Non-Primary Related
• Torture, 24 and Scalia, by Scott Horton.
• Why you should be against torture even if you think it may be morally permissible in some cases, by Publius.
• The writers of The Wire break away from entertainment to offer political advice:
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.So say we all. (Read the rest.)
• "The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father" -- a fascinating essay exploring some of the dynamics of liberal Zionism & anti-Zionism from a personal point of view.
• Robert Reich on the four stories of America. (About Obama, but not primary-related since it's about Obama vs. McCain, not vs. Clinton.)
Primary Related
• I've been pushing this historical comparison for a while now (and was hardly original in doing so), but William Lee Miller does it so much better in comparing the (bogus) "experience" argument. (Similar point made here, also well, if not quite as well.)
• Funny, with a dash of bitter: oops.
• Judging Obama & Clinton on their books.
• Hillary Clinton and Rwandan genocide. A genuinely devastating report from Hilzoy.
• Polls and how they each might win the electoral college.
• Via-I-don't-recall-who-because-everyone-is-linking-to-it, Chait sums up the current Clinton strategy in a few short sentences:
[Clinton] needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton's decision to continue her campaign. It's actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he's unelectable. It's not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.Time for the superdelegates to step in, I think. As someone pointed out, if enough of them endorsed, they could end this race today. Do it now, before Clinton manages to elect McCain in November.
• Mark Schmitt is one of the most insightful electoral analysts around:
Contrary to the gullible media's belief that "time" is a "powerful ally" on Clinton's side, in fact, Clinton's only ally is uncertainty. The minute it becomes clear what will happen with Michigan and Florida -- re-vote them, refuse to seat them, or split them 50-50 or with half-votes, as some have proposed -- is the minute that Clinton's last "path to the nomination" closes. The only way to keep spin alive is to keep uncertainty alive...Ezra Klein adds a few thoughts here.
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