Companies with net worth of over $4 trillion sign the Bali Communique:
We believe that tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy. Ignoring it will ultimately undermine economic growth.
Meanwhile, a new draft of the Warner-Lieberman climate change bill butches it up.
Ross dreams. The logic is strong. The politics not so much, alas. But surely the profound weaknesses of Romney and Giuliani are beginning to sink in.
Some interesting new ARG data in Iowa:
56% of those saying they support Romney say their support is definite. 89% of those saying they support Huckabee say their support is definite.
Then this:
Among men, Huckabee is at 34%, Romney 15%, and Thompson 17%.
Among women, Huckabee is at 19%, Romney 43%, and Thompson 11%.
In South Carolina, Huckabee has gone from 5 percent to 18 percent in a month. Romney has gone from 29 to 21 percent in the same period. New Hampshire is critical to Romney now. But one gets the feeling that he is sitting atop a souffle. If he loses Iowa, it could drop suddenly. And the South will never vote for a Mormon. That’s awful; but it’s true.
Dick Polman gives a run-down of Giuliani’s explanations for mistress-security-money. All five of them, at last count.
Romney has spent more than twenty times the money that Huckabee has in Iowa – to break even with him.
Glenn Greenwald compares the NYT’s simple factual rebuttal of various Giuliani statistical inexactitudes with the Washington Post’s pathetic recycling of anti-Muslim attempted smears of Barack Obama. It really was a low-point for the Downie Post.
It would be a fascinating race if that’s what it turns out to be. A reader writes:
It is urban vs. rural, lapsed Catholic vs. fundamentalist Protestant, North East v. Deep South. On the issues, it breaks down along those lines. Look at how they stand on trade, taxes, guns, gays, abortion, healthcare. They both symbolize parts of the GOP that hate each other. After all do you really think guys who work on Wall Street want to hang out with the Values Voters, or vice versa? If it comes down to these two against each other and it gets nasty that could really divide the party for a long time.
But Huckabee represents the future of Rove’s sectarian, big government party, and Giuliani the conservative past. The only thing keeping Rudy alive, I think, is his authoritarian appeal to the Jacksonian "bomb-em-round-em-up-and-torture-them" wing of the GOP. So the two natural developments of the Bush years – massive spending and untrammeled executive war-power – find their two representatives. And if you’re a traditional conservative, you feel like slashing your wrists.
Just a glimpse of a market in Bangkok:
"We love America, please protect it from suicide and self-destruction! … Let a stone, without the assistance of a hand, come off the rock and hit this homosexual idol right on its legs! Let this idol come down to ashes! Let this stone become a mountain and fill the whole Earth… Today we proclaim the death of the culture of death! We proclaim the victory of life! …
You, the Pharaoh of homosexualism – we will not give a hoof, a rusted nail to you! Our houses, our wives, our sons and daughters will go – and you will go bankrupt…
Homosexualism is a global problem and it is only the first wave. After that comes Islamization. If we won’t stop the first wave, then the second wave won’t wait for long," – Alexey Ledyaev, head of the New Generation Church movement, based in Riga, Latvia, with congregations throughout the former Soviet Union, Germany, Israel, Argentina and the U.S.) and one of the co-founders of Watchmen On the Walls, along with Scott Lively, Kenneth Hutcherson, and Vlad Kusakin.
