Thursday, May 06, 2010

Thursday Mashup (5/6/10)

  • And just how exactly did those “teabagger-endorsed” candidates do in elections on Tuesday?

    Well, as noted here…

    Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina all held primaries yesterday, and they were all bad news for Tea Party candidates, as "establishment Republican" candidates won the day across the board. In Indiana, Dan Coats won a brutal three-way race against two Tea Party candidates (one of whom even had the endorsement of Ron Paul), but he did so with less than 40 percent of the vote. An established House Republican, Dan Burton, successfully fended off challengers in his primary, but won his race with less than 30 percent of the vote. In North Carolina, Senator Richard Burr easily won his primary, which is good news for him because Democrats may have a solid chance against him in the fall. In Ohio, Rob Portman won his primary as well. Meaning that none of the Tea Party challengers were able to wrest the GOP nomination away from establishment Republican candidates.
    Hmmm, wonder if these characters (Marco Rubio notwithstanding) may have peaked too early (and even Rubio winning the nomination doesn’t guarantee him a victory in the general election)?

    I’m asking this partly because of a Gallup poll cited here, telling us that Republican voter enthusiasm declined by half over the last month (wonder if this will get repeated as much as the polling on how unpopular the policies of President Obama supposedly are, usually with a “whopping” 51 percent majority opposed, not including a 3-point margin of error?).

    And just to prove that Just Plain Folks Sarah Palin Dontcha Know continues to play these characters with their obnoxious signs and funny hats, she officially bailed on the California gubernatorial “teabagger” candidate Chuck DeVore and endorsed Carly Fiorina instead here (hmmm, can a sequel to the dreaded “red sheep eyes” ad against fellow Repug Tom Campbell be far behind?).


  • Also, I give you Joke Line today at Time, in full-on concern troll mode (here)…

    But the sheer number of new programs to be managed, if the financial-reform package is added to the health care and stimulus initiatives, should give Democrats pause about trying to pass anything else this year — although Senator Graham, the lone Republican co-sponsor of the energy bill, makes a deft argument for passage: "If we don't pass it, strict EPA carbon regulations will kick in. Our legislative vision will create millions of green jobs, which is something regulators can't do." Absolutely right, but it will also create new taxes, which is something politicians can't do.
    Ugh – he really should read some people who actually know what they’re talking about on this subject, including Paul Krugman, who told us the following here (basically, there would be a cost passed along to energy consumers, but it would be negligible compared to that paid by the providers)…

    In practice there are a couple of important differences between cap and trade and a pollution tax. One is that the two systems produce different types of uncertainty. If the government imposes a pollution tax, polluters know what price they will have to pay, but the government does not know how much pollution they will generate. If the government imposes a cap, it knows the amount of pollution, but polluters do not know what the price of emissions will be. Another important difference has to do with government revenue. A pollution tax is, well, a tax, which imposes costs on the private sector while generating revenue for the government. Cap and trade is a bit more complicated. If the government simply auctions off licenses and collects the revenue, then it is just like a tax. Cap and trade, however, often involves handing out licenses to existing players, so the potential revenue goes to industry instead of the government.

    Politically speaking, doling out licenses to industry isn’t entirely bad, because it offers a way to partly compensate some of the groups whose interests would suffer if a serious climate-change policy were adopted. This can make passing legislation more feasible.

    These political considerations probably explain why the solution to the acid-rain predicament took the form of cap and trade and why licenses to pollute were distributed free to power companies. It’s also worth noting that the Waxman-Markey bill, a cap-and-trade setup for greenhouse gases that starts by giving out many licenses to industry but puts up a growing number for auction in later years, was actually passed by the House of Representatives last year; it’s hard to imagine a broad-based emissions tax doing the same for many years.

    That’s not to say that emission taxes are a complete nonstarter. Some senators have recently floated a proposal for a sort of hybrid solution, with cap and trade for some parts of the economy and carbon taxes for others — mainly oil and gas. The political logic seems to be that the oil industry thinks consumers won’t blame it for higher gas prices if those prices reflect an explicit tax.

    In any case, experience suggests that market-based emission controls work. Our recent history with acid rain shows as much. The Clean Air Act of 1990 introduced a cap-and-trade system in which power plants could buy and sell the right to emit sulfur dioxide, leaving it up to individual companies to manage their own business within the new limits. Sure enough, over time sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants were cut almost in half, at a much lower cost than even optimists expected; electricity prices fell instead of rising. Acid rain did not disappear as a problem, but it was significantly mitigated. The results, it would seem, demonstrated that we can deal with environmental problems when we have to.
    As I’ve probably said more times than I realize, it’s a shame pundit wankery can never be converted for energy use. If we could, we would never need so much as a single drop of oil again.


  • Also, the soon-to-be-no-longer Moonie Times is back with the following allegations (here)…

    Covertly taken photos of CIA interrogators that were shown by defense attorneys to al Qaeda inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison represent a more serious security breach than the 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the agency's former general counsel said Wednesday.

    John Rizzo, who was the agency's top attorney until December, said in an interview that he initially requested the Justice Department and CIA investigation into the compromise of CIA interrogators' identities after photographs of the officers were found in the cell of one al Qaeda terrorist in Cuba.

    "Well I think this is far more serious than Valerie Plame," Mr. Rizzo said after a breakfast speech. "That was clearly illegal, outing a covert officer. I am not downplaying that. But this is far more serious."
    My suspicion is that Rizzo is trying to pull any legal trick that he can to deflect attention from his own culpability; as Spencer Ackerman of TPM told us in 2007 here…

    When Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked Rizzo whether he thought in 2002 that the CIA's interrogation regime was "humane," Rizzo -- who was acting general counsel for much of the time, and took part in deliberations about the legality of that regime -- replied that "We believed then, and we believe throughout the process, that the CIA (interrogation) program as it was conceived -- that the procedures, and the criteria, when taken in toto, leads to the conclusion, justifies the conclusion, that it was from the outset, and (in its subsequent implementation) was conducted in a humane manner." Yet the CIA, based in part on legal guidance delivered by the general counsel's office, authorized its interrogators to force detainees to stand for up to 40 hours; chill their cells to 50 degrees while dousing their naked bodies with cold water; and to simulate drowning them. Whether Rizzo actually believes such practices are humane, he conceded that "there had been some concerns that were expressed" by CIA interrogators who feared prosecution for carrying out the authorized interrogations.
    And emptywheel tells us here of “the witch hunt launched against the John Adams project (in which detainee lawyers employed investigators to figure out the identity of detainees’ torturers, in response to which the CIA has been demanding the lawyers be charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act),” which Rizzo considers to be worse than outing a spy who served our country with distinction.

    I should also point out, under the “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” category, that “the Obama Justice Department Omar Khadr’s military commission...start(ed) Wednesday (4/28), less than a day after lawyers in the case...received the thick manual laying out the rules for the newfangled military commissions.”

    Change you can believe in, my friends…


  • And finally, this tells us the following…

    A group of Republican lawmakers launched a task force on Thursday that seeks to reclaim the powers they say the federal government has unconstitutionally taken away from the 50 states.

    The 10th Amendment Task Force, a project of the Republican Study Committee, will develop and promote proposals that aim to usher in what supporters are calling a "New Era of Federalism."

    "When federalism is out of balance, people get hurt," Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, one of the group's 10 co-founding members, said at a news conference Thursday. "We want to empower state and local governments."
    Fine. The first thing the 10 members can do is work to pass a measure eliminating federal representation in the U.S. House for their congressional districts.



    Is it my imagination, or do I suddenly hear the sound of crickets?
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