Salon’s surfeit:
Three excellent articles in SALON this morning; I subscribe to the sucker, but you can get daypasses to it without much trouble.
Why is it that there’s so much corrupt pork in Alaska politics? In a state where the U.S. government still owned 60 percent of the land, and the population was settled too sparsely to develop viable creative industries, this dependence on federal assistance was of a certain grudging necessity. But under Stevens’ powerful hand the relationship between the state, the Republican Party, and federal cash was formalized and extended.
Is John Edwards’ strong environmentalism for real?
A good analysis of Huckabee’s startling second place finish in the Iowa straw poll. Despite these views, Huckabee packages himself in a largely populist message, which he can deliver with uncommon skill on the stump. On CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, he restated the central thesis of his campaign. “I am one of the few Republican candidates that’s having the courage to talk about how we need to really separate ourselves from being the Wall Street Republican crowd. We need to be the Main Street Republican crowd,” he said. “We need to quit being a wholly owned subsidiary of the major fund managers on Wall Street and start being more concerned about the people out there in places like Iowa.”