Blue Crab Boulevard

The Associated Press is rapidly calling races in a number of states based, apparently, solely on exit polls. Now, considering that polls in many Western states are still open, this pretty much constitutes interference in the process. But take the results with a major grain of salt - because they really have no official data to work with here.

WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain won primaries in Connecticut, New Jersey and Illinois Tuesday night, reaching for command of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton swapped victories as they waged a coast-coast struggle for delegates in the grueling Democratic campaign.

Obama won in Georgia and his home state of Illinois. Clinton countered in Oklahoma.

McCain's leading rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, won a home state victory.

The Associated Press made its calls based on surveys of voters as they left the polls.

After an early series of low-delegate, single-state contests, Super Tuesday was anything but — its primaries and caucuses were spread across nearly half the country in the most wide-open presidential campaign in memory.

The result was a double-barreled set of races, Obama and Clinton fighting for delegates as well as bragging rights in individual states, Republicans McCain, Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee doing likewise.

Huckabee won the inaugural Super Tuesday event at the West Virginia Republican convention, netting 18 delegates.

Georgia was Obama's second straight Southern triumph, and like an earlier win in South Carolina it was powered by black votes.

African-Americans accounted for slightly more than half the ballots cast in Georgia, and he was gaining about 90 percent of them. Clinton won nearly 60 percent of the white votes, a reduced advantage compared to her showing in earlier states.

Democrats awarded their delegates in rough proportion to the popular vote.

Not so Republicans, who held several winner-take-all contests.

New Jersey and Connecticut were among them, and they gave McCain 79 delegates in the two combined — leaving his rivals with nothing to show for their efforts there.

Frankly, I hope they are wrong on some of their calls. The media sort of cleaned up its act after the 2000 exit poll debacle, but they are back to their old tricks this year. I urge every American to perform a simple service to democracy if confronted by an exit poll taker.

Lie to them. On every, single question.  

…Sabotage. Yet another undersea internet cable has been cut off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. 

For the fourth time in a week, an undersea communications cable has apparently been cut (or "failed due to a power outage," as some sources suggest), and while no official reports of subversion have surfaced just yet, things are beginning to get suspicious. Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week — a quandary it has never dealt with until now. As it stands, traffic from the Middle East and surrounding areas is being routed through various other cables in an attempt to remain online, but any more snips and we could be dealing with ping times eerily similar to those seen in 1993 (or much, much larger issues).

This hardly ever happens and it suddenly hits four cables in a week? That's a bit too hard to attribute to coincidence. For all it's recent growth, the internet is still a very fragile structure and one hopes governments and financial institutions have backup plans in place - because this may be an actual assault or just a proof of concept for a bigger attack on the system. Enigineers better be thinking of ways to head this kind of weakness off, too. This could be a real problem, very quickly.

UPDATE: Lawhawk from A Blog For All notes that a fifth cable has now been cut or damaged. Could it be material defects in the cables? Even if the cables came from the same lot, that is, I think, very unlikely. If the cables did come from the same manufacturer and all had some shared structural defect, the odds of them all failing at the same time are basically nil. That just does not happen in the real world. I'm afraid we are all going to be guessing about this. I suspect that they simply will not release any information on what really happened. Regardless of the cause, it shows a weakness in the system that they will not talk about in public.

Another haughty, unilateral intervention in the affairs of another sovereign nation. We expect the French to condemn this immediately!

Oh, wait. It is the French.

NDJAMENA (AFP) - Rebels in Chad announced Tuesday an immediate ceasefire as France — emboldened by UN condemnation of the insurgents — declared it was poised to intervene militarily.

With refugees pouring into neighbouring Cameroon by the thousands, fearing renewed fighting in the capital Ndjamena, rebel spokesman Abderaman Koulamallah said the insurgents were bowing to diplomatic pressure to halt their offensive against President Idriss Deby Itno's regime.

"Aware of the suffering of the Chadian people … the forces of national resistance have given their agreement to an immediate ceasefire," Koulamallah told AFP by satellite telephone.

The rebels — who stormed Ndjamena over the weekend, pinning Deby inside his presidential palace — were doing so, he said, "in line with the peace initiatives of fraternal countries Libya and Burkina Faso".

Reacting to the announcement, Deby's government said a ceasefire was pointless because the rebels — who last week surged across the width of Chad from bases inside Sudan — had been "decimated".

"Why a ceasefire? They don't exist any more. With whom would we sign a ceasefire? … We've got them under control," Prime Minister Nourredine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye told the French global TV channel France 24.

In the wake of Monday's unanimous Security Council statement, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France — with 1,450 troops and Mirage fighter jets stationed in Chad — was ready to "do its duty" and intervene if need be.

"Now there is a legal decision taken unanimously by the Security Council, and if Chad was the victim of an aggression, France could in theory have the means to oppose such action," he said in the French coastal town of Aytre. 

In other words, the French are quite willing to intervene, unilaterally. Good for them. Sarkozy is a very different French President than Chirac was. By the way, did you note where the rebels are operating out of?

A word of warning to college students. Beware strong drink, it can make you swallow your room key.

In the hunt for lost keys most people check under the sofa, in their jacket pocket and even back at the pub.

But student Chris Foster had to have his stomach x-rayed before he could find where he left his keys the night before.
    
Chris has no recollection of his stunt

Chris had swallowed his room key so that his friends couldn't take him home and put him to bed.

But when he woke up, after spending the night on a friend's sofa, he had no recollection of his alcohol-fuelled protest. When friends told him about the stunt he didn't believe them.

However, he soon realised he was suffering from more than a normal hangover, and took himself to hospital.

After telling doctors what may have happened, the computer design student underwent an x-ray and was stunned to see the two-inch Yale key lying in the pit of his stomach. (Ed note: The picture with the story does not show the key in the stomach. It has traveled a bit further than that.)

Medics sent him home and told him to let nature take it's course.The key emerged 31 hours later and as Chris didn't want to pay the £20 fee his landlord would have charged him for a new one, he cleaned it up and put it back on his fob to use.

The doctors, unsurprisingly, were laughing at the boy genius when they sent him home. (Having personally performed the fun job of poking through baby poop to make sure a swallowed penny made its way safely through an intestinal voyage, I can assure you that recovery of the object is no fun.) I imagine the lad is getting a full ration of abuse from his friends over the whole incident as well.

San Francisco voters will have an initiative on the ballot today that calls for demolishing the second most popular tourist attraction in the city. The initiative calls for flattening Alcatraz and replacing it with - not making this up, folks - a "medicine wheel, a labyrinth and a conference centre for non-violent conflict resolution ." No, really. 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco voters will decide on Tuesday whether to remove the famous Alcatraz Prison visited by thousands of tourists a day and instead create a "global peace centre."

The proposition sharing the presidential primary ballot comes from the director of the California-based Global Peace Foundation who gives his name as Da Vid. He says transforming Alcatraz will "liberate energies, raising the whole consciousness of the Bay Area."

Supporters would like to raze the prison and build a medicine wheel, a labyrinth and a conference centre for non-violent conflict resolution. Volunteers collected 10,350 voter signatures last year to put it on the local ballot.

But even in a city long famed for its embrace of counterculture, many are sceptical about he plan.

"Perhaps we haven't reached the proper stage of enlightenment yet, but we're more inclined to support propositions with defined sources of funding attached to them," the San Francisco Chronicle said in an editorial.

Alcatraz is San Francisco's second-most popular paid tourist attraction after cable cars, luring 1.4 million visitors annually on a short ferry ride into San Francisco Bay.

The Chronicle's editorial is here and it is rather a lot more disdainful of the plan - and the new age nonsense in it -  than the above quote indicates. Meanwhile, in other Bay Area news, two members of the city council are trying to get the board to rescind their patently anti-Marine policy letter. 

A week after blasting the Marines as "unwelcome intruders" in Berkeley, two City Council members want the city to back off the declaration that ignited the wrath of the nation's right wing and inspired a Republican senator to try to sever Berkeley's federal funding.

Council members Betty Olds and Laurie Capitelli on Monday proposed that Berkeley rescind its letter to the U.S. Marine Corps that stated that the downtown Berkeley recruiting center "is not welcome in our city," and publicly declare that Berkeley is against the war but supports the troops.

The City Council will vote on Olds' and Capitelli's two proposals at its meeting next Tuesday.

"I think we shouldn't be seen across the country as hating the Marines," said Olds, who voted against last week's proposals. "If you make a mistake, like we did, you should admit it and correct it and move on."

The brouhaha started last week when the council passed two items condemning the Marine recruiting center on Shattuck Square, which opened about a year ago. The first called on the city clerk to send a letter to the Marines telling them they're unwelcome, and the second item granted Code Pink a parking space in front of the recruiting office every Wednesday afternoon and allowed the group to operate a loudspeaker.

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum, apparently. 

Reuters is reporting that the transportation chaos in China has abated somewhat but that millions of people will be ringing in the Chinese New Year in the dark. The situation is so bad that the government is deploying truck mounted diesel generators to many areas. Widespread areas are without power in this coldest winter in a century or more.

KAILI, China (Reuters) - Railways and highways were returning to normal across China on Tuesday, but millions are likely to spend the biggest holiday of the year without power and water in what for some is the coldest winter in a century.

The freezing weather in the run-up to the Lunar New Year break, which begins on Wednesday and offers the only chance for poor migrant workers to visit loved ones, has killed scores of people and left millions stranded.

Whole cities have had their power and water cut off for more than a week and so far 11 electricians have been killed trying to reconnect lines or break ice encasing poles and cables.

Chenzhou, a city of about 4 million in the central province of Hunan, began its 11th day without power on Tuesday, with people lining up at fire hydrants with buckets to get water.

The State Electricity Regulatory Commission said it intended to restore power to 80 percent of affected households in the next few days. Supply to the rest of the families would be resumed by tapping some 2,670 diesel-fired generating vehicles.

Kaili, with a population of half a million in the subtropical southern province of Guizhou, was cut off for several days by thick ice and hail.

It doesn't sound like a subtropical paradise at the moment, does it? The Rutgers Snow Lab shows that much of China is still covered in snow at the moment. It looks to be a bleak New Year celebration for a lot of Chinese this year.

Depending on where you live, you may get hit by yet another harsh winter storm that is sweeping across the country today. Some voters may be impacted by this one.

The heaviest snow on Super Tuesday was to sock Colorado, the northern Plains and the Great Lakes by nightfall. Rain and thunderstorms were to splash the southern Plains, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, the Appalachians and portions of the Northeast.

The forecast Tuesday for Wisconsin ran the gamut — including a dense fog advisory in the south and southeast regions, a winter storm warning in those areas through Wednesday afternoon and a winter storm watch for parts of the southwest into Wednesday morning.

"We're expecting for the Milwaukee area anywhere between 9 and 11 inches," said J.J. Wood, a National Weather Service meteorologist. He said up to 10 inches was expected in a swath from southwest Wisconsin through the Madison area up toward Port Washington.

The foul weather will also create a danger of very powerful thunderstorms over a large area of the country, according to Accuweather . The massive cold front that is sweeping across the midsection of the country will collide with moisture-laden, warmer air streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico, and all heck is likely to break loose.

The Severe Weather Center displays the thunderstorm-related watches and warnings in effect for these regions as the damaging storms erupt ahead of a cold front, separating two very different air masses.

Plenty of warm, moist air from the Gulf will help to fuel the storms on Tuesday. The strongest ones could produce downpours, hail and damaging winds exceeding 60 mph. A couple of tornadoes are also possible, especially toward the evening hours and overnight on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the strongest storms will stretch from East Texas to southern Indiana. By the night, the area of greatest threat will be shifting farther along from Louisiana through Ohio. Some storms will even fire in western Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday, the risk of severe storms will press to the Southeast Coast. The strongest storms will fire during the afternoon with the aid of daytime heating. Heavy rain, damaging winds and hail could accompany these storms with the strong cold front pressing toward the Eastern Seaboard.

Sounds like an unpleasant day for large areas of the nation, weather-wise. 

Brett Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal notes that the "America is declining" meme is growing popular, yet again. This happens on a fairly regular basis and the doomsayers are generally wrong.

In 1788, Massachusetts playwright Mercy Otis Warren took one look at the (unratified) U.S. Constitution and declared that "we shall soon see this country rushing into the extremes of confusion and violence." This, roughly, is the origin of American declinism — and it's been downhill ever since.

A couple centuries later, an international relations theorist at Yale named Paul Kennedy sought to explain the decline of great powers in terms of a ratio between military commitments and economic resources. The Reagan military buildup and the deficits that went with it, he warned, had brought the United States to the point of "imperial overstretch." Not quite. Within a few years, the Soviet Union collapsed, Europe and Japan (with no military burdens to speak of) entered a long period of economic stagnation, and the U.S. consolidated its position as the world's only true superpower.

Heh, I'm sure it the negativity started long before that. But consider some evidence that refutes the ones who keep saying things like this:

Yet each of these assumptions collapses on a moment's inspection. In his 2006 book "Überpower," German writer Josef Joffe makes the following back-of-the-envelope calculation: "Assume that the Chinese economy keeps growing indefinitely at a rate of seven percent, the average of the past decade (for which history knows of no example). . . . At that rate, China's GDP would double every decade, reaching parity with today's United States ($12 trillion) in thirty years. But the U.S. economy is not frozen into immobility. By then, the United States, growing at its long-term rate of 2.5 percent, would stand at $25 trillion."

Now take military expenditures. Yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal for 2009, which includes $515.4 billion for the regular defense budget. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this would be the largest defense appropriation since World War II. Yet it amounts to about 4% of GDP, as compared to 14% during the Korean War, 9.5% during the Vietnam War and 6% in the Reagan administration. Throw in the Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals, and total projected defense spending is still only 4.5% of GDP — an easily afforded sum even by Prof. Kennedy's terms.

Finally there is the issue of our allegedly squandered prestige in the world. There is no doubt America's "popularity," as measured by various global opinion surveys, has fallen in recent years. What's striking, however, is how little of this has mattered in terms of the domestic political choices of other countries or the consequences for the U.S.

As Stephens points out, there are two main groups who inhabit the declinosphere; those who simply accept the meme as fact and those who are actively rooting for it. I'd only add that memes like this can become self-fulfilling prophecies if enough people buy into them. But do read the whole thing, things are never as gloomy as the America in decline Eeyores make them out to be.