South Carolina Primary

Some thoughts I sent to the Talking Dog:
I'm in a university town in South Carolina, and mostly what I hear is people trying to figure out who can beat Bush. I have an African-American friend, very liberal, who says she is going to vote for Clark for that reason. The trouble is, there is no general agreement about who can beat Bush; people argue for Kerry, Clark, Edwards, and even Dean. I wouldn't be shocked if Kerry won the primary here, because of the poll that said he was the only one who can beat Bush. Fear of liberals is much less prominent than usual (besides, all the conservative Democrats have already become Republicans). I have heard that Sharpton is giving inspiring speeches, but my guess is that most people are more concerned about beating Bush than about making a statement. Education here is really hurting here, mostly because of state and local tax cuts and budget woes, but I haven't heard many people talking about that or any other specific issue.

One wrinkle is that South Carolina does not have party registration, so non-Democrats can vote. In fact, Republicans can vote in the Democratic primary now and still vote in the Republican primary for Senate in June. The "Loyalty Oath" has been dropped. Crossover has been a concern in previous primaries but has never turned out to be a big issue. I thought of voting for McCain in the Republican primary the last time around but I couldn't bear the thought of pretending to be a Republican, particularly since I always see neighbors at the polling place.

Another wrinkle is that there are projections that 40 to 50 percent of the voters will be African-Americans. Kerry is hoping that Clyburn's endorsement will be influential.

Polls are here, but I don't think they mean much.

more candidate selectors

This is getting weird. A candidate selector from AOL gave me the results:

1 Kucinich Score: 100%
2 Sharpton Score: 99%
3 Kerry Score: 90%
4 Clark Score: 87%
5 Dean Score: 85%

WBUR has another selector, with actual statements by the candidates, but I find it hard to find the key differences in the statements quoted.

Another interesting site is FactCheck--with corrections of statements by candidates.

politics

There is a candidate selector here. The results I got were:

2. Dean, Gov. Howard (83%)
3. Sharpton, Reverend Al (79%)
4. Clark, Retired General Wesley K. (79%)
5. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis (74%)
6. Edwards, Senator John (67%)
7. Kerry, Senator John (64%)

(#1 is an ideal.) I am puzzled how I can have Sharpton and Clark tied for second. If their views come out as that similar how good is the selector?

I found another selector that is somewhat more specific about the issues. It gives me:

#1 Carol Mosley-Braun
#2 Howard Dean
#3 Al Sharpton
#4 Dennis Kucinich
#5 John Kerry

Most of the people I've talked to here are focused on who can win, but I'm inclined to vote my own views in the primary, among the four who have a chance, anyway. The selectors are interesting because I thought I knew who I agreed most with but wasn't sure I had been following the issues closely enough.

evil

Timothy Burke has a thoughtful post about evil, based on the New York Times Magazine article about sex trafficking. I didn't find the article surprising or hard to believe and am disturbed by how it is being questioned.

snow

We get snow maybe once a year here; I told my daughter that a particular machine worked like a snowplow and then realized she had never seen a snowplow. We had slush that froze Sunday and two days off from school.

Monday when it was still very cold with a little freezing rain my daughter spotted a bluejay in a tree outside our window. The tree-trunk was covered with ivy and the bluejay was sitting on the very base of a small branch up against the trunk, surrounded by ivy. His feathers were all fluffed up so he looked like a baby bird. Bluejays live in much colder climates than this, but this one was cold.

praying

For gentleness with myself.
To find a way out of the trap of blaming myself for things that happened when I was a child.
To be able to believe in change.

conservation

A student came by asking for ideas for a paper (for another professor's class) on women in science. She is a wildlife biology major, so I suggested women in conservation. I wonder what she will make of reading Caroline Merchant?

Wildlife biology is a major started by schools of forestry so they could train B.A. wildlife specialists for natural resources management jobs. There is an emphasis on managing to goals, whether those goals be the needs of hunters or requirements to protect endangered species. We need to hope that endangered species are good indicator species for the functioning of an ecosystem (as they often are, since that is why they became endangered in the first place), since they tend to drive management.

And yet to say we should be concerned about the balance of an ecosystem instead of about a few species doesn't work either. Ecologists have moved away from the concept of a balance of nature because ecosystems change, they don't stay in stable balance. One of the concerns in the Galapagos is overfishing of certain marine resources, for example sea cucumbers. But how do you see the effect of that in a very complex ecological network in an environment that is subject to big variations? was wondering why predator populations are so small on the Galapagos; we saw a small number of endemic hawks and what seemed like a lot of possible food. I suspect that the population of prey regularly crashes, ue to a year with no rain or el Nino, so growing predator population can't be sustained.
Galapagos Hawk: