The New York Times takes a look and vanishing “working waterfront” spaces in Maine. The state has a very long coastline, but apparently only a small proportion of it is suitable for the docks and so forth that fishermen need and more and more of that is getting bought up for real estate development. That trend’s been going on for a while, but the Times reports that it’s now pushing all the way into the remote parts of the state east of Bar Habor.

My family has a summer home on the coast in Brooklin, Maine so I guess we’re part of the problem. This kind of thing ends up being somewhat more paradoxical than your urban gentrification scenarios since the working fishing operations and so forth are, at least in my opinion, an integral part of coastal Maine’s considerable charm. On the other hand, that reality may create a reasonable policy rationale for taking action to protect the industry.

I have to say, I think Brad DeLong’s being kind of unfair to Karen Tumulty. The people who cover political campaigns for a living haven’t done a ton to earn the benefit of the doubt, but the fact remains that the SEIU/CAP health care event was boring. Nothing happened, no news was broken, and we learned basically nothing about the candidates. I would be interested in hearing about Barack Obama’s health care plan except he . . . doesn’t have one. I see no particular reason to hear about the fact that he doesn’t have one. Everyone thinks he’ll produce one soon enough, and it would be good to hear about it when it happens.

Dennis Kucinich’s health care proposal actually deserves some serious coverage, but placing in the context of a presidential campaign in which he’s not a serious factor just ensures that this won’t happen. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson who are somewhere between Edwards and Obama on the spectrum of releasing detailed plans managed to clarify nothing. Edwards’ plan remains Edwards’ plan and listening to him speak about it in this format is less enlightening than just reading about it in detail. All in all it was dull. Less because it was, in The Politico’s headline to a pretty good summary, “More Than You Wanted to Know About Health Care” than that it was considerably less than someone genuinely curious about this would want to know, while also being much more than those who don’t really care about the issue will want to know.

It had been my understanding that Jonathan Chait wasn’t doing his column for The Los Angeles Times anymore, but this looks a lot like an insightful Jon Chait column about the right’s bizarre approach to global warming:

National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is “Planet Gore.” The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue.

Yes, right. Gore aside, it’s genuinely striking how much of conservative thinking about global warming seems to be driven purely by hatred of environmentalists. I can’t even say how often I think I’ve read the following sort of “logic” deployed in response to an environmentalist making some point about curbing carbon emissions.

• Environmentalists say global warming is a serious problem.
• Increased use of nuclear power plants could help curb global warming.
• Geoengineering could help curb global warming.
• Environmentalists dislike both global warming and nuclear power.
• Therefore, environmentalists hate capitalism and modern society and I’ll ignore this issue!

I’m not a scientist; I’m not a science journalist; I don’t specialize in environmental issues. Based on what I know about how the world works, I think it’s perfectly plausible that environmentalists are understating the role that nuclear power and geoengineering/adaptation should play in dealing with climate change. Still, it’s absolutely clear that the solution involves reducing aggregate global carbon emissions to some level lower than the current one, that the current trends project emissions to rise indefinitely, and that changing the trend will be politically difficult. Whether or not environmentalists hate capitalism (some probably do!) just doesn’t make a real difference.

Team Bush’s once formidable message discipline seems to be breaking down. Watch and see as aides to Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates tell all about their bosses efforts to get the Gitmo detention facilities shut down, and the ways Alberto Gonzalez and Dick Cheney stymied those efforts. They even say explicitly that Gonzalez’ political weakness is a reason for raising the issue again.

As you see, the Chapter VII UN Sanctioning process can be made to work just fine as long as the United States continues drawing its evidence of Iranian misbehavior from credible international sources. That our diplomats have been working diligently to get foreigners to ratchet-up the pressure is all to the good. It’s crucial that we not do anything crazy — bombing, say — that would puncture this international consensus. And, of course, you’ve got to be able to take “yes” for an answer if the Iranians decide they’d rather rejoin the world than build a nuclear bomb.