Category: The Dish

TNR relaunches itself.

"I wouldn’t be a U.S. senator or out of Chicago or a presidential candidate from Illinois if I didn’t have some sense of the world as it actually works. When I arrived in Chicago at the age of twenty-four, I didn’t know a single person in Chicago, and I know an awful lot of folks now. And so, obviously, some of that has to do with me being pretty clear-eyed about power," – Barack Obama, in a new piece by Ryan Lizza.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

It isn’t even campaign season. This isn’t even an ad made by or endorsed by the Obama campaign – it’s a self-made, YouTube-distributed anti-Clinton ad from a lone Obama supporter. But everything it expresses about Clinton I feel. I know it’s not an argument; it’s a feeling. But the thought of her on my television screen for four years fills me with a dread I find hard to articulate. With this ad, I don’t have to.

Jon Rauch urges calm in the climate change debate. It’s not an emergency, but it is a problem. Happily there is an obvious and not-too-difficult solution:

The most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions. "At around $30 per ton of CO2 over a 25-year horizon, experts seem to think this is the kind of price that will encourage the kind of technologies that are necessary," says Billy Pizer, an environmental economist at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. That would translate into an additional 27 cents or so on a gallon of gasoline and about a 20 percent increase in residential electricity bills (more like 34 percent for industrial users). Unpleasant, but hardly radical. Perfectly do-able, in fact.

So let’s do it, ok? Taxing carbon will prod the private sector to come up with new energy sources – no government-run Manhattan project, please – and the effect will be gradual but effective in the long run, i.e. the next century. Taxing carbon is good policy anyway, as Glenn Reynolds has pointed out. I know this sounds like a massive suck-up, but easily the best piece I have read recently on climate change is by Gregg Easterbrook in the current Atlantic. He lays out what the likeliest actual effects will be in the next few decades – who will benefit? how? and what difference will it all make? Canada and Russia are in for boom-times. The already poor and equatorial: not so much. There’s an interview about the piece by Tim Lavin here.

A website debuts.

I haven’t posted this for a while: Monty Python’s Philosophers’ Song. Never gets old.

One observer at the U.S. Court of Appeals in the First Circuit thinks that a current challenge to the military’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy could be one of the more promising in a long time. His account of the oral arguments is worth a look.

The Human Rights campaign is going to get back to me on Monday on the real numbers for their membership. Last week, they told me they had 650,000 members and supporters nationwide. But several readers have already done some simple math based on the publicly disclosed figures in the IRS 990 forms. The total of contributions last year amounted to roughly $7.3 million. If everyone paid the minimal membership due of $35, that means a maximum of around 210,000 members. But the filing also says that they received $2.25 million in large donations. So the odds are that the actual membership total for the last twelve months is somewhere in the region of, at the very most, 150,000. So is it 650,000 or 150,000? Or less? Again, the simple question is: how many people paid the minimum $35 membership fee or more to be part of HRC in the last twelve months? We’ll soon find out.

That’s K-Lo’s view of Sean Hannity. The title of Hannity’s most recent book is "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." He took a sentence from the Lord’s prayer and equated liberalism with terrorism. Reasonable? Good? He’s Coulter with testosterone.

What the heck: