With the Mormotron 5000 out of the race, establishment Republicans are left to pick between John McCain, whom they have spent the better part of the last decade repudiating for (among other things) being too soft on immigration and too tough on campaign finance, and Mike Huckabee, whose constituency they have been exploiting while at the same time desperately trying to keep them at arms length.

If there’s one thing at which Republicans excel though, it is radically changing their position to fit the circumstances of the moment. My guess is that for the most part, the party will line up behind the guy they’ve been calling “Juan McCain”, declaring him a true conservative hero and the latest inheritor of Reagan’s crown.

If Democrats are smart, they will run the picture above over and over and over.

Whether the national media can be shaken out of its love affair with Straight-talk McMaverick remains to be seen. If I had to guess, I would say the answer is “no.” Either way, the eventual Democratic nominee will have to fight eight years’ worth of pro-McCain hype, as well as the conventional wisdom that McCain is some sort of independent. The real danger of McCain’s candidacy is that voters in the general election still under the sway of this illusion will see him as some sort of centrist alternative to traditional Democrats and Republicans.

Fortunately, as pointed out by dday over at Hullabaloo, the DNC is already on the move against McCain. This is the kind of messaging that needs to be coming from Democrats now through November.

The New York Times has a pretty interesting article about the challenges to communities looking to decrease their carbon emissions or otherwise reduce their environmental impact. From outdated and inflexible zoning laws to dwindling tax revenues, cities and towns are finding it difficult to upgrade power plants, modify or replace municipal vehicles, and make other eco-friendly changes.

Likewise, the Times points out the hard choices facing individual citizens:

Nearly 1,200 miles away, in Austin, Tex., — a city that ranks high on any list of green strivers — some residents want to help but do not feel they can afford it. DeVonna Garcia’s family won an award for its beautiful outdoor display of Christmas lights — but she stayed with her old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, hearing that a friend paid $600 for energy-efficient lights.

Clearly, the only choice here is to continue stringing one’s home with hundreds upon hundreds of Christmas lights.

From this morning’s Washington Post:

In a statement prepared for his scheduled appearance before the House Judiciary Committee today, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said that unless Congress acts, “1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide” under a decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

“Retroactive application of these new lower guidelines will pose significant public safety risks . . .” Mukasey said in the statement. “Many of these offenders are among the most serious and violent offenders in the federal system and their early release . . . would produce tragic, but predictable results.”

Translation: The prison sentences given to black people will end up being slightly closer to those given to white people for the equivalent crime, and we can’t be having that. Because, you know—black people are violent. And scary. Or something.

There’s a huge disparity between the sentences meted out under federal law for the possession of crack and those given out for the possession of powder cocaine. The guidelines that have Mukasey and the Bush administration clutching at their hankies would give inmates incarcerated for crack-related offenses the opportunity to have their sentences reviewed. Only after an inmate’s case has been heard and her/his circumstances reviewed would the possibility of early release come up.

Nonetheless, Mukasey chooses to conjure up the spectre of thousands of violent gang members (read, “black people”) flooding the streets to threaten the good, hard-working people of America.

Personally, I would have preferred a one-sided blow-out by Obama yesterday. Despite the media speculation, though, that outcome was unlikely.

A number of pundits and analysts are painting rather dire pictures of the Democratic party tearing itself apart as Clinton and Obama supporters fight it out for the next few weeks. Meanwhile, McCain has consolidated his lead among Republicans.

The import picture to keep in mind, though, is this one:

The purple line represents Hillary Clinton’s aggregate nationwide polling numbers through 2/3, the yellow line the same for Barack Obama.

The big question, obviously, is whether the two lines will, at some point, cross. It is possible that Obama will plateau at some point below Clinton’s numbers. However, the story of the last two months has essentially been that of Obama closing the gap between him and Clinton. As to why Obama didn’t do better on Super Tuesday, there is a fairly strong argument to be made that with so many states’ primaries and caucuses grouped together, Obama’s organization had an extremely steep uphill climb, and simply didn’t have enough time to cover all the states.

This explanation is reflected in the graph above. Short of some radical event to change the trend, moving Super Tuesday back even just week would likely have produced radically different results. We’re now looking at a relatively long stretch until the next round of big primaries. My guess is that period will enable the Obama campaign to continue closing the gap with Clinton.

The larger question hanging over this whole discussion though, is whether the the Democrats’ lack of a clear front-runner is good news or bad news for their chances in November. Unless both Obama and Clinton open up a full-on negative campaign over the next few weeks (which is a possibility), it is hard to see how having two candidates getting into the nitty-gritty details of their policy differences in full view of voters is a bad thing. Dire predictions from the punditocracy to the contrary, the substantive differences between the two candidates are just are not that huge that the supporters of one will, en masse, refuse to support the other come the general election.

I mentioned via Twitter last week that the new Vampire Weekend album is either really good or really bad. I had just gotten the album, and listening to it for the first time, my thought was that over time, some of the off-putting tracks might grow on me.

A week later, I can safely declare that the new Vampire Weekend album is pretty good and pretty bad.

Tracks like “Mansard Roof”, “Oxford Comma”, “Walcott”, and the “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” are some of the more inspired indie-pop I’ve heard in recent years. At the other end of the spectrum, “A-Punk” is an entirely unnecessary exercise in warmed-over 2-Tone ska, while “M79″‘s early-80′s Casio keyboard is enough to send me lunging for the skip button.

In between are a handful of generally forgettable songs, most sounding like attempts to recreate various aspects of Paul Simon’s Graceland.

If this review is sounds harsh, it is due to the expectations created by the the album’s high points. The good songs I listed above really are quite good. In the end, these tracks make Vampire Weekend worth purchasing. However, I find myself wondering if perhaps the band would have been better off going with an EP rather than a full-length release.

Yesterday’s All Things Considered on NPR featured a conversation with Andrew Rasiej of TechPresident.com. The bulk of the interview is consumed by discussion of Obama’s latest YouTube video, in which various Hollywood personalities sing along to his “Yes We Can” speech, as well as the Clinton campaign’s “Hillary & the Band” effort and Obama’s ringtones.

At around the 3:10 mark, host Michele Norris asks Rasiej whether the Republicans have done anything similar. Rasiej’s answer answer is no:

For some reason, the Republicans are really terrified of bottom-up politics, and they have used some of these tools, but are trying desperately to keep control.

Call me crazy, but that sounds like a pretty interesting point of discussion. It represents a rather stark difference between the two parties, and an illustrative one, at that.

Does Norris ask a follow-up question (“Interesting. Why do you think that is?”)? No. Does she even remark upon Rasiej’s answer? No. Instead, she moves on to ask him if there’s any particular use of viral marketing that has made him say “Wow.” In other words, we might as well be talking about who had the most memorable Super Bowl commercial at this point.

Maybe there’s more to the interview than what made the final broadcast, but I can find no indication of it on the ATC section of NPR’s site. It is not exactly a revelation to say that the news media tend to focus on coverage of campaign tactics at the expense of commenting on the actual substantive differences. However, I tend to (perhaps naively) expect a little more from NPR, despite their continued employment of Cokie Roberts as a political analyst.

If you’re Apple, you force your customers to unnecessarily upgrade.

But wait—doesn’t Apple love its customers? Isn’t Steve Jobs a hero who battles against evil monopolists? DOES NOT COMPUTE! DOES NOT COMPUTE!!

Jon Talton has a killer post over at Rogue Columnist on the oft-remarked upon but (typically) poorly analyzed decline of the traditional newspaper.

We hear endlessly that the troubles are a result of the Internet, new technology, “people don’t read anymore,” and, my favorite, “people don’t have as much time as they used to.” As if there was once a 36-hour day, or people who once worked 12-hour shifts while raising large families had this abundance of time.

These forces are real. And yes, a big swath of the public is distracted by celebrity gossip and gets its “news” from blogs, television and talk radio. What’s less noted is how newspapers themselves contributed to the dumbing down of America. What’s most frustrating is that the discussion fails to focus on the more significant reasons behind the decline in newspaper journalism.

Talton goes on to detail the reasons newspapers essentially ignored the changes wrought upon their business model by technology. Instead of adapting to these changes, the industry contracted into a fetal position throughout the Nineties and into the current decade, and now finds itself with a consistently dwindling readership and little opportunity to change that trend.

The whole post is worth reading.

Anonymous Liberal hits the nail on the head:

I really wish the talking heads would stop attributing Rudy Giuliani’s embarrassing electoral performance to “poor strategy.” Yes, his Florida or bust strategy was stupid. But it’s not like he would have been more competitive had he tried harder in earlier states. He sunk lots of money into New Hampshire and it only caused his poll numbers to go down. Giuliani lost because he’s a creepy weirdo, and the more you see him, the more that becomes apparent. Moreover, his entire campaign was built around the fact that he happened to be the mayor of a city that was attacked by terrorists, and even stupid people eventually realized that wasn’t a particularly compelling rationale for being president. And, of course, it didn’t help that his closet was overflowing with skeletons.

Giuliani’s national appeal in the period from 2001 through mid-2007 was entirely the result of most people in the United States having no other experience of him besides what they saw on television during the 9/11 coverage. It’s no surprise that he would poll well among groups whose closest encounter with the former NYC mayor was a Time magazine hagiography.

Familiarity, in this case, bred contempt. Watch Rudy for more than about ten minutes, and all of his best tendencies will come out: a ninth-grade grasp of foreign policy, authoritarianism bordering on fascism, rampant cronyism, and serial race-baiting.

Undoubtedly, this list of qualities holds an appeal for some portion of the Republican base. However, Giuliani’s meteoric drop in the polls coincided almost exactly with the voting public’s growing familiarity with the real Rudy, as opposed to the Mayor 9/11 action figure.

Hero who saved us all? Great! Creepy weirdo? Not so much.

While I have, in the past, railed against the endless embedding of YouTube videos on blogs, I can’t resist…

If only I hadn’t given away my Baron Karza, RocketTubes, and Biotron.