Month: August 2008

"In terms of the conservative constituency of the Republican Party, Sen. McCain is an opportunistic infection that threatens to ravage and destroy its defenseless body. Tragically for America, in the larger context of our national political life he still plays the role of the AIDS virus, masquerading as a republican while opening the way for Barack Obama, the opportunistic infection that will ravage the defenseless body of our republic. If we accept the McCain/Obama choice, we resign the republic to its demise. I guess the "lesser of evils" crowd will take comfort in the notion that though infected with HIV, the patient actually died of pneumonia. Unfortunately, this is false comfort, since the choice they make increases the virulence of the opportunistic infection," – Alan Keyes.

Bob Wright logically dismembers Eli Lake in this clip. If you want to accelerate the private sector’s investment and research into alternative energy, why would you want to ease gas prices at the pump? Eli all but concedes that the McCain position on drilling and a gas tax holiday is pure politics, and not conservative economics.

Btw, great neologism, Bob: "the artists formerly known as neocons." Heh.

Don’t be fooled. There are no signs that the Chinese are actually that interested in green technology, if it comes at the expense of economic growth:

As every serious writer knows, the legitimacy of the dictatorship rests on its ability to deliver ever-rising living standards now that its Marxism is dead. Environmental concerns will always be trumped by the party’s survival instinct. Thus, President Hu Jintao reverses a programme to close coal mines. He has to, an official tells Der Spiegel, because China’s inefficient industries ‘need seven times the resources of Japan, almost six times the resources of the US and almost three times the resources used by India’. Thus, when the leaders of the G8 announce a wish to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Hu and India’s leaders see a plot by the rich West to handicap Asian rivals and refuse to accept the target.

(Hat tip: Appleyard)

Yglesias returns from his break and offers a clear-eyed take on the Gallup tracking poll:

…since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.

Here’s a really sharp and cogent analysis of the options from Martin van Creveld, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He’s – how to put this nicely – saner than NPod. But this point could do with more dissemination:

If American spokesmen in particular are to be believed, the declared rationale for attacking Iran is not so much the fear that, once Tehran has acquired nuclear weapons, it will use them against Israel and/or other countries in the region. Rather, they fear, or claim to fear, that nuclear “materials” and/or “technologies” may either fall into the hands of terrorists or be given to them.

Now suppose the U.S and/or Israel does attack Iran.

They succeed in destroying the country’s most important nuclear installations, postponing the moment at which it acquires a bomb by several years and perhaps preventing such a scenario for a long time to come. However, they cannot find, let alone eliminate, every element of the large, well-dispersed, redundant program. In that case, the danger of a “flow” of “technologies” and/or materials falling into all kinds of interesting hands may well become more acute, not less.

Of course the fact this is is utterly irrational to attack Iran at this point does not mean that Cheney cannot talk Bush into it.

Snap:

This is, ultimately, why I’m glad Clinton lost. Accountability does not exist with these guys, and in that, they really are Bush-lite. They had millions of dollars, front-runner status and, allegedly, the greatest politician of our era stomping for them–and they got their asses handed to them. But they can’t come to terms with it.

Even Chris Wallace can’t take this sitting down:

NARRATOR: Life in the spotlight must be grand. But for the rest of us, times are tough. Obama voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Mr. Davis, especially that last sentence, isn’t that misleading?

DAVIS: Nothing misleading about it. Barack Obama voted for a budget resolution that would have increased taxes on people, families, making $42,000. What’s misleading about that?

WALLACE: Well, in fact, it only would be single people making $42,000. It would be families making over $60,000. But Obama — as you say, he voted for a non-binding budget resolution that overall talked about doing away with the Bush tax cuts.

In fact, he says, that’s not his tax plan, that he supports a middle-class tax cut. And I want to put something up on the screen. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center says someone making $37,000 a year under Obama’s plan would get a tax cut of $892. Under McCain’s plan, they get a tax cut of $113.

(Hat tip: Kos.)