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Dilbert’s Blog leads us off since he declined to pick a candidate, but did post on the subject of hard work.
There were two types of interesting reactions to my last post. A number of readers think that I’m a closet Obama supporter who would never support a Republican candidate. For the record, I think neither Obama nor McCain come anywhere near the minimum requirement I would like to see in a president. For example, I’d like a president who preferred science over superstition, just to name one thing. So if you think my writing suggests that one of the candidates is slightly less unsuitable than the other, that’s unintentional.
I’ve only once donated money to a politician, and it was McCain. But that’s because I made the mistake of telling one of his fundraisers, a friend of mine, that I’d donate money if the surge “worked.” Admittedly that was more like paying off a bet than supporting a candidate. But time does seem to be vindicating the surge strategy, no matter what you think of how we got into the mess in the first place. …
The UN high commissioner for human rights is retiring. Marty Peretz has thoughts.
Onions again. This time from WSJ Editors.
Congress is back in session and oil prices are still through the roof, so pointless or destructive energy legislation is all but guaranteed. Most likely is stiffer regulation of the futures market, since Democrats and even many Republicans have so much invested in blaming “speculators” for $4 gas.
Congress always needs a political villain, but few are more undeserving. Futures trading merely allows market participants to determine the best estimate – based on available information like supply and demand and the rate of inflation – of what the real price of oil will be on the delivery date of the contracts. Such a basic price discovery mechanism lets major energy consumers hedge against volatility. Still, “speculators” always end up tied to the whipping post when people get upset about price swings.
As it happens, though, there’s a useful case-study in the relationship between futures markets and commodity prices: onions. Congress might want to brush up on the results of its prior antispeculation mania before it causes more trouble.
In 1958, Congress officially banned all futures trading in the fresh onion market. Growers blamed “moneyed interests” …
Bill Kristol has ideas for McCain’s staff.
From the gun clubs of Northern Virginia to the sports bars of Capitol Hill — wherever D.C.-area Republicans gather — you hear the question:
“Where’s Murphy?”
“Murphy” is Mike Murphy, the 46-year-old G.O.P. strategist who masterminded John McCain’s 2000 primary race against George Bush, helping McCain come close to pulling off an amazing upset. Murphy was then chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s successful Massachusetts governor run in 2002.
Murphy remained close to both men, and as a result sat out the G.O.P. nominating contest this past year, not wishing to work against either of them. It was widely assumed, though, that if either McCain or Romney won the nomination, the winner would bring Murphy on board for the general election. So far it hasn’t happened. I believe it soon will.
I hasten to disclose that Murphy is a friend. I should also disclose that when I called to say I had heard he might well be signing on with McCain, he went Sergeant Schultz on me, saying nothing.
But here’s what I gather from acquaintances and sources in and around the McCain campaign.
McCain is frustrated. He thinks he can beat Obama (politicians are pretty confident in their own abilities). But he isn’t convinced his campaign can beat Obama’s campaign. He knows that his three-month general election head start was largely frittered away. He understands that his campaign has failed to develop an overarching message. Above all, McCain is painfully aware that he is being diminished by his own campaign. …
David Harsanyi says as for as the GOP goes, “It’s the leadership stupid”.
… So a conservative might ask: Do the vagaries of the market and history, or an incompetent Republican president who abandoned fiscal conservatism, reveal a fundamental problem with ideology?
After all, a couple of election losses didn’t push the Democratic Party dramatically toward the right. It didn’t ignite mass doubt among the grass roots. It did the opposite. With each loss, the left found a stronger commitment to progressive ideas. All of which manifested when a decidedly left-wing Obama knocked off the allegedly moderate Hillary Clinton.
Republicans have won five of the last seven presidential terms with a conservative economic message. Come to think of it, Democrats won two presidential terms in the ’90s with a conservative economic message.
Should one of the most successful coalitions in the history of American politics be abandoned after a single midterm election loss — and a probable loss this November?
Maybe Republican leadership, rather than conservative principles, is in need of an overhaul. You wouldn’t believe what a charismatic, articulate politician can do with a set of old ideas.
Just ask the Democrats.
Caucus Blog says Hillary’s Howard Wolfson has signed with FOX News.
Howard Wolfson, who was a top strategist for the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is going where some Democrats were unwilling to go during the early days of the election season: the Fox News Channel.
The network is expected to announce as early as Tuesday that it has signed Mr. Wolfson as a contributor who will appear regularly on its programs.
Mr. Wolfson is joining a network that Democrats shunned for a time, complaining that its coverage was unfair. But aides to Mrs. Clinton came to view Fox News as distinctly fair to her in a news media climate that they believed favored Senator Barack Obama.
“I thought that Fox’s coverage during the primary was comprehensive and fair and evenhanded,” Mr. Wolfson said Monday in a telephone interview from Liverpool, England, where he was vacationing. “It’s a huge audience, and it is important to have a strong, progressive voice on the network.” …
A NY Times Profile of Rush Limbaugh continues.
… If McCain wins, Limbaugh will spend the next four years tugging him to the right. If he loses, it will not be, in Limbaugh’s estimation, Limbaugh’s fault, and it won’t be the end of his world either. A secret of Limbaugh’s success is that his uncompromising, often harsh ideas are offset by a basically friendly temperament. He is less like his angry father than his mature role models, Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their conservative world view.
And increasingly, he has other interests. He’s been spending more time with his extended family in Cape Girardeau, where he’s so popular that the municipality runs a Rush Limbaugh tour for visitors. He toys with the idea of buying an N.F.L. franchise. His friend Joel Surnow says that if there were a Rush Limbaugh movie, it would be something along the lines of “Citizen Kane” meets Howard Stern.
As for politics, Rush has already picked his candidate for the Conservative Restoration: Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 37-year-old prodigy whom Limbaugh considers to be a genuine movement conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold — “fresh, energetic and optimistic in his view of America.” In the meantime, though, there’s the Democratic convention in Denver to muck around in, and then the main event in November. Operation Chaos is over, but Rush will come up with something new to delight his fans and infuriate his foes. Presidents rise and presidents fall, but “The Rush Limbaugh Show” will go on, weekdays at 12:06, Eastern Time.
Talk about “bringing coals to Newcastle,” Der Spiegel says Arab states are investigating coal-fired generating plants.
For Alfred Tacke, CEO of the Essen energy giant Evonik Steag, it’s the yellowish-brown pall below that tells him the plane he’s on is approaching the Persian Gulf. Beneath the haze, he knows, is Kuwait, which has five large-scale gas- and oil-fired power plants in operation. The power they generate provide around-the-clock electricity for Kuwait’s gigantic seawater desalination plants and the country’s enormous air-conditioning needs.
“Here, you only need to stick your finger in the sand and you’re likely to strike oil or gas,” says Tacke, whose energy group ranks fifth among Germany’s electricity producers. But Tacke has his own ideas about how to make money in the region. And they center on a different kind of black gold: coal-fired power plants. “We’re currently in the process of discussing the conditions for projects of this kind,” he says.
As odd as the idea may seem, coal power in the gulf is just one more outcome of skyrocketing oil prices. In a world with dramatically disparate ideas on how or even whether to address the risks of global warming, demand for coal plants across the globe is growing rapidly to the detriment of efforts to increase the production of renewable energies such as solar, hydro and wind. …