Nutroots Excavate

Kos himself is instigating to have Democrats cross over in the Michigan Republican primary to vote for Romney. There is a major - ugly - flaw in his justification for doing so, as Bob Owens points out:

Kos justifies this tactic by pointing out that Michigan Republicans pulled a similar dirty trick in 1972 to vote for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, noting that Republicans' made up a third of Wallace's vote total.

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state's Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes.

But that isn't the whole story, and Kos purposefully leaves out the nasty truth: even without a single Republican vote, segregationist Wallace would have still won handily in 1972 Michigan, by more than 111,000 votes.

Go read it all, it's short and sweet. One thing I have not really noted anyone else pointing out that I think should be rather obvious. If Romney does win in Michigan, goes on and wins the nomination then wins in the general, Kos will be a political dead man. Whether or not his helpful suggestion results in any real votes for Romney - he's dead to the Democrats if they lose in November. Period.

The problem with political dirty tricks is that they can backfire so easily.

A Giant Train Set

Just the other day, I pointed out that I thought it was a really bad idea for Boeing to integrate internet access into their new 787 aircraft. Right after that, I linked to an article that detailed how a man hacked into a fault in internet browsers that allowed access to LAN printers. The result: spam spewing from printers that were not supposed to be accessible to the internet at all.

Well, today, a 14-year old Polish boy proves the point again. He managed to hack into the tram system in Lodz, Poland and play with the real trains, carrying real people, like a giant train set - injuring people when the trains derailed as a result of his antics.

Twelve people were injured in one derailment, and the boy is suspected of having been involved in several similar incidents.

The teenager, who was not named by police, told them he had changed the points for a prank.

A police statement said he had trespassed at tram depots in the city to gather information and the equipment needed to build the infra-red device.

"Questioned by police in the presence of a psychologist, the teenager testified he switched tram tracks three times, once causing a tram to jump the tracks," said the statement. A search at the boy's home turned up the device he had used to switch tram tracks.

Note that he did not crack into the system via the internet at all. Which is why I pointed out that there are unforeseen ways to break into any system, no matter how many safeguards the designers put in.

Snow In Baghdad

The Associate Press gets it wrong right in the headline, which reads: A first! Snow falls in Baghdad. But at least the reporter, Christopher Chester, did not try to twist it around the way the AFP report did. More on that it a moment. (UPDATE: Sae AP story from MSNBC with a nice picture of an Iraqi man holding a child wondering at the snow.)

For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad.

Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray puddles, they brought an emotion rarely expressed in this desert capital snarled by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings — delight.

"For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this falling in Baghdad," said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a 63-year-old retiree from the New Baghdad area.

"When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern Baghdad," Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of rain. "But snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent scene was beyond my imagination."

Morning temperatures uncharacteristically hovered around freezing, and the Baghdad airport was closed because of poor visibility. Snow is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but residents of the capital and surrounding areas could remember just hail.

"I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow in Iraq before, and her answer was no," said Fawzi Karim, a 40-year-old father of five who runs a small restaurant in Hawr Rajab, a village six miles southeast of Baghdad.

The AFP trotted out global warming in their report, that at least did mention that it was the first time snow had fallen there in about 100 years:

Light snow fell in Baghdad early on Friday in what weather officials said was the first time in about a 100 years.

Rare snowfalls were also recorded in the west and centre of Iraq, plunging temperatures to zero degrees Centigrade (32 degrees Fahrenheit) and even colder, an official said.

The snow in Baghdad, which melted as it hit the ground, began falling before dawn and continued until after 9 am, residents said.

"Snow has fallen in Baghdad for the first time in about a century as a result of two air flows meeting," said a statement by the meteorology department.

"The first one was cold and dry and the second one was warm and humid. They met above Iraq."

The director of the meteorology department, Dawood Shakir, told AFP that climate change was possibly to blame for the unusual event.

So the snowfall about a century ago was likely caused by what? A visit from Al Gore? The snow is a result of it being cold enough to snow. That's all. Just like it was cold enough to snow 100 years ago. Rare? Sure. Unheard of? Not even close.

But the Iraqis enjoyed their brief snowfall in peace, just as the AP reports. No violence, just enjoyment of an unusual weather event.

I Think We Figured Out…..

…How they managed to make the low bid on that new sprinkler system…..

(H/T Bad Bob via email.)

The Media Giveth, The Voters Taketh Away

Daniel Henninger at the newly revamped Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal (it isn't a separate website any longer) has an even more simple explanation for why the New Hampshire primary turned out the exact opposite as the media had it picked. The media screwed up.

But as to the media's coronation of Barack Obama after Iowa, what's to explain? They jumped over the moon for Barack. End of story.

All that said, taking potshots at the media herd as it "pivots" this way and that across the political plain is easy sport. The truth is that all of us are feeling and stumbling our way through the altered mental states being imposed on us by the Internet.

The one real thing that happened in the Iowa Democratic caucus is that Sen. Obama beat Sen. Clinton by eight points and by one delegate. A big deal for sure. There was a time that it would be reported as a big deal by the nation's print newspapers and several TV networks, after which intrigued voters would go back to their day jobs until New Hampshire.

Not now. An event that was once only big now gets air blown into it round the clock with electronic hot-air torches. While the media pumped the Iowa story to a colossal size, voters checked the Web to learn that the new Barack balloon was still expanding in the sky. Then people start exchanging emails. Have you seen this?? He's up by 12!!! By Monday, Mr. Obama had grown into a benevolent Godzilla, sweeping the entire Clinton village into the sea. All this after Iowa.

Should the media somehow do it differently? Who knows? Everyone has to file reports all the time, and the "everyone" now is simply a torrent of reporters, commentators, bloggers and comments on blogs. Buried amid all this you can indeed find it written that Iowa is an anomalous state with a weird caucus system. But no one is going to put this disclaimer in italics above everything they write or say about Iowa. Absent that ballast, however, the outsized weight given to the Obama victory bends reality. It turns the campaign into a video game.

That is probably one of the more astute, succinct analyses put out to date. Call it Pac-Man politics. Henninger thinks that the voters, inundated by media blather about the new winner-to-be did what people do when they feel pressured: the pushed back. He predicts that the new, urgent 24/7 news instant analysis fever will actually bring in more of that push back. The media can deliver all the "wisdom" they want - the voters will choose whether to pay attention. And, people being people, they may decide to turn that delivered wisdom right onto its proverbial ear.

The Tragedy Of Captain Ahab Potato Head

Or in search of the great white octopus. We regret to inform our readers that Mr. Potato Head has suffered a horrible death, dragged to a watery grave by a giant octopus. Well, ok, it's a normal-sized giant Pacific octopus, but it was more than big enough to do in the plastic toy.

A giant Pacific octopus living in a Cornish aquarium has formed an unlikely bond with a child's plastic toy.
Louis regularly plays with the Mr Potato Head figure which was given to him as part of an enrichment project at Newquay's Blue Reef Aquarium.

"We wanted an octopus-friendly toy which had a compartment to hide food in," said the aquarium's Matt Slater.

He says Louis gets very excited when sees the toy, which he plays with for an hour at a time.

"Its bright colours, strange shape and moveable parts make it fascinating for Louis," said Mr Slater.

"The secret space within Mr Potato Head allows us to hide tasty treats like fresh crab inside and that perhaps more than anything has resulted in him becoming such a hit."

Sob. They're using Mr. Potato Head's drowned carcass like a lunch box. Monsters. What a sad end for the troubled Mr. Potato Head. First it was the drug bust, now this horrible ending to what started out as such a brilliant artistic career.

We'll have a moment of silence after we finish our hash browns.

Predicting A Train Wreck

Peggy Noonan, like me, is thinking that Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory was likely a combination of many different factors. It wasn't tears, sneers, media antics, odd turnout factors or comfort levels. It was a combination of that and much more. But that is setting up a serious collision that will likely be very tough on both Clinton and Obama in the long run. Because while Clinton may have "found her voice" in New Hampshire, she is still a Clinton - as the nutroots have suddenly figured out.

While everyone beats the hell out of the media, which is never wholly a bad idea, one should point out what everyone in politics and journalism knows: Hillary Clinton's own people knew she was going to lose. Major supporters and fund-raisers thought so and said so, for weeks, off the record.

And they were not heartbroken about it. I saw no tears. They were shocked, not saddened; shaken, not stirred. One told me the problem was the campaign had been so obsessed from day one with showing she was a commander in chief that they never thought to urge her to be a woman among women. She used her sex–the boys are picking on me!–but she never assumed her sex. Then, tired and with nothing to lose, she allowed her eyes to well. It was an arresting sight because it suggested the presence of a soul in the machine.

Let's look at the tears before they harden like resin into cliché. Quickly. She was taking questions in a diner, a woman asked how she does it each day, she started talking about how hard it is, and she got misty-eyed, her voice soft for once–conversational, not hectoring.

Exactly 100% of the people who saw it on the news and on YouTube had one reaction. It was to ask a question: Is that real or artifice? With the Clintons you always have to ask, which is the great Clinton problem…..

….And if we are to believe the new voice will be a softer, more conciliatory and more engaging one, how to square that with what is going on at HillaryIs44.com, a Web site that is for all intents and purposes a back door to her war room? There you will see that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will soon "destroy" Barack Obama in a "scandal" involving an "indicted slumlord" who is Mr. Obama's "friend of 17 years" and with whom Mr. Obama has been involved in "shady deals."

This isn't a new voice, it is the old one, the one we know too well. The item was posted on Thursday, two days after Mrs. Clinton announced her new approach.

Between sobs she is going to try to destroy Mr. Obama. She is going to try to end him. She will pay a price for it–no one likes to see the end of a dream, no one likes a dream killer. But she will pay that price to win, and try to clean up the mess later.

The nutroots appear to be rapidly running toward Obama with Ned Lamont jumping to endorse him. They are, however, entering a target zone. Because Clinton will do her Clintonian best to personally destroy Obama. So we will be treated to a kinder, gentler public image of the ice queen, but her surrogates will become even more rabid in the coming days. Little "slips of the tongue" will become commonplace. Obama will have to respond in some way and his surrogates will also lash out at Clinton.

It is going to be ugly, it is going to be bitter. It is going to be a train wreck.

Tears Or Sneers?

Charles Krauthammer attributes Obama's loss in New Hampshire differently than most of the developing conventional wisdom. Most people are speculating that it was Hillary's strange, tearful moment that put her over the top. Krauthammer thinks it was more likely an incident that got very little play in the media at all. At a debate, Krauthammer says, Obama did a rather gauche thing and sneered at Hillary.

Was it the tears in the New Hampshire coffee shop? Whenever there is a political upset, everyone looks for the unscripted incident, the I-paid-for-this-microphone moment that can account for it. Hillary Clinton's improbable victory in New Hampshire is being widely attributed to her rare display of emotion when asked how she was holding up. This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played to a national television audience of 9 million that was even more revealing.

It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet — first demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."

At which point, Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign — the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.

Rising rock star puts down struggling diva — an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.

I did not see the incident in question but thanks to the magic of YouTube, I have now:

I'm not sure I interpret that incident the same way Krauthammer does, but he may be right. Some folks may not have liked the way Obama acted there. Personally, I think it was a combination of many factors and probably has a great deal to do with the way the Clintons have successfully maneuvered politically for decades now. Whatever the reason, Krauthammer's main point is spot on:

It is fitting that New Hampshire should have turned on a tear or an aside. The Democratic primary campaign has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Ch¿vez in English).

If the canonization of Obama got derailed in New Hampshire, the inevitable coronation of Clinton got beaten down in Iowa. That seems about right. So now we'll see the candidates sling mud and damage one another for a while longer. One can only hope that whoever emerges from the crucible has been severely cooked enough to have real problems in the general election. That is the way things are heading at the moment.