Category: The Dish

Phillip Carter writes:

The Bush administration has essentially adopted a consequentialist legal calculus for its detention and interrogation system. But if you’re going to be a consequentialist, then you need to be a good one, and accurately assess the costs and benefits of a given policy choice before adopting (or continuing) it. Senior officials in the White House, Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA may honestly believe that torture (or coercive interrogation, or whatever label you choose) is necessary. They may honestly think these policies are in the national interest. But if so, they’re wearing blinders — and totally oblivious to the strategic blowback from these policies.

At this point, they’ve gone too far into criminality to turn back, I fear.

A record-setting mentos-coke explosion by students in Belgium. Story here. Fuck yeah.

Joe Klein evaluates the McCain campaign thus far:

McCain gives you something to admire and loathe almost every day. He did some terrific things this week on his anti-poverty tour: He gave a lovely tribute to Congressman John Lewis in Selma, he called out Bush’s Hurricane Katrina non-performance in New Orleans. (Of course, he also voted against the Katrina relief funds.) The very fact that a Republican would take such a tour is significant–but his willingness to go into the muck on Hamas and Obama’s "friendship"–or whatever it is–with the American terrorist Bill Ayers is gutter crap.

So the jury’s still out on what kind of campaign McCain runs. I hope my colleagues in the press will call him out everytime he succumbs to sludge tendencies. I certainly plan to do that.

The smears by association do work, however, which is how you prevent someone with popular policies and a brilliant speaking style from becoming president:

Four in 10 registered voters (41 percent) say they have a less favorable opinion of Obama based on his association with his former pastor, Rev. Wright, whose racially and politically inflammatory sermons have been circulated on the Internet and covered in the media. A similar number (42 percent) say they will not vote for Obama because of comments he made about "bitter" small-town residents clinging to guns and religion.

My biggest disappointment with McCain, so far, has been the moronic gas tax holiday and his support for a massive new increase in the debt in order to suck up to Larry Kudlow’s crew. Sigh.

Tyler Cowen writes that free trade could help solve the food crisis:

Poor rice yields are not the major problem. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global rice production increased by 1 percent last year and says that it is expected to increase 1.8 percent this year. That’s not impressive, but it shouldn’t cause starvation.

The more telling figure is that over the next year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3 percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt.

Obama’s unruffled campaign is quite a contrast with Bill Kristol’s and Karl Rove’s beloved Clinton.

Fifteen posts at the Corner this morning on the same subject. If only Jeremiah Wright was running for something … the GOP would have a chance this year.

No, not yet another detour into the 1960s: an analysis of the very funny names so many real weatherman have. This is one opportunity for me to post my favorite Weather man from YouTube:

(Hat tip: Kottke)

The last eight years have seen the national debt go from $5,6 trillion to $9.1 trillion and unfunded future liabilities soar by $32 trillion – and all three viable future presidents have no plans to do anything serious about it. All three violate core fiscal conservatism in different ways: Obama and Clinton by promising big new healthcare programs and McCain by peddling the kind of maximalist supply-side fantasies that he once had the good sense to reject. According to the CBO, McCain’s plan is the most fiscally damaging:

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

It seems to me to be fair to call those who would ratchet up the debt "left-wing." If you still believe, as I do, that conservatism is about balancing the budget, then McCain is the least conservative of all three candidates. He is fiscally the furthest left out there. Given his past record, this is a crying shame, but an indicator that in the battle between Republican extremism and McCain, McCain has already forfeited one critical battle. Fiscally, he belongs to the party of the left. And it’s time fiscal conservatives started to call him on it.

And why so many of us find it such a toxic place to be:

An entire election and an entire political season may be reduced by one party to three words uttered by a black pastor without context and conflated with the Democratic nominee. And it works in Mississippi primarily because the pastor is black and the candidate is black. Pure Rove. Meanwhile, as Ben Smith notes, the Mississippi Daily Journal is able to hail McCain as disowning the ad while the ad continues to play on television.

The question, of course, is whether this kind of crude, content-free racial and ideological demagoguery will backfire outside places such as Mississippi. I don’t know. But if Republicans want to know why so many of us cannot stomach their politics any more, they don’t have far to look.