Statistics

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Source : Gallup.

Depending on who you ask, the Iraq war costs anything from a low $200 million, to a moderate $411 million to a whopping $720 million a day.

The American Friends Service Committee calls for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and they have put together this video describing in numbers the financial toll the war is having on the country's ability to deal with its domestic issues. When you spend $720 million in a failed war, you can't spend it in health care, schools, jobs or the current housing crisis.

Watch the video.

Austin's NBC News affiliate has conducted a pre-debate poll of the electorate and this is what they've found :

The race for the Democratic nomination is too close to call. The large percentage of "undecided" voters give even more weight to the CNN debates Thursday evening. As Senators Clinton and Obama both tour Texas, they will be reaching out to the undecideds to close the gap.

If the election were held today, who would you vote for? Democrats:

• Clinton 46%
• Obama 45%
• Undecided 9%

Margin of error: +/- 4%

If the election were held today, who would you vote for? Republicans:

• Huckabee 30%
• McCain 52%
• Paul 9%
• Undecided 9%

Margin of error: +/- 4%

Voter interest is high for the March 4 primary and as Texas plays a role in deciding the nominee, the expected voter turnout is historic.

Do you plan to vote in the March 4 primary?
18-39
55% (Democrats)
45% (Republicans)

40-59
61% (D)
39% (R)

60+
49% (D)
51% (R)

They are going to conduct the poll again after the debate. What's really interesting is the reason why they chose the company conducting the poll, Constituents Dynamics:

Ms Unhinged Malkin is using data of the white supremacist organization NumbersUSA, to prove that Latinos who voted for Hillary Clinton were "corruptly" naturalized under her husband's administration.

Is that really so? How can she be so certain that all of those who voted for Clinton are naturalized immigrants as opposed to old American Latino families with no links to their countries of origin?

This is the untold story of Super Tuesday. For all the talk from Democrats and Republicans about whether immigration is or is not a wedge issue in 2008, the fact of the matter is nobody is exit polling and on the look out for recently naturalized citizen voters.

More to the point for pundits who are scrambling to feign to know all things latino, nobody is going out of their way to define demographically what "Latino voter" means.

• Is a Latino a recent immigrant?
• Is a Latino a native Northern Mexican who never immigrated to the US?
• Is it Nuyoricans only or does it include also Puerto Ricans born in the island?
• When confusing Hispanic and Latino, are we also including people born in Spain and Portugal but naturalized in the United States?
• And how many generations does it take before you loose the identity politics moniker and become a "full American"?
• Too many people are tossing around the "Latinos only vote for white Democrats or the Clintons" without qualifying the term Latino or Hispanic and that's a problem.

I believe that Hillary Clinton won for 4 very important reasons :

1. The campaign was able to get as many registered Democrats to vote for her as possible.

2. Since most registered Democrats who came to vote were women, the "tear heard around the world" was successful in getting her the last minute sympathy vote from people who ...

3. would have otherwise voted for John Edwards.

I think it is clear that for Hillary Clinton to stay in the race she needs to beat John Edwards, not Barack Obama. Edwards ran a remarkable game in Iowa. Had he had as much money as Clinton, he probably would have beaten her by more than just 1%. I am not sure though that under the voting trends of Iowa, he would have been able to beat Barack Obama.

4. The Obama campaign has insisted in equating their "I am not a black candidate" campaign with a complete disregard for the colored blogosphere. Yesterday was the day that it showed how much that has cost them.

So let's look at the numbers, courtesy of MSNBC.com :

The Pew Institute for Research is probably the largest non-for-profit public opinion survey group in the United States. Many people from both the left and right look at them as the source for number crunching anything having to do with elections, media use and the socio-political impact of market demographics.

So it is not shocking to see the reaction around a recent survey they released that pits Hillary Clinton against Rudy Giuliani; especially after the hyperbolic headline published at Politico.com.

I just have to wonder though, how those numbers read when compared to Quinnipac's similar survey for New York state. Giulini's advantage over her is of only 2%. Considering that most surveys have a 2-5% margin of error, that means they are in a dead heat in the Empire state.

Given New Yorkers do know how much of an asshole Rudy is, all I have to say that these polls are more about name recognition and public perception than anything having to do with the facts about either candidate's career.

Which makes it even more depressing to realize that most people really don't vote with the facts; they really just vote with their intuition. Whomever controls the gut instinct wins.

Which is why, this would make for an interesting pairing because, as John Gandelman points out over at The Moderate Voice, it will all come down to immigration.

Transparency International has published their international government corruption scores. It does not look pretty for the United States.

A strong correlation between corruption and poverty is evident in the results of the CPI 2006. Almost three-quarters of the countries in the CPI score below five (including all low-income countries and all but two African states) indicating that most countries in the world face serious perceived levels of domestic corruption. Seventy-one countries - nearly half - score below three, indicating that corruption is perceived as rampant. Haiti has the lowest score at 1.8; Guinea, Iraq and Myanmar share the penultimate slot, each with a score of 1.9. Finland, Iceland and New Zealand share the top score of 9.6.

Countries with a significant worsening in perceived levels of corruption include: Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Jordan, Laos, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and the United States. Countries with a significant improvement in perceived levels of corruption include: Algeria, Czech Republic, India, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Mauritius, Paraguay, Slovenia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uruguay.

One of the most interesting things about the Bushes, George and Jeb, is that they came to power through the South and not their state of origin, Connecticut. George W and Jeb Bush really walked away from their WASP roots and have embraced the south, but not the south of Sherman.

I've always felt their southern strategy is more Latin America, not Georgia. Their ethos is more akin to banana republic dictators-in-the-making : Supressed and stolen votes, altered constitutions, co-opted civil liberties, disappeared dissidents, persecuted gays, paramilitary forces, abuse of executive powers ... the list could go on and on.