A new Pew survey shows a rather steep “Partisan Knowledge Gap,” with Republicans and Independents generally better informed than Democrats.

Mary Katharine Ham finds this quite amusing and also notes that, “if the polling had gone the other way, the NYT would shout it from the rooftops.”  She provides examples of the mainstream press doing just that on previous occasions.

We’d need a more wide-ranging set of questions and more replication over time to make any definitive conclusions about the relative knowledge of various partisans.   This does, however, seem to belie the recent White House-approved meme that Fox News and its ilk aren’t really news outlets.   The fact of the matter is — and this has been borne out over time — that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity are among the best informed people out there.   It’s not that those hosts are unbiased — Lord knows, they are — but because they draw an audience that’s much more interested in the news than most Americans.

CNN’s current business model is straight news, with the opinion shows pushed to their sister HLN.  But people actually watch Fox.

Becks observes, “I suspect many Twitter memes that I find annoying (one letter off movie titles, failed children’s books, etc.) would have been quite hilarious Unfogged threads.”

The post title, “The Medium Is The Message,” is appropriate.  Several Twitter memes  (created by adding a hashtag such as #failedchildrensbooks) of the sort mentioned can be amusing if one is in the mood.  The problem is that one gets a huge stream of them from participating people one is following whether one is in the mood or not.  If the latter, then it becomes clutter — if not spam — impeding one’s efforts to glean the sort of information usually imparted by those one follows.  Conversely, a comment discussion on a one-off blog post can be — and generally is — simply skipped over by those not in the mood and once can easily stop reading once one tires of it.

On a related note, the equivalent phenomenon — the widespread adoption of silly applications — has killed Facebook for me.  Once invitations to participate in zombie wars start to outnumber useful messages from friends and others in my network, it ceases to be worth the time.

Howard Fineman piles on to the burgeoning — if thus far unfounded — Obama overexposed and Obama fatigue memes with an uncharacteristically harsh column.

In addition to contending Obama gives too many speeches with too little substance, her goes further:

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. [...] Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a -senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

It’s not entirely clear what “consequences” the president can mete out to members of his own party in an independent branch of government who fail to do as he wishes.  Aside from petty exclusion from the reindeer games that surround the Head of State trappings of the White House — signings, dinners, awards ceremonies, and the like — he needs them more than they need him.

The reason Obama needs to more clearly articulate what he wants isn’t to scare the Congress but rather to inspire the people.  By “going over Congress’ heads,” presidents can leverage their popularity to put pressure on the legislature.

But the truth may well be that, as personally popular as Obama remains, people aren’t necessarily enamored with the specific policies he wants and can’t be talked into changing their minds.  If that’s the case, then going on TV more won’t help.  But it’s not clear what else would.

A man carrying an anti-abortion sign was murdered this morning.

A well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed Friday morning in front of a Michigan high school and another man was shot and killed just miles away in what police are investigating as related incidents.

Michigan State Police have taken a suspect into custody but have not released the name of the victim, the Flint Journal reported. The school was placed on immediate lockdown, though no students were injured or involved in the shooting, Ossowo Hish School officials told the paper. School officials say the shooting took place outside of school grounds around 7:30 a.m., when most students were already inside the building for classes. The school, located 20 miles west of Flint, is now allowing students to leave with a parental escort, WLNS News reported.

The suspect was picked up at his home at about 8:15 a.m. and is now being investigated in connection with a second killing that occurred a few miles away from the school, WNEM News reported.

As police sift through the second “homicide scene” near an Ossowo gravel pit Friday morning, they have ringed off a section of street in front of the high school, where a large sign bearing the image of a baby and the word “Life” can be seen, the Flint Journal reported.

Having only the information quoted above, I agree with Megan McArdle that “this seems more like a lone lunatic than a political killing” and share her hope that “if it does turn out to be someone with a political agenda, the right can manage to refrain from claiming that this is really a symptom of some dark rot at the center of liberalism.”

It does, sadly, seem yet another data point in my longstanding There Are Nuts on Both Sides meme.  Thankfully, even though this is the issue that seems to motivate the most vitriol in our politics, the number of murders committed since 1973’s Roe v. Wade can still be counted on both hands.  There have been more people killed for their sneakers than their views on abortion.

A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead.

A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn’t had any interest in using it in the future.  Then again, as Paul Banas noted, “If I were to survey US consumers right after World War II on whether they think they would use a television, and for those who don’t, do they think they would in the future, I’d probably get roughly the same data back as Forrester got on RSS.” Indeed, recall Ken Olsen’s classic 1977 statement that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

The more recent evolution of the debate is not so much about widespread adoption but that power users find RSS inefficient, preferring instead Twitter or various aggregators like Memeorandum or Techmeme.  Steve Gillmor proclaimed in May that “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.

RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites.

But, as Dave Winer retorted, it’s rather silly to proclaim the death of RSS while instead using technologies that rely on RSS!

Sam Diaz revived the argument this week saying “Once a big advocate for Google Reader, I have to admit that I haven’t logged in in weeks, maybe months.”

I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News. I have a pretty extensive lineup of browser bookmarks to take me to sites that I scan throughout the day. Techmeme is always in one of my browser tabs so I can keep a pulse on what others in my industry are talking about. And then there are Twitter and Facebook. I actually pick up a lot of interesting reading material from people I’m following on Twitter and some friends on Facebook, with some of it becoming fodder for blog posts here.

The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have. According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of U.S. online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago.

Although, again, YahooNews, GoogleNews, and Techmeme all merely aggregate information pushed through RSS.  Proclaiming RSS dead because you’re using it downstream is rather like proclaiming television dead because you never watch it anymore — you just TiVo everything.

Further, as Patricio Robles observes, “RSS may not be as popular as Twitter or Facebook, but who says it has to be? Twitter and Facebook are great for content discovery; RSS is one of a number of tools that can be used for content aggregation. Comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges.”

Steve Rubel takes that to the next level: “Think RSS is dead? Think it’s too slow for the age of streams? Perhaps that’s true for news. But have you ever considered using Google Reader as a private database? In this screencast I will show you how I do just that.”

Which is pretty much how I’m using Google Reader these days.  There’s a ton of information out there and trying to tab through and skim every post on every blog and newspaper that I want to follow simply takes too much time and energy.   So I rely in various aggregators, aggregate my own content feeds via the Firefox Feedly plugin, keep an eye on Twitter, and use Google Reader as a research tool for fleshing out posts once I’ve come up with ideas.

Hillary Clinton’s Congo blow-up is a story that just won’t go away. Even those sympathetic to Obama and Clinton, like Jon Stewart, are having a field day with this.

Mrs. Clinton’s answer on Monday has quickly become the No. 1 sound bite from her trip. Her whole seven-nation Africa tour, which has had quite serious intentions, like combating Congo’s appalling rape epidemic and raising her personal profile within President Obama’s administration, may end up being reduced to this: “Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not the secretary of state, I am. So you ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.”

Almost immediately, her showdown with the student became a media phenomenon, with a level of attention on an American in Kinshasa perhaps not seen since the so-called Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides have been notably frustrated that this brief flash of anger, or undiplo-speak, has come to overshadow a trip that took weeks of planning and was intended to strengthen America’s ties to some of its most strategic allies on the continent.

[..]

No matter the issues she was talking about — encouraging good governing, ending Africa’s wars, lifting women up from their lowly position in a place like Congo. The interest in this trip, it seemed, was not about the problems facing Africa. It was about her.

As one journalist covering her trip put it: “She is a celebrity. We have a celebrity secretary of state. When you have a celebrity, you get celebrity coverage.”

That’s the reality of modern media. And, like it or not, this is a big story. It’s yet another reason secretaries of state and vice presidents have to be on guard at all times rather than letting fly whatever thought happens to be crossing their minds at the moment.

As to the emerging meme that the media is playing up this sensationalism while ignoring the real story — the horrific plight of women in Africa — it’s nonsense. Of course the latter is much more important. But it’s not news.

Hillary Clinton chewed out a Congolese student for asking what “Mr. Clinton” thought about a public policy issue:

ABC’s Kirit Radia:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost her cool Monday after a Congolese student, speaking through a translator, asked her what “Mr. Clinton” thought about a Chinese trade deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” Clinton replied, clearly irked by the thought of being her husband Bill’s spokeswoman. “My husband is not secretary of state, I am,” she replied. “If you want my opinion I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.”

The only problem? Apparently the translator made a mistake and the student had wanted to know what President Obama thought of the deal. A State Department official tells ABC News the student went up to Clinton after the event and told her he was misquoted. No immediate word yet how Clinton responded.

Regardless of the error, the notion of Secretary Clinton’s deference to her husband clearly touched a nerve with America’s top diplomat. Just a week ago the former President stole his wife’s thunder when he appeared in North Korea to rescue two American journalists detained there. His trip came just as Secretary Clinton embarked on a swing through Africa she hoped would shine light on the plight of the continent.

What’s odd, unless there are two translators involved somehow, the video clearly shows the questioner speaking in English and saying “Mr. Clinton” and then the lady at the podium repeating the question — again in English — to Mrs. Clinton.

Regardless, her indignant response seems rather over-the-top for America’s chief diplomat. She could have asked for clarification before going off. (My guess would have been that the student meant “Mrs. Clinton” and it got garbled in translation to English.) Or she could have joked, “Well, you’ll have to ask him next time he’s in Kinshasha” and added “but here’s what I think.”

“Diplomacy in action,” indeed.

Jules Crittenden, Doug Mataconis and John Hinderaker all share my take, more or less, of the reaction.

All of the women commenting on this one thus far, however, stick up for Hil.

Pamela Leavey:  “As a woman who blazes her own path, I think Hillary’s response was natural.”

myiq2xu (Not a common name, so hard to guess gender other than that it’s on a blog with riverdaughter as the username A man, but one writing on a group blog with “riverdaughter” as its domain name):

This appears to be the new CDS meme – “Hillary is a mad b**ch.” They used to say she was “cold and calculating” but now she’s out of control. Exactly how do they think she should have responded to the “What does your husband thnk?” question coming from the translator?

Taylor Marsh:

As you can see in the video, Clinton was ticked off at being asked what a male leader thought, especially when her purpose in this region is to draw a bull’s eye on the rape and torture of women in the Congo.

The United States Secretary of State obviously didn’t appreciate the misogyny, which is rampant in the Congo and other African nations, born out by the questioner expecting her to “channel” a male. Assistant Secretary P.J. Crowley responded.

“The Secretary of State is going to Goma Tuesday, to draw attention to the plight of women who are victims of rape as a weapon of war” in Congo, he said. “She did react to what she heard,” Crowley explained. Even if the interpreter mixed up the translation, he said, “you can’t separate the question from the setting.”

As the Washington Post story quoted at the top reports, Congolese President Joseph Kabila has declared “zero tolerance” regarding sexual assaults and violence against women, but so far it’s just words.

There can be no doubt that Clinton came off harsh in this setting. A little righteous indignation from the most powerful female persona on the planet was in order, especially considering women in the Congo are in danger most of the hours of their waking and sleeping lives.

CNN reports that after the event Clinton and the questioner “seemed to have reached an understanding,” according to Crowley.

But seriously, you cannot bring basic human rights to women in places like the Congo if the men there don’t wake up to the respect women deserve, highlighting how far we have to go if not even the U.S. secretary of state is treated with respect.

But she was treated respectfully. A packed house had come to hear her and some nervous student whose native language isn’t English said “Clinton” when he meant “Obama.”

That said, Crowley’s point is a fair one:  “you can’t separate the question from the setting.”  It’s hardly inconceivable that she had gotten the impression during her visit thus far that she was not being treated seriously because of her sex and reacted to the question with that in mind.

Bill Maher has a piece at HuffPo arguing that Americans are a bunch of idiots who should just shut up and let people who know what they’re talking about make decisions on tough issues like health care reform.

[T]ake the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and “listen to their constituents.” An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife’s name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they’re not stupid. They’re interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words “Bush” and “knowledge.”

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It’s actually less than 1%. And don’t even ask about cabinet members: seven in ten think Napolitano is a kind of three-flavored ice cream. And last election, a full one-third of voters forgot why they were in the booth, handed out their pants, and asked, “Do you have these in a relaxed-fit?”

And I haven’t even brought up America’s religious beliefs. But here’s one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That’s right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There’s a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. “Inside the beltway” thinking may be wrong, but at least it’s thinking, which is more than you can say for what’s going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they’re talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

This rant is so powerful it’s united Dennis the Peasant (aka Kenton E. Kelly, CPA) and Roger L. Simon!

Kelly snarks, “Just ask any progressive. They love ‘the people’. They want to help ‘the people’. They want equality, fraternity, mutual respective and constructive dialog.”

And the meme’s spreading. Greg Sargent reports that Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says Democrats attacking other Democrats are “f-king stupid.”  And president Obama wants people who disagree with him to shut up.

What’s interesting here is that Maher’s largely right on the facts.  We’ve known for decades that people are wildly ignorant about basic facts.  Some of it’s explainable by getting caught off guard or not quite understanding the question.  But anyone who has taught college freshmen knows that even fairly bright folks can be astonishingly ignorant.

It doesn’t follow, however, that people are too stupid to make judgments on issues. People may not be able to answer the question “Name the branches of the U.S. Government” but they probably know that we have a president, a Congress, and courts and have some vague sense that there are checks and balances.  They may not know how much of our budget is spent on foreign aid but they know that they’d rather spend their money at home.  They know that abortion is legal and controversial even if they don’t know the name of the case that made it so or even understand that the Supreme Court is responsible.

The nature of representative democracy is that the people make judgments on broad policy directions and elect people to govern them accordingly.  The details are left to the elected representatives and, increasingly, to unelected bureaucrats with actual subject matter expertise.

To the extent that the public’s misunderstanding of the issues makes it difficult to make changes that presidents and congressmen think are necessary, it is incumbent on these leaders to explain themselves better.  Obama is a fine orator and gets more television time that “Seinfeld” reruns.   If he can’t persuade people to buy what he’s selling, he might need a new product.

Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent “How to save the dying newspaper industry” meme that’s been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere.

He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson (”How to Save Your Newspaper”) that advocates a micropayment system.  While pretty much every blogger who wrote about this idea at the time scoffed at it, Craig observes, “That seems like a pipe dream today, but who knows about tomorrow? Television was once free, but now the average American spends hundreds of dollars each year for his cable or satellite subscription.”  That’s a good point, actually.

But what pay television offered that the free version didn’t was variety.  In the old days, most of us had the three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), plus PBS and a couple of local independents to choose from.  Adding just ESPN and CNN was a huge advance and the availability of movie channels like HBO and Showtime was just remarkable.   I’m not sure what the online news equivalent of this would be.

The second suggestion, via Mark Potts (”Editors as Curators: What’s Taking So Long?) is that editors could repackage their skills and rethink online newspapers as smart aggregators.

[N]ewspaper and TV sites still generally are trapped in their walled gardens, putting together their daily reports only from the sources they pay for: their own reporters, maybe some wire and syndicated copy and photos, and that’s about it.

On the Web, you’re not limited only to the content you own. You can create a rich, deep package for your readers on any subject by linking to outside sources—background, context, documents, data, video, discussions, blogs, user-generated content, etc. Even, shudder, good stuff from competitors. But with very few exceptions, this is done only tentatively, if at all, at the vast majority of news sites.

Craig calls this “a really smart idea/model” and wonders, “Can the culture of the newsroom support it? Or does a version of the Not Invented (Created) Here syndrome work against it?”

I’d argue, though, that bloggers are pretty much doing this already and for free.  It’s Glenn Reynolds‘ bread and butter, of course, but even bloggers that aren’t primarily linkers tend to serve as aggregators.  Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and other general interest bloggers provide links to dozens of stories of interest to their readers a day and niche blogs like Small Wars Journal are, in additional to a source of original commentary and analysis, smart aggregators of the most important articles and discussions on their topics taking place elsewhere.

So, yes, this is a good model for attracting eyeballs on the Web.   But, since thousands of people are doing it for free — and hundreds are doing it well — I’m not sure how that translates into an effective business model for saving newspapers.

Photo by Flickr user Annie Mole under Creative Commons license.

The Old Gray Lady has another of the epic scoops that made them the Newspaper of Record. Ace correspondent Helene Cooper breaks the news in a piece of journalism titled “For Young President, Flecks of Gray.”

Well, that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray.

It happens to all of them, of course — Bill Clinton still had about half a head of brown hair when he took office but was a silver fox two years later, and George W. Bush went from salt and pepper to just salt in what seemed like a blink of an eye.

But so soon? “I started noticing it toward the end of the campaign and leading up to inauguration,” says Deborah Willis, who, as co-author of “Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs,” pored through 5,000 photographs of the first head over the last year.

Mr. Obama’s graying is still of the flecked variety, and appears to wax and wane depending on when he gets his hair cut, which he does about every two weeks. His barber, who goes by only one name, Zariff, takes umbrage with bloggers who alternately claim Mr. Obama, 47, is dyeing his hair gray (to appear more distinguished) or dyeing it black (to appear younger). “I can tell you that his hair is 100 percent natural,” Zariff said. “He wouldn’t get it colored.”

And for all of his 16 years giving Mr. Obama his “quo vadis” haircut — black parlance from the 1960s for close-cut locks — Zariff said he is not about to start ribbing Mr. Obama. “We do not tease about the gray at all,” he said.

Now, I have no doubt that running for president, let alone serving as president, is ridiculously stressful.  Anecdotally at least, the job does seem to “age” its occupants.

But, let me meet anecdote with anecdote which — there is some controversy about this — may or may not constitute data.   At 43, I’m younger than Obama.  While I work long hours under the pressure of Internet Time deadlines, I have never run for president nor had to make decisions on multi-trillion dollar budgets.  And yet, alas, my hair has flecks of gray.  Some (my wife, for example) would say “flecks” understates the situation.

So far as I’m aware, there is no Latin name for my haircut.  When I was a small boy, my dad would take me to the barber and order up “A regular man’s haircut.”  Aside from a few instances, such as Airborne school, where I wore it much shorter, I’ve had some variant of it since 1984.    Shockingly, my hair appears less gray when it’s freshly trimmed (usually every other Thursday).

What I’m getting at is this:  Obama probably had a bit gray hair when he started running for president.  He’s older now and probably has a bit more.  While young for a president, he is, after all,  well into middle age.  Further, as is typical of those who sport the quo vadis, his hair is dark, so the gray stands out more.   Depending on how the light — including camera flashes and television kliegs — it’ll sometimes appear more gray than at other times.   None of this should be taken as an indication that he’s cracking under the pressure.

via memeorandum

William “The Freezer” Jefferson, who has been under federal indictment for three years, narrowly lost a hurricane-delayed election yesterday to Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao.

Nine-term Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, who has been battling scandals and a federal indictment for the past three years, lost his bid for re-election on Saturday. Republican challenger Anh “Joseph” Cao, an attorney and community organizer, defeated Jefferson in the 2nd Congressional district race. He will become the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Cao had almost 50 percent of the vote to Jefferson’s 47 percent.

The 2nd Congressional district, in and around New Orleans, is mostly African-American and heavily Democratic, and Jefferson appeared to be favored to win re-election going into the election. “The people of the second district were able to transcend party, transcend race,” Cao said after claiming victory Saturday night.

Voters also chose Republican John Fleming over Democrat Paul Carmouche in Louisiana’s 4th District by a slim 356-vote margin. Fleming will replace retiring 10-term Republican Rep. Jim McCrery, a top-ranking Republican on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Elections in the districts were delayed after Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in September, setting up what should be the last two federal contests of 2008 on Saturday. Both races had two other contenders who drew a small percentage of votes.

While Republicans on Twitter and Memeorandum seem excited by these outcomes, I hesitate to read much into them. The 4th was a Republican hold. Given the margins, one presumes Jefferson would have won had the contest taken place on November 4 and turnout been normal. Indeed, if he’s still a free man two years hence, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if Jefferson runs again and wins. Certainly, it’s unlikely Cao will be able to hold on to a heavily Democratic district.

Still, it’s good to get him out if only for a while.  And Patrick Ruffini is right:

[T]here could be no more vivid example of why we need to run Republican candidates in every district than Louisiana’s 2nd. Cao won his seat more solidly than Fleming did in an R+7 seat. Starting with Obama CoS Rahm Emanuel, Democrats started to understand that Congressional races can be very nonpartisan under the right circumstances and that poor performance or other personal shortcomings by the incumbent can render even a hefty party ID deficit meaningless.  We can’t recreate Bill Jefferson in every district — the guy was indicted on 16 counts and the feds found 90 G’s in his freezer. It’s also an accident of history that the election happened today instead of on 11/4 when Jefferson could have ridden Obama’s coattails — it was delayed by Hurricane Gustav. There isn’t a Bill Jefferson in every district, but there is a Joseph Cao.

Now, there are plenty of “safe” seats where the incumbent not only has a huge partisan advantage but is also simply a very good Representative.  It’s not worth the opposition expending tremendous resources in losing efforts in those cases.  It is, though, worth grooming and running good candidates who can be funded if the incumbent suddenly becomes vulnerable.

Bernard Finel, to say the least a fan of neither the Bush Administration nor the Iraq War, throws cold water on the Bush Lied, People Died meme that refuses to die:

I’d like to urge folks to think through what standards should be applied to inherently ambiguous information. Here is what we knew in 2002:

(1) Saddam had a WMD program in the early 1990s.
(2) Saddam had not fully cooperated with weapons inspectors from 1991-1998.
(3) Inspectors had been expelled from the country from 1998 to 2002.
(4) When the inspectors returns, they found no evidence of a WMD program.
(5) Saddam was either unable or unwilling to provide a full accounting of what had happened to the program.

[...]

Finally, we can talk about cherry picking all we want. But then you need to address the Bob Gallucci/David Kay issue. These guys were inspectors as well. They knew the intel. They’d been on the ground. They thought Saddam had a program and stockpiles. Do we just want to dismiss them as dupes? Because we certainly can’t call them Bushie ideologues.

Now, as a supporter of both the Iraq War and the Bush Administration, I’ve long since come to the conclusion that the Iraq WMD evidence was indeed cherry picked, in the sense that they 1) genuinely believed Saddam had a WMD program and that it was unacceptable in a post-9/11 context and 2) rejected any evidence pointing the other way as outlier.  I also think they played fast and loose with the evidence on Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda — mostly by omission rather than commission — to the end of propagandizing for a war they genuinely believed necessary. But the idea that Bush and company simply manufactured a war for reasons other than sincere belief that it was in America’s security interests have no evidence.

Kathleen Parker seems vaguely annoyed by the Twitter phenomenon.

Shorter than a blog posting, a “tweet” consists of a concise sentence or two and essentially answers the question: What are you doing?

[...]

On Planet Facebook, nothing in one’s life is not worth mentioning. To what end, one can only surmise. I am, therefore I am, therefore I am. But what are friends for, if not to feign interest in what’s not the least bit interesting?

Serious twitter subscribers expect more than a mood update, I’m told, and presumably won’t stick around long for less. Or will they? I recently created an account at Twitter.com. Nary a tweet have I posted thus far, yet already I have a dozen subscribers.

Parker’s mildly famous and says interesting things; a handful of subscribers are just a sign that people are curious.  I’ve had a Twitter account for months, which I use mostly to push OTB and New Atlanticist posts and have 357 followers.

I’m only following 95 people but, in all honestly, am “following” them in the same sense that I’m quite sure a sizable number of my “followers” are “following” me:  Not very closely.   Here’s what they’re saying right now:

	nprpolitics NPR.org will have a live stream of Obama’s introduction of Bill Richardson as his Commerce Secretary nominee in about 10 minutes. @acarvin 4 minutes ago from web
	FP_Passport Report: Obama to inherit broken national security system: Five-plus years after the invasion of Ira.. http://tinyurl.com/5ptes2 6 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	stinson Here’s another reason why I stopped teaching at uni here. RT @sinosplice New blog post: English Essay Templates http://tinyurl.com/5e87mf 11 minutes ago from web
	MichaelTurk @seanhackbarth Based on the discussions I had about Newsweek/WaPo last night, I don’t believe so. 12 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to seanhackbarth
	stinson Dems worried about leadership? http://tinyurl.com/5pjf52 Maybe it’s because Congress will still be deeply unpopular once Bush leaves office. 14 minutes ago from web
	chrisabraham Bookmarked The Polus Center for Social and Economic Development http://is.gd/a3Ha 14 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	chrisabraham Dugg 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter http://is.gd/a3H7 14 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	poliblogger Speaking of Twitter…: http://tinyurl.com/6ymh7z 17 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	poliblogger The Twitter Revolution?: Just shy of four years ago I wrote: While I have no doubt that there is an i.. http://tinyurl.com/5u8krd 17 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	bfrist Blog: Letter from Cross Cultural Solutions Fellow: Thailand: I was a world away, in more ways than on.. http://tinyurl.com/6khcjt 17 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	seanhackbarth @MichaelTurk Has Blip.tv finally made their embedable player journalist/idiot proof? 22 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to MichaelTurk
	bloggingheads Dan Drezner & Heather Hurlburt on the “#mumbai as India’s 9/11″ meme. video: http://tinyurl.com/5cro3x 23 minutes ago from web

It turns out that, by very carefully chosing whom one “follows,” there’s a sizable amount of good information available. At least half those tweets have info worth my checking out and about half the rest are mildly interesting.

Still, like Steven Taylor, I only “half-get” Twitter myself.  While I check email too often, I just haven’t made it a priority to check my tweets with any regularity and I’ve made a couple of concerted efforts to be more engaged in the community and found it not worth the tremendous time investment.    Steven’s also right that mainstream coverage of these technological “revolutions” are ridiculously overblown.

Greg Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 2003 to 2005, takes exception to Paul Krugman’s assertion “Isn’t it amazing just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing.”  He points to the standard RePEc data, ranking citations of economics based on academic citations, and shows the rankings of Obama and Bush advisors:

11. Larry Summers
21. Greg Mankiw
35. Ben Bernanke
99. Eddie Lazear
132. Glenn Hubbard
249. Harvey Rosen
391. Christy Romer
653. Austan Goolsbee

Now, there are probably better measures available.  None of them has won, as has Krugman, a Nobel Prize.  Further, being an influential academic economist isn’t necessarily an indicator of being a competent policy advisor.

That said, he’s right that the “Bush appointed incompetents” meme is largely false.  All eight of these people, even Goolsbee with his meager 653 (out of 18,000 plus) ranking, are highly respected economists with impressive credentials.

Presidents, of both parties, have access to the finest minds in the country and tend to appoint them to key posts.  Bush appointed some people who weren’t up to snuff, such as Mike Brown at FEMA.  Then again, so did Bill Clinton.  Jocelyn Elders, anyone?  Political backscratching, cronyism, and other factors sometimes lead to less than steller people landing important jobs.  That seldom happens, though, in technical fields.

Two lawyer-bloggers who I’ve followed for years are upset with me for buying into the “Sarah Palin was in over her head” meme. Xrlq accused me of drinking “the anti-Palin Kool-Aid” for buying into claims that Palin didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA while Bill Dyer is “genuinely concerned for [my] mental health.”

As to the more “outlandish” claims, such as that Palin thought Africa was a country, I tend to share my colleague Alex Knapp’s view:

Look, I think it’s clear that Sarah Palin didn’t evince much interest in foreign affairs or have a deep knowledge base regarding it. Which was one of my problems with her selection as a VP nominee. But c’mon. Do you really expect me to believe that she didn’t know fifth grade geography? I’m pretty sure you’d have to actually play me a clip of her making that mistake before I actually believed it.

As I noted in the comments to his post, though, having taught plenty of undergraduates who thought Africa was a country or didn’t know where Canada and Mexico were located on a map, it doesn’t strike me as absolutely implausible.   Regardless, the point of the post where I mentioned the charges — and noted that even “if true,” they “seem petty at this juncture” — was that conservatives ought to take the criticisms of more centrist Republicans to heart rather than making support for Palin some sort of litmus test.

The post that has Xrlq and Beldar so up in arms was simply to dismiss Andrew Sullivan’s claim that the press somehow covered up concerns about Palin’s preparedness were absurd on their face.  Rather obviously, the idea that she didn’t know much about foreign policy or the broader swath of national issues grew steadily starting from Team McCain’s decision to shelter her from the press and then blossomed into full force with horrible performances in the Katie Couric and Charles Gibson interviews.

Bill’s criticism of me is much more extensive here. He believes that I am suffering from Palin Derangement Syndrome.

I was tickled to be invited to participate by telephone in his podcast immediately after the Palin announcement in late August, and I agreed with him and the other participants that Gov. Palin was an exciting choice. Some time shortly after that, however, something changed Dr. Joyner’s mind about Gov. Palin.

I invited Bill on the show (which you can listen to here) because he is and was the blogosphere’s most knowledgable Palin observer, having touted her as a VP choice long before she was on most of our radar screens.  What we agreed on was that 1) Palin was definitely causing a major buzz and seemed to have the base genuinely excited and 2) that Palin was at least nominally qualified by résumé for the job.   I stressed, though — drawing comparison with Harriet Miers (another issue where the couselor and I differed) — that her résumé was thin for the office by recent standards.  He agreed, as I recall, but argued that her personal qualities overcame any experience deficit.    We also agreed that Palin’s resume stacked up just fine with Barack Obama’s.

But, no, I was never a huge fan of the pick, as my reaction the moment I heard about the Palin selection makes clear:

Aside from being young and hot-for-a-politician, though, Palin undercuts McCain’s entire campaign theme. She’s got less political experience and less foreign policy experience than Obama.

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I’d never heard of Palin before the VP buzz started on the blogs a while back. She’s supposedly an excellent campaigner. And, obviously, her youth and gender make her a bold pick. Ultimately, though, I think she doesn’t make sense. If you’re running on “the country’s security is too important to be run by neophytes,” you can’t have one as next in line.

While Joe Biden was, twice, an awful presidential candidate, he’s a plausible president. Sarah Palin is not.

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She’s going to make us pine for the days of Dan Quayle, methinks.

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We’ll see what the reaction turns out to be. I’m certainly not the target audience. But McCain’s first big decision is, in my mind, a truly awful one. Obama went traditional but steady in Biden. It wasn’t a bold pick but it was one that butressed his claim that he has judgment even though he lacks experience. McCain has done the opposite here.

He’s incredulous that I “now seriously purport to believe, for example, that Gov. Palin ‘couldn’t even name a newspaper she read.’”  I came to that conclusion only because Palin was unable to name a newspaper that she read in the Palin interview.

Ms Couric asks: “When it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?”

Mrs Palin replies: “I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.”

Ms Couric: What, specifically?

Mrs Palin: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”

Ms Couric: “Can you name a few?”

Mrs Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, ‘wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?’ Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

As with the Miers pick, Bill and I simply have a different idea of the criteria for high office should be.  He’s much more of a populist and I’m much more of an elitist in terms of credentialing and expertise.  Miers was nominally qualified to serve on the Supreme Court — and might have done a good job, for all I know — but she wasn’t a distinguished choice.  Ditto Palin as VP.

Palin must be a reasonably bright woman.  Bill’s right that it’s inconceivable that she got elected and re-elected to so many offices over the years, culminating with a state governorship, by being an airhead.  She’s obviously quite charismatic and a strong campaigner.  And I’m sure she knows Alaska issues backwards and forwards.   I saw little evidence, though, that she’s very interested in foreign policy or most issues of American domestic policy.   That doesn’t make her a bad person — she’s in the same boat as most Americans on that score — but it made her a bad choice for the vice presidency.