Sunday, September 7, 2008
The Macs
As American governing philosophy becomes more contradictory almost by the day, we observe yet another blow in the Republican fight for smaller government and free markets. In the form of nationalizing the two largest mortgage banks in the country. See the WSJ article here.
Sunday Afternoon Music
Last week, I talked about a Congolese band that I enjoy a lot, Kasai Allstars. I hope some of you guys checked it out and enjoyed it. This week, I’m going with something a little bit different.
One of my favorite albums of this year has been a 2006 album by the Denton, Texas band Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther. I caught up to it a bit late, but when it put its hooks into me, it was hard to get away from it. Midlake have evolved quite a bit since their earlier material, from a totally different band with a jazz fusion sound to their current incarnation as an indie rock band deeply indebted to classic rock of the seventies. This album, especially, sounds like Thom Yorke of Radiohead fronting Fleetwood Mac. The song above, “Roscoe,” opens the album. The whole album is great, but other tracks especially worth checking out are “Bandits,” “Head Home” and “Young Bride.” They’ve got great videos as well. Can’t ask for too much more than that, can you?
One of my favorite albums of this year has been a 2006 album by the Denton, Texas band Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther. I caught up to it a bit late, but when it put its hooks into me, it was hard to get away from it. Midlake have evolved quite a bit since their earlier material, from a totally different band with a jazz fusion sound to their current incarnation as an indie rock band deeply indebted to classic rock of the seventies. This album, especially, sounds like Thom Yorke of Radiohead fronting Fleetwood Mac. The song above, “Roscoe,” opens the album. The whole album is great, but other tracks especially worth checking out are “Bandits,” “Head Home” and “Young Bride.” They’ve got great videos as well. Can’t ask for too much more than that, can you?
Frank Rich and the Mystery of Hyperlinks
Frank Rich and the Mystery of Hyperlinks
Frank Rich has a pretty thorough destruction of McCain’s Palin pick in today’s Times. It’s worth a read – especially since, as Matt Yglesias often points out, Rich actually includes hyperlinks to the articles that he discusses. It’s amazing the extent to which something as simple as that can help make an editorial so much more readable. One of the great features of the Internet is the ease with which you can send people to all sorts of information. I’m glad to see at least one writer from the Times following up on this potential. It makes his editorial a great round of on just why McCain’s pick is so disturbing.
Frank Rich has a pretty thorough destruction of McCain’s Palin pick in today’s Times. It’s worth a read – especially since, as Matt Yglesias often points out, Rich actually includes hyperlinks to the articles that he discusses. It’s amazing the extent to which something as simple as that can help make an editorial so much more readable. One of the great features of the Internet is the ease with which you can send people to all sorts of information. I’m glad to see at least one writer from the Times following up on this potential. It makes his editorial a great round of on just why McCain’s pick is so disturbing.
She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.In the original piece, this paragraph is chockablock with links to relevant articles so that one my inform oneself as to what Rich is talking about (I’m too lazy to put them all back in, so you’ll just have to head over there). I really can’t understand why the NY Times doesn’t simply make this standard for their articles and (especially) their editorials and opinion columns. If nothing else, it should make William Kristol’s columns a bit more entertaining. But good for Frank Rich for going the extra mile.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Drill Baby
As the election cycle has progressed, the price of gasoline has become increasingly central to the campaigns of both parties, and energy policy in the wider sense has seemed to recede to the periphery. 70% approval ratings are a powerful motivator. There are a few things I know. Petroleum is not indispensable- if we had to, we could stop using it tomorrow. Tremendous dislocation would result, but it isn't like oxygen or water. Buying it from regimes who don't necessarily like us is relevant, but not nearly so much as many politicians are claiming. The massive transfer of wealth from countries that are rich but lack oil to countries that are poor but have it may introduce new dynamics into international markets, but they hardly constitute a threat that could easily be remedied by increasing domestic oil production. Here is why- energy is about cheap. It isn't, although it probably should be, about clean or domestically produced. And it is much, much, much cheaper to buy your oil from Saudi princes who dislike you than to rely on domestic sources.
Let's test some assumptions. Who was the leading producer of refined petroleum in 1945? (Here's a hint- they produced so much, they fueled themselves and their allies in a global war effort simultaneously overrunning Europe and the Pacific.) Who today holds the world's largest petroleum reserves?
The answers, in order, are the United States and Canada.
So why do we keep buying oil from other places? US oil is usually relatively low grade, and Canadian oil is so low grade it's condensed into rocks- oil shale. Extracting the petroleum from rocks costs a fortune. In the years after 1945, oil companies began to open the first middle eastern fields, and they drove all others from the market. It is notably cheaper to haul oil up half a world away, load it into massive purpose built vessels using massive pumping and loading stations, and ship it to the far corners of the planet than to produce it locally. In the 1950's, it was so cheap France undertook a program to convert its power plants to burn imported oil- the cheapest fuel that could be found.
If we were interested in doing so, the US could reopen the fields which still contain sizable amounts of oil in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We could start taping into the shale fields that run down into the US from the far more substantial Canadian ones. We could even adopt the Fischer-Tropsh conversion process, allowing one to transform coal into oil, albeit at tremendous financial and environmental cost. We could probably achieve something akin to "energy security." We would also probably conservatively achieve something like $15 a gallon, paralyzing the economy almost as surely as that complete removal of oil I half-seriously posited above.
We keep buying oil from the middle east because its massive fields of light, sweet crude are cheap to refine, and thus cheap to buy. A truly global infrastructure exists to move it around the world, and it is traded on what is probably the most international of markets, in which China and India may well consume continually greater shares of limited refinery capacity.
So let's hold our political discourse to a slightly higher standard. If we are going to cast international energy purchases as a threat to national security, realize that the costs of "energy security" - defined as putting it to those dangerous foreign oil pushers -could include returning the horse to American streets as a competitive alternative for short-distance commuters. Additionally, those who claim that we are in danger of exhausting the planet's supplies should refine (sorry!) their point- we are in danger of running out of cheap oil, not oil generally. Americans who think that we should be drilling in ANWAR or on the continental shelves have lost their perspective- the most wildly optimistic estimates of what might be discoverd in those places amounts to 4% of global output, and no mechanism exists to insulate that new production from the global market mentioned above. We might marginally reduce the international cost for everyone, but anyone looking for the "Made in the USA" label on their gas pump is probably certifiable.
I suspect that a large part of the blame for curent high oil prices will in later years be found to lie with the Bush administration, and their decision to deregulate oil futures markets so that anyone could buy them, rather than restricting their sales to persons who could demonstrate refinery capacity. Guess what? The number of investors in oil futures increased dramatically. I'm sure their competitive bidding to purchase oil they can only store, not process, has had no effect on short term prices...
In the longer term, however, as Chinese and Indian populations purchase their own internal combustion engines, their demand for limited resources will increase, and more expensive sources of oil may become profitable. There is a recently opened Fischer-Tropsh plant operating a couple of hundred miles north of me in Ohio, making jet fuel at something like one ton of coal to the gallon.
More to the point, we need to get back to a conversation about systemic energy problems. If it's all going to cost more, our origin point should be GREEN energy. Oil is an input- what counts is the output. If our politicians want to strike a blow for real energy security this year, they should strike it against the use of fossil fuels at all, not which bit of rock we get them out of. Before the concept of polar ice becomes a quaint memory of a former age, we should draft legislation making it much harder for any person or community to impede the construction of wind turbines. 1% of the money currently being spent in Iraq should be converted into distributing free solar panels as we rotate those units home, and the converter boxes that will put the excess energy they capture back into the grid, reducing our need to burn other fuels. People buying electric cars, or better agreeing not to own one at all, should have some sort of encouragement for doing so in their taxes. An integrated power grid with green sources at one end and electric powered vehicles and homes at the other really would free us from the Faustian bargain we have been forced into with petroleum, and really all the other fossil fuels. That is a definition of energy security the future would look back on as truly visionary.
Let's test some assumptions. Who was the leading producer of refined petroleum in 1945? (Here's a hint- they produced so much, they fueled themselves and their allies in a global war effort simultaneously overrunning Europe and the Pacific.) Who today holds the world's largest petroleum reserves?
The answers, in order, are the United States and Canada.
So why do we keep buying oil from other places? US oil is usually relatively low grade, and Canadian oil is so low grade it's condensed into rocks- oil shale. Extracting the petroleum from rocks costs a fortune. In the years after 1945, oil companies began to open the first middle eastern fields, and they drove all others from the market. It is notably cheaper to haul oil up half a world away, load it into massive purpose built vessels using massive pumping and loading stations, and ship it to the far corners of the planet than to produce it locally. In the 1950's, it was so cheap France undertook a program to convert its power plants to burn imported oil- the cheapest fuel that could be found.
If we were interested in doing so, the US could reopen the fields which still contain sizable amounts of oil in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We could start taping into the shale fields that run down into the US from the far more substantial Canadian ones. We could even adopt the Fischer-Tropsh conversion process, allowing one to transform coal into oil, albeit at tremendous financial and environmental cost. We could probably achieve something akin to "energy security." We would also probably conservatively achieve something like $15 a gallon, paralyzing the economy almost as surely as that complete removal of oil I half-seriously posited above.
We keep buying oil from the middle east because its massive fields of light, sweet crude are cheap to refine, and thus cheap to buy. A truly global infrastructure exists to move it around the world, and it is traded on what is probably the most international of markets, in which China and India may well consume continually greater shares of limited refinery capacity.
So let's hold our political discourse to a slightly higher standard. If we are going to cast international energy purchases as a threat to national security, realize that the costs of "energy security" - defined as putting it to those dangerous foreign oil pushers -could include returning the horse to American streets as a competitive alternative for short-distance commuters. Additionally, those who claim that we are in danger of exhausting the planet's supplies should refine (sorry!) their point- we are in danger of running out of cheap oil, not oil generally. Americans who think that we should be drilling in ANWAR or on the continental shelves have lost their perspective- the most wildly optimistic estimates of what might be discoverd in those places amounts to 4% of global output, and no mechanism exists to insulate that new production from the global market mentioned above. We might marginally reduce the international cost for everyone, but anyone looking for the "Made in the USA" label on their gas pump is probably certifiable.
I suspect that a large part of the blame for curent high oil prices will in later years be found to lie with the Bush administration, and their decision to deregulate oil futures markets so that anyone could buy them, rather than restricting their sales to persons who could demonstrate refinery capacity. Guess what? The number of investors in oil futures increased dramatically. I'm sure their competitive bidding to purchase oil they can only store, not process, has had no effect on short term prices...
In the longer term, however, as Chinese and Indian populations purchase their own internal combustion engines, their demand for limited resources will increase, and more expensive sources of oil may become profitable. There is a recently opened Fischer-Tropsh plant operating a couple of hundred miles north of me in Ohio, making jet fuel at something like one ton of coal to the gallon.
More to the point, we need to get back to a conversation about systemic energy problems. If it's all going to cost more, our origin point should be GREEN energy. Oil is an input- what counts is the output. If our politicians want to strike a blow for real energy security this year, they should strike it against the use of fossil fuels at all, not which bit of rock we get them out of. Before the concept of polar ice becomes a quaint memory of a former age, we should draft legislation making it much harder for any person or community to impede the construction of wind turbines. 1% of the money currently being spent in Iraq should be converted into distributing free solar panels as we rotate those units home, and the converter boxes that will put the excess energy they capture back into the grid, reducing our need to burn other fuels. People buying electric cars, or better agreeing not to own one at all, should have some sort of encouragement for doing so in their taxes. An integrated power grid with green sources at one end and electric powered vehicles and homes at the other really would free us from the Faustian bargain we have been forced into with petroleum, and really all the other fossil fuels. That is a definition of energy security the future would look back on as truly visionary.
Friday, September 5, 2008
How Many Colleges Did You Attend?
Andrew Sullivan points out that Sarah Palin attended five colleges in six years. That’s kind of shocking. I personally attended two in the course of getting through my college years. I don’t think that people going to different schools is all that uncommon. But five in six years?
Rancor and Frustration
I realize this is a somewhat trite observation, but “McCain Vows to End Partisan Rancor” is a frustrating headline. McCain did cut down on his attacks against Obama – although not on his references to his POW experience – but the others at the GOP convention certainly didn’t. Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin especially set themselves apart with the snide, condescending tone of their remarks about Obama. Which, I suppose shouldn’t surprise me. Ah, well. The article mentions it in a general way, but doesn’t quite make the point that McCain’s party is where the rancor is coming from. But McCain changed his tone for this one speech, and he gets the headlines.
As my friend Jeff just said, “Remember who else was a uniter, not a divider?”
As my friend Jeff just said, “Remember who else was a uniter, not a divider?”
Thursday, September 4, 2008
A Cynical Eye
I have made a fairly conscious effort to approach the Republican convention with an eye out for its merits, on the assumption that it would probably showcase the McCain campaign at its finest.
The longer I have watched, the more inclined to cynicism I have become.
Those folksy hand-lettered signs the crowd has been holding up? NPR reported this afternoon that they are in fact mass produced...to look like hand lettered signs.
McCain was interrupted early on by several protesters, motivating the crowd to shout them down. How did protesters get to such prominent places on the floor? I have no proof for this one, but in Nixonland Rick Perlstein documents how Nixon would make a point of letting Vietnam protesters into his campaign speeches, so that when they interrupted his speeches with their shouting, the "silent majority" would shake their heads and vote Republican. Considering the security at this event, one does have to wonder.
Credulity is one of my shortcomings, but the Democrats somehow seemed so much more authentic.
McCain's speech was strangly soft in tone. I rather liked his olive branch to the Obama campaign. The admission that the Republicans had lost their way over the last eight years was surprisingly candid. It is certainly starting to look more like the John McCain I held real respect for back in February. But then he turs to the attack. The punchlines are formulaic- taxes bad! Government bad! Small businesses good! The policy specifics so painfully lacking in Palin's speech last night were finally there, and McCain does seem to realize where many solvable problems lie. But his proposed solutions are disappointingly similar to the ones that haven't been working for the better part of a decade.
There just seems to be some aura of frailty about him as he speaks.
What he is doing effectively is presenting a vision of the Republican brand without the hallmarks of the Bush years.
It's remarkable the degree to which Obama has set the tone for their convention- win or lose, this is clearly his election.
But it's hard to move past those manufactured signs. They just aren't the product of a party transformed, or to be more specific, a party prepared not to crassly manipulate the American public to preserve its grasp on as much authority as it can get. For a speech purportedly focused on service and cooperation, McCain still seems to be running to a large degree on his biography. Even if McCain really believes that he can bring a fresh wind to government, his staffing choices suggest that he won't. It's hard to believe that the people who wrote last night's adventure in selective omission were not also the authors of tonight's very different piece, and would be advocating for absolutely anything they thought might win the election, regardless of the damage to the environment, the increase to the deficit, or complete deviation from independent reality. The speech tonight is probably the peak of the McCain campaign thus far- it's a shame he's chosen to surround himself with people whose presence undermines his every claim.
And by the way, why on Earth should the enthusiasm of a hand-picked crowd give commentators any reliable guide to the success of a speech? Convention crowds would applaud any series of words at all presented in a language they could understand. Such "interpretations" are just lazy. Dur!
The longer I have watched, the more inclined to cynicism I have become.
Those folksy hand-lettered signs the crowd has been holding up? NPR reported this afternoon that they are in fact mass produced...to look like hand lettered signs.
McCain was interrupted early on by several protesters, motivating the crowd to shout them down. How did protesters get to such prominent places on the floor? I have no proof for this one, but in Nixonland Rick Perlstein documents how Nixon would make a point of letting Vietnam protesters into his campaign speeches, so that when they interrupted his speeches with their shouting, the "silent majority" would shake their heads and vote Republican. Considering the security at this event, one does have to wonder.
Credulity is one of my shortcomings, but the Democrats somehow seemed so much more authentic.
McCain's speech was strangly soft in tone. I rather liked his olive branch to the Obama campaign. The admission that the Republicans had lost their way over the last eight years was surprisingly candid. It is certainly starting to look more like the John McCain I held real respect for back in February. But then he turs to the attack. The punchlines are formulaic- taxes bad! Government bad! Small businesses good! The policy specifics so painfully lacking in Palin's speech last night were finally there, and McCain does seem to realize where many solvable problems lie. But his proposed solutions are disappointingly similar to the ones that haven't been working for the better part of a decade.
There just seems to be some aura of frailty about him as he speaks.
What he is doing effectively is presenting a vision of the Republican brand without the hallmarks of the Bush years.
It's remarkable the degree to which Obama has set the tone for their convention- win or lose, this is clearly his election.
But it's hard to move past those manufactured signs. They just aren't the product of a party transformed, or to be more specific, a party prepared not to crassly manipulate the American public to preserve its grasp on as much authority as it can get. For a speech purportedly focused on service and cooperation, McCain still seems to be running to a large degree on his biography. Even if McCain really believes that he can bring a fresh wind to government, his staffing choices suggest that he won't. It's hard to believe that the people who wrote last night's adventure in selective omission were not also the authors of tonight's very different piece, and would be advocating for absolutely anything they thought might win the election, regardless of the damage to the environment, the increase to the deficit, or complete deviation from independent reality. The speech tonight is probably the peak of the McCain campaign thus far- it's a shame he's chosen to surround himself with people whose presence undermines his every claim.
And by the way, why on Earth should the enthusiasm of a hand-picked crowd give commentators any reliable guide to the success of a speech? Convention crowds would applaud any series of words at all presented in a language they could understand. Such "interpretations" are just lazy. Dur!
About What You'd Expect
I guess that, after the whole “Let’s praise Clinton” thing didn’t work out so well for Palin and McCain, they’ve settled on “Let us change the mess we made.” I’m having a hard time following the RNC this year. It’s just exactly what I expected. Palin excited the kinds of people who go to the RNC and everyone else seems confused. The DNC this year had a lot of drama – how will the Obama/Clinton reconciliation come together? The RNC is just … well, dull. Fred Thompson? Rudy Giuliani? Eight minutes of Bush? I’ll be curious to see what McCain says today. The media certainly said that Obama had to bring something new in his speech – and he did. Will expectations of McCain be the same? Is there any chance that McCain will bring up a single policy proposal? Does the McCain campaign have anything to say besides “just not Obama”? Palin has excited the base – do they have anything for anyone else?
On a side not, The Daily Show last night was fantastic. Living abroad, it’s hard to keep up on what’s going on in the world of television. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both available in streaming versions that are accessible from all over the world. NBC and Fox’s Hulu and Turner’s Adult Swim streaming versions aren’t available outside the US. They should take a note.
On a side not, The Daily Show last night was fantastic. Living abroad, it’s hard to keep up on what’s going on in the world of television. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both available in streaming versions that are accessible from all over the world. NBC and Fox’s Hulu and Turner’s Adult Swim streaming versions aren’t available outside the US. They should take a note.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Where's the Policy?
The Palin Speech tonight was an impressive collection of logical non sequiturs, and close to a desert with regard to policy. Still, she was photogenic, and had good delivery.
John McCain "has already faced tougher challenges" than being president. I respect the guys military service, but can that statement really be true?
Palin tells us more about her family than I would expect to learn having dinner with them- and as an aside, what is up with all the lingering shots of people holding their unconscious children? Surely it isn't good parenting to drag your one-year old to all-night political conventions?
How can Palin claim in one breath to be an average pit-bullish hockey mom, then turn in the next to the part where she just happens to govern a state? And her claims to economic policy success in the course of that job have to be taken with the caveat that Alaska is a financial mutant- its residents do not pay taxes! Alaska pays you a couple grand a year to live there, siphoned from oil profits. Regretably, the federal government employs a different system, to which Palin would presumably have to adapt.
The policy thinking tonight has been limited to suggesting that we should drill for oil, and to continue to fight for small government (of the sort that supports the largest public works project in US history, presumably). Thin barely describes this. The goods are being saved for tomorrow night?
Jaw dropping moments:
John McCain "has already faced tougher challenges" than being president. I respect the guys military service, but can that statement really be true?
Palin tells us more about her family than I would expect to learn having dinner with them- and as an aside, what is up with all the lingering shots of people holding their unconscious children? Surely it isn't good parenting to drag your one-year old to all-night political conventions?
How can Palin claim in one breath to be an average pit-bullish hockey mom, then turn in the next to the part where she just happens to govern a state? And her claims to economic policy success in the course of that job have to be taken with the caveat that Alaska is a financial mutant- its residents do not pay taxes! Alaska pays you a couple grand a year to live there, siphoned from oil profits. Regretably, the federal government employs a different system, to which Palin would presumably have to adapt.
The policy thinking tonight has been limited to suggesting that we should drill for oil, and to continue to fight for small government (of the sort that supports the largest public works project in US history, presumably). Thin barely describes this. The goods are being saved for tomorrow night?
Jaw dropping moments:
- she. mocked. "healing. the. planet."
- stadium applause for the US not "reading (terrorists) their rights," with all that implies.
- another obvious lie about her documented support for the bridge to nowhere
- most popular crowd chant according to PBS: "drill, baby, drill"
- this is more just interesting, but apparently the post-speech was the first time a pres. and veep candidate have ever hugged, at least in public (PBS- man alive is that obscure)
Mute
It is killing me not to be able to live-blog this Giuliani speech. I'm finding it more confusing than anything. Was he invoking the unfairness of gender role dichotomies a second ago? The mind reels.
Greetings!
Greetings loyal readers of TPBP!
Having presumably lost some sort of bet, the editors of TPBP have seen fit to give my already absurdly long posts greater prominence. I thank them for their confidence, and the opportunity. It is a pleasure to join the writing staff of this fine publication, and I look forward to parsing current events with you all in the weeks and months to come.
Now then, if you'll excuse me, there is a convention to watch.
Having presumably lost some sort of bet, the editors of TPBP have seen fit to give my already absurdly long posts greater prominence. I thank them for their confidence, and the opportunity. It is a pleasure to join the writing staff of this fine publication, and I look forward to parsing current events with you all in the weeks and months to come.
Now then, if you'll excuse me, there is a convention to watch.
A Third Amigo
The Pseudo Body Politic would like to welcome longtime reader and commenter 'pw', who will be joining Aaron and I as posters within the next day or so. He's an extremely smart guy, and will be a valuable addition to the analysis and commentary here at TPBP. I can't wait to see what he brings to the table. An additional bonus to 'pw' joining TPBP team is that the reader awards are now wide open.
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