Month: July 2008

Could it get worse? $200 a barrel could be closer than we think:
 

"I have been told by a reliable source that the IEA has been forbidden by the US administration from updating their absurdly cornucopian oil supply and demand scenarios until the report that comes out late this year (after the election); that report, which will publish the result of a "bottom-up" analysis (ie a summary of all existing oil fields, their production and/or prospects) is expected to show that oil production is unlikely to reach the levels that so many have blithely assumed."

Ed Kilgore isn’t buying the netroots’ sell-out meme. Substantively, I don’t see it either:

"First of all, a candidate doesn’t really have to "move" at all to create the perception of a different message and strategy once the primary season is over. The general election issue landscape is inevitably going to be different, for the simple reason that the candidate and partisan debate will be different."

He was nice to her on her show. But he wants to revoke her civil right to marry one person, while he has legally married twice. But that isn’t discrimination, is it? And he’s still a good guy, right? Nothing personal: he just thinks we’re inferior.

Hilzoy responds to Jeffrey Lord’s article:

Something about this election is bringing out all the right’s fantasies about the left, no matter how implausible or inconsistent with one another. Obama is a scary foreigner and the sneering guy at the country club; a doctrinaire Marxist and an unprincipled flip-flopper; a Muslim with a hatemongering pastor; naive yet corrupt; reckless but wimpy. But even I hadn’t expected the charge that he plans to install government-controlled FM receivers in our air conditioners.

Jeffrey Goldberg comments on the diminishing, but still lethal, threat of al Qaeda:

…at yesterday’s Aspen panel on nuclear non-proliferation, the general consensus was that there’s a reasonably high likelihood that a nuclear device will be detonated in an American city, New York or Washington most likely, at some point in the next ten years. And the experts on the panel, John Holdren and Joe Cirincione among them, are not exactly attached to the Bush Administration worldview. After such an attack, we’ll look back — those of us still around, obviously — on our efforts to combat al Qaeda and judge them inadequate to the task, just as we look back now on the Clinton Administration’s pre-9/11 preparations (and the Bush Administration’s, as well) as thoroughly inadequate. So I suppose I’m convinced of two things simultaneously: Al Qaeda is fairly weak, and not very popular at all, and that this might not matter as much as people think.

An article on the science of humor:

The real news is that the investigation of humour is belatedly becoming a science. After millennia of untested speculation by armchair thinkers, moves are afoot to bring the study of laughter into the mainstream of experimental psychology.

And kill every joke ever made.

Vintage anecdote from Senator Thad Cochrane:

"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table and I don’t know what attracted my attention. But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever … I don’t know what he was telling him but I thought, ‘Good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.’ I don’t know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy … and he just reached over there and snatched … him."

McCain says none of this happened. Why Cochrane would make it up is unclear.

Ross on David Brooks’s talk at Aspen:

Brooks brought up President Bush, and remarked that in all of his conversations with the President he’d always been struck by the extent to which Bush seemed (unconsciously, in ways he’d never articulate if pressed) to think of decisions in terms of fifty-year time horizons – almost as if he couldn’t conceive of political action except in long-run terms. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, and this might not be exactly what Brooks meant, but I think it’s an interesting way to think about what’s gone wrong – and occasionally right – in the Bush Presidency, and especially the extent to which Bush’s actions have been influenced, unconsciously or consciously, by the long-running American narrative of What Makes Presidents Great, often to the detriment of his day-to-day execution of the job.

The holiday weekend approacheth, folks: