McCain and Obama Surge In New Hampshire

It makes sense to me: they’re both very New Hampshire-style candidates (I guess I’m a pretty New Hampshire-style blogger, politically, given my fondness for both). Check out the swing in the last two months: Obama has gone from a 14 point deficit to a 2 point lead; McCain has gone from a 15 point deficit to a two point deficit. If momentum counts, McCain and Obama will both win – and the imponderable will be who pulls in the most Independents. That, in turn, surely depends on Iowa. My sense is that if McCain emerges as a front-runner, he could take off.

Frum, Charen and Torture

The good news is that some on the right are beginning to understand the catastrophic public relations of the Bush administration’s authorization of torture. But they are still in denial about some things:

I was recently invited, for example, by the Oxford Union in England to debate (for the affirmative) the proposition “Resolved: This House Would Torture to Save Lives.” I declined but counter-offered on David Frum’s advice to debate "Resolved: This House Believes Terrorists Deserve the Full Protection of the Geneva Conventions." I await their reply.

But this is a straw man. I’m obviously opposed to torturing or abusing military prisoners. But I don’t favor full Geneva protections for al Qaeda terror suspects. They shouldn’t have the full rights of uniformed soldiers in a conventional war. I just favor the minimal baseline protections of Article 3, that bar abuse and torture. I also believe that it’s not a given that all captives are thereby terrorists. As we have found out from Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, large pluralities (and at Abu Ghraib a vast majority) have been shown not to be terrorists. So how’s this for a debate at my alma mater:

"This House Believes Terror Suspects Deserve the Minimal Protections of the Geneva Conventions."

I might add this is not, under US law, a matter for debate. It is the law of the land. If Charen and Frum want to change it, they need to persuade the Senate to rescind Geneva. But I’d happily debate them at Oxford on this question.

Green Sanity

Some smart advice from Eric De Place:

You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than you can switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.

So, we should stop trying to design a techno-magic "car for the future." It really won’t end our oil addiction or save us from climate change. That’s right: no more HyperCar and no more FreedomCar. At least not until we’ve done the dull and unsexy work of boosting fuel economy at the bottom of the fleet, where it matters far, far, far more.

The real fix for oil addiction isn’t exciting, and it doesn’t lend itself to massive research investments. We just need to do stuff that we already know how to do. So here’s my new policy proposal. While CAFE standards (fleet averages) are groovy, what we really need to do is simply outlaw vehicles that get below, say, 15 or 18 mpg.

Hoover’s Plan

Pretty staggering:

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

It probably made Michelle Malkin’s Christmas. Powerline:

Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000– but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.

The Mirror Has Two Noses

Nagasarete_airantou_nosebleed

A reader writes:

With respect to your post on noses and penises,

In mainstream Japanese animation marketed to adolescents, the nosebleed is comic shorthand for male sexual arousal. Typically, a man (teen to bent and aged) will unexpectedly encounter a nearly nude female beauty, and blood will begin shooting out from his nostrils like gore from a sliced villain in a Quentin Tarentino film.  With the rising popularity of anime and manga in the past ten years, American teens are probably familiar with this trope (lust-provoked nosebleeds happen with some frequency in the Cartoon Network’s hugely popular DragonBall Z and Naruto cartoons, for example).

The things Dish readers know…