Another indispensable piece from my colleague and friend Gregg Easterbrook at TNR Online. He highlights two competing plans for reducing pollution from some grandfathered pollution plants in the MidWest. Despite the predictable myopic chorus of criticism from the New York Times, the Democrats, and “environmental” groups, Bush has two plans to pick from to further clean up the environment: a bad Cheney plan and a good Whitman plan. Gregg makes a good place for Whitman’s plan and asks, plaintively, why liberals and environmentalists don’t seem to want to support it. In an election year, some Democrats seem to prefer dirtier air and a wedge issue to cleaner air and a more pro-environment Republican party.
THOSE PESKY LABELS: The spin on the College Freshman Survey that I cited on Monday helps reveal how useless many contemporary political labels are. The headline in many stories including this one was “College Freshmen More Liberal, Less Apathetic, poll finds.” But the key signifiers for this were three shifts: “For instance, a record percentage — 57.9 percent — think gay couples should have the legal right to marry. The highest portion in two decades — 32.2 percent — say the death penalty should be abolished. And more than one-third — the highest rate since 1980 — say marijuana should be legalized.” Now those are all positions I hold. So am I a liberal? I think you can make solid conservative arguments for all three. Growing numbers of conservatives support the first, the Pope backs the second and National Review supports the third. Isn’t the real swing toward a more libertarian politics?
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE I: “The Pentagon’s release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal [the] failure [of the war in Afghanistan] from the American public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged the Cold War.The threat of “terrorism”, some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare… There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the politically blind believe otherwise.” – John Pilger, The Daily Mirror (London).
PARTNOY’S COMPLAINT: I’m not an expert in this and I’m not sure I understand all of it, but this testimony from Frank Partnoy makes more sense to me than some of the hot air now floating around about Enron. It deals with regulation of derivatives. A reader I trust on these matters brought it to my attention. Here’s the money quote:
“”In a nutshell, it appears that some Enron employees used dummy accounts and rigged valuation methodologies to create false profit and loss entries for the derivatives Enron traded. These false entries were systematic and occurred over several years, beginning as early as 1997. They included not only the more esoteric financial instruments Enron began trading recently – such as fiber-optic bandwidth and weather derivatives – but also Enron’s very profitable trading operations in natural gas derivatives. Enron derivatives traders faced intense pressure to meet quarterly earnings targets imposed directly by management and indirectly by securities analysts who covered Enron. To ensure that Enron met these estimates, some traders apparently hid losses and understated profits. Traders apparently manipulated the reporting of their “real” economic profits and losses in an attempt to fit the “imagined” accounting profits and losses that drove Enron management.”
It’s time to look beyond the name-calling and understand what went wrong here. This Senate testimony helped me.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE II: “The next night I had dinner with this magazines advice columnist, Cynthia O’Neil. She told me of the work of Harvard Psyciatrist, James Gilligan, who argues that a high percentage of violence can be traced to two things: shame and humiliation. This led to a discussion about anti-American Terrorists and the ways in which being humiliated and shamed by poverty, blight, and bombs contributed to Sept. 11th and it’s continuing legacy of violence” – Brendan Lemon, editor of Out magazine.
The Dish 