Month: June 2010

Balko is on-board:

Kansas GOP gubernatorial candidate Sam Brownback is proposing an “Office of the Repealer,” tasked with seeking out bad or repetitive laws, wasteful programs, and archaic state agencies for elimination. As a general rule, the media venerates politicians who propose new government programs as bold and visionary, while anyone daring to suggest perhaps there might be cause to eliminate an agency or two is depicted as some fringe draconian nut. Or just quaint and silly.

A reader writes:

Regarding the NY Post headline, as a Harvard man, I am sure you would agree that the Post was consciously alluding to the Crimson headline from 1968, recently brought back into public consciousness by the documentary with the same title.

To wit: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29." And I would agree.

An example:

The congressman has apologized. Carlos Miller captions:

There is speculation that the “students” were actually republican plants. It doesn’t make a difference if they were the Watergate burglars, they had every right to film him walking down the street and ask him a [political] question. While Etheridge did have the right to demand to know who they were, the videographers had every right not only to videotape him but to not tell them who they were. What Etheridge didn’t have the right to commit battery on the videographer.

Jay Newton-Small asks:

The seven-term Democrat from North Carolina's Second CD is looking pretty safe. He's raised more than $735,000 compared to his closest GOP opponent, Renee Elmers, who has only raised $73,000. Still, I wonder how long it takes the NRCC to make this into a campaign video?

A reader writes:

I worked for many years with seabirds in California and Hawaii, and I wanted to add something about the differing impact of mortality between oil and wind. Oil affects predominately seabirds, whereas wind turbines affect mostly land birds. Land birds and seabirds have much different reproductive lives; seabirds live much much longer and produce fewer young each year. By way of comparison, the European Blackbird lays two clutches of eggs a year with around four eggs per clutch; a similarly sized storm-petrel (a tiny relative of the albatross) lays a single egg a year. The life expectancy of the Blackbirds is only 2.4 years, whereas the storm-petrels regularly live for decades.

The relevance of this to oil and wind? Adult mortality in seabirds is generally much lower than for land birds, under normal conditions. But increases in adult mortality are much less sustainable. 

In a situation where you have a significant die-back of adults, land birds can sustain that die-back longer and rebound back much faster once that problem has been eliminated. The recovery time of seabirds is measured, however, in decades.  For example, in California's Farallon Islands, the Common Murre was decimated from half a million pairs in the 1860s to around 3000 pairs due to egg collecting for food. Almost 150 years later that has recovered only to around 70,0000 pairs. So there is good reason that seabirds are the amongst the most endangered in the world.

Another writes:

It might interest your readers to know that millions of birds are killed every year when they collide with ordinary office buildings. Compared to this, the fatalities caused by windmills are small.

Another:

Daily Dead Birds is keeping track of the toll.

Another:

As if birds didn't have enough threats, they also have to look out for Randy Johnson's fastball.

That's Thomas Barnett's hope about the mineral discoveries in Afghanistan. Money quote:

Before anybody gets the idea that somehow the West is the winner here, understand that we're not the big draw on most of these minerals–that would be Asia and China in particular.  What no one should expect is that the discovery suddenly makes it imperative that NATO do whatever it takes to stay and win and somehow control the mineral outcomes, because–again–that's now how it works in most Gap situations like Africa.  We can talk all we want about China not "dominating" the situation, but their demand will drive the process either directly or indirectly.  There is no one in the world of mining that's looking to make an enemy out of China over this, and one way or another, most of this stuff ends up going East–not West.

If anything, this news should be used to leverage more of a security contribution out of regional great powers–to include China.

So less of a game changer than perhaps a very welcome game accelerator–as in, China is a lot better positioned to reap the mineral rewards that is Afghanistan, with the question being, "How long does it take for China to step up security-wise and stop low-balling its effort there?"  Certainly, the notion that we turn Afghanistan and all its minerals over to Karzai's cronies, Pakistan's ISI and the Taliban strikes me as truly cracked, but the truth remains:  we and our Western allies aren't enough to make the security situation happen on our own–not for the long timelines required.  If it were that easy, these discoveries would have been made decades ago.

Two ads out today give a sense of the political narratives going into November. Here's Rick Barber, who is running for congress in Alabama:

And here's Reid's new attack ad against tea party favorite Sharron Angle:

Chuck Schumer owns the whole strategy of punishing Gazans for voting for Hamas:

“The boycott of Gaza to me has another purpose — obviously the first purpose is to prevent Hamas from getting weapons by which they will use to hurt Israel — but the second is actually to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re gonna get nowhere. And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go makes sense. “

I think it's useful to have this on the table. The U.S. supports democracy in the Middle East, but if it leads to the wrong results, then the voters need to have their lives made as miserable as possible, short of starvation. Greenwald vents:

That's Chuck Schumer:  suffocate Gazans; champion Bush national security appointees; punish those with insufficient devotion to Israel; serve Wall Street.  And that, by definition, is the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Ken Silverstein hates US soccer coverage:

There is no such thing as an “upset draw.” Next thing you know the U.S. will lose a game by three goals and the media will say it’s an “upset loss” because it might have lost by six.

Being on the terrorist watch list is not grounds for being denied a legal firearm. Louis Klarevas has details:

The Government Accountability Office has found that, from February 2004 to February 2010, 1,225 purchases involving individuals on the watch list were submitted for a Brady background check. Ninety-one percent of these transactions were approved; the other 9 percent were denied for reasons other than the purchasers' suspected terrorist activities. In 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who was also on the FBI's radar, bought a gun that he used to execute a drive-by shooting outside a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. One soldier was killed, another wounded. Similarly, anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder legally purchased the handgun he used to kill Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009 from a pawn shop in Lawrence, Kansas.

Bipartisan bills to reform the screening process have languished in committee because of pressure from the gun lobby. This must make Glenn Reynolds' head explode.

Beinart notes the news out of Afghanistan, and the lack of it:

One might think that this emotional isolationism would bring demands for military retrenchment. But ironically, the public’s boredom and disillusionment with international affairs actually makes it easier for the Obama administration to sustain US deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Richard Nixon realized when he ended the draft in 1973, and thus sucked the oxygen out of the anti-Vietnam movement, it’s easier to prosecute a war when that war doesn’t directly affect the vast majority of Americans. Today, even more than then, war’s human costs have been confined to a military clique—a clique whose ability to organize politically is limited by law.

In George W. Bush’s second term, Iraq became a dominant political issue nonetheless, largely because it came to symbolize a broader discontent with the people in power and the direction of the country. But among liberals, Obama remains far more popular than Bush, and because most liberals did not oppose the Afghan war from the start, they are not as passionately opposed to it now. Were the Tea Partiers true libertarians—genuinely opposed to expensive and intrusive government—they would take up the anti-war banner. But with the exception of Ron Paul and a few others, they’re not true libertarians; they’re anti-welfare staters, and so they treat Iraq and Afghanistan as irrelevant to their anti-government crusade.