John McCain’s new ad says that Barack Obama’s refusal to open America’s coastline to drilling is to blame for high gas prices:

They say nobody ever went wrong underestimating the intelligence of the voting public, but it is staggering that you can’t find any credible people anywhere prepared to argue that McCain’s drilling schemes will bring any short-term relief from high gas prices or that the long-run price reductions would be anything other than tiny. Meanwhile, it’s McCain who has no plan to help bolster alternative fuels and no plan to bolster alternatives to driving.

Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where the gas price issue wouldn’t hurt so much. But there’s a movement afoot to change things. Similarly with minimum parking rules — regulations that interfere with the operation of the free market in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to live energy efficient lives. And again, there are people trying to change this. These things are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Naturally, conservatives have chosen to aim all of their fire at anti-drilling regulations. And that’s the sort of thing that makes the conservative movement hard to take seriously — it’s an organized defense of existing power and privilege that now and again adopts principled rhetorical modes of various kinds but basically can’t be moved to act unless some lobbyists pay them too.

Read the chart. And, no, highways don’t pay for themselves. Also there are large negative externalities associated with driving that militate in favor of making drivers subsidize transit users (or pedestrians, cyclists, etc.) rather than the reverse.

UPDATE: Of course you can’t bring this subject up without legions of people informing you that the gas tax pays for the highways. This simply isn’t true. All the funds raised by the gas tax are spent on highways, and then a bunch of additional money is also spent on highways. It’s exactly the same as with transit, financed by a mix of user fees and subsidies in order to encourage the economic benefits of infrastructure investment. But one kind of investment is better for the environment and for public health. So naturally we give the other kind radically more money.

You can listen to Marc Lynch, Colin Kahl, and Rand Beers talk about the latest developments from Iraq if you’re tired of just reading some blogger guy mouth off. They very effectively put these events into the larger context of events in Iraqi politics that went undernoticed until Maliki’s statements exploded onto the campaign scene.

Note to would-be imperialists — my advice would be to stop trying to lamely spin away the content of what Nouri al-Maliki is saying and take the Andy McArthy route of deriding him as an Iranian stooge. Surely the US security establishment hasn’t lost the ability to engineer a coup or whatever in a country currently under American military operation. Maybe Iyad Allawi would like to play host to American toops for 100 years.

Here’s the video of Maliki’s aid walking back the walkback on a timetable for withdrawal:

It seems to me that, one good reason for the Iraqi government to take a welcoming attitude toward something like Obama’s plan is that this gives them some meaningful bargaining power. I think common sense dictates that Obama would be willing to change a 16 month timetable into an 18 month timetable if the Iraqi government can put forward some persuasive reasons why 18 is better than 16. But to get in that conversation, you need to be rowing in the same direction as the new president — and the American people and the Iraqi people — and looking to find some definitive light at the end of the tunnel.