Looks like Christmas is coming early this year!

From The AP:

Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham says the former Alaska governor invested herself deeply and passionately in the project. He says the book contains fascinating detail.

The 400-page book is the first for Palin, who has been an object of fascination since Republican Sen. John McCain chose her as his running mate during his 2008 presidential bid. The book will be called “Going Rogue: An American Life.”

A huge first printing of 1.5 million copies has been commissioned by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Folks, she’s laying some serious groundwork for a 2012 run. There’s really no other reason why she would quit her position as Governor, give speeches in China and write a memoir.

But the question remains…will she be going for the GOP nomination or will she be “going rogue?”

Sorry, I had to…

Now, there’s a haircut you can set your watch to. The man is thoughtful and well-spoken. He says what he means and means what he says – Orwell would be proud. Listening to him was a pleasure.

Particularly poignant were the last four minutes of the interview when he speaks of the lack of long-term thinking and information overload.

His advice to future leaders:

1. be super competent, never stop learning
2. take care of your people and the people you serve
3. have a personal code based on a value and ethical system you can be proud of

That’s good advice, sans proselytizing.

We are doomed without personal morality and our consumerist techno-culture doesn’t exactly stress responsibility and mindfulness. The best a person or organization can do is seek knowledge, pay attention to (and take care of) others, and be honest with oneself.

When asked if the new generation has a personal code Zinni replies that it’s hard because the institutions that used to provide such a foundation (family, faith, and schools were his examples) aren’t.

It is hard, but I think our morality is evolving with everything else. We’re scraping off the facade of institutions and reclaiming the values upon which they were built. We’ll find our way.

This is Danielle Ivory, reporting from the American News Project and Alternet.

Back in February, in the House Financial Service Committee, when asked a question about the value of Citigroup’s assets, CEO Vikram Pandit provided a less-than-clear response: “It’s an extraordinarily difficult question.”

Click the video below to WATCH the exchange between Rep. Louis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Vikram Pandit.

Rob Weissman, director of the corporate watchdog group, Essential Action, and author of a new report called Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America, said that, in addition to what Pandit said, there’s an additional factor that could fog the test results: off-the-book assets.

“If you don’t include the off-balance sheet assets in the stress test, then it’s not a legitimate stress test,” Weissman said. “It’s pretty plain that the off-balance-sheet operations are a central part of the story of why we don’t know what the banks own.” The Treasury Department declined to comment on whether they would take off-book-assets into account when running the stress tests.

Weissman says that recipients of bailout money, like Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan, have been engaging in “fanciful accounting” of what they owe and what they own by relocating of their less-than-healthy assets off the books, in shadow corporations. Rep. Brad Sherman has described the process as, “apples on one balance sheet and oranges on another.”

According to RGE Monitor, off-balance-sheet operations have skyrocketed over the last 15 years. From 1992 to 2007, on-balance-sheet assets grew by 200 percent, while off-balance-sheet assets grew by 1,518 percent. In 2007, it was estimated that there was 15.9 times more money parked in off-balance-sheet operations than in on-the-book operations. Not all off-book assets are toxic. Some financial institutions might park assets off their books if they are planning, for instance, to sell them. However, in rough economic times, off-balance sheet accounting allows banks to veil their losses from investors, regulators, and even insiders.

“This turns out to be a really important benefit [for a bank] if it happens to be insolvent,” Weissman added. “And many believe that if you total Citigroup’s assets and liabilities, it is insolvent.”

As of July, Citigroup appeared to have the most off-book assets — an estimated $1.1 trillion. But they aren’t alone. As of July 2008, JP Morgan Chase & Co. had more than $400 billion off their books. Bank of America had $48.2 billion off the books before it bought Merrill Lynch. “If you start adding up all the potential exposures, it’s a huge number,” Sam Golden, former ombudsman for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told Bloomberg. “The banks will say that it was disclosed. Investors are saying, ‘Yeah, but it was cryptic.’”

Disclosure rules for off-balance sheet operations are notably less strict than those for assets on the books. Neri Bukspan, chief accountant for Standard & Poor’s told Bloomberg, “A lot of information tends to disappear.”

The use of the off-balance-sheet assets was a core part of the Enron scandal, where they were able to wrap debt inside of debt, using obscure corporations, so no one could track what they owed and what they owned. After the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was set in place, there were efforts to address the problems with off-book assets. But after heavy lobbying by two main trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the American Securitization Forum, banks were given special exemptions.

In September of 2008 as the financial crisis was coming into full view, the Senate Baking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held a hearing, discussing off-balance sheet operations. Senator Jack Reed recalled Enron: “This phenomenon of moving assets off the balance sheets is eerily familiar. We recall back in the days of Enron that its schemes to manufacture false profits included special purpose entities that conducted transactions off-balance sheet. The goal was to avoid financial reporting. While no one is necessarily suggesting scandals of the Enron kind, we cannot fail to admit the irony. We are dealing with a similar problem yet again, only six years later.”

George P. Miller, Executive Director of the American Securitization Forum, said that moving assets off-book back on to the books would cause dangerous swelling of balance sheets. He added, “There are many other steps that the industry can and should undertake to promote broader and better transparency about risk exposures in these vehicles, whether they are on or off-balance sheet.”

But Donald Young, former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board countered, “We just had an investment bank [Lehman Brothers] go bankrupt with a fair value balance sheet that showed it had plenty of assets and liabilities. And it almost seems like financial reporting is out of control and not trusted and not believed in. And I think what we do here has got to establish transparency. If the transparency is such that we’re going to bring out some bad news that wasn’t there before, that’s a risk. But I think the benefits of reestablishing confidence in the markets will overwhelm that.”

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) are revising the rules so some off-book assets will have to be reported on the books. However, the changes won’t be effective until January 2010 at the earliest. In March at a House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing, Rep. Sherman complained about this lag. He told the chairman of the FASB, Bob Herz, “If you guys can’t act quickly and logically, perhaps the regulatory accountants need to act and depart from what is a somewhat illogical and certainly slow process that you’ve got.”

In the meantime, in a recent letter to his employees, Pandit has said Citigroup is having its best quarter since 2007 and the bank had conducted its own internal stress tests with positive results. But Weissman says something doesn’t add up. “Either they’ve done a lot of due diligence in a short amount of time that they hadn’t done before, or the stories are incompatible.”

Crossposted at Alternet.

Here she is with David Gregory explaining Lincoln’s leadership and Obama’s intentions to stock his cabinet with campaign rivals…

First Biden. Then Hillary. And now we get word of Bill Richardson.

But who will be the Republicans in the cabinet?

More as it develops…

Sure, it’s just a book tour, but we all know what it’s really about.

From NY Times:

Mr. Huckabee’s new book could offer him a fresh platform to weigh in on the emerging debate over the Republican Party’s future. His Web site describes it as: “Huckabee’s amazing story, in his own words s — from making commercials with Chuck Norris to meeting a Michigan woman who insisted on donating her wedding ring.

But this is more than just a campaign memoir. It’s a vision for a smarter, fairer type of politics— “‘vertical politics” — as he has espoused before, that focuses on common-sense solutions for education, health care, the economy, and many other issues. It’s not about right versus left; it’s about taking America up rather than down.”

If that’s Huckabee’s message in 2012, it’ll need some tweaking. “I’ll see your “change” and raise you some “vertical politics”?” Hmm…

Perhaps, it should be “I’ll see your “change” and raise you some “common sense.”

Regardless, the themes are emerging…

There has been speculation about this which I’ve ignored, no doubt because there are enough policy reasons to oppose Barack Obama and I don’t want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia.

But I’ve finally read Jack Cashill’s lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. It is thorough, thoughtful, and alarming — particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.

There is nothing in Obama’s scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is. And when Obama speaks extemporaneously, one doesn’t hear the same voice one encounters in the book.

Now maybe Obama has a backlog of writing fom Columbia or Harvard that signal great literary promise, but he not only hasn’t shared it, he’s assiduously hidden traces of it. And, to be sure, writing is different from speaking — in fairness, some of Obama’s off-the-cuff bumbling when he speaks is certainly due to the rigors of the campaign which would cause even the most gifted communicator to faulter from time to time. But it’s not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator.

Two immediate, glaring problems with McCarthy’s logic here.

First, extemporaneous speaking is live and off the cuff. Writing (well, at least good writing) is overly considered and slavishly revised. Why he doesn’t appreciate the obvious distinction is beyond me. But maybe he just writes everything once and never looks back. I guess that would explain his post.

Second, there is this other form of speaking that politicians do all the time. And it’s quite a bit like writing. It’s called “the political speech” and the good ones are, you guessed it, overly considered and slavishly revised. Again, why McCarthy chooses to highlight extemporaneous speaking and ignores the flowery prose that speechifying brings with it is not only odd, it also smacks of intellectual dishonesty. I mean, McCarthy’s no dummy and he hasn’t been living in a cave for the past 4 years. He knows what one of Obama’s key strengths is. And it appears as if he’s purposefully ignoring it.

So then, what about that analysis from Jack Cashill moved McCarthy so much that he simply had to write a post about it?

Here’s how The American Thinker article starts out:

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called — with a straight face — “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.

Gee, how can you argue with a hypothesis as iron clad as that? “The American Thinker” indeed.

Again, this all sounds like a big fit of jealousy (masked as a conspiracy theory) that tries once again. to tie Obama to the notion of terrorism in the form of Bill Ayers.

No wonder William F. Buckley’s son is backing Obama.

The conventions have certainly got the partisan juices flowing. How about a change of pace?

I read David Mayhew’s “Divided we Govern” during a recent sea-faring holiday, a book I had intended to read for some time. It is one of the cornerstone works of scholarship on which I have built the divided government voting heuristic promoted in my blog.

The book can be a tough slog for a casual reader like myself. Working through the extensive footnotes and supporting material that some would consider dry, perhaps arid, maybe even Sahara desert-like, requires some perseverance. But Mayhew has a clean, approachable style, writes with clarity, and if you bring a curiosity of why things really get done (or don’t) in Washington – it is a fascinating read.

There is a pervasive belief – a nugget of “conventional wisdom” – that if you want to “get things done” in Congress, whether legislation, investigations to clean up governmental abuses, or just promote “change“, a single party must control the Presidency and both legislative branches to avoid gridlock. It certainly seems intuitively obvious that the federal government would be more productive if all branches are run by one party. In this book David Mayhew proved the conventional wisdom flat wrong, at least in the modern era. He put the proposition to the test by rigorously quantifying and analyzing all legislation and investigations (the two primary functions of Congress) from 1946-2002. First published in 1991, the book was updated with a second edition in 2005. It is the seminal reference work that debunked the notion that the federal government functions more effectively with unified single party control.

But if unified vs. divided government does not correlate to congressional productivity, what are the factors that prompts congress to “get things done”? Mahew analyzes some of the possibilities in the book. Watching the ubiquitous blue “Change” signs waving at the Democratic convention and listening to McCain’s born-again “Change” message at the Republican convention, I was reminded of one such Mayhew hypothesis. In his data, he documents periods spanning many years, where Congress becomes very productive in what Mayhew calls a legislative and/or investigatory “surge”. Having eliminated any consideration that single party government is correlated with these productive congressional eras, he speculates on other factors that might drive these legislative surges.

This portion of the book is considerably less rigorous statistically, but it is interesting and potentially directly relevant to what we are seeing in this 2008 election season. Specifically, Mayhew explores the notion that a primary pre-requisite for these periodic legislative “surges” is a pervasive “public mood” demanding “change”. He wrote this more than a decade before the Obama candidacy, but his analysis may be the key to unlocking one of the great puzzles of this election. What does “change” really mean to the public in this context?

[WARNING: Long post continues after the fold]

Mayhew:

“… causes of legislative surges can be found in extended expressions of “public purpose” or creedal passion.” To put it another way, they can be located in a certain kind of “public mood” that favors change via government action (Some “moods” have that aim; others, as in the private- oriented 1920s, discourage government action). A “mood” seems to be one of those phenomena that drive political scientists to despair by being at once important and elusive. But perhaps something useful can be said. In principle, a “public mood” probably has the following features. First, much of at least the politically aware public, inside and outside Washington, shares a certain outlook about what can and should be done right now on a wide range of political issues. Second, a large number of people who possess that outlook bring considerable intensity to it; they are not lukewarm. Third, to the extent that the outlook calls for it, an appreciable number of people go on to engage in, to use a term that is probably as serviceable as any, citizen action. They actually do things: They may form organizations, persuade others, go to meetings, give money, write letters, join protests, approach members of Congress, in general make themselves heard and felt. Fourth, the outlook in question is in some sense dominant: Non- sharers of it have a hard time wholly resisting its intellectual or political appeal or mustering intensity or action against it… Fifth, a “public mood” has a beginning and an end. The outlook, the intensity, and the citizen action emerge or balloon at some detectable juncture, and then several years later, at another juncture, they deflate or disappear… An anti-government mood may not call for much citizen action, but a mood favoring change through government action requires -or at least seems to be associated with- a great deal. Levers need to be moved.” – David Mahew – Divided we Govern

Examples offered by Mayhew of documented decade-long legislative surges that were driven by a palpable “public mood favoring change” include: reconstruction in the 1860’s; the “progressive”movement in the 1910’s; Roosevelt’s “New Deal” of the thirties; and the civil rights/ womens’ rights/environmental and social programs of the LBJ/Nixon era (yes, you read that right – Mayhew documents that the generally liberal legislative surge of that era equally bracket both the LBJ and Nixon presidencies.) The question on the table, is whether the much heralded public appetite for “change” that has been promoted by the Obama candidacy and adopted by the McCain candidacy, is in the category of a “public mood favoring change” as described by Mayhew.

If you look at Mayhew’s five criteria for a “palpable public mood”, it is easy to conclude all the conditions have been met. Certainly, if the Obama campaign is used as a proxy for that public mood, we can check off criteria 2 through 5:

• #2 - Observable supporter intensity? – Check.
• #3 - Large numbers engaging, joining and doing things? – Check.
• #4 - Difficult for opposing views to resist? – Well the Clintons will agree, and since McCain adopted rather than fight the mantra – Check.
• #5 - The mood has a beginning and an end? – Certainly the beginning is in evidence. – Check.

But then we have criteria #1: A common outlook about what can and should be done right now on a wide range of political issues.

So exactly WTF is it? What specifically is this public political appetite that Obama and McCain are trying to feed? What are the specific political issues that both Obama and McCain supporters broadly agree must be changed right now? The phenomena is real, but do we know what it is really about?

We can ask the candidates. In their acceptance speeches both candidates endeavored to define and promote the “change” they represent. Obama offered an unremarkable litany of liberal Democratic policy positions. McCain offered an unremarkable litany of conservative Republican policy positions. So each candidate, acutely aware of a “palpable public mood for change“, wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of change, then explicitly pitched the proposition that the same partisan bromides that Republicans and Democrats have been flogging for decades represent the change that the public seeks. Tough sell.

Here is the rub – Mayhew’s criteria specifies that the kind of pervasive public mood for change that results in a real legislative surge, that results in real change, must include broad agreement on what can and should be done across the partisan divide. Where do we have that now? Do we have broad agreement on environmental policy? global warming? education policy? taxing policy? deficits and spending policy? judicial appointments? abortion? religious participation in governmental policy? same sex marriage? right to work? Equal pay? Immigration policy? homeland security? social security? I don’t think so. So they are all off the list. Moreover, both presidential campaigns are useless at articulating what exactly this “change” means. So we are left to our own devices.

Here is my take on what this inchoate public impulse for “change” really means, and by extension, what this election is really about. Your mileage may vary.

THE CONSENSUAL “CHANGE” CHAMPIONS
(In reverse order)

“Change” 2nd Runner Up – Health Care / Energy Policy (tie)
These are both a close call for me, I profess no certitude about either, but I am saying that they both make the cut. Barely. In both cases, there seems to be a hue and cry in the electorate that “something must be done.” For both issues, strong sentiment is generated on both sides of the partisan divide. While there are obvious policy disagreements between Republicans and Democrats on these issues, it is possible to craft a general solution statement with which most Americans will agree. Not an overwhelming majority, but a majority. On health care – most Americans want a solution where people do not fall between the cracks, and are not risking financial ruin to get the care they need. On energy policy, most Americans will agree we need to drill and develop more in America, conserve more, build nukes, and work aggressively to invest in and develop alternative energy sources. Both candidates are missing the boat to some degree on these two issues. McCain and the Republicans are misreading the degree to which Americans are willing to socialize medical care. Obama and the Dems are misreading the degree to which Americans are willing to drill for fossil fuels here and develop nuclear energy as part of the solution.

“Change” First Runner-up – The War in Iraq.
12-24 months ago, this was the number one issue that was driving the “change” mantra and the fuel that propelled the Obama candidacy. The “change” that people wanted was quite explicit and easily articulated. A large majority of Americans wanted us out of the quagmire that Iraq had become. If the status of the war in Iraq was the same now as it was then, there would be no contest. Obama would be 20 points ahead in the polls. But events on the ground have overtaken the campaign rhetoric and morphed the meaning of “change” in the process.

Violence in Iraq is down, and the Iraqi government has effectively removed the issue from the campaign. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki set a time “horizon” for us to be mostly out by 2011, so – that is going to happen regardless of who is elected president. It is not a presidential campaign issue anymore.

Yes, looking back, Obama was right and McCain was wrong about the war in 2002. But McCain was right and Obama was wrong about the surge in 2006. It is a political wash. The war was the “Change” issue, but now it has been rendered effectively moot. Getting out is still part of the “change” people want, but, looking forward, there is simply no practical difference in the rate at which we can and will redeploy out of Iraq regardless of whether McCain or Obama are elected president. It is even reasonable to postulate that we will be able to reduce our military footprint faster with a McCain presidency. The only difference between the candidates on Iraq, is the rhetoric they use to posture for their respective base.

“Change” Champion – Exorcise the Bush administration, and punish incumbent Republicans.
That is it. That is what is left of the “pervasive public mood for change” mandate once the issue of the War in Iraq was rendered moot by Maliki. There is broad agreement among Americans that the occupation of Iraq was a mistake, that the strategic execution of the war was flawed, and the Bush administration was largely incompetent (see – he was a uniter not a divider!) Blame for the war falls squarely on the Bush administration, enabled by a gutless, ethics challenged, majority Republican Congress. Even many (most?) conservatives (neocons excluded) will agree that GWB has been a disaster for the country, the Republican party, and has betrayed conservative principles. The punishment for the Republicans began in 2006 and will be meted out again in the 2008 congressional elections. It is very possible that the Democrats will finish with a 100 seat majority in the House of Representatives, and secure close to a filibuster-proof 60/40 majority in the Senate. The Republican party may well be rendered impotent as an opposition party in Congress. Punishment complete. So that leaves the presidency.

The issue that is now determinative in that contest, is whether the electorate believes that McCain/Palin is an extension of the Bush administration. If the Obama campaign succeeds in painting that picture (hence the oft-repeated “McCain is 90% Bush” canard), Obama wins. If McCain succeeds in separating himself from Bush and painting himself as a maverick, the “pervasive public mood for change” does not hurt him, and may even help his candidacy. Early indications are that his acceptance speech and the Palin pick went a long way to accomplishing exactly that.

Net net – We may still have a change election, but it may be John McCain that wins it.

^{x-posted from “Divided We Stand – United We Fall“}

“Everything is f**king spin.”
- John McCain talking about the Bush White House in Bob Woodward’s new book.

Now that is the type of stuff I wish I heard publicly from McCain. Because if he spoke out like this more often (maybe not as harshly) he’d probably lose some of the base, but how many independents would he attract? I think a solid majority of them.

Not only that, it would give all of us hope, Democrats and Independents and Republicans alike, that he wouldn’t be 4 more years of the Bush spin.

He has 2 more months to do it.

Will he be so bold?

For political bloggers and readers, there are few things as interesting as an analysis of umm… political bloggers and readers. In recent weeks three studies have been getting attention from bloggers, focusing on the polarized political web, polarized political book buyers, and polarized political blog readers.

First up, Presidential Watch 08 is showcasing their latest Map of the political blogosphere:

“Our new map… will reveal:- the 500 most influential websites of the U.S. political webosphere;- the newcomers to this online territory;- the locations of the candidates’ websites;- a refined categorisation of websites that abandons traditional media categories (Mainstream Media vs. Social Media) to offer an accurate view of this territory as one of mainly partisan websites…”

The map is automatically generated based on links between political websites, and includes news organizations and candidate websites as well as blogs. However, each website’s label (conservative, progressive, independent) is manually assigned, which introduces opinion, error and the possibility of bias and distortion in the graphical display. It also certainly gives short shrift to independent and centrist blogs (Some oddities: Moderate Voice and Andrew Sullivan are labeled as Progressive, Memeorandum and Cato are labeled Conservative and the only sites to be labeled Independent are Roll Call and FactCheck.) The bias against Independent/Centrist blogs may be an artifact of their selection algorithm which apparently determines “influence” by mutual links. One might posit that Independent/Centrist blogs will link to partisans of both sides, but partisan blogs of either stripe are less likely to find independent blogs worthy of links. The study is also sadly deficient in that Donklephant and DWSUWF are inexplicably not included in the data or the map.

Still,the partisan polarized nature of the political blogosphere clearly emerges in the map and the interactive nature of the presentation makes it the coolest of the three studies and the biggest potential time waster for the casual visitor.

Vlaldis Krebs, blogging at The Network Thinker looks at political readers of political books, and produces visual maps of their purchase patterns. He compares past and present clusters in his recent post “New Political Patterns“:

“In the past we saw a divided nation in our book buying data. We saw then a distinct red cluster and a distinct blue cluster with very little holding them together in terms of cross-links or books in common. Now, in June 2008, after the major party candidates have been selected via the long primary season, we again probe the predictive patterns of political polemics…”

We learn from Vladis that there is as pronounced a clustering in 2008 political book buyers as there was in in 2004, but with a wrinkle. While the polarized clusters are similar, they split on a distinctly different fault line. In 2004, the book buying patterns clustered around a traditional red/blue Republican/Democrat fault line. This year the cleanest split is between buyers of books that are for and against the War in Iraq.

Henry Farrell (blogging at Crooked Timber), Eric Lawrence, and John Sides (blogging at The Monkey Cage) are distributing a draft paper, entitled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics.”[PDF] and soliciting comments. The study shares the same deficiency as Presidential Watch ‘08, shockingly excluding both Donklephant and DWSUWF from the data. While the paper arguably presents the most boring graphics of the three, it arrives at the most interesting conclusions.

From the abstract:

“…we find strong evidence of polarization among blog readers, who tend to be more polarized than both non-blog-readers and consumers of various television news, and roughly as polarized as US Senators. Blog readers are also substantially more likely to participate in politics than non-blog readers. However, in contrast to previous research on offline social networks, we do not find that cross-cutting exposure to blogs of different ideological dispositions lowers participations.”

And their conclusion:

“… there is a general tradeoff between deliberation and participation among blog readers, an increasingly important group of highly politically aware individuals. Blog readers are more likely to participate in politics than non-blog readers, but also very likely to read only blogs whose political leanings accord with their own.”

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway is not surprised by the results, observing in “Blog Polarization and Self-Segregation“:

“After all, we’re a polarized polity right now, so it stands to reason that we’d see the same in the blogosphere. Given that the mass media outlets to which blogs are compared in the chart above are ostensibly “neutral” whereas the blogs are openly biased, it’s remarkable how polarized the audiences of the former are.”

I agree with Joyner that the blogosphere is a reasonable reflection of the political sphere at large, so the finding that political blog readers (like political book readers) are also polarized is perhaps a blinding flash of the obvious. Still, the degree to which blog readers are polarized is surprising, as the authors find that 94% of blog readers are classified as “Carnivores” seeking primarily sites in agreement with their views, leaving only 6% “Omnivores” that seek a more balanced diet of political perspective.

Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice worries in “There aren’t many blog readers in the ideological center” that this polarization “makes us a niche read here at TMV!” Surprise.

I am among the 6% omnivores as I do read blogs from both the right and left (as I suspect are most of the readers at Donklephant). However, as some of the Crooked Timber commenters point out, the source data is from 2006, and the results could be highly time and context dependent. Since I advocate for divided government on my blog, in 2006 I spent more time flocking with left-of-center blogs who at the time were receptive to the divided government meme. Now – Not so much. I find myself now spending more time reading right-of-center blogs, who are in the midst of an epiphany about the wisdom of voting to maintain divided government into 2009. Funny how that works.

Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish laments the author’s findings in “Bloggy Homophily” saying “A new study of blog readers finds a depressing amount of polarization…”

By focusing primarily on the polarization of blog readers, both Joyner and Sullivan overlook an equally important point in the paper. Blog readers are much more likely to be active participants politically. This is not a new phenomena. Note this historic parallel to the authors’ conclusions, linking increased participation and polarization as going hand in hand:

Different eras, different self-selection dynamics and different organizing principles, but a the saying goes – The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Point being – When you lament political polarization, you are lamenting political participation. In American politics, polarization and participation are not just linked, they are one and the same. When you argue against “bad” political polarization, you argue for decreased political participation – you argue, in effect, for political apathy.

The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry’s Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what’s scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama.

Conservative journalist David Freddoso’s “The Case Against Barack Obama” will offer “a comprehensive, factual look at Obama,” according to Regnery Publishing President and Publisher Marjory Ross. But the book’s subtitle makes clear its perspective: “The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate.”

Ross contends that the mainstream media has offered insufficient scrutiny of Obama and likens the goal of Freddoso’s book to that of “Unfit for Command,” the scathing assessment of Kerry’s war record that rocketed to number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

Will voters bite this time around? Or will Bush’s record low approval rating make them ignore Freddoso?

One thing’s for sure…any 527s that’ll pop up will probably offer this exact same story line: “What do we know about him? Is his agenda dangerous? Can you trust him?”

While disgusting, attacking Kerry on his war record was a brilliant stroke. However, this line of attack on Obama seems destined to fail. What the right-wing fails to realize is that Obama has packaged himself as the “welcome surprise”, and many voters know they’ll be casting a ballot for somebody who, while unproven, could ultimately do great things…and that’s exciting.

So Freddoso’s attacks may ultimately only work to reinforce this excitement. Sure, it could swing people away from Obama, but my gut is that Barack’s unlikely narrative only reinforces our belief in the American Dreamâ„¢…that rarest of hopes that somebody can come from nothing and ultimately become the most powerful person in the world.

We shall see…

From Politico:

The forthcoming volume from Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic “The Faith of George W. Bush” spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, is titled “The Faith of Barack Obama.” Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright-from conservative critics, and portrays him as a compelling figure for Christian voters.

“Young Evangelicals are saying, ‘Look, I’m pro-life but I’m looking at a guy who’s first of all black-and they love that; two, who’s a Christian; and three who believes faith should bear on public policy,” Mansfield, who described himself as a conservative Republican, said in a telephone interview. “They disagree with him on abortion, but they agree with him on poverty, on the war.”

In a recent post, I explored how Obama could get upwards of 40% of the evangelical vote, and with yesterday’s blistering father’s day speech using explicitly religious language (”We do what we can to build our house upon the sturdiest rock, and for me that means building that house on the foundation of Jesus Christ.”) he may give a lot of values voters a reason to take a second look.

Ironically enough, the book may also give Obama’s right-wing critics more firepower:

There are also passages in Mansfield’s book that may give Obama’s secular supporters pause. In particular, a theme from his book on Bush—the suggestion that the president’s rise was itself an act of God-reappears in his coverage of Obama. He approvingly quotes Obama’s old rival Rep. Bobby Rush saying that Obama’s Senate win was “divinely ordained.”

“Increasingly, words such as called, chosen, and anointed are being used of Obama,” he writes.

“The Faith of Barack Obama” is due to be in stores on August 5th.

On misleading the American people…

On being part of the propaganda campaign to sell the war…

On knowing that the book would have an impact…

Frankly, this doesn’t sound like a guy who’s afraid of speaking his mind. I wonder if he will indeed testify, especially about the Rove/Libby/Plame stuff.

More as it develops…

Part 1:

Part 2 (after Dan Bartlett):

I don’t know about you, but this seems like the same Scott McClellan I saw for years behind that podium.

So apparently, two things set him off. First, when he found out that that Rove and Libby lied to him about being involved in the Plame affair and made him look like a fool. Second, when he found out the President secretly declassified that NIE on Iraq so Cheney and Libby could anonymously leak it.

But more importantly than all that, McClellan’s core message in this book seems to be that this hyper-partisanship is Washington must stop because it results in people making really poor decisions and trying to destroy the credibility of the other side if they disagree.

One thing’s for sure, if this guy gets called to testify, he won’t have any problems defending what he wrote.

He basically suggested that McClellan had not really written many of the strongly worded accusations, and even talked of a phone conversation he had with him earlier that day where McClellan said his editor had definitely made some tweaks.

The reporters on the panel promptly laughed in Ari’s face.

In fact, here’s Ari on MSNBC making similar claims of being “heartbroken”…

So then, it feels like the White House and the loyalists are trying to do something here that’s particularly clever. Because when you hear Ari and Rove saying that this isn’t “the Scott we know” as if they’re hurt friends, what they’re really suggesting is that McClellan was not smart enough to write the book.

And yes, maybe it’s true that this was really shocking for everybody involved, but how many of these “after the fact” books do we have to endure before people will start to accept that something is not right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Not the Scott we knew? How about not the government we deserve.

Today Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) called for former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to testify under oath regarding the devastating revelations made in his new book on the Bush Administration’s deliberate efforts to mislead the American people into the Iraq War.

“The admissions made by Scott McClellan in his new book are earth-shattering and allege facts to establish that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby – and possibly Vice President Cheney – conspired to obstruct justice by lying about their role in the Plame Wilson matter and that the Bush Administration deliberately lied to the American people in order to take us to war in Iraq. Scott McClellan must now appear before the House Judiciary Committee under oath to tell Congress and the American people how President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and White House officials deliberately orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people.”

McClellan certainly rang a lot of bells, didn’t he? I guess we may see how well his stories hold up after all.

From Hannity and Colmes last night…

Folks, how out of the loop does Rove really think we’re going to believe McClellan was? After all, he’s said in the past that he knows he was lied to regarding the Plame affair, and no amount of carefully parsing by Rove of “Well, he asked this, not that,” will change that for him.

More as it develops…

After the administration threw Scott McClellan under the bus in the Plame affair, you knew this had to be coming. But most revealing is his inside info about the Iraq war.

Politico details some of his assertions:

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• Steve Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, said about the erroneous assertion about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium, included in the State of the Union address of 2003: “Signing off on these facts is my responsibility. … And in this case, I blew it. I think the only solution is for me to resign.” The offer “was rejected almost out of hand by others present,” McClellan writes.

• Bush was “clearly irritated, … steamed,” when McClellan informed him that chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey had told The Wall Street Journal that a possible war in Iraq could cost from $100 billion to $200 billion: “‘It’s unacceptable,’ Bush continued, his voice rising. ‘He shouldn’t be talking about that.’”

• “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

McClellan also offers a cautionary tale about the Bush administration’s legendary take-no-prisoners partisanship…

Decrying the Bush administration’s “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance,” McClellan recommends that future presidents appoint a “deputy chief of staff for governing” who “would be responsible for making sure the president is continually and consistently committed to a high level of openness and forthrightness and transcending partisanship to achieve unity.

Some will call McClellan a traitor. Others will praise him as a patriot. But as is the case with so many ex-White House insiders, the answer is much more complicated. See, I think a lot of people believed in Bush, but his stubborn partisanship and blind resolve failed them all miserably. That’s why we’re seeing exposés like this…because Bush is a woefully flawed leader.

And in this case, at least, history isn’t waiting to be unkind.

Ron Paul supporters are nothing if not passionate, and they’ve pushed his book to the top spot on the biggest online retail site in the world.

From CNN:

“The Revolution: A Manifesto”, released earlier this month, is currently No. 1 on the Web site’s list of top sellers, besting even Oprah’s latest Book Club selection.

“Despite a media blackout, this septuagenarian physician-turned-congressman sparked a movement that has attracted a legion of young, dedicated, enthusiastic supporters…a phenomenon that has amazed veteran political observers and made more than one political rival envious,” boasts the book’s product description, adding: “Candidates across America are already running as ‘Ron Paul Republicans.’”

Meanwhile, they’ve been causing some ruckus in the GOP. Good for them. But I asked it before, and I’ll ask it again…is the GOP worth “saving?” Wouldn’t they be better served simply forming their own party and pouring their energies into that? It’s not like the GOP base is going to wake up one day and embrace Paul’s free-wheeling philosophies.

Answer: if Ron Paul quits the GOP, he wouldn’t win his congressional seat and he’d be out of a job.

One last note from Robert D. Steele’s review at Amazon…

John McCain is walking a tightrope. In my view, if McCain can form a Transpartisan Cabinet now–even if only a transitional one–and get David Walker and Ron Paul to lead the group in creating a balanced budget that wipes out the national debt and begins pulling back from all our overseas bases, especially the secret ones that are not worth the outrageous $60 billion a year we pay for the 4% we can steal and not process), then I think it is possible some good may come from this election. Otherwise, it is just four more years, and we MUST create a new political party.

Then you MUST create a new political party, because McCain isn’t going to do ANY of those things.

To be fair, I haven’t read My Beautiful Mommy, but still…that title is pretty bad.

If this is just a book about the idea that “mommy” is going to have some work done and how to explain it to a kid, that’s one thing. But if it’s more of a story about “transformation” from normal to “beautiful,” well, that seems incredibly unethical to me.

From Newsweek:

What’s the market for a children’s picture book about moms getting cosmetic surgery? No one specifically tracks the number of tummy-tuck-and-breast-implant combos (or “mommy makeovers,” as they’re called), but according to the latest numbers from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation was the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure last year, with 348,000 performed (up 6 percent over 2006). Of those, about one-third were for women over 40 who often opt for implants to restore lost volume in their breasts due to aging or pregnancy weight gain. There were 148,000 tummy tucks—up 1 percent from the previous year.

Salzhauer got the idea for a book after noticing that women were coming into his office with their kids in tow. He says that mysterious doctor’s visits can be frightening for children. “Parents generally tend to go into this denial thing. They just try to ignore the kids’ questions completely.” But, he adds, children “fill in the blanks in their imagination” and then feel worse when they see “mommy with bandages,” he says. “With the tummy tucks, [the mothers] can’t lift anything. They’re in bed. The kids have questions.”

Here’s one doctor’s understandably snarky response…

First, let’s consider toddlers’ views on what makes a person beautiful. Let’s be honest, isn’t it annoying how clueless they are of true standards of beauty? All children seem to think, for example, that their moms are beautiful, even if she has a big nose or sagging skin…or worse.

I ask you: is this a healthy viewpoint? If we don’t teach our toddlers otherwise, won’t they take this misguided view of beauty into later childhood, even adulthood? Imagine the consequences to society if everyone was considered beautiful in his/her own way.

And should we be praising toddlers for how they look, when they invariably possess offensive pot bellies and gross rolls of ‘baby fat’? Give me a break. Who really likes a big fat stomach on any human of any age? You don’t like one on yourself, why should you on a child? Imagine the let-down in store for them when their cherished jelly bellies become objects of ridicule by their peers!

Agreed. Reinforcing artificial standards of beauty so early in life with a book like this is nothing more than clever marketing.

This bother anybody else?