Dixie Notes

I read the Affadavit posted on Nola.com. It’s not novel material. Because the surveillance had verbatim transcripts of dialog between the Defense Department employee and the Chinese agent, you can get a feeling for the kind of people these guys are.

For example, one time the DD employee comes home with a bunch of cash in his wallet and his wife finds it. He tells her he won it gambling, and she takes half.

The Chinese agent takes the DD employee to Vegas and spends a couple thousand on him, and later the Chinese agent tells his boss how much he spent on the guy, referring to him in Chinese derogatory slang.

The DD employee keeps telling the Chinese agent, “this is classified shit, man, so don’t lose it. I’d go to jail. I don’t want to go to fucking jail.”

Their idea of subterfuge was using a chinese-based webmail provider, but they didn’t use it all the time, and copying documents and faxing them, instead of emailing them. The FBI even found where the Chinese agent bought PGP Home Edition 9.5

Apparently the real carrot for the DD employee, who worked in weapons purchasing, was to steer purchasing contracts for weapons systems through the agent’s purchasing company in exchange for kickbacks, and maybe the agent was really going to try that, but I’ll bet the companies were just for show, and the DD employee’s greed did the rest.

If this is the level of spy threat we’re facing, we’ve got nothing to worry about.

There was only a 15% voter turnout yesterday, and Obama handily won, whereas Huckabee narrowly won. Not surprising to anyone, Obama won Orleans parish. He also won by smaller leads in Jefferson, Plaquemines, and St. John, with Mrs. Clinton winning St. Bernard and St. Tammany. St. Bernard is the only parish she won by a decent margin, and I’m not sure what to make of that. St. Bernard had the lowest percentage of McCain voters, as well as among the lowest percentage of Huckabee supporters, which doesn’t suggest a clear reason why St. Bernard went for Clinton.

The interesting thing is that McCain won all of the above parishes - Every single one - yet Huckabee won the statewide vote. This suggests that it’s the more rural people from north Louisiana who swayed the vote, in other words, the strongly evangelical voters.

Parker said a lot of the votes for Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, came from the more socially conservative areas of the state from Alexandria northward.

Almost half of the voters in the Louisiana GOP primary described themselves as born-again, evangelical Christians, according to the AP exit poll, and most of them voted for Huckabee. He also won two-thirds of those voters who said they were looking for a candidate who shares their values.

The motivating force that gets evangelicals up and out of the church pew is emotionally-charged issues. They could care less who the guy is. Get them riled up enough with abortion/stem cell research/evolution issues and they’ll go to vote for that, and drop a vote for the most atavistic Republican almost as an afterthought. The thing is, there’s lots of ‘em. As these results show, they easily overpower the more population-dense and sanity-dense areas.

Here’s my point: Democrats can’t be led like this. We won’t march to the polls behind the pied piper of the pulpit. The only chance we ever have of winning anything is just to avoid stirring these people up, and that’s why I’m placing myself in the Obama camp today. The speech he gave at Tulane certainly helped, but more than that, I think when you add up the votes Clinton will gain over Obama in the Northeast then subtract the protest votes she’ll provoke from evangelicals, you end up with a negative number. This resulted in McCain’s narrow loss in Louisiana, and this is not a trend we want to see in the National election.

_{p.s. Tom Schaller is a dumbass. I called it!}