In an interview with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Dick Cheney commented on his wife Lynne’s revelation that Dick and Barack Obama are related. Lynne reported that Dick and Barack are connected through an eighth generation French descendant. Dick referred to Obama today as “cousin Barack,” and said he’s not sure whether the relationship “would help or hurt” Obama. Watch it:

Also in the interview, Cheney referred to the House’s recent passage of SCHIP as “veto-bait.”

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Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Laura Keehner said that FEMA’s staged press conference is “inexcusable to the secretary.” FEMA is part of DHS. Keehner described the incident as a lapse in judgment, but said “stunts such as this will not be tolerated” and noted that “the senior leadership of the department is taking this very seriously.” “This is offensive, inexcusable,” she told USA Today.

Speaking at Columbia University today for the culmination of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, right winger David Horowitz compared the negative reception his campaign has received on campus to the recent incident of a noose being hung on the door of a black professor at Columbia. Horowitz claimed “nooses have been put figuratively on the doors of the College Republicans“:

We’ve had many distractions this semester, and I guess I’m one of them. A recent one was an unfortunate incident of a noose being put on a professor’s door. I think that the campus is right to be concerned about that. But I detect a somewhat of double standard at this university and other’s that I’ve been to, in that nooses have been put figuratively on the doors of the College Republicans here who have invited me. Of course, there’s always a noose over my head by a national hate campaign which has been organized by radical Muslim groups and radical leftist groups.

Watch it:

Apparently for Horowitz, being accused of racism is the equivalent of being the target of racism.

Via Henry Farrell, Gelman et. al. post some interesting maps. First, which states would John Kerry have won were only poor voters allowed to vote:

Basically it seems that here Bush wins only the whitest of states, though not super-white Maine. Next, only people in the middle third of the income distribution:

This looks a lot like the actual election results, though there are a few states Kerry carried in reality despite losing middle income voters. There are no states Bush won without carrying middle income voters. Last, people in the top third:

Basically, rich people love Bush. But not the rich people who live New York, its suburbs in New York or New Jersey, or DC, or the DC suburbs (i.e., Maryland) or those who live in California. Interestingly enough, a huge proportion of political journalists and editors and people who run media companies live in precisely those places. One wonders if this doesn’t have a distorting effect on media types’ perception of what’s going on in politics.

Yesterday, the conservative front group Family Security Matters (FSM) released its list of “The Ten Most Dangerous Organizations in America.” Among the top 10 “hate” organizations were MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, and “Universities and Colleges.” ThinkProgress earned the 10th spot in the rankings.

Ironically, various members of both the Family Security Matters board of directors and board of advisers have direct associations with some of the organizations that FSM now declares “the most dangerous” in America. For instance, former CIA director James Woolsey, who sits on the board of advisers, appeared on a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress in Sept. 2007. Unsurprisingly, other FSM advisers work for various “universities and colleges”:

- Executive Vice President Linda Cohen is also a trustee on the Santa Fe Community College Foundation Board, which seeks to “provide the college with ever-increasing funds.”

- Dr. Arthur Waldron, who sits on the board of advisers, is a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and has previously worked at Princeton, Brown, Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College.

- Dr. Cheryl L. Willman, who sits on the board of advisers, is a professor in the Health Sciences Center at the University of New Mexico.

- Dr. Latanya Sweeney, who sits on the board of advisers, is an associate professor of computer science, technology and policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

While the folks at Family Security Matters seem to think that higher education and the protection of civil liberties are “dangerous” to America, they should be more cognizant of the “dangerous” ideas emanating from within their own doors.

For instance, in August 2007, FSM Contributing Editor Philip Atkinson published an essay, titled “Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy,” in which he counseled that President Bush should follow the example of Julius and Augustus Ceasar and become “the first permanent president of America”:

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Ceasar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nucelear weapons.

Atkinson also suggested that Bush should have used “his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead.” In the minds of Family Security Matters, supreme dictator Bush nuking the Middle East is less dangerous than this website.