A couple days back I ran an online story about McCain’s town hall campaign strategy. The idea was that Obama is great in front of big auditoriums, reading speeches off a teleprompter. McCain is not. But McCain is as energetic and engaging as any candidate I have seen this cycle if you take away the [...]
The number of people who think that drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge will help solve our immediate oil crisis (or even our long term one) is high enough that if they all stopped driving, we’d be fine. One of the helpful myths that keeps that idea alive irks me to distraction: [...]
Colleague James Poniewozik has an interesting telecentric take on Michelle Obama’s “View” debut this morning. I was pleased to find out that the Obama’s are “bacon people” and, you know what? If I had arms as toned as hers I’d stick to sleeveless, too.
• “[S]ome might argue that save for a few cosmetic details, the ‘candidates’ are essentially identical.” Ha ha, it’s funny because they’re talking about soda! [Slashfood] • The guy who said this: “Gay sex is ‘intuitively’ unnatural and can lead to ‘lacerations, perforations and deaths.’” Is not someone you’d really want overseeing the country’s health [...]
Last winter, one of the reporters assigned to cover McCain was, by training, largely an environmental writer. As with having someone from Iraq on board, or someone from a financial publication, her depth of knowledge in a specific subject allowed her to ask McCain questions — and to make points — we generalists didn’t have [...]
Over at Politico.com. Jeanne Cummings has an interesting look at the array of big players lining up on both sides of the battle to turn back the law on ethanol subsidies. As consumers are squeezed between paying for their groceries or filling their tanks (the role that biofuels play in that tradeoff was ably explained [...]
Karl Meyer reminds us that the deal that ended the British Mandate in Iraq in 1930 bears no small resemblance to the Status of Forces Agreement being negotiated with the Iraqis now. I’m not sure that Meyer has the outlines of the deal right: no way will there be 58 long-term U.S. bases. But the [...]
Todd Gitlin, via Hilzoy, has picked up on a rather sticky environmental problem for John McCain: he seems a bit confused about the nature of carbon emissions cap and trade programs–a problem, since he claims to support one. Cap-and-trade regimes enforce a gradual, but mandatory, cap on carbon emissions levels while setting up a market [...]
