May 25, 2008
Barr the Spoiler
People often forget nowadays that that much vaunted politician of lore, Bill Clinton, won in 1992 thanks to Ross Perot. Probably. Clinton got 43% of the vote. George Herbert Walker Bush 37.4%. Perot 18.9%. Arguably, the largest share of Perot's vote came out of Bush senior's hide, though Perot's exact effect on the outcome remains controversial thanks to Clinton apologists. Florida was very close, as usual (it went Republican), but so were Georgia and Ohio (for Clinton). North Carolina and Arizona (for Bush) were close, too, tying up precious Republican resources in the process. The point is, a strong conservative third party candidate is guaranteed a non-trivial share of hard right votes in important states. Perhaps a winning share. Enter the 2008 Libertarians.
May 21, 2008
The Nightmare
If the Democratic Party establishment hasn't got the wherewithal to pull the plug on Clinton's campaign well before the convention, then the Democrats deserve to lose the election. And lose they will. Taking the fight to seat Florida and Michigan and the fight over superdelegates into August will do two things: it deprives Obama of rest, recuperation, and an opportunity to plan the general campaign that he needs (and deserves), and it ensures bitter, lasting division between the demographic groups that have broken consistently along sharp lines between the candidates. Given the arcane challenges of the electoral college map, putting a winning coalition back together would become almost impossible. Our political system would be well and truly broken, obviously so, for everybody to see. In a non-trivial sense that would be the historic failure of the Democrats: shirking their responsibility to try to make the system work.
May 20, 2008
Business Patriots
Here in DC some of the big defense contractors run feel-good, super patriot type television ads. 'With our weapons systems you're safe' sort of thing. Presumably the ads are directed at a handful of members of Congress and an assorted gaggle of generals at the Pentagon. Either that or perhaps for some reason these contractors believe they need to encourage a more martial culture. Whatever — while watching one particularly schmaltzy production I wondered: where do these defense contractors stand, or do they even take a position, on Senator Jim Webb's legislative proposal (S. 22) for a new GI bill? Educational benefits for veterans has got to be a good thing, right?
May 17, 2008
Suburban Illusions
Extraordinarily belated, Paul Krugman's recent (and nevertheless excessively qualified) admission that oil prices don't reflect some kind of market bubble may help the mainstream media come to grips with the present and future fact of permanently rising prices. And the sooner the media stops thinking in terms of spikes, the better. Regardless whether we've actually passed Peak Oil in physical terms, we seem to have passed effective Peak Oil: extraction capacity constraints; refining constraints; producers with new incentives to keep a dwindling resource in the ground for their own use; increased world-wide demand that picks up any production increase &mdash never mind that there haven't been any significant net production increases for several years, etc., etc. The oil just isn't there. When the Saudis told the snarky Tyrant that they won't increase production, what they meant was, "Get a clue, we can't." Not counting shifts to alternatives, our adjustment to price increases is going to have to come mainly from the consumption side.
May 14, 2008
Obama/Edwards
Edwards gave a brilliant speech. Obama looked like he was enjoying himself again. It would be a dream ticket. At any rate, the odds of the primaries ending soon now appear to be excellent. And thank God, too — don't let naysayers tell you there's not a dime's worth of difference between Obama and McCain!
Yesterday's Big Vote
The real news wasn't West Virginia, but Mississippi, where for the third time in a row a Democrat captured what had been considered a safe Republican seat in a special Congressional election. "There's a lot of people that are mad at Bush," said Jim Jennings, a local Republican, quoted in the New York Times. Indeed. The roughly 80% of the country who feel things are on the wrong track and who have negative views of Bush seem to be transferring — as they should — their views to the Republican party generally. If you think about it, to be even remotely accurate the survey numbers require that a large proportion of traditional Republicans are dismayed with what their party has become: if they haven't yet gone over en masse to the Democrats it's from residual skepticism that the Democrats are capable of organizing a bake sale, if that. In a more significant sense than usual, then, a smoothly functioning convention in Denver becomes an important marker.
May 13, 2008
Poor, Stupid, White Voters
Evidently oblivious (along with her mainstream media cheering section) to the fact that most white men wouldn't vote for her in the general election, for the past several months Hillary has been claiming the mantle of "Great White Hope." Her message to those Democrats who don't happen to be poor, uneducated, and white is that without pandering to that group the Democratic party cannot win the White House. A lot of people who are well-off, educated, white and — despite all that — very, very stupid have bought into this insidious political paradigm. Looking backwards it may have its tiny grain of truth; looking forward it has none. It would, indeed, be the recipe for crushing Democratic defeats.
May 6, 2008
Hard Core Republicans for Clinton
It really doesn't make sense for election officials to allow party crossover voting in primaries. Perhaps in a perfect world where nobody "cheated" by voting strategically for the candidate they'd most like to oppose in the other party, then increased primary turnout might have a positive effect on a party's chances in the general election. Maybe. But I suspect the practice of allowing crossover voting has its origins in some sort of fuzzy feel-good politics of inclusion with little attention to its practical ramifications. It's an anachronistic practice that should be stopped.
May 1, 2008
Principles of the Imperial New World Order
By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
We have to recognize that in the Imperial New World Order (INWO), with the Soviet Union gone, and an aggressive and highly militarized United States projecting its great power across the globe, destabilizing and devastating in all its major areas of operation in the alleged interest of liberation and stability, a revised set of principles should be discernible. Most of these are hardly new, but even more audaciously than in the past they translate power relationships into affirmations of rights or the denial of these very same rights, with the ensuing double standards applicable pretty much across the board. The real-world significance of these INWO principles thus depends on three factors: (a) whether Washington affirms them for itself (and directly or by implication for its close allies, clients and hangers-on); (b) whether Washington denies them to its enemies; and (c) whether Washington doesn't care one way or the other.
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