An inordinate people are coming in to view my four-year-old post “Google Shut Down for 15 Minutes, Thought Hacked.”  A couple minutes of digging reveals the likely cause.

Michael Arrington reports, in a piece with the odd title “Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up,” that there are rumors that Apple is trying to buy Twitter, this after Google was rebuffed in the effort.  Given Arrington’s strong presence on Twitter, FriendFeed, and other social media networks, I’m guessing that retweets and likes and other passing on of a post with “Google Got Shut Down” in it is causing a mild panic.

Michael Arrington previews what purports to be a prototype of a new Google search experience, incorporating user commenting and voting such as we see on Digg and other social media sites:

The video above shows a user interface being bucket tested by Google to select (probably randomly determined) users. Earlier today we showed a screen shot of the interface and a video of the search history, recorded by Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango. This new video, however (also recorded by Pike), shows the full Google search experience with a very Digg-like interface. Users vote search results up or down – a down vote makes it dissapear with a “poof,” an up vote moves the result to the first page.

I’m not at all sure this is a good idea.  What we’ve seen repeatedly at Digg-type sites is that a handful of users — fewer than 100 early adopter power users — will band together and dominate the voting.  Indeed, as few as 10 users can totally skew the results if they know what they’re doing.  Surely, we don’t want the same thing to happen to search?

Google’s electronic algorithm is too subject to gaming and the splogs are showing up far too much in the results.   But it’s basically an excellent search engine that needs constant tweaking to combat these moves.  Moving in a totally different direction, especially one proven to be even more easily gamed, would be a major blunder.

Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll.

Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today.

[...]

Unlike other areas of blogging, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).

He expounds on this in great detail in an embedded video, using a nifty Australian accent to boot.

I’ve still got a blogroll using blogrolling.com but it’s AJAX’ed so you don’t see the links unless you click for them. But mine, like most still in existence, is a museum, preserving my blog reading habits circa 2005. There are numerous defunct blogs on the list and it really hasn’t been updated at all in two years. Nor do I use it myself, like I once did, as a source for posting materials.

In addition to the causes Duncan suggests, I think it’s mostly a function of the rise of aggregators.  Most of us read blogs through RSS feeds, memeorandum, and even social media sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and FriendFeed.  (The last, incidentally, is how I found this post, via a link shared by K Welch.)

[UPDATE: Eric Berlin suggests an explanation that I overlooked: "The rise of widgets and the greatly increased focus on jamming ads into every nook and cranny likely have had a role in squeezing out blogroll real estate." It's probably at least part of the reason I AJAX'ed mine -- so that I could put it back where readers would see it without sacrificing much sidebar space.]

Do any of you readers actually still use the blogroll?  Is it worth a blogger’s time to update their lists?

Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, “I’ve seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.” He offers three likely explanations:

1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed and others.

2. People, especially those who read this site, are relying more on RSS readers, and many have subscribed to so many feeds that they are reading through stories in an effort to clear out their unread items, not clicking the embedded links.

3. People who actually read blogs on the site (outside of RSS) are clicking through to respond to the author with comments, rather than viewing links.

Indeed, I found his piece on Techmeme and had never heard of Gray before, despite his being a relatively big player in the tech-social media space.

Gray rank ordered his referrals from the last six months and, sure enough, search engines, social media sites, and aggregators delivered much more traffic than links from very popular blogs such as Scobleizer, TechCrunch, and Micro Persuasion.  None delivered more than 500 visitors!

My experience in the politics niche is quite different.  Yes, without question, Google and other search engines provide a significant share of OTB’s traffic.  For June, Google brought in 118,236 visits; Yahoo 10,574; MSN 4764; Google Images 2522; Ask 2147; and Windows Live 1914.  Aggregators memeorandum and RealClearPolitics brought in 1722 and 3635, respectively. Social media sites brought in negligible traffic:  Fark 1891, Digg 153, and StumbleUpon 129.

Still, blog linkage accounts for significant traffic and can bring in nice surges. In June, links from InstaPundit brought in 7502 visits, Balloon Juice 3812, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish 2371, and Matthew Yglesias 1495.  And that’s only counting top-level referrals, as I’m not ambitious enough to add up referrals from individual URLs within those sites or www/non-www variants.   Certainly, though, plenty of them brought in more than 500 visits.  And that’s in a single month, not a six-month period.  Indeed, links from any of those sites and many more can bring in more than 500 visitors in a single hour.   The key variable there is the nature of the link.  One that (Like this post, I’m afraid. Sorry, Louis.) provides significant excerpts of a post and provides extensive original analysis tend to send much less traffic to linked sites than posts that provide only a teaser.

It may well be that the ethics of linking and the reader habit of clicking through is more engrained on the political blogs than other sectors of the blogosphere.  In the celebrity gossip space, where I’ve also got a presence (albeit mainly an ownership/management one) there is relatively little linking to other blogs and, indeed, outright theft of content without even a nod in the direction of attribution is the norm.

I suspect, too, that the reading habits of tech and politics bloggers are simply different.  The handful of the former I read, for example, seem to be much more engaged with Twitter and various other social media outlets than most of us in the political space.

Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google’s terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they’re able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service.

After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”

Larry Johnson and others charge that this is a coordinated effort by “Obama supporters,” a rather nebulous group, but they have no proof as of yet. Certainly, nothing yet ties this to Obama or his campaign team. Sister Toldja says “it wouldn’t be surprising to find out this indeed was happening, considering how so many far left Obama supporters react at the slightest hint of criticism of Barry Oh.”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine, given the pattern, that “Obama supporters” aren’t behind this. I’d be surprised, indeed, if Obama or senior campaign staff had any knowledge of this. Unless some major news comes out toward that end, then, the Obama angle is only tangentially interesting.

The crucial issue here is the ease with which electronic speech can be stifled. Jim Geraghty observes that “Google may need to revisit its policy in managing Blogspot,” snarking, “At the very least, the system should inquire if the person making the complaint has adopted the middle name “Hussein”. And Warner Todd Huston reminds us that this isn’t a unique occurence, with many conservative blogs having previously fallen victim to Google’s policies.

The power of Google in the marketplace is troubling. I say that as someone who’s an avid user of their products, especially Gmail and Google Search, and who derives some small income through Google’s AdSense program. On the other hand, I also, like most other bloggers, am at the mercy of Google — by far the biggest player in Internet search — for ranking in their system and referred traffic.

As I’ve recounted previously, I’ve been the victim of BlogSpot myself. More than a dozen niche blogs that I had on that domain, including the original incarnation of Outside the Beltway, was summarily “disappeared” and I was unable to get a non-automated response out of Google. I’ve said it before and I repeat: If you’re serious about your blog, get your own domain.

It doesn’t end there, though. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides that those who claim copyright infringement on material published on the Web merely have to lodge a formal complaint with the server and the host is obligated to take the material down in short order. The burden of proof is on the publisher, not the claimant, to prove that they have a right to publish the content. That power could easily be abused in an election cycle.

YouTube (which has been absorbed into the Google collective) and various other highly influential online outlets have adopted similar “guilty until proven innocent” rules. I have received several notices from YouTube informing me that a company has claimed a copyright on a posted video and that, while the video I posted would remain operational, all statistics and so forth would be credited to the claimant.

[Claimant] claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with [Claimant] and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between YouTube owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

In fact, the videos in question were legitimately copywrited and I’ve got no quarrel with the outcome. I only posted them to my account to preserve them, having posted videos on OTB only to have the original poster remove them and screw up the post. But the policy here is bizarre: YouTube will take action based on a claim but they provide zero recourse!

Given that online communication is increasingly important in politics and business, we’re going to need a better, more efficient means of dispute resolution than we currently have. Right now, it’s far too easy to do mischief.

The latest mini-scandal in Campaign 2008 is that the McCains have apparently not done a good job keeping track of their finances.   HuffPo has gotten 1420 Diggs at this writing with a story headlined “McCains Defaulted On Home Taxes For Last Four Years, Newsweek Reports.” It promises “a highly embarrassing report.”  Newsweek has delivered with “Mrs. McCain, San Diego County Would Like a Word” or, as the page head puts it, “Cindy McCain Pays Back Taxes on San Diego Condo.”

The lede is surprisingly fair:

When you’re poor, it can be hard to pay the bills. When you’re rich, it’s hard to keep track of all the bills that need paying. It’s a lesson Cindy McCain learned the hard way when NEWSWEEK raised questions about an overdue property-tax bill on a La Jolla, Calif., property owned by a trust that she oversees. Mrs. McCain is a beer heiress with an estimated $100 million fortune and, along with her husband, she owns at least seven properties, including condos in California and Arizona.

San Diego County officials, it turns out, have been sending out tax notices on the La Jolla property, an oceanfront condo, for four years without receiving a response. County records show the bills, which were mailed to a Phoenix address associated with Mrs. McCain’s trust, were returned by the post office. According to a McCain campaign aide, who requested anonymity when discussing a private matter, an elderly aunt of Mrs. McCain’s lives in the condo, and the bank that manages the trust has not been receiving tax bills on the property. Shortly after NEWSWEEK inquired about the matter, the McCain aide e-mailed a receipt dated Friday, June 27, confirming payment by the trust to San Diego County in the amount of $6,744.42. County officials say the trust still owes an additional $1,742 for this year, an amount that is overdue and will go into default July 1. Told of the outstanding $1,742, the aide said: “The trust has paid all bills shown owing as of today and will pay all other bills due.”

Obviously, this is an awkward situation but a familiar one. Clearly, the McCain’s weren’t intentionally skipping out on their taxes; this was an administrative error. I suspect the most embarrassing thing here will be the revelation that they own seven homes.

There’s quite a buzz over this for a story that broke on a Saturday night (it’s 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning as I write). memeorandum has sixteen responses already, almost exclusively from the Left.

• Mark Kleiman: “It must be nice to own so many houses you can’t remember which ones you’re four years in arrears on your real estate taxes.” (Which, again, I think is the most damaging take-away.)

• Eric Kleefeld: “This isn’t exactly the kind of story that speaks positively of John McCain’s ability to manage the public’s finances.”

• Mark Adams: “This has got to go down as the worst Presidential campaign by a major party since Herbert Hoover’s reelection motorcades were pelted with eggs and rotten fruit.” (I’m guessing he wasn’t around for Michael Dukakis.)

• Gun Toting Liberal: “Just because Señor McCain wasn’t born on U.S. Soil doesn’t mean he gets a ‘pass’ when it comes to financing our government’s ambitious projects, Sir and Ma’am.”

• Pam Spaulding: “McSame says our taxes are too high and he wants to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, right? I guess none of that really matters to him anyway since he doesn’t bother paying them on his beachfront condo. Why does John McCain hate America?”

• Jill S.: “If the McCains can’t handle owning eight houses, perhaps they ought to consider being more like the common people they’re trying to pass as and sell a few of them.”

• Jeff Fecke: “[If a] lower-middle-class family is a few weeks late paying rent, they get evicted. John and Cindy McCain are by any measure phenomenally wealthy, and they haven’t paid taxes on at least one of their seven (!!) houses for four years.” (It’s surprisingly hard to evict people for not paying rent in most places. And you certainly know when you’re not paying it.)

• Nate Silver introduces a scale for judging the impact of scandals and judges this “Medium-impact, but not spicy.”

Stacy McCain, the only Republican responding, is decidedly not a fun of “the other McCain.” He concludes, “An overblown nothing of a story, as it turns out. It appears to be a case of misdirected mail.” His disagrees with my assessment of the fairness of the lede, which he complains, “tries to play the class warfare card a bit too obviously.” Perhaps so. Then again, it strikes me as quite accurate.

And lest new or occasional readers think I’m merely excusing McCain while I’d be hammering Barack Obama for this, this was precisely my reaction when I learned that Al Franken had failed to pay income taxes in seventeen states.

I’m no great fan of Franken but this explanation strikes me as quite plausible. People who make that kind of money hire accountants and sign where they’re told and write out whatever checks are necessary. Due dilligence tends to involve a quick scan to make sure nothing’s obviously out of whack.

Mistakes happen, even to conscientious, honorable people. They’re still embarrassing, obviously, but hardly disqualifying.

Jane Hamsher wants to know, “If You Can’t Use a Computer, How Can You Be President?”

I chuckled when I saw the story at memeorandum since, after all, it’s unlikely that any president before Bill Clinton could “use” a computer in any meaningful sense. (Maybe Jimmy Carter, who was a nuclear engineer in a past life, could, too, but proficiency with punch cards probably didn’t come into play very often during his stint in the White House.)

Clicking the link, I see that Jane is echoing an idea put fort by Tracy Russo, who served as John Edwards’ chief blogger. Mark Soohoo, John McCain’s deputy e-campaign manager, who recently said, “You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.”

Jane summarizes Russo’s retort: “Tracy said most emphatically that you do, and that someone who is going to be expected to lead the country through the social, political, economic and communication upheavals that are happening as a result of the changes in computer and online technology very much needs to be able to use one.”

This strikes me as nonsensical. I’d venture that 99.9 percent of daily computer users have no clue whatsoever about said upheavals and that some tiny fraction of those who do has any idea what public policy responses, if any, would be appropriate.

It’s a rare day that I don’t spend twelve hours in front of a computer. Furthermore, studying politics is my livelihood and I’ve been at it for more than a quarter century now. While I’m by no means a power user, I’m on Fark, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and various other social media outlets more than most. And I’m something of an amateur sociologist, interested very much in cultural changes. Yet, I wouldn’t pretend to any especial expertise in analyzing these “upheavals” of which Russo speaks.

Going out on a limb, I’d also guess that Russo’s in the same boat. She’s a communications professional, field organizer, and fundraiser. I’m guessing that she’s not on the short list for the National Security Council.

Photo: Assistive Technologies

The gang at Media Matters is excited that they have caught Shelby Steele admitting that the subtitle of his book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (Free Press, December 2007) is wrong to Sean Hannity.

HANNITY: All right, so he can’t win?

STEELE: He can win. I regret that subtitle.

HANNITY: OK.

STEELE: It was an afterthought. And I don’t argue that in the book. He can definitely win. There is a powerful desire in American society today to see someone like him move to the White House.

This admission against interests is right up front, without any badgering on Hannity’s part.

How to explain that Steele manifestly doesn’t believe his book’s subtitle? First, the book was published seven months ago and the title was presumably chosen quite some time before that. Certainly, an Obama victory is much more plausible now that he’s won the Democratic nomination and is ahead in the polls. More importantly, though, Steele probably didn’t pick his own subtitle. Indeed, he almost certainly didn’t in this case since, as he says, it has next to nothing to do with what’s inside the book.

Having spent a little time in the publishing industry as an acquisition editor, I’d say we changed the author’s proposed title about half the time and virtually always changed or added a subtitle. We also commissioned the jacket design, usually without the author’s even having a right of input, let alone refusal. Why? Because the publisher has to market the book and pithy, provocative titles are what grab the attention of those making the decision to carry the books and to place them in prominent places where prospective customers might see and buy them.

Echidne finds the whole process infuriating.

The title of a book should be short and redolent of the main message of the book and the emotions it provokes. It should stick in your memory and make it easy to talk about the book. Subtitles don’t do any of that. They are crutches, added to keep the wobbly main title on its drunken feet, and I resent that very much.

Subtitles are not that common on the covers of most books, but they sure are proliferating on the covers of books about politics. It’s as if readers of political books are expected just to read the subtitle before they go on some pundit show to discuss the book (which they mostly appear not to have read). Or as if readers of political books are viewed as so stupid that the political bias of the book must be condensed into a suitable subtitle.

Unfortunately, it’s a proven marketing technique. All the “How to Blog” and “Social Media 101″ sites obsess about writing the perfect post title. Faced with enormous information clutter, those scanning their RSS reader or the hot items page at Digg or Reddit need a shortcut and an attention-grabbing headline makes all the difference. Similarly, a provocative cover makes it more likely that a customer will pick up a book and take a moment to evaluate it. Or, yes, that a radio host will invite the author onto their show to talk about it.

It’s still true that you generally can’t judge a book by its cover. But a bad cover makes it much less likely that people will buy the book.

Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . .

• Rodney is off to Alcatraz.
• Wizbang is in a hole and digging faster.
• Wyatt Earp has a balled head.
• Public Pondering is serving steamed rice.
• Cowboy Blob is bulking up.
• Willisms shoulda worn white gloves.
• Right Pundits is singin’ Soprano.
• Blonde Sagacity is planning for some lonely nights.
• The Gone Rick Motel won the Science Fair.
• bRight and Early hopes the check isn’t lost in the mail.
• Brainfuel still hopes to meet Dick Van Dyke.

Other Humor:
Political Demotivation is not particularly motivated.
Icanhascheezburger welcomes you to the kitteh cult.
V the K always has the best pictures at Caption This!

To join in, start a Caption Contest at your blog, edit it to add a link to this post, and then send a TrackBack. If your blog doesn’t automatically generate one, use the Send TrackBack feature below. For more information, see this post.

Barack Obama moved to within 200 delegates of securing the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, scoring a 56-42 blowout in North Carolina while narrowly losing, 49-51, in Indiana. Barring revelations that would make the Wright affair look insignificant in comparison, the race is all over but the shouting.

Obama Wins the Night

AP’s Calvin Woodward:

On the rebound, Barack Obama left Hillary Rodham Clinton with fast-dwindling chances to deny him the Democratic presidential nomination after beating her in North Carolina and falling just short in an Indiana cliffhanger. Obama was on track to climb within 200 delegates of attaining the prize, his campaign finally steadying after missteps fiercely exploited by the never-say-die Clinton. His campaign dropped broad hints it was time for the 270 remaining unaligned party figures known as superdelegates to get off the fence and settle the nomination.

[...]

Clinton vowed to compete tenaciously for West Virginia next week and Kentucky and Oregon after that, and to press “full speed on to the White House.” But she risked running on fumes without an infusion of cash, and made a direct fundraising pitch from the stage in Indianapolis. “I need your help to continue our journey,” she said.

And she pledged anew that she would support the Democratic nominee “no matter what happens,” a vow also made by her competitor.

Polarizing, protracted and often bitter, the contest is hardening divisions in the party, according to exit polls from the two states. A solid majority of each candidate’s supporters said they would not be satisfied if the other candidate wins the nomination. Fully one-third of Clinton’s supporters in Indiana and North Carolina went beyond mere dissatisfaction to say they would vote for Republican John McCain instead of Obama if that’s the choice in the fall.

[...]

In both states, Clinton won six in 10 white votes while Obama got nine in 10 black votes, exit polls indicated. It was a slightly better performance than usual by Clinton among whites, while Obama’s backing from blacks was one of his highest winning percentages yet with that group.

Adam Nagourney of the NYT:

Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s hopes for overtaking Senator Barack Obama dwindled further on Tuesday night.

For Mr. Obama, the outcome came after a brutal period in which he was on the defensive over the inflammatory comments of his former pastor. That he was able to hold his own under those circumstances should allow him to make a case that he has proved his resilience in the face of questions about race, patriotism and political mettle — the very kinds of issues that the Clinton campaign has suggested would leave him vulnerable in the general election.

Beating Mr. Obama in Indiana, a state he had once been confident of winning, was an achievement for Mrs. Clinton. But it was hardly the kind of strong victory she posted in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And when paired with his comfortable victory in North Carolina — which Mr. Obama pointedly described in his victory speech as “a big state, a swing state” — it hardly seemed enough for Mrs. Clinton to convince so-called uncommitted superdelegates to rally around her candidacy.

While it remains all but impossible for Obama to win enough delegates to secure the nomination before the convention, Clinton has no chance of overtaking him in the delegate count or the (meaningless, mathematically flawed) popular vote. Mike Allen notes that she’s trying to move the target.

The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has begun urging party officials and news organizations to include the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations when figuring the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. That unorthodox approach could put her in striking distance of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) over the next month.

Harold Ickes, Clinton’s chief delegate strategist, said in a telephone interview that the senator is likely to finish the primary and caucus season on June 3 “substantially less than 100 delegates behind” Obama’s total if those two states are included. “We don’t believe that this party is going to go forward into a presidential race without seating both Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said.

Clinton has thus far been unsuccessful in her attempts to include those states, stripped of their delegates, into the mix. It’s unfathomable that Howard Dean and the Democratic Powers That Be would change their mind at this late stage, in effect handing it to Clinton, barring some monumental scandal hurting Obama.

Indeed, both Tim Russert and Matt Drudge have proclaimed Obama “the nominee.”

The Popular Vote

To the extent that the argument that superdelegates should obey the “will of the voters” as reflected in the popular vote — which pretty much anyone who isn’t a die-hard Clinton supporter agrees is absurd — it looks as though Obama will win that, too. Here’s the latest estimate by the folks at RealClearPolitics:

No matter how you slice it, it’s razor thin. There’s simply no reason for either candidate to think they have some great “mandate” if these numbers mean anything (which, by the way, they don’t). Still, the only way Clinton has a shot at taking the lead is with the inclusion of Florida and Michigan.

Does Hillary Finally Quit?

Several commentators think Clinton may finally have seen the light last night. TNR’s Michael Crowley asks, ” Does Hillary Know It’s Over?” He thought Clinton sounded “dispirited” last night. And Josh Marshall muses,

NBC just reported that Hillary Clinton is holding no public events tomorrow. We’d earlier reported that she’d cancelled her morning show appearances. But that’s not that surprising. There’s not a lot good to talk about. But canceling all public appearances, if that’s what they’re saying, is a different story.

So, obviously, she’s going to pack it in and graciously concede, right?

Not bloody likely. This is a Clinton we’re talking about here. Hillary Clinton, no less. While candidates always say they’re going to keep campaigning until it’s pried from their cold, dead hands right up until the point when they drop out, it’s simply not in this woman’s DNA to concede defeat.

We’ll be hearing murmurs from the Clinton camp for years to come about how this was stolen from her and that, if only Florida and Michigan had counted, it would have been hers. That’s doubly true if Obama loses to John McCain in November.

The Limbaugh Effect

The most bizarre question going around is the degree to which Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” influenced this thing. “Not enough,” would seem the obvious answer given that Clinton underperformed the polls in both states.

ABC’s Jake Tapper reports having met one voter who was heeding Limbaugh’s commands and, if he could find one, there must be thousands! millions!

There were anecdotal reports of big turnout in Republican precincts in Indiana – with, presumably, Republican voters asking for Democratic presidential ballots.

Were they Republicans swept up in Clintonmania or Obamamania? Or did they have something more devious on their minds?

Most of the Republicans voting for Clinton or Obama this election season have been voting sincerely for those candidates – or so they told us, at any rate.

Jonathan Chait thinks he’s found a proxy for measuring the “Limbaugh Effect.”

One exit poll question asks Indiana voters who they would support in a Clinton-McCain contest. 17% of them say McCain. Of those voters, 41% say they would vote for McCain over Clinton. In other words, these voters, 7% of the Indiana electorate, voted for Clinton in the primary but have no intention of supporting her in the fall.

Now, this isn’t a precise measure of the “Limbaugh effect” — no doubt there are some Republicans who backed Obama in the primary out of anti-Clinton sentiment, but plan to vote for McCain in November. But it is a good place to start when making a ballpark estimate. And it’s a sizeable number — 7% may wind up being as big as her margin of victory.

HuffPo’s Sam Stein adds more fuel to this fire:

Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said “neither candidate” shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton.

These are not small numbers. By comparison, of the 33 percent of voters who said Sen. Barack Obama does not share their values, only seven percent cast their ballots in his favor. Basically, more people who don’t relate to Clinton are, for one reason or another, still voting for her. These are not likely to be loyal supporters.

On a broader level, among the 17 percent of primary goers who said they would choose Sen. John McCain over Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election match-up, 41 percent of that group came from Clinton’s own camp. In essence, roughly seven percent of Clinton support in Indiana (40 percent of 17 percent) said they would defect to the Republican should she end up the nominee. That would be a difficult punch to stomach in November. In 2004, nearly 1 million Indianans voted for John Kerry. A seven percent defection rate would have meant 70,000 less votes.

Did these Limbaugh people lie to pollsters, too, convincing them that they were likely Democratic voters? Otherwise, we need to account for the fact that fewer Clinton voters showed up at the polls — despite huge turnout — than in the polls.

Prediction Games

In our predictions yesterday morning, Dave, Alex, and I all picked the outcomes correctly. Alex came closest on the margins, picking Clinton to win Indiana by 5 points and Obama to win North Carolina by 10 points. SoloD was even closer, guessing 4 points and 10 points, respectively.

John Zogby, whose polls I dismissed as an outlyer in that post, got it pretty close, it turns out. He had a 14 point gap in NC but, alas, had Obama winning Indiana by 2. He missed that one.

The Needling and the Damage Done

The biggest concern for Democrats — and, indeed, much of the impetus for “Operation Chaos” — was that a prolonged nomination fight would bloody the eventual winner, damaging his chances against McCain in the Fall. The exit polls would seem to provide some evidence that this has happened.

Marc Ambinder worries about a ” Democratic Party crack-up.

Forget the horse race numbers for a moment: if the surveys are accurate, the polarization within the Democratic Party has reached critical levels. Nearly six in ten Obama supporters in Indiana say they would be dissatisfied if Clinton were the nominee — that’s (I believe) the high percentage of Obama supporters who have ever said that.

In both IN and NC, two thirds of Clinton supporters say they’d be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee — I believe that’s the highest number recorded for that question, too.

The percentage of Clinton voters who say they’d choose McCain over Obama in a general election is approaching 40% in Indiana. Put it another way: in North Carolina, less than HALF of folks who voted today for Hillary Clinton are ready to say today that they’d definitely vote for Obama in a general election.

But this is just a furthering of existing trends, with partisans of each candidate digging in their heels. Remember all those Republicans who said they’d never vote for McCain? Or would vote for Hillary rather than McCain? Where are they now? Sure, some of them will never come home and that’s likely true for some Clinton voters, too. But history tells us that people get over these things and revert to form come election day.

The racial gap, which actually widened last night, is a legitimate concern. Blacks rallied to Obama in even greater numbers than previously and Clinton got slightly higher white support, especially among the “working class” (a term I truly despise, as it implies that those putting in 60 hours a week at high paying jobs don’t work).

Then again, Obama is almost certainly going to get the nomination. Which means the black base isn’t going to be alienated.

The question, then, is whether white Democrats are going to stay home in November — or even vote for McCain — in significant numbers. Why would they do that? Are we to believe that 40-odd percent of Democratic primary voters simply won’t vote for a black man? Or that the seemingly paper thin ideological differences between Clinton and Obama loom so large that her supporters will abandon the party in droves? That just doesn’t make sense.

Race and the Race

Interestingly, Andrew Sullivan — who yesterday was fearful that race would be a big factor in the postmortems — couldn’t be more pleased with the way things turned out.

Here’s what now seems obvious: African-American voters killed the Clinton candidacy. It is a fitting end to the Clintons’ campaign and an almost Shakespearean coda to their career. The Clintons were exposed in their long-running exploitation and reliance on minority votes. No group was more loyal to them than African-Americans; and in the end, like everyone else, African-Americans realized that the Clintons are frauds, disloyal to the core, cynical to their finger-tips, and finally, finally, returned the favor.

[...]

After what the Clintons did in this campaign, and what they’ve revealed about themselves, and their alliance with Fox News and Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan, this couldn’t be more appropriate.

This will be history’s verdict: in the end, the Clintons were defeated not by Republicans, but by African-American Democrats. How wonderful. How poignant. In the end, the karma gets you. Maybe it had to be this way. But this final coup de grace against these awful, hollow, cynical people is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

It’s a good thing those African-Americans showed up! (Although, for the life of me, I’m not sure what Fox News, Bill Kristol, and Pat Buchanan have to do with anything.)

It’s doubtless true that black voters were decisive, propelling Obama to a huge win in North Carolina and making it close in Indiana. Indeed, there were so many absentee ballots in Gary that they were up late at night counting them.

On the other hand, let’s not forget that Obama got a handful of white votes, too. Like, 40 percent of them in these two states. And that he won numerous primaries and caucuses in states with negligible black populations.

Indeed, if Obama has been somehow transformed by this process into “the black candidate,” he’s doomed. Even presuming that he’ll energize that bloc like no candidate in recent decades, driving out turnout to record levels, we’re still talking about 12 percent of the population and less than that of the eligible voting population. Remember, too, that 90 percent of blacks routinely vote for the Democratic nominee anyway.

Fortunately for his party, though, Obama is far more than the Great Black Hope. He’s energized the youth vote and seems to have turned that phrase into something other than an oxymoron. A goodly number of Republican-leaning moderates have found him appealing. He’s going to be a very formidable candidate in the fall in a country that’s 74 percent white and where the voters will likely be closer to 80 percent white.

Race is going to be a factor in the election, of course, just as it always is. The “race gap” has always been much greater than the vaunted “gender gap.” But the contest will ultimately be decided on issues, personalities, charisma, trust, fear, and the same litany of intellectual and visceral issues that always decides these things.

Fundraising has been very, very good to Bill Clinton.

When London socialite Renu Mehta sought to urge Britain’s super-rich into giving more to charity, she threw a fundraising dinner headlined by former President Bill Clinton, who has used his global star power to encourage large-scale philanthropy that stresses accountability. Mehta declared the first gathering of her Fortune Forum, held Sept. 26, 2006, a rousing success. The event raised about $1.5 million and brought together dozens of billionaires, celebrities and activists to network about tackling such problems as global warming, water shortages and disaster relief.

But success came with a steep price. Fundraising costs consumed more than half of the proceeds, with $450,000 going to Clinton as a speaking fee, one of the largest he has collected as personal income, according to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s federal financial disclosure forms. Clinton’s fee for his Fortune Forum appearance dwarfed the $280,000 the former president charged for a speech earlier in the day in London sponsored by a for-profit partnership and the $280,000 he received the next day for a speech in Dublin.

“We were a charity, but he wouldn’t come without that, so we paid it,” said Vijay Mehta, a co-founder of the Fortune Forum who is Renu Mehta’s father. “If we had been charged less, we could have given a bit more” to charity.

[...]

Clinton’s fee included travel costs, and the former president agreed to deliver the speech “under the understanding that the honorarium would be underwritten by the head of the Fortune Forum and her family and would not be taken from the proceeds of the event,” Hillary Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said in an e-mail. Bill Clinton’s press office referred queries on the speech to his wife’s campaign.

“That’s rubbish,” Renu Mehta said in a telephone interview. “The contract was with Fortune Forum, not me.” Mehta said she agreed to guarantee Clinton’s fee in the event the dinner did not raise enough money to meet Clinton’s tab.

I guess this all just goes to reinforce the old adage that charity begins at home.

It’s odd that Clinton charged nearly double his normal appearance fee for a charity event, particularly one supporting a cause that he’s using to stake his post-presidential legacy. Frankly, it looks unseemly. At the same time, we don’t know how much Fortune Forum would have raised with a less high-profile but cheaper speaker; the net may still have worked out in their favor.

via Digg

Via Marc Ambinder and reporter Bill Gertz of the Moonie Washington Times, three State Department contract employees were recently caught sneaking peeks at Barack Obama’s passport records. The relevant particulars from Gertz’s piece:

The officials, all contract workers, used their authorized computer network access to look up files within the department’s consular affairs section, which processes and stores passport information, and read Mr. Obama’s passport application and other records, in violation of department privacy rules, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified of the security breach today, and responded by saying security measures used to monitor records of high-profile Americans worked properly in detecting the breaches.

Mr. McCormack said the officials did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.

“As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity,” Mr. McCormack told The Washington Times. …

One administration official said the FBI is conducting a preliminary inquiry into the officials involved in the unauthorized access incidents related to Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat. An FBI spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Government records of political candidates are tightly restricted because of concerns they could be used against candidates or the data could be altered as part of campaign dirty tricks. …

Each time an employee logs on to the passport-records network, they are informed that the records are protected by the Privacy Act and are “available only on a need-to-know basis,” he said. But no technical bar prevents a person, once he is in the system, from gaining access to Privacy Act-protected records to which he has no “need-to-know” rights.

But the network has an electronic monitoring system that is tripped when an employee accesses a record of a prominent person, like Mr. Obama. The alarm then triggers an inquiry into the incident, and “when the answer is not satisfactory, a supervisor is notified.”

More paranoic quarters of the blogosphere have leapt to the conclusion that the lookups represent Republican dirty tricks.

However, given both that the GOP presumably has people in the bureaucracy with access to the records who aren’t low-level contractors doing data-entry work, the timing of the incidents following news events (rather than months or years ago, when any opposition researcher worth his or her salt would be scouting potential targets like Obama), and the fact that any professional dirt-digger would know that searches like these in government databases raise red flags automatically, I strongly suspect that Sean McCormack is right to attribute these actions to “imprudent curiosity” or, as Mark Kleiman suggests, lame independent efforts to find some dirty laundry that could be shopped to opposition candidates or the media. Since the records in the application system appear to be very limited (basically, just what the was on the application form submitted to the State Department, with the only travel records being the optional “plans” disclosed thereon) I doubt you’d find much dirty laundry there even if you tried.

All that said, the FBI should continue its investigation to ensure that these were simply incidences of bad judgment by the contract workers. Presumably the fired employees are subject to criminal prosecution for violating the Privacy Act, subject to prosecutorial discretion; given the negative publicity the case has drawn, I’d imagine the chances of the employees being brought up on charges are quite high, even if they were just being willfully stupid.

As part of a retrospective commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens admits to having been right all along. He does, however, reject the premise of the question.

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath Party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger’s faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.

If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam Hussein, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favor in our nation’s capital at the precise moment when he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favor until the very moment when he decides to “engulf” his small Kuwaiti neighbor. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam’s regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, “lied into war.” We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him.

This is all true, of course. History isn’t a series of discrete events but an interwoven tapestry of actions and reactions. At the same time, though, it’s rather silly to pretend that things didn’t change dramatically with the decision to invade in 2003.

Regardless, Hitchens argues that, while the reasons for war have been “overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself,” he nonetheless thinks the good has outweighed the bad.

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya’s (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region’s keystone dictatorship.

This is all right so far as it goes. And we can’t know what evils would have occurred had we not entered. But we’re at least partly to blame for those which have happened following our invasion. Tens of thousands of innocents have died. While large numbers of al Qaeda terrorists have been killed, so too have many been recruited; I’m not sure that anyone knows how the balance sheet has come out. And Iraq is in danger of becoming a failed state.

Reconciling this is difficult, as Hitchens admits:

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam’s immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

That’s the question, really. Hitchens is a liberal interventionist rather than a neoconservative but their policy prescriptions amount to the same thing.

I’m very much in the Colin Powell “You broke it, you bought it” school. Given that we toppled Iraq’s regime and set out to create a model Mesopotamian democracy, we’ve got a responsibility to keep trying so long as there’s some hope of success. I disagree, however, that we have a responsibility to attempt to right every wrong that exists around the world.

While there’s no question that there was a humanitarian argument for going to war in Iraq and that it comprised a key element of President Bush’s speeches to the nation and the international community, that wasn’t the argument that carried the day. The nation simply wouldn’t have supported invasion absent the fears of Saddam building of weapons of mass destruction and using them against us or our friends or selling them to our enemies.

Reflecting on the Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce settlement, Alex Massie, blogging from the other side of the Pond, observes,

Isn’t £24m pretty fair compensation for having endured Sir Paul McCartney for four years. It works out at £16, 427 a day which, as a per diem, seems quite reasonable…

(Of course if you take the view that she is but a gold-digger, then McCartney can reflect that £24m to tell her where to hop-off is money well spent.)

Quite. Heather’s certainly improved her pre-Paul lifestyle enormously for her four year investment, certainly more so than, say, the return on a University education. And £24m is barely more than nuisance money to Sir Paul.

The whole controversy immediately reminds me of how the Beatles changed their tune on the issue of money as their personal status changed. In their leanest days, before fames hit, they covered Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford’s “Money,” which put forth the cynical view that,

Your lovin’ gives me a thrill
But your lovin’ don’t pay my bills
Now give me money
That’s what I want

In 1964’s “Can’t Buy Me Love,” one of McCartney’s infamous Silly Love Songs, we see a wistfulness:

I may not have a lot to give but what I got I’ll give to you
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love

In “All You Need Is Love,” written when McCartney and his songwriting partner John Lennon were wealthy and newly married, they inform us that,

There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time
It’s easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love.

Presumably, hallucinogenics drugs also contributed to this newfound economic consciousness.

Toward the end, with 1969’s Abbey Road, however, the message was much more cryptic. In “You Never Give Me Your Money,” McCartney foreshadows today’s events:

You never give me your money
You only give me your funny paper
and in the middle of negotiations
you break down

I’m not sure how much Sir Paul’s views evolved during the Wings era and thereafter. Economic commentary seems not to have been as strongly featured in them, as I can’t recall any post-Beatles hits with that theme.

My colleague Alex Knapp has pointed out some outrageous comments made by John Hagee and Rod Parsley, nutball preachers whose endorsements McCain has courted and received.

McCain’s not alone, apparently, among our major presidential hopefuls in having associations with religious crazies. By far the hottest story on memeorandum today is an ABC News piece headlined “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11.”

Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He said Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.

Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Obama’s association with Wright is, one might reasonably conclude, closer and of longer duration than McCain’s with Hagee and Parsley. But I have shrugged off all these stories along with those about Obama’s association with Tony Rezko and McCain’s relationship with Rick Renzi (indeed, I’ve conflated Rezko and Renzi in my mind and had to look them up) for the simple reason that they don’t seem to shed much light on the candidates.

Do any of us believe that Obama or McCain are secretly conspiracy theorists who have repressed a lot of whacky ideas? Or that, even if they actually believed this nonsense, they’d try to enact it into policy? Of course not.

Unfortunately, the process of building a winning national coalition means appealing to some unsavory types. Politicians walk a fine line when accepting endorsements from these people and expecting them to denounce every nutty idea any of their supporters might harbor is asking too much.

That’s not to say that the words of Hagee, Parsley, Wright and others aren’t worth looking into. They’re influentials who voice — and shape — opinions that many Americans have. Understanding that the shared consensus of polite society is not universal is worthwhile and illuminating. But we should stop short of assuming guilt by association.

Alex is in the process of digging into Wright and his relationship with Obama and I’ll be interested to see what he finds. My hunch, though, is that he’ll find that Wright is a whackjob and that Obama regards him as a crazy uncle. (Perhaps he’s related to that crazy aunt Ross Perot kept in the basement?)

UPDATE: Steve Benen quips, “I guess there’s a political upside for Obama: he can’t be a Muslim and a Christian with a radical pastor at the same time.”

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty takes exception with Wright’s claim regarding Obama “he ain’t white, he ain’t rich, and he ain’t privileged” by pointing out “Obama’s mother was white, the Obamas’ income hit $1.7 million in 2005 and $991,000 in 2006, and he went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School.”