasitic corporate suits as it is about the struggling, bona-fide musicians who are just trying to get by–except for all you lousy, stinking criminals who keep stealing their music and taking food out of starving artists’ mouths? And so forth and yadda yadda yadda.

Well, despite the fact that the musicians do all the work, spilling their hearts into the music, writing and arranging and performing, the RIAA pays them a pittance–and now wants to cut that even further. Despite the fact that digital downloads and digital streaming costs far less to distribute than traditional CDs, the RIAA thinks that current royalties paid for a music track (now at 9 cents) is much too high. They want to pay less than that. For a downloaded track, the songwriters are asking for 15 cents; the RIAA wants to cut the current rate by about half, down to 5 cents.

For streaming music–aka Internet radio–the artists want 12.5% of the money made. The RIAA: take 0.6% and be happy with our extreme generosity. Why? Because, they say, streaming music is like radio and artists don’t deserve any of that revenue. Which is full of it, because radio doesn’t pay, last I checked, while streaming music now does. The RIAA wants all the money made from streaming music, and wants to give the artists squat.

For the Democrats, Super Tuesday was interesting indeed. Obama and Clinton virtually split the popular vote exactly down the middle; some estimates have Hillary winning 49% to 48%, others have the same numbers the other way around. Hillary won more big states, but Obama won more states overall, often by larger margins. Hillary won one state with over 60% of the vote, but Obama won several in that range–and at least three states with wins in the 70’s or 80’s. Hillary will get more delegates, but mostly because of Super-delegate votes, which are not a popular or democratic measure, but rather a political one. Even so, the delegate count remains very close.

And, as noted before, several races remain in February, most of which are leaning in favor of Obama. And momentum is with him. While Super Tuesday was not a decisive win for him, the press at least is not pulling another New Hampshire–they are not claiming that Obama lost because he did not beat the most optimistic polls in his favor. Everyone is calling this an even split, but the unreported story is that this is a big win for Obama. He should have lost by a fair margin today, especially by what the last-day polls were saying. That he held it to a tie is great news for him: it means that he is holding his own, and since the momentum is his, he stands to gain more and more as time goes on.

Still, Hillary has more of those Super-delegates lined up, and she might be able to hold this out until the convention, where the gaming will really start.

One thing in Obama’s favor: more and more people seem to be coming around to the idea that Obama will fare much better against McCain than Hillary could. The more people realize how Obama will perform in a general election, the more people will realize that Obama hold much more hope of a Democrat winning the election this November.

I didn’t know that tupperware even had an operating system.

Obama has momentum. But then again, he did before New Hampshire. Polls show him just now edging out Hillary in California. Again, the same as New Hampshire. And yet, so many signs are good for Obama. He raised $32 million in January, while Clinton probably did a lot worse (they’re not saying, but one report has the number at “at least” $10 million). And despite Krugman’s out-of-balance Obama-bashing (sorry, but Krugman’s over-reaction to Obama goes way beyond logic), Obama is racking up the endorsements, and not just from the Kennedys.

I think the key thing here is to keep perspective, and look at it as Obama catching up. Obama supposedly lost in New Hampshire, right? A big blow to his campaign. Except one thing: he lost by only a few percentage points, in a race where Hillary had a huge lead in the polls up until the last several days. The real story about New Hampshire for Obama was a come-from-way-behind almost-win, not some sort of crushing defeat.

The problem is, a lot of people are now touting Obama as a possible winner on Super Tuesday–so if he gets fewer than 50% of the total votes tomorrow, even if he performs admirably compared to where he was in the polls a week ago, people will call it a “loss.” Despite the fact that (a) Hillary has no chance of tying up the nomination tomorrow, not even close to it, (b) Obama is doing better in states that will vote after Super Tuesday, and (c) momentum is in his favor, which means he’ll do better in a drawn-out race. Even if Obama “loses” tomorrow, so long as it’s not a blow-out in Hillary’s favor, it’s good news for the Obama campaign. These things are not decided in one day–this will be a long, drawn-out affair, and in that context, Obama has the advantage.

And let’s not forget that after Super Tuesday, we have a stack of February primaries (Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington, Maryland, Virginia, and Hawaii) which almost all favor Obama heavily; even if he “loses” his momentum on Super Tuesday, he’s bound to pick it back up with successive wins in the weeks following. (Ironically, in an election year where so many states flooded the early calendar so as to be more relevant, it’s the states at the end of the calendar that may prove most influential of all!)

Obama does have one big disadvantage: the primary race is among Democrats and some Independents, and so we see fewer of Hillary’s flaws and fewer of Obama’s strengths in the context that counts: in a general election where everybody votes. In a general election, Hillary will face far greater obstacles than will Obama. Say all you want about Hillary being a fighter (though that hasn’t helped her much against Obama), say all you want about her being pre-smeared and that things somehow couldn’t get worse for her–the fact remains, she is polarizing. She stands a far worse chance of bringing Independents to her side than Obama does, and she stands virtually no chance of bringing any Republicans over.

But the big story was pointed out to me a few days ago: Hillary will not just lose the Republican vote solidly; she will actually galvanize the right wing and help them bring out the vote. Republicans who will be dissatisfied enough with John McCain and/or accepting enough of Obama will stay home, if those are the choices. But those same voters will turn out in droves to defeat Hillary Clinton. That is a huge negative for Clinton which does not show up in any way in the primaries.

Even further down the road, we have to look at how things will play out after a Hillary or Obama victory. If Obama becomes president, he will likely have much bigger coattails than Hillary, helping him win more congressional seats for the Democrats; Hillary, in bringing out the Republican vote, will lose more seats for the Democrats. Neither will have a Democratic super-majority, so either would have to face a Republican filibuster machine perhaps even more obstinate and obstructionist than the one that has shut down virtually every Democratic initiative for the past year. Obama fixes this by bringing the center to him; Hillary fixes this by running to the center, which means that if you think her proposals are more progressive today, you won’t much like them next year–and Obama will suddenly look a lot better.

This especially counts towards health care: there is no way that any Hillary health care plan will get through a Republican Senate filibuster. The Republicans have too much history, too much invested in that. They vaulted to power in 1994 very much aided by their opposition to Hillary’s health care plan back then; allowing one to pass for President Hillary would be unthinkable for them. Where they could deal with Obama, they will flat-out shut down Hillary. Whatever you think of mandates, Hillary will not bring you anything come 2009. Even if you think that that is no worse than an Obama health care plan winning, it still cancels out any advantage Hillary has over Obama, leaving Obama again with all the advantages.

And then there’s the chance, as I explained earlier, that Obama, in bringing more votes for Democratic Senate and House seats, will not only have a stronger voting bloc in Congress, but will scare more Republicans who won by close margins; if Obama can maintain a strong, positive, and popular image in office, as Reagan did, then he may very well get his “Obama Republicans” which might even give him that filibuster-proof Senate super-majority. The one Hillary has no chance of getting.

That, along with the very real chance that Hillary could lose the election to a Republican–which for Democrats this year is the nightmare scenario–demonstrates more and more reason to support Obama.

There has been quite a lot said recently about how McCain has the power to appeal across party lines. While, surprisingly, fewer seem to talk about Obama Republicans, there has been more than a little talk about McCain Democrats:

His penchant to stray from the GOP herd is legendary, and explains his ability to attract independent voters and Reagan Democrats. McCain’s appeal across party lines emboldens wishful thinkers about a Republican victory in November.

I believe that the primary reason this impression persists is that Democrats haven’t been much exposed to McCain recently. They were, a bit, before his candidacy went under the first time, but that was a while back, and McCain strangely still seems able to draw upon his image as the “straight-talker” from eight years ago.

And eight years ago, McCain did appeal a lot to the left–albeit superficially. Known for his attacks on illicit campaign financing and pork-barrel spending, he spoke out against conservative Christian influence on the party and criticized the Confederate flag. He became a media darling because he allowed nearly unfettered access and answered almost every question put to him, or at least that was the image he maintained. He further gained sympathy from the left when he was mercilessly smeared by the Bush-Rove machine, and after the 2000 elections, there were even rumors that he was in negotiations to join the Democratic party. As late as 2004, there were rumors that Kerry might consider him as a vice-presidential candidate.

So is McCain really someone who would appeal to independents or even liberals? Despite his surface appeal, McCain is actually pretty solidly conservative. If you get past the popular image and see where he stands on the issues, and McCain comes across as more of a right-winger than most people are aware. He would repeal Roe v. Wade; he strongly supports the death penalty and wants to see it used more, with fewer appeals granted; he approves of school vouchers; he’s a military hawk, especially on Iraq, and sees us staying there for a long time; he has strongly supported the “Patriot” Act and save for his reservations on torture, has generally supported the attack on civil rights in the “War on Terror™”; he is not strong on health care; he is anti-union; he wants to privatize social security; the NAACP rates him at 7% for not supporting civil rights; and he supports the flag-burning amendment.

He gets wishy-washy on several issues: he opposes gay marriage, but not to the point of approving of a constitutional ban–he’s for civil unions, but seems comfortable with homosexual discrimination going on in the background. He has a mixed record on gay rights, but ultimately scores a low 33% in his voting record; he also has mixed records on education and the environment. He’s against the Confederate flag–kind of… he doesn’t want it on top of a state building, but in front is OK, and he acknowledges the “cultural heritage” many use to excuse the racist message behind it. He would not mandate prayer in schools, but is fine with “allowing” it. He believes in evolution, but wants school districts to decide on whether to add creationism to the science curriculum; he supports some gun bans, but ultimately supports the Second Amendment and wants to loosen already weak gun control laws; he is anti-abortion, though he supports an exception for rape and approves of stem cell research; he was against Bush’s tax cuts at first, but now approves extending them.

He is fairly liberal on immigration, but most of his “independent” image seems to come from his stances on economic and government reform issues–from budgeting and pork-barrel spending to campaign finance and special-interest influence. That, and his appearances on The Daily Show. But as far as being “moderate” on the issues, that’s about as far as he goes.

In fact, he is about as conservative as Obama is liberal; the are similar in that they are both fairly deep into their respective ideologies, but both also seem to appeal across party lines. The difference comes when you see why: while Obama get his appeal through his elegance and his ability to address people on core principles that can sway them across party lines, McCain seems to depend almost wholly on his “maverick” image from the 2000 campaign, the public perception that he’s a switch-hitter, rather than any solid reason or ability to use rhetoric in any way.

In the end, there’s only so far that campaign finance reform and his now-tarnished image from the “Straight Talk Express” can take him. There is too much awareness of McCain as having caved on his principles from eight years ago and sucked up big-time to the same conservative Christians and hard-right-wingers who trashed him eight years ago. And it won’t be too hard to use Iraq against him; the image of his meltdown where he claimed it was safe to walk the streets of Baghdad is not much helped by his recent statements about being in Iraq for a hundred years. Add to that the fact that he is a short-tempered 72-year-old cancer survivor. Not that the age nor the cancer detract from him personally, but when you’re looking at someone who may inhabit the White House for the next eight years, it does raise some concerns.

Whatever people say about McCain’s ability to cross party lines, when it comes down to it, I’ll bet on Obama’s record and charisma over McCain’s any day.

It snowed about ten days ago; when I blogged on it, it was just a light dusting in the morning. It continued to be somewhat heavier than that, but still didn’t amount to much. Today has been a bit more snowy; it started early morning, and has continued all day, leaving a much thicker layer of white over Tokyo. And it figures, too–the first day I planned to really get back to birding, and this hits us. So I have to be satisfied with snapping a few photos of snowy central Tokyo out the window.

So, Sachi and I are holing up in our cozy apartment, watching TV (Sachi loves Boston Legal) and generally being lazy. Usually Sachi goes for homeopathy lessons at a private school, but they cancelled classes today. As I may have pointed out before, Tokyo doesn’t tolerate snow well–most likely half the train lines are out right now.

News reports have several train lines out of service, dozens of flights cancelled, the Shinkansen (bullet train) slowed or halted, at least 16 snow-related injuries, highways closed, and a major marathon race with 20,000 participants in western Tokyo called off.

They say that 3 cm of snow has fallen. That’s a hair over one inch. Those of you in regions that operate normally through several feet of snow can stop laughing now.

Staying home can have its benefits, though; I get more of Sachi’s cooking. We do split cooking duties, but there’s little use denying she’s a lot better at it. Last night, it was pasta with chicken and pork with a tuna sashimi salad and strawberries in yogurt flavored with fresh lemon juice on the side. The photo doesn’t do it justice.

I remember back to my days as a model in television commercials. Well, okay, I was in one commercial. But I also did some voice-over work for radio ads, and had a gig as the host for a half-hour TV show. Not an ongoing TV show in a half-hour format, but rather just a show that was on for a single half-hour. Well, okay, it was kind of an infomercial. I think I still have that videotape around here somewhere.

Even still, that all sounds rather impressive, much more so if you’ve ever seen what I look like, or heard what I sound like. My secret: I was almost the only game in town. That helps a lot.

This was back in 1985 to 1987, in my first few years living and working in Japan. I got a job teaching English at the Toyama YMCA. Toyama Prefecture, on the Japan Sea coast halfway down Honshu, had a population of one million; three hundred thousand lived in Toyama City, where I lived and worked. And in the entire prefecture, there were only about thirty non-Asian foreigners around, and I was one of them. So when a local TV station wanted a foreign model for a local car dealership commercial, or a foreign voice for a local radio ad, they didn’t have many alternatives to turn to. So I got the gigs.

This comes to mind because I just finished writing answers to questions for a spot in The Japan Times to be published in a week or two. They have a new “blogroll” feature they’re trying out, and I was asked if I would participate. The feature focuses on Japan bloggers, and I guess I qualify–I told them that Japan is not the main focus of my blog, but being based in Japan is a big part of it, it seems. I doubt that this blog would be getting that kind of attention otherwise; like I said, it helps to be part of a smaller population if you want to get noticed. Not that there is a dearth of blogs in or about Japan, but it is a sub-group of relatively limited population, especially compared to the now-burgeoning blogosphere.

The evolution of this sub-group also brings to mind a comparison with how I have fit into communities in Japan since coming here a few decades ago. Back in 1985, I was one of a very limited sub-group; being outnumbered 10,000 to one in a city where most people look radically different from you is quite the experience. Back then, I used to turn heads every day. A lot of double-takes, a lot of whispered, “Ah, gaijin da!” Groups of teenage kids would dare each other to speak English to me, and once I even scared a little girl silly by smiling at her and saying, “Konnichi wa!”

Moving to Tokyo changed that. It was refreshing to not be noticed so much any more, to walk down the street and not cause a stir. To have local residents be bored at the sight of me much more often than startled or amazed. Not being noticed can be a big thing after being the center of attention for a few years.

Not that I was the center of anyone’s attention in the blogosphere, now or back then. I started this blog when blogs were pretty new, and average-Joe blogs were just taking off. I joined a webring called “Japan Bloggers” when there were only a few dozen members. You can still find blogs out there with archives going back before 2003, but not a whole lot. Still, blogs were not exactly rare, and with American politics evolving like it was, a lot of people found a reason to go online with their thoughts.

Nevertheless, it was a lot less crowded of an arena back then. Today, it’s very easy to get lost in the stampede. So being a member of a still relatively-limited corner of the blogosphere can get you noticed.

Having the TV switched on to Japanese channels like Sachi has a lot allows me to observe a lot of stuff I had not seen before. One of them is what products are being pushed. And one that I find interesting is that the MacBook Air is being advertised a lot in Japan. It’s the exact same manila-envelope ad which you see in America. Which makes me wonder if the speculation is true, about the MacBook Air being targeted at Japanese consumers as a way to increase the Mac’s languishing market share here.

I’m losing track. Six months back, we had captured or killed the #3 man in al Qaeda for the sixth time. But now word is out that not only is the 7th #3 man down, but at least one, and maybe as many as three more of “Al Qaeda’s #3 man” is pushing up daisies. My prior list had: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Abu Hamza Rabia, Abu Zubaydah, Abdul Hadi Al-Iraqi, and Mohammad Atef; and, at that time, Saif al-Adel was still at large.

But now, Steve Benen at Political Animal says that Saif al-Adel is one of the ex-#3 men, and adds two more names–Mohammed Sheikh Mohammed and someone code-named “C-2” to the list–along with a brand-new #3 man, Abu Laith al-Libi, who is now also dead.

I count ten so far, not counting whoever just inherited the #3 parking space. Benen says it best: “You’d think, after a while, al Qaeda’s #4 guys would stop seeking promotions.” Indeed.

As I pointed out last July, this whole “We Got al Qaeda’s #3 Man” game is wearing thin. Al Qaeda apparently has an inexhaustible supply of #3 men. The farce is in the fact that the whole thing is repeated again and again–which only shows that either the U.S. government is exaggerating the importance of the people they’re taking out, or that terror organizations are not hurt by the loss of “important” leaders. And the continuing line of #3 men walking into the grinder just emphasizes that the #1 man–bin Laden–is still evading capture.

But hey, John McCain has a secret plan to capture bin Laden. It’s one of those things that he can’t tell us about or else bin Laden will get wise. But apparently he’s also willing to keep it a secret from the U.S. government, and–as the Carpetbagger points out–seems willing to allow bin Laden to stay free for another year until McCain takes power, and then he’ll unleash his secret plan.

How very Nixonesque of him.

While on the Republican side, McCain clearly won the Giuliani vote. Edwards’ bowing out of the race brought a far less clear result. While it may seem that Clinton got only one point and Obama three out of the 4 points Edwards’ lost campaign gave up (the polling sample included three days, only one of which where Edwards had announced the end of his campaign), the truth is better seen in light of recent trends.

As I posted yesterday, Clinton has been losing one point per day while Obama gains the same. Presuming the same has held true, then Hillary lost one point again–but gained two points from Edwards. Obama probably gained one point on his own, but Edwards gave him two points as well. So it would seem that while Obama continues to gain on Hillary, they are splitting the Edwards supporters between them. Yesterday, Obama was 6 points behind Hillary, today he is four points behind.

What will happen in two days, when all polling results in this daily poll reflect Edwards’ withdrawal? If the current trend continues, it could be tied in two days–Clinton and Obama both at 45%. The remaining 10% undecideds would make all the difference… unless Obama’s upwards trend continues.

However, from the polls I have been seeing, Obama faces an obstacle: most of the big Super-Tuesday states are Hillary-heavy. If Obama’s support is in post-Super-Tuesday arenas, that support could suffer if Hillary takes most of the victories next week.