Robert Stein:

Half a century ago, after the Supreme Court desegregation decision, an Arkansas governor named Orval Faubus stood in the doorway of Central High School in Little Rock with National Guard members to keep African American teenagers out. Now Mike Huckabee is doing a Faubus impersonation in South Carolina.

“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” the former Arkansas governor told a crowd in Myrtle Beach yesterday. “In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole, that’s what we’d do.”

. . . If Huckabee believes he can win in South Carolina by going back to the past, he should take a look at the later career of Orval Faubus. A decade after the Little Rock standoff, he was managing the Li'l Abner theme park in the "Ozark Mountains, Dogpatch USA."

At a campaign event yesterday, Barack Obama said:

You won't hear me saying one thing one day to one audience and then saying something else another day to a different audience because I think it's politically convenient.

Um, perhaps Senator Obama can explain why he said one thing in Iowa about independent expenditures and something else in Nevada? How come Obama criticized union expenditures in the Iowa caucus campaign and refuses to do so regarding UNITE HERE's independent expenditures in Nevada? Could it be that there is a new rule for Obama? Is it ok if the expenditure is in support of his candidacy? Is it ok if it is "politically convenient" for Barack Obama?

As I have said, this is politics as usual. The problem is Obama pretends he is going to reinvent politics. He is not. He is just a pol. An extremely talented one. But still just a pol.

(Bumped: TL)

The Nevada polls are all over the place and we should probably ignore them . . . which is why I am posting the LV Review-Journal poll conducted by Mason Dixon:

On Friday the Review-Journal will publish the results of our statewide pre-caucus presidential preference poll conducted Monday through Wednesday by Mason-Dixon Polling & research.

On the GOP side former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leads his closest opponent by 15 points.

On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton outdistances Barack Obama by 9 points.

Update [2008-1-18 8:58:4 by Big Tent Democrat]: Here are more details:

"Clinton's base is women and voters over 50, and she does well with Hispanic voters," said pollster Brad Coker, Mason-Dixon managing partner. "Those have been the national patterns, and Nevada, I think, is more reflective of the nation as a whole than either Iowa or New Hampshire." Obama dominates among black voters, favored by 65 percent to Clinton's 18 percent, but they make up just 10 percent of likely caucus-goers. Hispanics make up 15 percent of likely caucus-goers and favor Clinton over Obama by 50 percent to 29 percent. Obama, who has gotten a major boost from the Culinary union, also leads among union households, but by only 7 percentage points over Clinton. Edwards, despite his focus on the labor vote, is in third place in this and almost every other group.

The other thing to note is Mason Dixon has been polling in Nevada for many years with a very good track record. It appears this poll may carry more weight than the others.

In this AP story, "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh complains that fugitives who flee from the United States into Mexico escape justice by evading the death penalty. Pursuant to treaty, Mexico (like Canada and other countries) will not extradite a fugitive who might be put to death.

"It's not about revenge. It's not so much about closure. It's about justice," [Walsh] said.

Obeying a treaty obligation isn't unjust. Death is an extreme punishment inconsistently administered in an imperfect criminal justice system. The treaty respects Mexico's sovereign right to make its own judgment about extradition while assuring a mechanism to return fugitives for trial and punishment. Doesn't that sound like justice to you?

Remember this?

Obama criticized Edwards for saying that he doesn't approve of 527s, while at the same time not disavowing a group, Alliance for a New America . . . "You've got these outside groups that are helping out candidates and it's a way of getting around the campaign finance laws. . . . [Y]ou can't say yesterday you don't believe in 'em, and today you have three quarters of a million dollars being spent for you. You can't just talk the talk. The easiest thing in the world is to talk about change during election time."

No kidding Senator Obama. You sure aren't walking the walk in Nevada: [More....]

Via Left Coaster, Joe Califano's terrific piece discusses the historic partnership between LBJ and MLK. It is a great history lesson:

The greatest fairy tale of the 2008 campaign so far is the accusation that there is some tint of racism or putdown of Martin Luther King Jr. in Hillary Clinton's comment that "it took a president," Lyndon Johnson, to realize the civil rights leader's dreams. The visionary preacher and the tough-talking master politician would be the first to say that they needed each other. I know how they came to work together, in a complex partnership, to produce a social revolution that has saved this nation. . . . LBJ appreciated King's powers of persuasion and ability to attract media attention. He decided to "shove my stack of chips into the pot" to push for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in education, employment and public accommodations. To break a filibuster, Johnson had California Democrat Clair Engle, who was dying of a brain tumor, wheeled onto the Senate floor. Engle couldn't speak, so LBJ had him signal his aye vote by pointing to his eye.

More...

HuffPo:

Hillary Clinton brought a ratings bonanza this "Meet the Press" this week, delivering an audience of 4.71 million viewers to the network — it's largest audience for a regularly-scheduled prgram since January 30, 2005.

Love her or hate her, they still pay attention to her.

No word yet on how this will affect the striking Hollywood writers, but the film and TV directors have settled with the motion picture industry.

Hollywood’s movie and television directors agreed Thursday afternoon to a new contract with production companies. The accord would appear to send a none-too-subtle message to striking screenwriters: This is not the time to get hung up on new media.

Some deal terms below:

Via Josh at Talking Points Memo, who calls it "trainwreck tv":

What do you think Obama meant by this?

Not very Reaganesque to me. See, Reagan said HIS Party was the "party of ideas."

Oh btw, here is an extended clip of Obama on the fights of the 60s. I guess disrespecting Dr. King and other leaders of the "fights of the 60s" is ok if you are Obama:

For other stuff.

Like Barack Obama, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias seemingly have no understanding of how Ronald Reagan operated as a politician. Ezra writes:

What he's saying is that Reagan effectively understood the ideological currents in the country and used that mastery of public opinion to drive popular sentiment. In other words, he admires Reagan for shifting the center. . . . Obama is suggesting he has a fairly grandly ideological view of the president's role, and that it includes harnessing the ideological forces of the moment to push the country in a new direction.

This is simply balderdash. Ronald Reagan did not rise from thin air in 1980 and ride a wave of conservative sentiment. Ronald Reagan was the heir to Barry Goldwater's conservative revolution. He fought the Rockefeller "post-partisan" Republicans throughout his political career and finally won in 1980. He carried that message into a general election and won a mandate for his ideas. Obama is running a campaign that is the exact opposite of the Reagan trajectory. I know Ezra and Matt are young, but it is amazing how little they seem to know about Ronald Reagan. They could not possibly be more wrong than they are.