As President Obama makes his case for health care reform to the AMA now, he includes a reference to Newt Gingrich while discussing progress being made in the overhaul to achieve a modern electronic record system.

As Newt Gingrich has rightly pointed out -- and I don't quote Newt Gingrich that often -- we do a better job tracking a FedEx package in this country than we do tracking a patient's health records

Indeed, this has been one area of bipartisan cooperation. But notably, the shout-out comes weeks after the former House Speaker issued a high-profile rebuke of the president's Supreme Court choice.

Twice as many Americans interviewed so far this year in national Gallup surveys say they are conservative, rather than liberal. Even with the recent election of a liberal president who won 60 percent of the moderate vote -- and a fifth of the conservative vote -- the number of self-described conservatives has increased this year.

Gallup reports that 40 percent of interviewees this year said they were conservative, 35 percent moderate and 21 percent liberal. The number of conservatives hasn't shifted much in the last two decades -- from 1996 through 2004, between 39 and 40 percent described themselves as conservative -- though that number had dropped to 37 percent over the last three years.

While two-fifths of the population says it's conservative, more Americans consider themselves either Democrats or independents than Republicans. Interviews this year found that 37 percent are independents, 36 percent Democrats and 28 percent Republicans.

The Iranian elections appear to be a mess. But were they fixed?

One of the most frequently cited pieces of evidence for those attempting to answer that question in the affirmative is a chart which appears at Andrew Sullivan's site. It shows 6 different vote announcements made by the Iranian Interior Ministry over the course of the night. After all the vote announcements, incumbent President Ahmadinejad maintained roughly the same vote share:

The gist of the argument that this is proof of an illegitimate election is quoted by Sullivan:

Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own.

Before I examine this any further, let me say that I hold no brief for Ahmadinejad. And I would love nothing more than for the entire regime in Tehran to come tumbling down.

But as someone who has watched a lot of election returns come in from a lot of places, the chart above doesn't seem that odd. For whatever reason, elections sometimes hew to their final results early on, and stay there.

Consider Kyle's and my recent liveblog of the Virginia Democratic Gubernatorial Primary. There aren't many more diverse electorates in America than Virginia Democrats. You have both urban and rural black voters, farmers, coal miners, large student populations and affluent suburbanites, all voting in the same primary.

Yet the results were steady as they came in last Tuesday. With 4% of the precincts in, Deeds was up 54%-23%-23%. This is awfully close to the 50%-26%-24% final outcome. With only a quarter of the precincts in, 30 minutes after the polls closed, the results were 51%-25%-24%. They changed little as the remaining 70% of the votes came in.

This isn't to say that results are always consistent. Just that they sometimes are, and that a consistency doesn't mean fraud (either that, or we have a much bigger problem with Diebold in this country that many believe!)

To further test this, I decided to run a simulation of sorts using U.S. Presidential Elections. I wanted to see if results trickling in for our Presidential elections have a different result than what we saw in Iran. Do we see substantial deviations from the trendline? After all, the US is a large, diverse country, like Iran. It is broken into various regions, all with different electoral loyalties. Some areas of the country are extremely Democratic (many Congressional districts gave Obama more than 80% of the vote in 2008), while some are extremely Republican.

Unfortunately, I can't find a list of different popular vote results reported at different times over the course of election night (this is unsurprising, since our focus is on the electoral vote). What I can do, however, is look at how the popular vote changed as state polls closed.

State poll closing times are here. We have nine poll closing times for the states, which gives us three more observations than we have in Iran. Also, our first poll closings are in Kentucky and Indiana, which we would expect to naturally skew things toward Republicans. So our system is set up to see deviations of the type we didn't see in Iran.

Although in reality it takes time to count state polls, here we'll assume for simplicity's sake that all returns for a state come in at once. In other words, we'll assume that at 7pm we had all the results reported from GA, SC, etc.

With the Obama-McCain matchup, we can plot the number of votes for McCain and for Obama at different poll closing times. We can then plot a trendline over them, and come up with something that looks an awful lot like the Iran chart. We see the following:

Looking at the chart, the deviations from the trendlines don't look that dissimilar to the slight deviations from the trendline we see in the Iran chart. And remember, the first states to close are IN, GA, SC, KY, etc – which means the election is front-loaded toward Republicans – while the last few pols to close are CA, OR, WA, HI and AK – a selection that is loaded for the Democrats. Yet we still see little deviation from the trend.

As Jay has demonstrated, 2008 was one of the most polarized elections in recent history (if not the most polarized). In other words, there was a lot of diversity in how states voted, which in turn makes it more likely that there would be substantial movement in the returns.

What if we look at an election with low polarization, 1988:

By the 8pm closing time, we have a 55%-45% Bush lead, which is very close to the final call. And looking at the chart we see only very minor deviations from the overall trendline; the largest deviation is from the first closing time; we would expect this for IN and KY in 1988.

Anyway, the Iranian election may well have been fixed. There are other strange events that occurred that are difficult to explain. But this chart doesn't seem to be particularly good proof that the election was fixed. Even with the vast diversity of our country, our Presidential returns look at awful lot like the Iranian ones. Proponents of regime change from within in Iran should focus on other, stronger talking points.

Paul Krugman thinks the recent murder of abortion doctor George Tiller and yesterday's shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC by 88-year-old are related to an upsurge in extremism caused by irresponsible, inflammatory, Obama-is-leading-us-into-fascism rhetoric from the righ, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

Let me make it clear: I despise the "fascism is coming!" scaremongering.  That said, I think it's ludicrous to suggest that 88-year-old neo-Nazi James von Brunn -- who, as Jonah Goldberg puts it in his NRO column, was "considered a dangerous nut even within the dangerous-nut community" -- was inspired by the likes of Limbaugh, O'Reilly, or Glenn Beck.  Von Brunn no doubt regards the conservative establishment as controlled by the Jews (The Weekly Standard was reportedly on his hit list).

Trends in anti-Semitic hate crimes make it hard to speak of a pattern linked to overall political trends.  However, it's fair to say that a lot of anti-Semitism in recent years has been linked to, and fueled by, left-wing rhetoric against Israel and its supporters.  I think Jonah goes too far in suggesting that swipes at "neocons" are usually code words for anti-Semitism, but the connection, in many cases, does exist.  Discussions of "the Israel lobby" on the Internet certainly do draw the Jew-haters out of the woodwork.

That aside, Krugman's a good one to talk about political hate- and panic-mongering, after eight years of hysterical warnings from the left about Republican fascism.  Remember Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America" screed, followed by a book called The End of America?  Wolf was given a voice in such respectable venues as the Colbert report and National Public Radio, and her paranoid rants about Sarah Palin as "the muse of the coming Rovian police state" were hosted by The Huffington Post.  And that's just one example.  Hate and hyperbole have become an endless cycle in American political discourse, and while there are stylistic differences between the left and the right, no one is innocent.

(Cross-posted to The Y-Files.)

Every cycle controversial Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman discusses running for office, then backs out at the last minute.  Now it appears that he is at least seriously considering running for Governor of the Silver State as an Independent.  The typically colorful Goodman--whose resume includes the description "mob lawyer," stated: "I have to have an answer very, very soon because everybody's out there making announcements and collecting money, and I'm drinking martinis," Goodman said.

Incumbent Republican Jim Gibbons has had a rocky tenure as Governor, to say the least, and he sits at a horrendous 21% approval rating.  That said, an entry by Goodman as an independent could split the anti-Gibbons vote, especially since Goodman would presumably draw most of his votes from Las Vegas, which is the Democrats' base in the state.  Democrats have yet to field a candidate.

And yes, that was just an awful, awful pun.  But I had to use it.  Sorry about that.

Whenever some lunatic commits a hate crime, there's a parsing of his insane notebook scribblings and straight-faced analysis of how he came to his "philosophy." Paul Krugman pursues this unfortunate sport by attaching James von Brunn's killing of a guard at the Holocaust Museum to a political viewpoint, in this case, "a right-wing extremism" that is "being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment."

In doing so, Krugman draws a very squiggly line from the Oklahoma City bomber to the murderer of Dr. Tiller to the rantings of Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck to the provocations of Rush Limbaugh to the melodrama of actor Jon Voight to the unremarkable thank-you for Voight's speech by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

My main question isn't what right-winger drove von Brunn over the edge to violence. It's who let him out on the streets after, in 1981, he entered the Federal Reserve System headquarters in Washington with a revolver, hunting knife and sawed-off shotgun. Von Brunn's plan, he told police, was to take the Fed board hostage "to focus news media attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties," according to The New York Times.

That alone should qualify one for permanent residence in a high-security mental facility. Attaching a political motive to the craziness only dignifies it.

The O'Reillys and Becks are your basic publicity hounds. They are not the conservative movement's heralds but among their worst problems. Limbaugh says some silly and irresponsible things, but you can't hang the "hatemonger" sign around his neck. Krugman does -- then tries to hang Limbaugh around the GOP's neck by noting a poll in which 10 percent of Republicans identify the radio entertainer as "the main person who speaks for the Republican Party today." I thought the percentage would be a lot higher.

As for actor Voight, his supposedly inflammatory speech involved calling Obama a "false prophet."  And he told attendees at a Republican fundraiser that "we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression." Colorful but nothing here suggests any place for accomplishing this other than the ballot box.

And I speak as one who is generally happy with President Obama.

In any case, these semi-persecutory statements have easily been matched on the liberal side. Recall actor Alec Baldwin's 2006 blog post holding that Dick Cheney "terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately." And that was very tame next to Baldwin's televised opinion during the Clinton impeachment proceedings that in another country, "we would stone [Judiciary Committee Chair] Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they're doing to this country." Baldwin later apologized.

I'm sure that Krugman's sentiments have been warmly applauded on the cyber left. But just as rightwingers' intemperate attacks hurt the conservative agenda, low blows delivered by prominent liberals don't help their cause.  Most Americans like a fair fight.

As for James von Brunn, he is, at bottom, a head case. Whatever fig leaf of philosophy he might use to cover his personal disintegration is beside the point.

A new poll by McClatchy on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has some warning signs for Republicans. It finds that 37 percent of voters generally, and 42 percent of Hispanics in particular, say they'd feel less favorably toward the party if senators "overwhelmingly oppose" her in a final vote. Twenty-four percent of voters say Senate Republican opposition would make them more favorable.

Even weeks after her selection, 55 percent of Americans say they still have not heard enough about the Bronx-born judge. But 54 percent said she should be confirmed, compared 21 percent who said she doesn't deserve to sit on the High Court.

The survey was conducted from June 4-8 of 1,000 voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent. The Hispanic subset of 505 voters was surveyed May 28-June 8, and had a margin of error of +/- 4.36 percent.

Wonder what campaign contributions bought on Thursday?

Read this McClatchy report about the senators who stood against the big legislation on big tobacco. The legislation, which can be read about here, will grant the Food and Drug Administration regulatory power over tobacco. Today, the FDA can be sure what your pet eats is safe but not what you smoke. This bill, when law, will change that. It passed in the Senate Thursday by a 79-17 vote.

Not surprisingly, most of the 17 senators who opposed the tobacco legislation are the big recipients of money from big tobacco.

It's a reminder that money buys not only power and influence in politics but sometimes, political martyrdom.

President Obama's approval rating is holding steady, even as his administration has faced some of its toughest policy fights to date on health care, national security and his Supreme Court choice.

A new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Survey (June 9-10, 900 RVs, +/- 3 percent) shows that Obama's approval rating has ticked up since May, and now stands at 62 percent. Obama has seen strong growth among independents (from 57 to 66 percent approval) and even Republicans (23 percent to 28 percent), while support has slipped slightly among Democrats (from 93 to 88 percent). Thirty-one percent of voters now disapprove of his job performance, up from 30 percent last month.

On the economy, 40 percent of those surveyed think the economy is getting worse, while 40 percent say it's getting better. Another 16 percent say it's stayed the same. When asked about the infusion of billions of federal dollars into the economy, only 46 percent said it has been successful, compared to 39 percent who say it's failed. Voters also said they'd rather see business executives manage major American businesses than the government, by a 49-27 percent margin.

The poll also surveyed voters' feelings about the Big Three automakers. While Ford Motor Company has a strong 72 percent score, both Chrysler and GM – recipients of major federal intervention, were seen favorably by just 48 and 46 percent, respectively.

Vice President Biden's approval has slipped under 50 percent, to 49. Meanwhile, 34 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of his predecessor, Dick Cheney.