Some recent polling demonstrates what many of us have suspected: it’s the leadership, not the people, who are the barriers to lasting peace with Israel.

When a Republican Governor of South Carolina writes an editorial on race and the Obama campaign that I find stirring, you know you’ve got something good.

Political observers were as stunned as everyone else by Hillary Clinton’s win in New Hampshire, and are struggling the re-establish the frame for the race. Many people thought that Clinton would get major momentum out of New Hampshire, and it certainly didn’t hurt her. She narrowly edged out Obama in Q4 fundraising, got a bevy of positive media coverage (ironically enough, most of which related to voter backlash against the media’s prior sexist coverage), and is looking to reestablish...

(How) can voters legitimately (and illegitimately) take gender issues into account when deciding whether to vote for Hillary Clinton?

The conventional wisdom regarding GOP primaries is that what the establishment wants, the establishment gets. It’s part of what makes it so difficult to believe Mike Huckabee is going anywhere in the primary process, despite his impressive victory in Iowa and his meets-expectations third place in New Hampshire. After all, if there is one candidate this side of Ron Paul the establishment is lined up against, it’s Huckabee. But there’s a kink, as DJW of Lawyers, Guns, and Money points...

I wrote three relatively brief posts so far on the New Hampshire primaries, which I didn’t put up over here. Wasn’t Obama supposed to have a bounce or something? Then why is he locked in a dogfight with Hillary Clinton (and losing it)? Meanwhile, aside from pulling for Obama, I’m rooting for Ron Paul to beat Rudy Giuliani for fourth place on sheer humiliation grounds. And finally, lest the Clintonistas get too excited, be advised that New Hampshire’s college towns have yet...

Cross-Posted to The Debate Link Over at The Plank, Michelle Cottle reports that John McCain is establishing a “truth squad” specifically to counter negative attacks in South Carolina. Can’t say I blame him. Say what you will about McCain, but he was brutally smeared in South Carolina 2000, the worst being “Black baby” calls (McCain has an adopted child from Bangladesh, “unknown” operatives implied that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child). I find...

Cross-posted to The Debate Link I’ve always kind of assumed the deep divisions between (conservative) American Catholics and Evangelicals had mostly healed by now. But maybe that’s due to my stance as an outsider: as a liberal Jew, it’s difficult for me to differentiate between various conservative Christian sects from each other. This also might lead me to pervasively underestimate the amount of anti-Mormon sentiment Mitt Romney faces. He’s conservative (today, anyway)! He’s...

Cross-posted to the Debate Link I like Hillary Clinton. She’s not my favorite candidate, but I’d be quite pleased with her as President. And even when she annoys me (as, like any politician, she does from time to time), I respect her talent, drive and abilities. But the one thing that really pushes me towards Hillary more than anything else is the blind, frothing hatred that is directed at her. It viscerally offends me, and makes me want to stand in her corner on fairness grounds alone....

Cross-Posted to the Debate Link CNN’s Political Ticker reports Mitt Romney pumping up his credentials against new Democratic front-runner Barack Obama: “Frankly, I don’t think Senator McCain, despite his service and his length of experience that that’s going to be able to stand up to the message that Barack Obama has brought forward,” he said. “We better think about somebody who can stand up with a message and go toe to toe with [Obama],” Romney said, adding...

The State Senate special election here still remains really tight. Republican Ray Cox currently holds a 220 vote lead with 66% of precincts reporting (42 of 63) RAY COX (R) 3556 50.08 KEVIN DAHLE (D) 3333 46.94 However, Northfield still largely hasn’t reported in. Northfield has nine precincts, eight of which still are yet to report (the one that is in went for Dahle 143 to 106 [56.75% - 42.06%]). Even beyond the college students, Northfield is considered at least liberal leaning, so it’s...

Again, I doubt this has any meaning whatsoever aside from amusing me. Results as of 8:51 Central Central College, Pella, Marion County (27 Obama, 12 Edwards, 10 Clinton, 1 Richardson) Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, Linn County (7 Obama, 5 Edwards, 2 Clinton, 1 Richardson) Grinnell College, Grinnell, Poweshiek County (39 Obama, 21 Edwards, 7 Clinton, 6 Biden) Luther College, Decorah, Winnesheik County (33 Obama, 14 Edwards, 11 Clinton, 4 Richardson, 1 Biden) If this did have meaning, though, I’d...

***Results as of 8:27 PM*** Senator Barack Obama : 35.25% Senator John Edwards : 31.02% Senator Hillary Clinton : 30.78% Governor Bill Richardson : 1.80% Senator Joe Biden : 1.01% Uncommitted : 0.11% Senator Chris Dodd : 0.03% Precincts Reporting: 1304 of 1781 Obama’s lead has been growing all night. It’s hardly over, but the trend lines are looking good for the Illinois Senator. One of my friends was caucusing in the Bettendorf B21 precinct. It went 2-2-1 Obama/Clinton/Edwards, but Obama...

You Iowans think you’ve got all the attention. Well I voted in the special election to fill Minnesota’s 25th State Senate seat. And with one precinct reporting, my candidate, Kevin Dahle is winning with a whopping 60% of the vote (out of 23 cast). His Republican opponent, Ray Cox, is reasonably moderate. In fact, I almost voted for him in 2004 — I was undecided until I was in the voting booth. He does, however, have a significant tendency to talk about moderation on election day...

Now if that doesn’t shake the GOP race up a bit…

Because the Democratic Party’s Iowa Caucus website breaks down results in absurd amounts of detail (and is updated literally by the minute), I’m going to track the voting around four small liberal arts colleges (I don’t do the big ones because they’re in big cities and it’s impossible to figure out which precincts actually contain the schools). I don’t pretend that this information has any specific use — I don’t know what percentage of caucusers are...

It’s a testament to how poll-starved I am that I can panic from seeing early numbers putting the Democratic order as Clinton/Edwards/Obama (with Obama lagging significantly) — numbers gathered from seven of 1781 precincts. I know in my heart that this is utterly meaningless, but yet I still feel dread. Cf. Jay Carney.

Argentina has been doggedly pursuing an investigation linking Iranian officials at the highest levels to the 1994 bombing of a JCC in Buenos Aires. Iran is not happy about this, and has just threatened to lodge a complaint with the ICJ if Argentina doesn’t cease its investigation immediately. It is unclear what legal grounds Iran is relying on for its complaint.

This is new: a conservative columnist pens an article defending the “stupid conservative”. Apparently, it’s better to be dumb — that way you’re not duped by charlatans who use “rationality” to defend gay marriage. Obviously, there is a lot of snark in my initial reaction to this, but honestly there is quite a bit of fear as well. There is a distressing anti-intellectual trend among many conservatives nowadays (read how right-wingers talk about global warming...

California Democrat Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has announced he is retiring after being diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Lantos has been a passionate defender of human rights while serving in the House, and the only Holocaust survivor serving anywhere in Congress. Unsurprisingly, he has been a particularly early and vocal Congressional leader on Darfur. Via Kos, who had been supporting a primary challenge against Lantos due to his relatively-hawkish foreign...

I’m going back to Minnesota on New Year’s Eve (that should be a fun plane trip), so this is it until 2008. Y’all are wonderful. Have a safe New Year’s, and see you soon!

Cross-posted to The Debate Link Earlier today, the co-chairman of “Veterans for Rudy in New Hampshire” made a rather impolitic remark on how Rudy was the guy who will “chase them [Muslims] back to their caves or in other words get rid of them.”". Kind of indicative of the sort of fellow who supports Rudy Giuliani, but I figured that the story would take a predictable course: the speaker would backtrack, saying that he only meant “Islamofascists” or something of...

Jon Swift has collected a “best of 2007″ round-up, with every blogger contributing their own favorite post of the year. I ended up choosing The Chronicle of Madison’s Tomb: Why “Roe Rage” has Nothing To Do With Legal Theory”. I want to thank everyone who gave their input on my list of finalists — it was a good year of blogging, if I do say so myself. But you should certainly check his list out — there are some excellent posts up there, and Jon put a...

Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 239 pages excluding index and endnotes. The book is about the shifting relationships Jews had with Whiteness, race, and Blacks. My review is in the classic law review sense of the term — I use the book as an excuse to talk about what I want to talk about — in this case, how the “Whitening” of Jews paradoxically made them more likely to support civil rights than when...

Politicians are normally rational creatures. This isn’t to say that they act in ways that I find preferable. Rather, though they upset me rather often, normally it’s based on at least a perception of political gain. When they do dumb things, it’s usually based on a miscalculation of the same. That being established, what was Gordon Smith’s angle, defending Trent Lott’s comments on Strom Thurmond (specifically, that he should have been elected to the Presidency on his...