I keep hearing people on the radio imply that Senator Barack Obama has no experience or accomplishments to recommend him for the job of President of the United States of America. Generally this comes up in the form of a pointed question thrown at a random Obama supporter: “Can you name one legislative accomplishment of Barack Obama?”

So if you’re an Obama supporter, here are two pat answers for you to keep handy:

• Nuclear Weapons Threat Reduction Act of 2007
• Coburn-Obama Transparency Act

Maybe you don’t want to read the actual bills, that’s OK. Just remember that he’s done more for anti-proliferation than his opponents have, and has done more for ensuring that the government is answerable for the money it spends than his opponents have.

A couple more things he’s done that you may want to be prepared to fling out when challenged:

• Sponsored 280 Illinois bills that passed into law over eight years, six of which he was in the minority party.
• Ethics & campaign finance reform, welfare reform in Illinois.
• Expanded children’s health care in Illinois.
• Federal ethics reform bill currently pending reconciliation with the House of Representatives.

More importantly, the true answer to a question of “What has Barack Hussein Obama accomplished in his life that recommends him to the role of Commander in Chief,” particularly in contrast to the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain:

• He learned that Sunnis and Shias aren’t the same.

Being able to hold notions like that in your head may come in handy in the near future. Oh, and screw you, Roger Hedgecock.

It is generally accepted around these parts (Northern California) that the Democratic Party is a circular firing-squad, lacking any internal discipline in the face of the lock-step unity of the Republicans. Internal party discipline is certainly something that the Republicans talk about more openly, and their long stretches as the minority party in the federal legislature has lead to a number of impressive filibusters and procedural maneuvers requiring few or no hold-outs. The relatively recent rise of the right-wing echo chamber on talk radio and other media lend additional credibility to this perception. Even their primary process for nominating a presidential candidate ensures an early knock-out by way of winner-take-all contests rather than the slow bleeding of proportional representation.

Social Action, a tool produced by the University of Maryland, was recently used to show that this may be all perception. Taking the voting records for all US senators during 2007 and feeding these data into a social-network visualizer, you get a bit of a different story. Last year the Democratic and Independent senators voted very similarly to each other. On the other side of the aisle, four Republican senators (Collins, Smith, Snowe, and Specter) broke ranks repeatedly, dragging them out into the center of an otherwise-sharply-divided network. McCain and Brownback, both Republicans, had too few votes on record during the sample period to be meaningfully represented.

Hat tip to Visual Complexity for posting this where I’d run into it.

The Olympic torch is going to pass through San Francisco this week, and all manner of protests have been planned. Some have already been implemented. The locus of these protests has been, largely, China’s relations with Sudan in light of the situation in Darfur and their actions in Tibet suppressing the local population.

As a resident of Sonoma County, I’ve long been subjected to bumper sticker rhetoric showing the iconic red, gold, and blue Tibetan suburst with the words “FREE TIBET” emblazoned below. People ranging from west-county hippies to Beastie Boy Adam Yount express great concern that the unique cultural heritage and traditions of the Tibetan people are being systematically eradicated by the totalitarian government in Beijing.

I’ve got news for you: The uniquie cultural heritage and traditions of all the Chinese people have been under the same process for the past 49 years. Millions died in Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. Nothing about the Tibetans makes them more important than hundreds of millions of their neighbors who are every bit as entitled to religious freedom, self-determination, and all the various civil liberties we consider basic human rights. Screw Tibet. Free China.

I’ve commented before that the 2008 presidential election was at serious risk of being a matter of getting to choose between a small handful of candidates chosen for us by the news media. California bumping our primary date to February 5th, the first day of the official primary season, was supposed to give us some say in who the nominees of the major parties were going to be, but it looks like we’ve been cheated again. A list of the fallen:

• Joe Biden
• Sam Brownback
• Chris Dodd
• Jim Gilmore
• Duncan Hunter
• Dennis Kucinich
• Bill Richardson
• Tom Tancredo
• Tommy Thompson
• Fred Thompson

Each of these candidates had their problems, but chief among them was lack of face-time at the national level. Without Anna Nicole Smith or Natalee Holloway drama to clamp onto, most news outlets simply latched onto every little thing that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama said and did, with so-called pundits bickering for hours about their subset of darling candidates (Clinton, Obama, McCain, Romney) for every minute of coverage any other candidate received.

Now it looks like Giuliani and Edwards are dropping out. Being registered “undeclared,” the Republicans wouldn’t let me vote for Rudy, but I had four choices left on the Democratic side of things until today: Clinton, Edwards, Gravel, and Obama. Maybe I didn’t want Clinton or Obama to walk into the convention this year with a majority of delegates. Maybe I wanted a real convention for once. Maybe I wanted Edwards to hang in there and play king-maker. Yeah, a big part of me really did. The conventions for both parties have been a joke since 1980. No question as to the nominee. No question as to the platform. No question as to the running-mate. Just a balloon-drop and a bunch of cheerleader speeches.

So the Democrats have let me down. Hopefully Huckabee, McCain, and Romney can split up enough of the February 5th delegates to keep things interesting on that side of things.

note: the Edwards campaign site still has its “contribute” link accessible, so maybe I’m jumping the gun here.

*Update: yep, he’s out.

I’ve heard people complain that there have been too many presidential debates already. True, we’ve had a lot, and there are still a lot more credible contenders than we’re used to, but I think they’ve still got a lot to say, and we’ve got a lot left to hear about how the various candidates propose to handle the responsibilities of leadership.

That, and I follow politics like most guys follow sports. Keep ’em coming. I just hope we can get more than one or two cross-party debates once the nominees are settled in.

It’s game day today, with the Nevada caucuses for the Democrats and Republicans, and a primary in South Carolina for the Republicans. Frankly, the Republican side of things is where the real fun is. Sorry, Clinton and Obama, but the same old tired bickering over perceived slights to civil rights leaders just doesn’t do it for me. Nothing to get the the blood racing. Over on the other side of the aisle, however, things are nice and dicey. They’ve got a race in the first Republican stronghold state, and four candidates have a legitimate stake. Four! And the fur is flying. Is McCain the Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed by his communist Vietnamese buddies? Is Huckabee a tax & spend liberal with Christian Taliban trappings? Can Romney get a bunch of southerners to vote for a polygamist cultist? Is Fred Thompson actually a credible candidate anywhere? Hoo boy!

Throw in the fact that early Nevada results are currently showing Ron Paul coming in second, ahead of an awful lot of presumably-more-credible contenders… I may have to switch out of my “undeclared” registration just so I can get in on this come February.

Three and a half years ago, a curious thing happened. A former US president passed away and his lying-in-state was televised almost continuously by the 24-hour news networks. Can’t we just leave the old Gipper dead?

Or at least stop totally misrepresenting him? He raised taxes.

Raised.

Taxes.

He raised them on California in 1967, he raised them nationally after his much-lauded 1981 cuts backfired. Particularly he raised payroll taxes, taxes that make up most of the money heading from working people — by which I mean anybody that has a job — put into the federal government, far more than they pay in income taxes or death taxes, the bugaboos of the Republican party, came from his tax increases.

Increases.

In your taxes.

That you pay.

To the government.

The goverment that’s here to help you. The government that the real President Reagan recognized had to act responsibly, as opposed to the phony, flim-flam, made-up hindsight Reagan that so many people like to look back on when they’re crafting duplicitous political rhetoric.

Simply aiming to always cut taxes, always increase military spending, never grant clemency, always cling tightly to the absolutist hard-line of your party faithful does the public a disservice. Things are more complicated than that. You can be frugal without being miserly. You can be strong without being belligerant.

Watching Barack Obama’s speech last night conceding New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton, I couldn’t help but think back to the big immigration rallies last year, with people massing in the streets wearing white tee-shirts, bearing U.S. and Mexican flags chanting “Sí se puede.” That is all.

Despite its rich intellectual history, conservatism at its core is little more than the recycling of old ideas throughout time. Interesting, sure, but hardly sufficient for someone who values progress more than tradition.

—Morte

Really? Conservatives want to promote old ideas and keep things the way they were? That’s kinda what “conservative” means, most concisely put as “the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change.” Yet the writer values progress over tradition. That sounds more like a diametrically-opposed world view, that of a progressive. Of course conservatism doesn’t appeal to a progressive. It’s like saying that red jelly beans don’t appeal to you because you prefer blue jelly beans. It explains nothing.