JOHN KERRY gets an endorsement from The Concord Monitor.

JUDITH DEAN gets a good review from Stephen Green. “No matter who the Democratic nominee is, the party ought to nominate the other Dr. Dean for First Lady.”

THE COMMAND POST’S special election coverage section is shifting into high gear. Check it out regularly. You might also want to visit Jack O’Toole’s blog, and Taegan Goddard’s PoliticalWire.

BY POPULAR DEMAND, the State of the Union Drinking Game is back for 2004. Of course, if you follow these guidelines a liver transplant pretty much goes without saying. . . .

IOWA POLITICAL BLOGGER DAVID HOGBERG has observations on the Edwards and Kerry surges, the Dean slippage, and why he thinks that Kucinich should be doing better than he is.

Personally, though, I think that everyone has missed the obvious candidate.

IN RESPONSE to my earlier tax-cut post, reader Kate Hamilton — who, like the InstaWife, seems to be in charge of her family’s tax preparation — emails:

The tax cut has saved my family about $1500 this year. I realize that to your average monocle wearing elitist that isn’t much, but to my husband who works so I can stay home with our three kids, and myself, it is a real life saver! Not only that, but the extra money from our return is going to pay for plane tickets so my kids and I can go visit their grandparents in the lower 48. Now thanks to the president and his tax cut we’ll be helping out the airline industry too. Reaganomics work!

I wonder how many people are having similar experiences right about now? To the extent that a lot are, attacking Bush for the tax cut may be counterproductive, simply ensuring that he’ll get credit. In fairness to Bush’s critics, however, hardly any of them actually wear monocles.

UPDATE: Reader Jorge Del Rio emails:

I experienced the same thing. I have the benefit of a father who is a CPA (even if I didn’t I work for one of the Big 4 accounting firms, although I’m an attorney) and I recently had him run our numbers. Our return is rather large. The effect of it is even more profound. My wife never returned to her job after her maternity leave. She was a senior associate here in DC at one of the largest law firms in the country. You can imagine what she was making. It completely dwarfed my salary, and I do ok. We saved up quite a bit of money and only needed to draw on it modestly. Well, our son will be 2 in April and it was looking like she was going to have to get back into the workforce sometime in the late summer, early fall. With this refund, she can now stay home for almost another 9 months. That really is priceless. Kind of hard to try and convince us that the tax cuts were reckless. If those guys in Iowa tried telling my wife, to her face, that they would increase our taxes by repealing the tax cuts, they just might get popped in the nose.

Interesting. I don’t know how many people are having this experience, but if there are a lot, I imagine that it will help Bush — ironically, especially if his opponents make an issue of the tax cuts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A couple of readers ask why I’m not fulminating against the deficit. Well, I was really making a political point, not an economic one, but I don’t think the deficit growth is a product of the tax cuts so much as of overspending. I think that the Bush Administration is guilty of overspending, all right, and if I had my way I’d hold non-defense spending flat. But that’s not going to happen. Bush’s tactic here seems reminiscent, as I said in an earlier post, of Nixon’s though it seems unlikely to touch off Nixonian levels of inflation anytime soon.

As I’ve also mentioned before, there’s an interesting irony in that the pressure to play against type, and the sort of pigeonholing employed by the press that produces such pressure, means that Democratic presidents wind up being worse on civil liberties, and Republicans worse on deficits, than you might otherwise expect based on stereotypes.

MICHELE CATALANO has thoughts on the difference between sexy and skanky. And scroll for observations inspired by Popeye’s 75th birthday.

BUSH’S PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BE COMFORTED by this piece in the New York Times:

By most measures prospects for George W. Bush’s re-election look very good. No single indicator guarantees a second term, of course, but on balance the president’s numbers are as good if not better than those of the three presidents who won second terms in recent times.

From a political standpoint, Mr. Bush is strong. His approval ratings are relatively high, as is the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the right track, and alone among recent presidents he saw his party gain seats in the midterm elections.

The economic numbers are also positive. Consumer confidence is high, disposable income is rising and the unemployment rate is lower than that of the three presidents who lost bids for re-election.

Just remember: the numbers looked good for Gore, last time around. I think that Bush remains vulnerable under the right circumstances.

UPDATE: Interesting poll discussion at Kevin Drum’s.

WHY I DON’T TRUST POLLS: This Des Moines Register poll shows Wesley Clark trailing Dennis Kucinich, with 2% vs. 3% respectively.

Now I know that Iowa is to the left of the nation generally, and that Iowa caucus voters are to the left of Iowa. I also know that Clark’s campaign hasn’t been terribly impressive. (Though the blog is pretty good.) But still — two percent? And behind Dennis Kucinich? I find that very hard to believe.

But I could be wrong — my political-prediction track record isn’t especially impressive.

UPDATE: Iowa reader Joe Kristan emails:

While your point about the reliability of polls is a good one – especially with our caucus system – I don’t think they are too far off with respect to Clark. Why? He’s not here. Kucinich has been here for months, and Clark, with no effort or organization at all here, is lost in the candidate ad blizzard. It’s also hard to say he’s offered anything that isn’t available from the candidate’s who aren’t blowing Iowa off, so there probably isn’t a group of disaffected Democrats who would go to him anyway by default.

Yeah, but two percent? (On the other hand, Kevin Drum emails: “Clark isn’t running in Iowa. Heck, I’m surprised he’s getting 2%….”) It just seems to me that anyone who’s being talked about as a serious national candidate should do better than that. But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Meanwhile, Michael Peckham emails:

I agree that the poll you mention is probably bogus, but Kucinich does have a small ace up his sleeve in Iowa — The Transcendental Meditation crowd who
live in Fairfield:

Even as much of the country still struggles to pronounce his name (it’s koo-SIN-itch), Mr. Kucinich has become a phenomenon in Fairfield, population 9,500. His proposals to promote world peace, universal health care and environmental sustainability arguably resonate here as in no other place in America.

Hmm. Okay. (There’s more here.) And reader Andrew Boucher says that the poll’s probably right and that Iowans are mad at Clark for snubbing them: “Regardless of whether or not they might support him, they’d never stand at caucus for someone who is snubbing his nose at the system.” This may make the polls look a bit less bogus — but doesn’t it also make the whole Iowa caucus process look a bit more bogus?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has lengthier and, no doubt, better informed comments on Iowa.

CHIEF WIGGLES had a close call this morning. He’s okay, though. So is Rich Galen, who has pictures. (Scroll to the bottom).

(Wiggles link busted earlier — fixed now).

SADDAM’S NEPHEW DROPS THE BALL BOMB:

An explosive device being transported in a car exploded near a U.S. Army patrol, killing two Iraqis in the vehicle including a relative of Saddam Hussein, the military said today. There were no U.S. casualties.

The blast in a white Mercedes car happened late on Saturday on a street in the former dictator’s home town of Tikrit, said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division. . . .

Russell said one of the two men killed was a nephew of one of Saddam’s brothers, and was carrying a homemade bomb comprised of artillery shells and plastic explosives in his lap that detonated prematurely, killing him instantly and fatally wounding the driver. He would not further identify the bomber.

More like this, please.

SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?

The capture by the United States of thousands of centrifuges on board a German-owned vessel, the BBC China, en route to Libya has raised suspicions in Washington and London that Col Gaddafi offered to abandon his weapons programme after threats from America, rather than the lengthy British and American diplomacy vaunted by Tony Blair.

Diplomacy has more to do with (credible) threats than with sweet reason. And “threats from America” are a lot more credible, nowadays.

TACITUS is having the rare experience of seeing a blog-Troll go to jail. He seems to be savoring it.

ED CONE:

Whatever else may go wrong between now and Election Day, George W. Bush will always have the months after 9/11 to his credit, and that is going to make him very tough for anyone to beat in November. . . .

That’s why criticism of the invasion of Iraq is quickly approaching its sell-by date as a campaign issue. Look back just a few months too far, and you see George Bush in his finest hour. Anger over Iraq has played well in the pre-season, but will go only so far in the general election. Voters already know how they feel about the decision to go to war, and either way the war happened, and it’s clear that the way out is the way forward. What’s up for grabs is what comes next.

The emotion the Democrats need to stimulate is hope.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Allen notes this poll of attitudes toward the war and observes: “Backing up Ed Cone’s assertion that vocal opposition to the Iraq war is ‘quickly approaching its sell-by date,’ are the results of a poll by the financial paper Investor’s Business Daily. In this poll the war is not a hot election issue even among those who opposed it. . . .” Interesting.

CAPITALIST CHICKS founder Debbie Brannigan was interviewed here not long ago — I just noticed it. And check out their monthly Capitalist Next Door feature — it’s probably not too late to send in your submission for next month. And blogosphereans may recognize this prior winner.

I mentioned this website a year or two ago, but it really seems to be developing. And it looks like they’re having fun. All it really needs is a blog!

GOD, SCHMOD — I want my monkeyman! Well, it is some kind of bizarre, against-nature combination. InstaAtrios? Nobody really wants that. . . .

THE BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION: Jeff Jarvis observes:

Let’s add this up, shall we? So the head of an Arab anti-American channel is hired by the BBC at the same time that the BBC forces out a Briton who dares to criticize Arab states. The BBC isn’t clever enough to even care about appearances.

The BBC chose sides long ago, and the side they’ve chosen isn’t ours.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP of the latest South Carolina primary news.

ANDREW SULLIVAN’S SITE, which suffered from a server meltdown yesterday, seems to be back up now.

A WESLEY CLARK ENDORSEMENT: At the mall I was talking to a Kosovar refugee, now a Knoxville resident, and I asked her what she thinks of Wesley Clark. “I want him to be President!” she said. “He helped us.”

DUELING WESLEY CLARKS: Stephen Sachs does a side by side comparison of passages from two Clark statements on the war, and concludes: “Now, it’s possible that Clark’s position in these two pieces is consistent, just highly complex. . . . But I simply don’t see how these two pieces, from April and November, can be read as expressing the same opinion of the war.”

As I said before, Clark seems like a hard guy to pin down.

UPDATE: The lefties at CommonDreams seem to think Clark supported the war.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus writes: “It’s possible to square Clark’s Congressional testimony with opposition to the war as waged. But it’s impossible to square this London Times article with Clark’s current antiwar criticism.” But Mark Kleiman is trying hard to do just that.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon writes: “I am all-too-familiar with Clark, having watched him ad tedium and ad nauseam on CNN both during and after the war, when extracting a definitive opinion from the coy former General about anything, even whether he was a Republican or a Democrat, was like pulling teeth from a rhinoceros.”

MORE: Andrew Sullivan: “He was pro-war until it was politically convenient for him not to be. He was pro-war, depending on what the meaning of ‘pro’ is.”

ANOTHER CASE OF ANTI-GUN BIGOTRY OVERCOME:

So what would make someone like me change my mind? I met this gun enthusiast. As research for my new novel, I asked him many questions, all the while voicing my disgust. My character might use a gun, but I never would. “Come to the range,” the gun guy said. “I’ll teach you to shoot.”

I expected a dungeon full of men missing teeth and wearing T-shirts decorated with Confederate flags. Instead, I found a sunny, wood-paneled lobby and guys who looked like lawyers on their lunch break. . . .

I no longer was so sure. I did some research — there are countless testimonials about guns saving someone’s life. I looked into shooting as a sport. I spoke to a woman who had found a wounded deer and shot it, ending its agony. I changed my mind: Guns aren’t bad.

Read the whole thing. (Via Alphecca).

SOME RATHER IMPRESSIVE progress in the rocket-fuel department. Cool.

UPDATE: Reader Doug Pratt emails:

Thanks for the posting about hybrid rocket motors. You’re right, it’s cool. In fact, we rocket hobbyists have been flying hybrids for the past seven years! They are great fun, and since none of the components are explosive, we don’t need any special licensing or storage for the motors.

We use nitrous oxide as the oxidizer, and plastic pipe of some sort as the fuel grain: PVC, polypropylene, or cast thermoplastic of some sort. There are several commercially available systems.

I’m proud to say that I designed the ground support equipment that controlled the filling and firing of the nitrous oxide hybrid motor in the article you linked to. My company specializes in unusual products and accessories for model fliers. I got interested in hybrids several years ago, and my modular launch system has gone down quite well. You can see the catalog at PrattHobbies.com. I also set up a web site last year to disseminate information on hybrid motors in a sales-pitch-free environment; that’s at FlyHybrids.org. Anyone who is interested in learning more can start there or at FlyRockets.com, which is more of an overview of the entire sport.

Like a lot of amateur activities, model rocketry — at its high end, at least — is likely to be a source of considerable innovation that will spread into military and commercial applications. That’s one reason why I think it should be encouraged.

FRITZ SCHRANCK notes that the IRS’s audit of The Nature Conservancy is probably a harbinger of stricter scrutiny over the finances of nonprofits. I think that’s probably a good thing.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen has more background, and observes: “The institution has over $3 billion in assets, so this is hardly a small matter.” He also notes reasons why this sort of problem likely exists at other nonprofits as well: ” This area is just ripe for institutional failure. Too many donors would rather look the other way and pat themselves on the back for their generosity. They do not want to hear bad news, which is one reason why news about bad non-profits often remains hidden for so long.”

WHY GEORGE BUSH WILL (PROBABLY) BE RE-ELECTED: The tax cuts. I’m the luckiest of all men, as my wife does our taxes. That makes sense — mine are easy, and she’s the one who runs her own business. This has the added side effect of removing any pressure for me to make more money, since if I do it just makes her job harder. . . .

But she just did a preliminary run-through of our taxes and it looks like the Bush tax cut is going to save us a lot of money. (Well, a lot by law professor standards, anyway.) “I love George Bush!” she exclaimed. Such expressions of enthusiasm for political figures on her part are uncharacteristic, to say the least.

If very many people are experiencing this phenomenon, it’s likely to prove quite the shot in the arm for the Bush presidency. I don’t know if they are, as I didn’t expect the tax cuts to help us very much. My experience has always been that when “massive tax cuts” are discussed by pundits, they’re always tax cuts for someone else. But it’ll be interesting to see whether a lot of people feel this way. If so, this is a source of Bush strength going into the election season that people haven’t paid enough attention to.

On the other hand, John Cole points to a major Bush weakness that people haven’t given enough attention, either.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman sneers. But hey, I’ll just consider this a much-delayed version of that middle-class tax cut that Bill Clinton promised!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. It seems as if the InstaWife’s general theory of taxation — that the government will take as much as it can get away with in order to buy votes from special interests — is also shared by Milton Friedman. (“Raise taxes by enough to eliminate the existing deficit and spending will go up to restore the tolerable deficit. Tax cuts may initially raise the deficit above the politically tolerable deficit, but their longer term effect will be to restrain spending.”) I always knew she was Nobel material.