Month: November 2008

Robert Rapier disagrees with parts of Obama’s energy plan:

The oil industry does make big profits, but they are also already one of the most heavily taxed industries. And their tax payments to governments increase along with their profits. There has been a lot of coverage given to the record profits being made by the oil companies, but much less to the record windfalls in the form of taxes that governments have received over the past few years as a result.

And don’t forget that we have experimented with a windfall profits tax before. It raised far less revenue than anticipated, and caused investment to fall…

I don’t think there is any doubt that a windfall profits tax won’t help add to supplies. And refunding it back to consumers sends the wrong message: If gas prices go up, the government will protect you by taking the money from the oil companies and giving it back to you. Where is the incentive for the consumer to conserve? For the oil companies themselves, the likely impact would be that foreign earnings wouldn’t be repatriated back to the U.S., and would just be reinvested overseas. For that matter, a steep windfall profits tax would provide incentive for U.S. oil companies to simply relocate overseas.

Look: Palin is for windfall taxes. Obama shouldn’t be.

Drum agrees:

Despite all the grief she’s gotten, I continue to think that the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier far more fundamental than most people realize. It’s not just that she was inexperienced (Spiro Agnew and John Edwards weren’t much more experienced than Palin when they ran for VP) but that she was — obviously, transparently, completely — uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level. We’ve simply never seen someone so completely unmoored from the normal requirements of national office before. She was chosen purely at the level of celebrity, and an awful lot of people seemed to be just fine with that.

With one caveat:

Andrew’s obsession with Palin was often hard to take, and I sometimes wished I could reach through the screen and strangle him whenever he started talking about Trig Palin again. Still, aside from the "clinically unhinged" crack, I agree with all of this. Disturbing hardly begins to describe what we’ve gone though with Palin over the past two months.

While Prairie Weather thinks I have the wrong focus:

I think Andrew Sullivan is making a sad mistake.  And that’s coming from someone who admires him greatly.  Palin has gotten under his skin and he’s scratching himself bloody.

Palin is Palin — she’s ignorant, ambitious, and annoying.  She’s  far too attractive to right wing yahoos for all the wrong reasons.  But jeez, the real problem is with the yahoos, not Palin.  The real problem is that a major political party would elevate her, with so little apparent forethought, to a campaign for one of the highest positions in the land.  The hot lights should be trained on people like John McCain who remains in the Senate and his campaign advisors who’ll be hired by some other candidate.

He’s up by 814 votes according to the ADN. Sean Quinn adds:

As we’ve pointed out and has been pointed out elsewhere, the remaining votes come from Begich-friendly districts. Mark Begich is now an overwhelming favorite to win the Alaska Senate seat.

Sam Wang also expects a Begich win:

As I predicted from polls, Begich is pulling ahead. Andrew Sullivan is still clinging to the idea that turnout is suspiciously down from 2004, which I have pointed out may not be true. I’ll stick with my prediction of a Begich win by 2-7%, and normal turnout. In the face of hard polling data, a straightforward interpretation without conspiracies is most likely to be right.

Dan Savage sums up gay political activism:

Gay people generally aren’t the placard-waving, bomb-throwing, chaps-wearing, communion-wafer-stomping radicals we’re made out to be by the Bills O’Reilly and Donohue. Most gays and lesbians are content to be left to alone; many gays and lesbians go out of their way to ignore political threats and political activism and political activists. Only when gays and lesbians are attacked—only after the fact—do gays and lesbians take to the streets.

Remember: the Stonewall Riots were are a response to a particularly brutal and cruelly-timed (we’d just buried Judy!) police raid on a gay bar in New York City; ACT-UP and Queer Nation were a response not to the AIDS virus, but to a murderous indifference on the parts of the political and medical establishment that amounted to an attack.

Most gay people grow up desperately trying to pass, to blend in; most of us flee to cities where we can live our lives in relative peace and security. We don’t go looking for fights. And most gay people walk around without realizing that they’ve internalized the dynamics of high school hells some of us barely survived: it’s better to pass, to stay out of sight, to avoid making waves, lest you attract negative attention, lest you get bashed.

Continued here.

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country," – Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

(Photo: Hiroko Masuike/Getty.)

Ken Silverstein interviews David Hendrickson, author of "blogbook" Cause for Depression: A pictorial guide to the financial crisis and a professor at Colorado College. Hendrickson’s response to a question about how the financial crisis will affect Obama’s administration:

There will be decisive constraints. They will be able to undertake new initiatives, but only ones directed towards savings and cutting programs to make them more cost-effective. Obama’s capacity to undertake major initiatives in programs like health care will be extremely limited. The economic crisis Obama is inheriting is like the first President Bush’s gift of Somalia to the Clinton administration. After the 1992 election, President Bush sent substantial forces to Somalia, which became an enormous headache for Clinton. It was a parting gift. Now multiply the headache by 100 times. It’s not an entirely apt analogy, but the Bush Administration’s response to the financial crisis is a huge albatross for Obama.

Sonny Bunch responds to my post on the artistic director of Sacramento’s Musical Theatre:

… this post feels awfully sympathetic toward some kind of blacklist. Isn’t one of the joys of America that we can work with people with whom we disagree politically? Or should we only associate with people whose political ideologies align with our own, and shun those who diagree with us?

I should clarify. I don’t think anyone should lose their job, as Eckern has, over this. I despise the idea of blacklists of any kind.

My point is simply that this is not just a political disagreement. Imagine a white jazz musician sending money in the 1950s to support bans on miscegenation. That is his right. But how is an African-American supposed to play a set with such a person? It’s not easy. 

This goes both ways, of course. Some of the generalizations by gays about Mormons have been prejudicial; and attacks on people of faith who are sincere about this are misplaced. We need to be able to live civilly with one another. We need to argue this on the basis of reason, not emotion. But when you have done that for twenty years, as I have, and realize that reason doesn’t really matter to your opponents, what then? Try living with people who think of you as "intrinsically disordered" and want to have the constitution amended to ensure that that stigma is enforced every day. How would you feel? 

I think I’m not the only one who’s had enough. Live and let live – under equal protection of the laws. Not that hard. And yet far too hard for some.

So red that schoolkids chant "Assassinate Obama!" on the school bus.

Michael Scherer charts the fathomless task at hand:

Obama, Podesta and their team must build a government in just 77 days, if you count both New Year’s and Christmas. At the first briefing about this process Tuesday, Podesta said that he expects to spend about $12 million on the effort, most of which will be paid for by private donations from individuals who are not registered lobbyists in sums of $5,000 or less. (Congress kicks in $5.2 million to the effort.) All that money will pay for about 450 staff in Chicago and D.C. offices to do reviews of the major federal agencies, create dossiers on potential appointments, and otherwise set up the personnel for the future of the U.S. government, which included in 2004, 15 secretaries, 24 deputy secretaries, more than 275 assistant secretaries and more than 2,500 additional presidential appointees not subject to Senate confirmation.