It seems that this is a real candy available for sale in China:

These coconut-flavored (a bizarre choice in itself considering the available alternatives in Afghanistan: cardamom, raisin, almond, yak… ) balls are sold in purple boxes (not to be confused with Purple Heart boxes) and feature Bin Laden’s bearded mug preaching peace and enlightenment among tanks, warplanes and cruise missiles. Delicious, and now available for the Olympics, too. Get them while stocks last.

I don’t personally go in for coconuts, but tastes differ.

Ooops. In an earlier post, I criticized congressional legislation to ban incandescent lightbulbs and mandate the use of Compact Fluorescent Lights. There is no such legislation. Instead, there’s legislation that mandates bulbs meet energy efficiency standards that only CFLs and impractically expensive LEDs can meet. I apologize for the error.

That said, the point still stands. The sort of plans to curb carbon emissions that the Democratic Presidential candidates are both necessary and sufficient to meet the challenges of global warming. These plans place an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions, auction permits to produce the allowed level of emissions, let emitters buy and sell permits on the open market, and will then rely on the price system to help individual consumers adjust their personal habits to the new low-emissions regime as they see fit. Domain-specific efficiency standards like this CFL business are, by contrast, neither necessary nor sufficient. I’m not going to take to the streets to protest against incandescent bulb bans or increased CAFE standards, but I do think the legislative battles over this stuff are fundamentally a waste of time.

Mickey Kaus’ rejection of John McCain’s effort to make nice on immigration is fascinating:

McCain said he had “respect” for opponents of his immigration plan (which he didn’t renounce) “for I know that the vast majority of critics to the bill based their opposition in a principled defense of the rule of law.” Not like those others who base their opposition on bigoted yahoo nativism! McCain’s semi-conciliatory words aren’t what you say when you really respect your opposition–then you say “I know we have honest disagreements.” Not “I know most of you aren’t really racists.” Even his suckup betrayed how he really feels. Which I suspect is sneering contempt!

So he’s holding out for McCain to make the extremely implausible claim that there’s not a single bigoted yahoo in the anti-immigration movement? I thought Mickey schtick used to be that just because all his favorite causes are also the favorite cause of racists didn’t necessarily mean people who agreed with him are racists. Now I guess it’s all-or-nothing; either you think there’s no racism in the United States, or else he’s got no time for you. Weird.

Fred Kaplan points out that what Robert Gates is asking the Europeans to do in Afghanistan won’t really make a big difference. What’s needed, instead, is something much larger:

What is needed now goes well beyond Germany’s reticence, goes well beyond NATO. What’s needed is a full-blown initiative—military, economic, diplomatic—involving all the nations of the region. It requires imagination, tireless negotiations, heaps of money (in part to pay for other countries’ troops, since we have so few to spare), and some unpleasant deal-making with some otherwise unpleasant nations.

I think this re-enforces what I was saying earlier about Afghanistan. On the one hand, it’s not possible to imagine a global effort of this scale succeeding without stepped-up American involvement. And on the other hand, it’s not possible to imagine Europeans committing in this way to Afghanistan unless the United States is committing itself as well. If we want the Europeans to treat this as a major priority, in other words, we need to act like it’s a major priority rather than as if the idea is for Europe to hold our coat in Central Asia so we can keep throwing more resources into Iraq.

Speaking of which, I recommended Fred Kaplan’s book Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power back when I read it, rather than now when it’s available in stores. Always a mistake. Kaplan is vital reading, as you can perhaps tell from my constant quoting of his Slate columns, and the book is no less vital. At this point, basically everyone can see that the Bush foreign policy has been a disaster. But what’s still not well-understood is why it’s been such a disaster. The book demonstrates that it’s much more than a matter of Bush “blundering” or some such rather — rather, as Kaplan lays out, Bush’s policies have been driven by ideas that seemed right but are, in fact, wrong. Importantly, as Kaplan’s recounting makes clear, the ideas, though wrong, tend to be at least somewhat plausible, raising the danger that the ideas themselves will continue to live in some form beyond Bush’s presidency.

(Of course, my book, Heads in the Sand is also good.)