Two bits of information which combine as unpleasant news for Democrats:

(1) Hillary’s way ahead in the polls, with 43 percent of Democrats leaning her way, more than Obama and Edwards have combined.

(2) But while Democrats seem to have convinced themselves that Hillary is electable — and who knows, at this point, given the stumbling herd of flip-flopping GOP torture advocates now lining up to debate — a new Zogby poll shows that fully half of the electorate now firmly say they would "never" vote for Clinton under any circumstances.

Hillary’s "never" number is higher than that of any other candidate, major or minor, in either party.  Worse, that number is rising as the campaign goes on, up four points (and thus outside the margin of error) from the 46% who reported similar feelings in March.

(All of this is consistent with stuff that seemed pretty obvious here on the day she declared, although of course I could be wrong.)

But rather than bothering further about the horserace here, shouldn’t we all be stepping back to marvel at just how  dysfunctional our electoral system so obviously is?  Bad enough our campaign finance structure and winner-takes-all system limit the spectrum of "mainstream" political opinion from conventional suck to full-blown delusional.  But we’re still more than a year away from the actual election, and our most likely leaders for the next four years have already been winnowed down mostly to people we already can’t bloody stand.

Genius.

That’s an actual current Reuters headline.

Princeton professor Eric Maskin shares this year’s Nobel Prize in economics with two colleagues; the trio are pioneers in the field of mechanism design theory, which is dedicated to finding ways to make markets work more efficiently and fairly.

Maskin dares to say something fairly sensible, it turns out:

Prof. Maskin goes on to speak of the needs of ensuring that public goods are provided for properly, taking into account the interests of all citizens, and on the role of his field in finding ways to do so most fairly and efficiently.

This should be considered sane, valuable, important work, especially if we care more about building sustainable human societies more than any ideology, yes?

However, the mere acknowledgment of this complex field is an affront to "free market" ideologues who prefer to believe that markets are, by their very existence, efficient — in much the same way that food riots are, by their very existence, orderly. 

Unfortunately, this remains something of a state religion in the US, so while hundreds of newspapers have reported on Maskin’s winning of a Nobel, few have bothered to pick up the Reuters story of what the Nobel Prize winner actually says.  (In fact, as I write this, the wire story is already a day old, and while I might have missed something, I can’t find it in a single American newspaper.)

The efficiency of the great free market, absolutely proven once again.

I guess some people would rather die than just loop around the block.  Damn.

And what, exactly, is the penalty for not obeying this particular traffic law?  Like a fine is gonna matter.

That’s the headline of this front-page story in today’s Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, concerning how the African nation of Malawi has rapidly transformed its food economy from famine to surplus, saving countless lives:

Bottom line: food production is up 150%. But at what cost?

In other words, the subsidies only cost half as much as previous measures, and generated enough income to pay for themselves. Twice over. In addition to ending the famine.

This is, of course, pure sacrilege to those who hold "free" markets as a hallowed force of religious power. (Odd to see it front-paged in a national newspaper. Of course, I’m not in the US at the moment. I’m in Canada, where well-funded public health, education, transport, and educational systems would have destroyed the economy by now, if some disembodied heads on CNBC were remotely tethered to earth.)

My point here is not to promote or decry any particular economic agenda — I have none, personally — but to yearn for the sort of open-minded pragmatism that allows, y’know, a newspaper to actually report something useful like this without being instantly denounced for a breach of ideology.

What worked in Malawi may or may not work anywhere else. But it worked in Malawi.

Ideology apparently helped cause a famine. Moving past ideology helped stop one.

Meet Australia’s increasingly vulnerable quokka, courtesy my Trebekistan pal Dara (who in turn I think cribbed this guy from Cute Overload):

I’ve seen quokkas in Aussie zoos several times, but their natural range (the southwest bit of Western Australia) and mine have yet to overlap in the wild.  Quokkas may look more like children’s plush toys than any other species.  They’re still found in abundance on Rottnest Island near Perth, which got its name (Dutch for "rat nest") from a 17th century explorer mistaking these fuzzy marsupials for large rats.

Of course, quokkas are much more closely related to the kangaroo.  Like everything else in Australia.  If Russell Crowe someday slugs a guy in a bar and then bounds away on two giant feet, don’t be too surprised.