Just trying to keep track of our random thoughts, insights, knee-jerk reactions, etc. during this election year. All posts are from law school grads who happen to be moderate Dems. We make no attempt at objectivity.
Kevin Drum has a link to the BBC Clinton interview where he allegedly starts (so writes Drudge) "losing it."
Washington Monthly had a great article back in the day on the general uselessness of most of what passes for journalism today, a theme that really has hit home for me since seeing Control Room, which I'll dicuss in further detail some other time.
So this falls under the category of old news, but this article from the Times got me wondering again about how it is that anyone can suggest with a straight face that drilling in ANWR will suddenly solve all of our problems when it comes to foreign oil:
The administration says that the way to achieve this is by allowing drilling on off-limits lands. Last month, President Bush, speaking of Republican legislation to open more federal lands to oil drilling, said, "These measures have been repeatedly blocked by members of the Senate - and American consumers are paying the price."
. . .
Industry analysts take a third view, arguing that lifting drilling prohibitions on federal lands might help, but not right away and ultimately not very much. Their reasoning is simple. The United States sits atop just 3 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, but burns one quarter of global production. Sixty percent of what it uses daily is imported.
The countries of the Persian Gulf, on the other hand, have nearly two-thirds of the proven reserves.
Given these facts, and absent a major conservation campaign or a breakthrough in alternative fuels, the country can't sharply reduce its oil dependence.
Lately, the hot thing to do among the conservatives/libertarians I know is to lament the state of political discourse in our country today. My friend Eddie does a pretty good job of describing why I've found it so frustrating to listen to or read conservative commentary lately.
To the extent that there has less cooperation across the aisle under the Bushies, this is, in my opinion, a direct result of this White House's attempts to frame nearly every political issue as a struggle of good versus evil, where their agenda is "good" and anything that gets in its way is "evil." And, time and time again, when people -- like, among others, Paul O'Neill, or Dick Clarke, or Joe Wilson -- have stood up and tried to reintroduce facts or reasoned argument into the debate, this Administration and their allies have responded, by and large, not with facts or arguments of their own, but rather by impugning their motives and by exacting political retribution on them for speaking out.
Apparently, there are people out there who find this kind of moral reductionism clarity appealing, but it's a bit rich for these same people to bemoan the lack of civility in politics today.
Anyway, on another note, I've been reading more and more stuff in the papers saying that Kerry's going to pick Gephardt for Veep over Edwards. Boo, I say. These two pieces in the American Prospect [#1, #2] make a pretty convincing case for why this would be a mistake.
Hendrik Hertzberg had a nice column in The New Yorker recently, writing about the role of religious zealotry in contemporary American politics. Here are a couple of key grafs towards the end:
The salient division in American political life where religion is concerned is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, if it ever was, or even between believers and nonbelievers. It is between traditional supporters of a secular state (many of whom are themselves religiously observant), on the one hand, and, on the other hand--well, theocrats might be too strong a term. Suffice it to say that there are those who believe in a sturdy wall between church and state and those who believe that the wall should be remodelled into a white picket fence dotted with open gates, some of them wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer full of federal cash through.
President Bush is the leader of the latter persuasion, and his remodelling project has been under way for more than three years. This project goes beyond the frequent use of evangelical code words in the President's speeches; beyond the shocking and impious suggestion, more than once voiced in the President's approving presence, that he was chosen for his position by God Himself; beyond the insistence on appointing judges of extreme Christian-right views to the federal bench; beyond the religiously motivated push to chip away wherever possible at the reproductive freedom of women. It also includes money, in the millions and billions. The money is both withheld and disbursed: withheld from international family-planning efforts, from domestic contraceptive education, and from scientific research deemed inconsistent with religious fundamentalism; disbursed to "abstinence-based" sex-education programs, to church-run "marriage initiatives," and, via vouchers, to drug-treatment and other social-service programs based on religion. Though Congress has declined to enact the bulk of the President's "faith-based initiatives," the Administration has found a way, via executive orders and through bureaucratic novelties like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the Department of Health and Human Services' Compassion Capital Fund. "The federal government now allows faith-based groups to compete for billions of dollars in social-service funding, without being forced to change their identity and their mission," the President boasted a couple of weeks ago, in a commencement address at a Lutheran college in Mequon, Wisconsin. He did not mention that "their identity and their mission"--their principal purpose, their raison d'etre--is often religious proselytization.
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