While waiting in line at Books-A-Million today here in Ocala (a long wait, since the computers crashed due to a power spike), an elderly woman noticed that I was buying a copy of the latest book on Southern politics by the Black brothers, Merle and Earl, The Rise of Southern Republicans (a real find in a general-interest bookstore). The woman, who I really didn’t want to get into a political conversation with,* informed me that she hoped Bush would be reelected in 2004, and that she considered two Democrats particularly “dangerous”: Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton. I nodded, smiled, and seriously considered backing away slowly.

She didn’t seem quite as interested in the copy of The Economist’s “The World in 2004” I was buying.

This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

I think Michele has the better of the argument in contrasting Lair’s and Meryl’s reaction to the U.S. sending aid to the earthquake victims in Iran with her own. Personally, I think it’s worthwhile even if not a single Iranian mind is changed about America—the point of charity, after all, isn’t to make the beneficiary think better of you for doing it.

Update: Add Glenn Reynolds to the list of people who can’t seem to make the people/leaders distinction—even if I agree that the U.S. efforts to play arbiter are unlikely to be effective.

While Stephen Green points out that the latest Zogby numbers show Howard Dean in statistical dead heats in both Iowa and South Carolina (but with a commanding lead in New Hampshire), James Joyner retorts that Dean’s lead is more durable than the numbers indicate:

...this is now Dean’s race to lose. While he’s not running away with anything, he’s got a huge lead in New Hampshire and a small one everywhere else. Meanwhile, there is no consistent number two. More importantly, he’s absolutely dominating the money primary.

More to the point, the rules are such that you can effectively discount anyone not named Al Sharpton* unless they get double-digits, because the Democrats’ delegate allocation system works at the congressional district level—and, as I keep pointing out, you have to get 15% in a congressional district to win delegates from it. This effect will massively inflate Dean’s standing at the convention.

Like James, I’m becoming more convinced than ever that South Carolina will be pivotal. And, barring a seismic shift after Iowa, I can’t see any S.C. scenario that Dean can’t spin as a win—realistically, he needs to be blown out by 10% or more by a credible candidate (at this point, either Clark or Gephardt), which just ain’t happening with Edwards still in the race and a lot of Republicans coming out to vote for Sharpton. A narrow ABD victory gives Dean the line that he “polled well in the South,” even if he only gets a third of the primary vote.

Eugene Volokh, in a post defending Strom Thurmond against the charge of child molestation, notes a handy table that lists the age of consent in all fifty states, and comments:

I also suspect that the table is mostly designed for people who like to have sex with teenagers, but it seems to be pretty accurate, and I’ve found it useful even for more academic purposes.

Now, I’m not an expert on such matters, but it seems to me that having sex with teenagers is quite a popular activity, particularly among college students; the only thing I can figure is that law professors—the only academics who, as a group, don’t have much contact with the 17-21 demographic—are unaware just how much sex goes on among undergraduates.

Dave of dave’s not here thinks the arguments of some in favor of reinstating the draft don’t hold up against scrutiny. Me? I’d be even happier if Congress killed the Selective Service System—and the ridiculous line-item in the budget attached to it—once and for all.

I safely arrived at my dad’s house in a secure, undisclosed location in southeastern Marion County, Florida last night. Traffic on both I-10 and I-75 was horrible, albeit fast moving—though I-10 could use an extra lane from Pensacola to I-75, as left-lane traffic was continuously stacked up trying to pass the few stragglers in the right lane.

Anyway, if you’re a regular SN reader within, say, a two-hour radius of Ocala (roughly anywhere north of I-4, south of I-10, east of Tallahassee, and not in the Atlantic Ocean), the first beer’s on me.

Stephen Green and Matt Stinson note the latest whining from Howard Dean about his fellow candidates picking on him.

Also of note: Dean’s Bushian energy policy coverup. Truth to power indeed.

Update: Steven Taylor points out that DNC head Terry McAuliffe couldn’t do much about the attacks, even if he were inclined to do so. And, the Diktat has the Stalinist perspective, as always.

Dan Drezner will be playing the role of guest-blogger for Andrew Sullivan this coming week. I knew there had to be a reason I added Sully to the blogroll…

Rosemary Esmay apparently is familiar with the same driver I saw today on I-10 between Mobile and Pensacola who apparently thought the left lane was his own personal playground—even when the right lane was clear a mile ahead of his pickup truck.

Also of note: I think I saw more Mississippi state troopers today than I’d seen total in the 5½ years I’ve lived in the state.

Steven Taylor links approvingly to a Jonah Goldberg column lamenting the lack of political knowledge in the electorate.

At some point, I’ll have meaningful thoughts about the column (i.e. something to say beyond “Goldberg’s wrong”). Unfortunately, now isn’t that time; for some reason, driving through a landscape of endless conifers in eastern Mississippi and western Alabama has sapped my ability to compose coherent arguments.

Colby Cosh notes, in the midst of decrying Howie Kurtz’s lack of permalinks, that the people most upset that George W. Bush doesn’t read The New York Times are print journalists. Fancy that.

Kevin Aylward passes on the good news that we can expect increased venom levels in the near future.

American Idol loser Clay Aiken’s new hit, “Invisible,” features the following chorus:

If I was invisible
Then I could just watch you in your room
If I was invincible
I’d make you mine tonight
If hearts were unbreakable
Then I could just tell you where I stand
I would be the smartest man
If I was invisible
(Wait… I already am)

Yes, it’s a toe-tapping song you just want to sing along to… but, as the founder (and sole member) of the American Society to Revive the Subjunctive Voice, I must point out that the first line should read “If I were invisible,” as it expresses a hypothetical state of being rather than objective reality. (Just call me Don Quixote.)

I also am slightly disturbed by the fact that the loser on American Idol is permitted to have a showbiz career. Fox should seriously consider adding a provision to the rules that permanently blackballs the runner-up from showbiz. Nothing against Clay, but if there’s nothing at stake, and no downside to losing, what’s the point of the contest?

Update: Brian J. Noggle further deconstructs Aiken’s lyrics and is, to put it mildly, disturbed.

Steven Taylor’s Boxing Day edition of the PoliBlog Toast-O-Meter is now available. And, for those of you living in a hole, it shows Dr. Howard Dean with a commanding lead—but facing a serious uphill struggle in head-to-head polling against George W. Bush.

Also of note: Jeff Quinton has the latest South Carolina primary news, while Robert Prather doesn’t see Anyone But Dean (a.k.a. Dick Gephardt) looking much better than Dean himself.

The Mississippi Board of Education is considering making a change to its math requirements in order to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act.

It seems that the NCLBA requires states to test students on the highest level of math required by the curriculum. Currently, Mississippi requires geometry, but only gives standardized tests on Algebra I.

So rather than comply with federal law by giving standardized tests on geometry, the Mississippi Board of Education is considering dropping the geometry requirement.

Yet another illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

The Boston Globe suggests that Howard Dean isn’t really a secularlist after all; instead:

Presidential contender Howard B. Dean, who has said little about religion while campaigning except to emphasize the separation of church and state, described himself in an interview with the Globe as a committed believer in Jesus Christ and said he expects to increasingly include references to Jesus and God in his speeches as he stumps in the South.

Dean, 55, who practices Congregationalism but does not often attend church and whose wife and children are Jewish, explained the move as a desire to share his beliefs with audiences willing to listen. [emphasis mine]

Well, it’s nice to see Dean takes his faith so seriously that he considers it to be a strategic asset in his campaign. Me, I’d rather he be honest with the public than start engaging in calculated pandering to voters—but, then again, I already find Dean loathsome on so many levels that I’m probably not in his target demographic.

I also tend to agree with Jeff Jarvis and Matt Stinson that people of faith will find Dean’s attempts to speak on faith deeply insulting—particularly if they know that it is part of a calculated strategy by Dean. And I don’t think regionalized campaigning can really work in the modern era—Bush probably lost as many votes as he won by visiting Bob Jones University in 2000, for example.

Incidentally, I saw a shorter version of the article in today’s Memphis Commercial Appeal, so it must be getting wide play.

One other thing: like Matt, I don’t think the fact that his wife and kids are Jewish should make any in how Dean’s religiosity is perceived (if anything, the faith of the people I know in families with mixed religions seems stronger than the norm). His other behavior alone is sufficient to make his sincerity about the nature of his faith questionable.

Link via email from Erick Erickson.

Merry Christmas.

Robert Prather of Insults Unpunished has reevaluated the MSA component of the Medicare reform/prescription drugs bill, and thinks it goes much further toward introducing more of a market-based approach to health care than he originally thought. However, James Joyner correctly points out that the bill’s other provisions greatly expand the role of the government in health care in ways that won’t be easily rolled back and which may lead to subsequent expansion.

I discovered Christmas Eve that the reason I thought that my mother’s new cell phone—my old cell phone—wasn’t working for the past week, since I added it to my account, is that I put the wrong phone number for her line in my new cell phone’s built-in phone book.

So, the moron scoring goes: Me 1, SprintPCS customer service 0. At least it made the day of the CSR who handled my call.

If you’re the morbid sort, you can join The Amish Tech Support Dead Pool, coordinated by everyone’s favorite catblogger, Laurence Simon. So far, the pick distribution seems fairly interesting. Now I just need to remember (or dig out) the list of picks I sent Lair…

Glenn Reynolds has the scoop on David Letterman’s latest trip into a war zone. In a related story, I hear Jay Leno took a crew down to Camp Pendleton to film a “Jay Walking” segment.

(Yes, it’s the same joke I used last year when Dave went to Afghanistan…)

Kyle Sing of The Chicago Report posts on Neal Boortz’s scheduled appearance at the 2004 Libertarian Party convention and the fissures in the party that Boortz’s appearance has brought to the forefront. I’m not sure I’d cast the conflict as one between the “anarchist” and “Objectivist” wings—I really don’t subscribe to either philosophy, personally, being more of a pragmatist—but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. And, for what it’s worth, Boortz is something of a cult hero to the Georgia Libertarians, who have put together quite an impressive local organization—the national party could use the backing of someone of his stature.

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Update: Patrick Carver begs to differ with me and Rand Simberg, helpfully pointing out that the Florida state constitution does explicitly recognize a right to privacy. Now, if only Rush would recognize that all people (not just Floridians) have an inherent liberty interest in privacy absent a compelling governmental interest to the contrary—the Lawrence v. Texas standard in a nutshell—I’d be more inclined to be sympathetic.

Nice to see mad cow disease has finally followed me across the Atlantic. Yipee!

Via Bill Hobbs comes the bizarre tale in The New York Times of Howard Dean’s rather odd claims surrounding his younger brother Charles, who went missing—and was presumed killed—in the Laotian jungle in 1974, and whose remains have now apparently been identified. Quoth the newspaper of record:

Asked by The Quad-City Times, which is based in Davenport, Iowa, to complete the sentence “My closest living relative in the armed services is,” Dr. Dean wrote in August, “My brother is a POW/MIA in Laos, but is almost certainly dead.”

Charles Dean, however, wasn’t a member of the armed forces at all—he was, in fact, by all accounts a civilian tourist and anti-war activist, something Dean the elder claims was common knowledge:

“The way I read the question was that they wanted to know if I knew anything about the armed services from a personal level,” he said. “I don’t think it was inaccurate or misleading if anybody knew what the history was, and I assumed that most people knew what the history was. Anybody who wanted to write about this could have looked through the 23-year history to see that I’ve always acknowledged my brother’s a civilian, was a civilian.“…

Dr. Dean called the editorial, which referred to his brother as a “renegade,” “one of the greatest cheap shots I’ve ever seen in journalism.”

“It’s offensive and insensitive not to understand what the impact of this is,” he said, “writing about this in such a tawdry way.”

Personally, the only thing I consider tawdry is the attempt by Dean to link his brother, who was apparently playing Hanoi Jane on the cheap and—amazingly enough—got mixed up with the wrong people in the process, with the real American POWs and MIAs who suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese and Laotian communists. Sorry, but to me little wayward Charlie’s vanity trip to Southeast Asia doesn’t exactly scream “empathy with American servicemen,” either.

I’m not sure what galls me more: that Dean thought he could get away with this, that he genuinely thinks that all there is to empathy with our armed forces is the experience of having a loved one disappear, or that Dean’s circle is so far removed from the military that he can’t even name so much as a sixth cousin with some genuine connection to America’s armed forces. What a truly loathsome creature.

The Quad-City Times editorial is here.

Update: Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind—whose excellent blog I’d read far more often if he pinged weblogs.com when he made new posts—has thoughts on another concern regarding Howard Dean’s candidacy.