Here’s a game for the immigrant-hater in your family, complete with crude and offensive stereotypes.
Graham Claims McCain Has Done ˜Even More Than Al Gore On Global Warming
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) said of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):
Let’s see. McCain got 43 votes the first time he pushed his bill with Lieberman. He added some nuclear subsidies for the second go-round and got 38 votes. So I’m not sure he can lay claim to great achievements.
The key point for me is that unlike Gore — and unlike Clinton and Obama — McCain doesn’t support the policies needed to successfully address catastrophic climate change without devastating the economy (and without an absurd over-reliance on nuclear power):
- Campaign stunner: McCain “might take [new CAFE standards] off the books”
- McCain’s non-straight talk on nuclear power
- Even more doubletalk on mandates from John McCain
- No climate for old men: Why John McCain isn’t the candidate to stop global warming
- McCain’s Double-Talk Express on Global Warming
Heck — McCain ramped down his talk about climate recently, even as Gore ramps up his communications effort. For the full statement by Graham, and a full rebuttal, see ThinkProgress, which has a great post that I’ll just reprint below :
CNN’s Ware: Long-Term U.S. Presence In Iraq ‘Could Actually Ferment Further Resentment Towards’ The U.S.
In a speech last week at George Washington University, former Bush adviser Karl Rove asserted that a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq would positively provide “the projection of American power to maintain stability in a dangerous and difficult part of the world.” In a Washington Post op-ed on the same day, columnist Charles Krauthammer echoed Rove’s point, claiming that “maintaining a U.S. military presence in Iraq would provide regional stability.”
But CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has reported from Iraq since before the U.S. invasion in 2003, disagrees. In an interview yesterday, Ware told ThinkProgress that “there will be very much mixed reaction in Iraq” to a long-term troop presence, but he added, “what’s the point and will it be worth it?’
“A limited American capability” stationed in the country would be exposed, said Ware, “to a whole host of dangers” and “could actually ferment further resentment towards the United States”:
A deeper question, however, is: what would be the point? Why keep say, just one division of combat troops in Iraq? You think that would intimidate Iran? Do you think that would prevent Syria from manipulating Iraqi affairs when 160,000 American troops aren’t able to stop that kind of interference? [...] The fact that just such a limited American capability in that country, being stationed there, could actually ferment further resentment towards the United States because such a limited force structure would not be able to actually do anything if a civil war broke out.
Watch it:
Ware added that while “many people could live with” a troop presence “if America stays out of Iraqis business, others will resent their mere presence for the blame that they cast upon America.”
In the same interview, Ware also dispelled the notion — promulgated by AEI’s Frederick Kagan — that sectarian cleansing in Baghdad is a “myth“:
If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you.
For more of Ware’s comments about Iraq, visit the Wonk Room.
Transcript: Read more
Defending Bush
It’s rare that I have the opportunity, but here goes — Mark Krikorian’s got an anti-Bush screed up on the Corner that doesn’t even involve immigration:
Croatia and Albania are going to join NATO. So now an attack on Albania will be an act of war against the United States. Can someone explain to me how this is in our national interest? I have three sons myself, and I can’t spare any of them to die defending one pissant Balkan dump against another pissant Balkan dump.
The obvious starting point of analysis here is that the odds of any American troops dying in a war for the defense of Albania are vanishingly small. And that’s the point. Albania is a small and weak country that one could imagine some neighbor maybe trying to push around with military force. But nobody’s going to want to take on NATO over some beef with Albania. Meanwhile, over the longer term the goal would be to bring the entire Balkans into a common security architecture that could help ensure the peace among all of them.
Recall that NATO’s great achievement in the 1940s and 50s wasn’t just that it helped face down the Soviets. That was important, of course, but in many ways equally important was that it allowed the various countries of Western Europe to rebuild their militaries without those militaries appearing threatening to other European countries.
Where Is McCain’s ‘Comprehensive’ Health Care Plan?
Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, Domestic Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Earlier this week, Elizabeth Edwards wondered whether John McCain’s health care plan would cover people with costly diseases – like Edwards and McCain themselves.
According to the McCain campaign, Edwards did not understand “the comprehensive nature” of McCain’s plan. But it turns out that McCain advisors themselves are struggling to figure it out, according to today’s Boston Globe:
Lately, some of McCain’s aides have said he might try to divert some Medicaid funds into a program that would help people with preexisting conditions, but his advisers can’t yet say how such a program would work or how many people would be covered.
“These are real questions, and I think there will be answers, and there better be, but they are not there yet,” said McCain adviser Thomas P. Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “A lot more remains to be hammered out.”
Indeed, while McCain talks about having a comprehensive healthcare plan, many of the details are being debated within the campaign as aides try to determine how to pay for McCain’s promises.
The problem is simple: insurance companies profit from covering healthy people but not sick ones. Sick people can get coverage as a part of a group, such as a job or through a government program, but often struggle if left on their own. The McCain plan will make the problem worse by raising taxes on employer-provided health care, reducing the number of people covered through their jobs, and by deregulating the insurance market, undercutting even the inadequate consumer protections that exist now.
It’s no wonder McCain aides are having troubling squaring that circle.
Burning Bush 2.0
Gregory: Bush ‘didn’t jump to invade Iraq’ after 9/11.
Yesterday, on MSNBC’s Hardball, David Gregory exonerated President Bush for his misguided invasion of Iraq, saying there’s “not a lot of argument” that Bush “had the right response to 9/11.” Gregory commended Bush for not immediately “jump[ing] to invade Iraq” and instead waiting until March 2003 to do so:
If [Obama] talks about what you do in response to a crisis, either you have the right intelligence and you have the right response. Well, there’s not a lot of argument that Bush had the right response to 9/11. He didn’t jump to invade Iraq even though there was some argument that he should do that in the room.
Watch it:
(HT: C&L)
Commenters on this blog — and a joke — explain things better than I do!
Two of the comments on my too-long piece on the Pielke Nature article have really boiled it down. And then I remembered an old joke that says it best of all.
Joe’s vehemence over this Pielke paper, I think, comes from the fact that unlike some of the commenters here, he is looking at it in the context of Pielke’s past work. In many of his previous writings, Pielke (like other delayers/deniers/skeptics) has worked to convey the messages that global warming might not be the crisis that the IPCC report suggested. His criticisms of global warming activism have tended to be that their recommendations might be too extreme, and so more scrutiny was required. Given that history, it is amazing that Pielke can turn around now and with a straight face argue that the recommendations of the IPCC and activists weren’t radical enough.
It’s the height of irony for skeptics to argue that the IPCC wasn’t alarmist enough on global warming. And it’s the depth of perversity for them to even imply that because global warming is so bad, we shouldn’t bother with the efficiency and decarbonization measures we can actually take now.
And Tyler writes:
I’m tired of calls for more R&D. I can’t count the number of technologies I come across daily that are off-the-shelf, have decent payback, and make a serious dent in emissions by either improving energy efficiency or reducing energy requirements. Based on what I’ve seen in Canada, our universities and startups up humming with R&D, but we’re seriously lacking demonstration and deployment, and programs that assist large-scale deployment in industries that stand to benefit in the long run. It’s a sad situation, and I don’t think government gets this. Articles like the one in Nature put too much emphasis on human ingenuity, like some silver bullet is going to come along and save the day if we simply throw more dollars into R&D. It’s simply foolish.
Precisely. Tyler’s comment reminded me of one of my favorate old jokes, which I’ll reprint from here:
100 Years
It seems to me that John McCain’s campaign doth protest far too much when they whine about being portrayed as the ticket that wants the war in Iraq to last for 100 years. Of course John McCain would prefer the war to magically end ASAP and then move into his vision for 100 years of peaceful occupation. But as Joe Klein says that vision “betrays a fairly acute lack of knowledge about both Iraq and Islam.”
Meanwhile, McCain has made it clear that he believes the war in Iraq ought to continue indefinitely. He would prefer that the fighting end sooner rather than later, but he has no intention of bringing it to an end nor does he see any limit in terms of time spent or resources expended beyond which it would make sense to end the war. Since McCain can’t serve in office for any more than eight years, he clearly can’t commit the country to 100 years of continued fighting in Iraq. A McCain administration would mean not 100 more years of war in Iraq, but 8 more years followed by a new President taking office. But if McCain lived forever and stayed in office forever, the war would continue forever — he doesn’t want it to continue forever, but he does regard all realistic means of ending it as unacceptable. That means endless war.
Graham Claims McCain Has Done ‘Even More’ Than Al Gore On Global Warming
An online ABC News article on the “surrogate wars” of this year’s presidential election quoted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an ardent supporter of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) candidacy, saying that McCain has “earned a reputation…of doing things that put the country ahead of party.” As an example, Graham cited McCain’s environmental record, claiming that it’s stronger that former Vice President Al Gore’s:
“He’s not going to run away from President Bush but at the end of the day, John McCain has earned a reputation, and has the scars to show it, of doing things that put the country ahead of party,” Graham said, noting McCain has differed with the party on immigration, his desire to close Guantanamo Bay, and enacting robust climate change policies.
“Climate change is the road less traveled but he’s traveled it even more than Al Gore,” Graham said. “Al Gore has talked about it and deserves great recognition but he was around here a long time and never introduced a bill.”
On its face, Graham’s claim is laughable. But digging deeper into the substance, it rings of pure absurdity. In fact, Gore held the first congressional hearings on climate change in the late 1970s, well before McCain was even elected to Congress.
In 1997, Gore helped broker the Kyoto Protocol which called for nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the passing of a Senate resolution stating that the U.S should not join Kyoto, Gore symbolically signed the protocol in November, 1998. While McCain voted for the resolution condemning Kyoto, he claims today that “we have an obligation” to cut greenhouse gases but still thinks the U.S. “did the right thing by not joining the Kyoto treaty.”
Moreover, the evidence shows that McCain is confused on environmental issues. He now supports ethanol despite previously criticizing it. McCain has talked tough on capping carbon emissions but failed to even vote on key Senate legislation addressing the issue. Furthermore, he doesn’t seem to understand his own position on cap-and-trade:
In the Republican debate in Florida, he denied that his cap-and-trade program included a mandatory cap on carbon. (One wonders what he thought that first word was doing in there.) He has said he won’t support a cap-and-trade bill unless it includes extra support for nuclear power (because nuclear power is low-carbon), not seeming to grok the fact that the whole point of a cap-and-trade program is to raise prices on carbon, offering a de facto subsidy to all low-carbon options.
While Gore was starring in the Oscar winning global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, McCain has been trying to build an environmental record that is just strong enough to anger conservatives and fool the media into continuing to call him a “maverick.” But the reality is that McCain’s record falls well short of the leadership Gore has shown on the issue.
