Today, Hillary Clinton was asked to respond to Samantha Power's resignation:

Well I think sen. Obama did the right thing, but I think it’s important to look at what she and his other advisors say behind closed doors...

You mean like this?

"[Expletive] you!" Ickes shouted.

"[Expletive] you!" Penn replied.

"[Expletive] you!" Ickes shouted again.

Considerations

Most analyses of voting records begin by looking at the bills, and only looking a "key" votes (there are a lot of procedural moves in the roll call, as well as nonsense votes). So, by careful selection, the National Journal is able to "show" that Barack Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate (more liberal than Bernie Sanders, the socialist), just as they did for John Kerry in 2004. Conversely, Progressive Punch gives Clinton a 91.5 to Obama's 89.28. One of the ratings sites used to call Obama a "Rank and File Democrat" and Clinton a "Radical Democrat", but I can't find it, so maybe they're in the process of reversing the designations.

Furthermore, there's really no way for an outsider to know by looking at the write-up on Thomas what a particular vote really means (is an "Aye" vote on a procedural move the same as a "Nay" vote on the underlying bill? Only sometimes.) The only people who can possibly know what a vote actually are the people in the Senate, so I decided to avoid classifying bills or roll-calls at all. Let the Senators classify them, by their votes.

Methodolody

GovTrack.us has rdf yearly files of roll call votes here, which list by bill who voted which way. Using a simple xml parser, I invert these so I have a list for each senator of how they voted on each bill. That makes it easy to compare each senator's voting record for a year.

I started by producing two lists: Obama's voting record compared to everybody else's, and Clinton's voting record compared to everybody else's. These are sorted by descending order of percent of agreement. For example, here's the top of Obama's 2007 list (percent agreement, number of comparable votes, senator):

It doesn't exist.

In 2005, Obama voted with Lieberman 90% of the time, while Clinton voted with Lieberbman 89% of the time.

In 2006, it was 88% vs. 85%.

And in 2007, they were tied at 84%.

And Obama and Clinton voted the same way 94% (2005), 92% (2006) and 96% (2007) of the time.

All of this by crunching the data you can download at GovTrack.us. If I can find any meaningful statistical differences, I'll do a followup.

How people spend their money says a lot about them. Using OpenSecret's campaign expenditures breakdown for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I indulged in a little spreadsheetery.

The following chart tells you nothing about how much the actually spent on any of these categories. What it shows is what Hillary Clinton spent for each $1.00 that Barack Obama spent.

My town has about 1,000 residents (though many of the retirees are elsewhere this time of year). It had 276 registered Dems. In 2004, less than 30 people showed up to caucus. This year, 98 people showed up (and the weather was 33 degrees and raining).

There was about 45 minutes of confusion - the former head of the Democratic Committee was retiring (after a heart attack), so the new folks had to keep getting direction from the experienced ones. Plus we had to change rooms (to the gym) because the library was too small.

In this state, at least, a caucus is really a meeting of the Democratic Committee. So there were elections of secretary, treasurer and new chairman, then the representatives to the county committee. Once we finally got rolling, it went smoothly:

...has a truly outstanding post (part 1 of 2) comparing US and Canadian healthcare by someone who knows both firsthand. All you Canadians can bookmark it, so that you can respond to the next troll with a link instead of writing it all out all over again.

Control your compulsive politeness, please; I'm almost as tired of reading it as you are of writing it.

...but they don't even pay the bills?

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

...

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation "was halted due to untimely payment," the audit found.

Wow, that's as good as the Gooper who had sex with a gay hooker, then tried to stiff him on payment.

I recently reached overload on the number of conflicting claims I'd heard about ethanol, so I went digging. It quickly became obvious that ethanol suffers from both unhinged hype and deranged derision. The answer to the problem as currently framed is a rather unsatisfactory equivocation, but it does point to something far more exciting.

The Technical Claims About Ethanol

It takes more energy to make than it provides. It turns out that's just not true, even when made from corn. The major factor in those studies which claimed it was a net loss was ignoring the value of the byproducts, which while they won't power cars, can power the refining process, or be used as fertilizer.

Ethanol can't be shipped by pipeline. Dirty, rusty water tends to accumulate in pipelines, and the ethanol will soak it up (whereas gas just skips over it). In fact, this is a pretty minor problem; you have to keep your pipelines cleaner, and keeping the ethanol running is a good way to do it. Ethanol is more corrosive than gas, so joints and gaskets have to be made from different materials. Brazil is building an ethanol pipeline, and discussions are underway to build one in this country.

Heavy equipment doesn't run on ethanol. Well, little heavy equipment runs on gasoline. You can buy lower end E85 tractors right now, though diesel (and biodiesel) is generally better for heavy equipment.

CNN's obit.

Famous for being lightening fast, with a technique that (like Art Tatum's) allowed him to keep playing long after the other musicians on the stage had collapsed from exhaustion.

One of the greats, and a true gentlemen. RIP.

Caught a bit of a "conservative" author on BookTV, decrying that Political History, as currently taught, includes nothing of the "Founding Principles". His first example: the importance of Free Markets.

So I googled for a match on "free market" at site:constitution.org/fed (the Federalist papers) and got no (zero, zip, nada) matches. OK, well how many are concerned with economic issues? I only find eight (out of 85) by title (though I think there are a few more mentions, still, economic issues were a relatively minor consideration). Well, seven of those eight are on taxation.

But taxation - now there's a hot-button issue for conservatives! "Cut taxes" thunders Joe Scarborough every morning on MSNBC, and legions of conservatives agree, happily citing the (logically laughable) Laffer curve.

Amazing post over at Street Prophets by the authors of The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America.

On average, presidents from Franklin Roosevelt — commonly viewed as the beginning of the modern presidency — to Jimmy Carter mentioned God in less than half of their major addresses. In contrast, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush (through year six of his tenure) all did so in more than 90% of theirs. Further, the total number of references to God in the average presidential speech 1981-early 2007 was an astounding 120% higher than the average speech 1933-1980.

more after the break

The Energy Information Administration (www.eia.doe.gov) has huge amounts of data (and PDF reports). Unfortunately it can be difficult to compare across reports because they often use different units and definitions, but I made a stab at it earlier this year. This post finally prompted me to write up what I had now, rather than keep postponing it until I had worked out harder numbers (which was beginning to look like never).

According to the EIA, in 2005, transportation amounted to 28% of our energy use, 32% was industrial, and 22% residential and 18% commercial. Residential energy was 68% electricity, commercial was 77% electricity, and industrial was 35%, (transportation was less than a rounding error).

The Washington Post's Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002
article starts this way:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Two excellent articles today on reducing your carbon footprint.

At AsymptoticLife there's a summary of their 10 part series where the authors do the work of studying their own energy consumption and how to reduce it. They looked at 3 paths: the "Easy Method" (no major expenditures, no major lifestyle changes), the "Planned Method" (use all available tech), and the "Hard Method" (what would life be like if we had to have zero emissions now).

...[we] discovered that using the Easy Method— no lifestyle changes or significant investments— we could reduce our CO2 emissions by 70%. That's more than a 2/3 reduction, without any major changes in our lives!

Godwin's law states: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

A corrollary says that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. Why? Because almost always the comparison is laughably hyperbolic. And the few isolated cases where the comparison is accurate are simply and effectively dismissed as being hyperbolic because all the other comparisons are.

But, you say (and you know who are), it's so clear, it's undeniable, the parallels are so obvious!

Football is a game. Most games are competitive (and those that aren't are boring). Some games are pretty abstract, but football unquestionably mirrors war, with it's violence, brute strength effort and determination. But it's war in the classical Roman style. There are strict rules. You have to have strategy and tactics. You plot and plan. Managing the clock is a chess like art all in itself.

All sports have rules, of course (otherwise, it wouldn't be sporting). From relatively few and simple (soccer) to the incomprehensibly arbitrary, complex and numerous (football). There are games that fairly easily agreed to in pick-up leagues. You can play pick-up soccer and maybe have one or two arguments per season. You can play pick-up baseball and have only a few safe / out disputes per game. Football? There will be at least one argument over rules and infractions every five minutes.

Arthur Silber's Blinded by the Story: Liberals and Progressives as Political Creationists has gotten a lot of attention. Now Arthur is sometimes interminably wordy (just under 7,000 words on this one), so lets see if I can distill it for you (read alongside if you like). Here's the paragraph by paragraph summary.

From The World's Fair (a science blog):

Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced [on July 24th] that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue - and in some cases literally bankrupt - American farmers.

Monsanto seeds (or even just "their" pollen) infect other farmer's fields. Monsanto then sues for "theft" of their IP (they've done this over 100 times). A number of farmers have been bankrupted by trying to fight Monsanto in court. Let's hope this affects their activities in India, where Monsanto has been even more predatory.

The remarkable thing about the WaPo Angler series on Cheney is that it is designed to make everyone, Left, Right and Center, hate Cheney.

He is blamed for military commissions, warrantless wiretaps, violating the Geneva conventions, promoting torture and black sites. He's blamed for killing fish, gutting the environment, snowmobiles in National Parks, Yucca Mountain and shafting the EPA for his energy producer friends.

Then, to make sure Republicans are on board, he is blamed for pushing the courts too hard ("turned tactical victory into strategic defeat", "setting precedents that will bind Bush's successors"), tricking the President on military tribunals, shafting Ashcroft and Powell, turning Gonzales and Meirs into pawns, deliberately chasing Jim Jeffords from the GOP (and thus losing the majority), backstabbing Greenspan, O'Neill and Evans (to get his captial gains tax relief, thus creating the budget deficits). And he protected William Jefferson (the Dem caught with $90K in his freezer) from the wheels of justice, for unknown reasons.

Continued after the jump.

From CNN:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- All of her life, Zoila Meyer believed she was an American. She even won election to the City Council of Adelanto.

But now she is facing a threat of deportation for illegally voting, because she never became a citizen after being brought to this country from Cuba when she was 1 year old.

When voter fraud meets immigration hysteria, the result is deadly.

Meyer was released pending a July 18 appearance before an immigration judge who will determine whether she will be deported to Canada, the last point of entry into the U.S. recorded in her immigration record.

Canada. Oh no - they'll put her in the Comfy Chair and play Celine Dion until she breaks!

It seems the "made in USA" flag patches on our US troops' uniforms aren't really made in the USA.

Federal prosecutors said Moritz Embroidery Works in Coolbaugh Township, near Mount Pocono, contracted with the U.S. military to make more than three million American flag patches, but prosecutors say that didn't happen. . . . Prosecutors claim that "somewhere else" was a company in Thailand. By doing that, Moritz reportedly broke the "Buy American Act", a law that's supposed to keep the military from buying clothes made somewhere other than the United States.

Sniff. Reminds me of my first after-school job (after paperboy), when I worked for the gift shop in town in the run up to Christmas. I sat in the basement, taking the "Made in Japan" stickers off the plastic Madonnas.

From TPM:

Today's New York Times has an enormous front page story today suggesting that John Edwards' antipoverty programs were set up merely to provide a "bridge" to his 2008 Presidential campaign.

But guess what -- the Edwards campaign tells us that The Times refused the chance to speak to people who actually benefitted from his programs.

$400 haircuts (oh heah, Romney's just grows like that, and Rick Perry's, too), manufactured hit pieces about home sales? What's next, Poverty Fighting Trial Lawyers for Truth? Yup, this is the guy they're scared of.

from Effects Measure

With all the concern about contamination of imported food ingredients, especially from a major exporter like China, you'd think the US Food and Drug Administration would be eager to make whatever information it has available to US food producers as quickly as possible. You know what's coming next:

Lee Sanders, a senior vice president with the American Bakers Association, requested FDA documents on imported honey in 2002. The Washington-based association wanted to know about a pesticide in honey imported from China, she said in an interview.

From CIDRAP (h/t Effect Measure):

Jun 19, 2007 – TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – The continuing debate over developing countries' ability to afford pandemic-influenza vaccines has produced a disturbing complication: the possibility that Indonesia and other countries affected by H5N1 avian flu will assert legal ownership of the viral isolates on which the vaccines would be based.

These are the same laws that the US shoves down the developing world's throat by insisting that they be recognized in order to get a World Bank loan, or a trade treaty. These same laws are used by Monsanto to say that when the wind blows seeds of their patented crops onto a farmer's field (who doesn't want them), that they can sue the farmer and confiscate his crops. These laws take the ability of corporations to rape the commons to a whole new conceptual level.

...when they have to hire a Canadian to be deputy political director in California.

Christopher Matthews, 35, a Canadian citizen, has worked for the state GOP as a campaign consultant since 2004. But he recently was hired as full-time deputy political director, with responsibility for handling campaign operations and information technology for the country's largest state Republican Party operation, California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring confirmed in a telephone interview this week.