Uh-oh.

From The Oil Drum:

An important Dutch energy institute, the Clingendael International Energy Program (CIEP), recently published a report that confirms most of the conclusions about the oil market reached over the years at the oildrum. That the floor price of oil is now 110 dollars per barrel, that supply will not rise beyond 100-105 million b/d in the coming decades, that there will be an oil supply constraint for most of the next decade, that there are insufficient quantities of alternative fuels available and that thus demand destruction is inevitable. CIEP is especially important because it is endorsed by amongst others BP, Shell Netherlands, Total E&P Netherlands, three Dutch Ministries, Wintershall, Vopak Oil Europe Middle East and several Dutch energy companies.

If you still haven't seen T. Boone Pickens' short video proposing a national effort to reduce imported oil, you owe it to yourself to watch it now. Here is the four-minute version.

I am highly, repeat highly, suspicious of anything T. Boone Pickens has his hands in. T. Boone is not interested in my welfare, he's interested in his own welfare, and his own only. But I will give him credit - he is moving the discussion past the irrelevant (except to oil companies) question of whether we should drill off-shore, and looking at the big picture.

This morning on the Marketplace public radio program, a "scholar" from the Cato Institute attacked the Pickens plan and defended sending $700 billion a year overseas for oil. This is what the market demands, and the market is God. If the Cato Institute is against Pickens, that's a good indication that there's something good there.

But healthy skepticism is still warranted.

The "Straight Talk Express" Derails

What a guy.

The Story of Stuff

Andrew Tobias pointed me to this entertaining, 20-minute video/cartoon: The Story of Stuff. I highly recommend it.

Bush 3

The NY Times notices that McCain's campaign has become The Low Road Express.

Indulgences Are Back!

You may have missed it, but Pope John Paul II revived the granting of indulgences, and there are some "specials" now being offered. This article in a Canadian newspaper gives the story.

Catholic theologians explain the thinking behind indulgences like this:

Our souls suffer eternally when we sin, but we suffer temporally too, in that we hurt other people, and ourselves when we do evil.

If we repent, God forgives us, but we must still pay the price. Like a child who has stolen a candy bar and confesses to a parent, we are back in the good books, but we still must pay the shopkeeper. Similarly, we pay for the damage we do through sin, either on earth or in Purgatory.

In an indulgence, God allows the pope to draw on the goodness of the Jesus and the saints, paying the "shopkeeper" in our stead and letting us off the hook for the suffering.

I'm sorry -- who is the shopkeeper we're paying here? This is very interesting theology.

From Kevin Drum:

McCain was hardly the first guy to work hard on his public persona, and, ideological disputes aside, he always struck me as a basically decent person. A little too self-righteous for my taste, but decent.

But now I'm watching him in 2008, his desperation for the presidency driving him to conduct a campaign that's carefully but relentlessly testing ever more contemptible depths of squalor in its attacks on Barack Obama ("he made time to go to the gym but cancelled a visit with wounded troops" is just the latest), and I wonder how he's going to feel when it's all over. Not only will he lose the election, but he's going to wake up one morning and realize that he abandoned his dignity in the process. That's obviously something that's important to him, and even for someone who was never much of a fan, it's kind of sad to watch him give it up so readily.

Polls

It's amazing how many presidential polls are taken these days, and you really can pick and choose whichever you want to make the point you want to make.

Last night I caught the political news segments on ABC News and NBC News. One of them pointed to an unnamed poll (which I know was the Gallup poll) to show that Obama was opening his lead on McCain. The other used polls in a few "toss-up" states to show that McCain was making gains on Obama.

The Gallup poll is a national, daily tracking poll, so it's up-to-date; but elections are won on a state-by-state basis, so it's trend-line is valid, but that's about all you can say for it. The other poll was several days old (pre-Obama visit) and it only covered a few states, so it was interesting but not as complete a picture.

Pick your poll. I've added a feature in the upper left-hand corner that links to the latest poll results, and updates the projected electoral votes and Senate and House seats. Click on it to go to the site for more information.

I Had a Great Dream Last Night

Have a good day.

For McCain is an Honorable Man ...

Take a look at John McCain's latest:



That business about canceling his visit to wounded soldiers because there wouldn't be cameras present was -- a lie. Anybody still think McCain is an "honorable man"? (You'd never guess his new campaign manager is a Karl Rove groupie, would you?)

I especially like that "Country First" slogan at the end.

QUOTATION: Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
ATTRIBUTION: SAMUEL JOHNSON.—James Boswell, Life of Johnson, entry for Friday, April 7, 1775, p. 615 (1970).

“In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, at entry for patriotism, The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, p. 323 (1946, reprinted 1973).

Bartleby.com

How Low They Go

Remember the scurrilous list of people that made its rounds in the Clinton Administration? The list of Clinton associates, headed by Vince Foster, who died "mysteriously"?

They're (reportedly) at it again. My favorite is:

DARSANO RAHARDJO - Childhood classmate of Barack Obama when he attended a madrassa in Indonesia. Was found with his head cut off in a Jakarta alley way in 1970. Many children at the school attributed Rahardjo’s murder to the young Barack Obama. It was likely done as an initiation ritual, since Islam demands that a boy spill another’s blood before the age of ten to prove their loyalty to Allah.

P.S. I love the first reader's comment after the article!

A Must-Read Letter from the World

Michael Bérubé writes at Talking Points Memo. Ya gotta read it.

The Depression Was Not Without Its Good Points

One very fine thing the government did during the Great Depression was try to find work for photographers, artists, and writers in a program called the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

And one of the many fine results of the WPA was a collection of guide books to the different states, called the American Guide Series, or, more commonly, "WPA Guides," whose writers gave startlingly frank and interesting descriptions of the places they visited.

When Suellen and I learned we were moving to Ironton, Ohio, 30+ years ago, one of the first things we did was go to the library and consult the WPA Guide to Ohio. Besides admiring some black and white Ben Shahn photographs included, we learned that during the Civil War Ironton was a sort of No Man's Land between the North and the South, where the major activity was smuggling guns and other contraband one way or the other. It painted a bleak portrait of the town then, and suggested things had not changed much in the intervening years. They were right.






[The picture above is why you should always have a polarizing filter with you, Exhibit A]

It turns out there is a revival of interest in the WPA Guides going on, and the NY Times is running a series of amusing articles as their writers revisit towns the writers did. Here's a sample.

Next time you're in a book store, pick up a WPA Guide for a state you're interested in. I think you'll have trouble putting it down.

A Genuine Horse's Patoot

The following example of deep thinking from Byron York at The National Review has been quoted extensively across the blogosphere, so there's really no reason to bring it up here. But it's been eating at me for 12 hours now, so I need to purge and move on.

Here's the quote. He was talking about what griped him about Obama's recent speech:

It’s a small passage from Obama’s Berlin speech, but this formulation, common in some circles, grates on some ears, like mine: “The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.”

Yes, the victims were from all over the globe — places like Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Queens, and Staten Island, and New Jersey — all over. And most were Americans, weren’t they?

This is it. This is the perfect encapsulation of the conservative "mind". They can read and write and do arithmetic, but somehow they missed out on common decency. Only American lives are important. It's just a variant of the same disgusting formulation you hear wherever idiots roam. Only Shiite lives are important. Only Palestinian lives are important. Only Israeli lives are important. Only Serbian lives are important. And on and on ad nauseum.

Jonathan Zasloff at The Reality-Based Community has this to add:

When George W. Bush addressed Congress in the wake of 9/11, and left conservatives fainting in the aisles with man-crushes, he emphasized:

"Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own: dozens of Pakistanis; more than 130 Israelis; more than 250 citizens of India; men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan; and hundreds of British citizens."

But that was back in the days when American foreign policy still acknowledged that your life had value even if you weren't an American. As it turns out, the policy was on its last legs. It would be nice to see it make a come-back.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Everybody knows that Obama is the media darling. John McCain, who once called news people his "base," says so.

So get a load of this video blog from McCain's daughter:




There was once a time when news people did not socialize with politicians. We had a professional press then.

The Issue of Pardons

Speculation is beginning about GWB's use of pardons at the end of his term. Numerous members of the adminis- tration, past and present and himself included, are in serious legal jeopardy once the Torture Party is out of office.

Will Bush issue pardons? It's hard to imagine he wouldn't.

But to whom?

My guess is there are some scoundrels who will demand preemptive pardons. Cheney, Addington, and Rove will clearly be in this group. They'll have no compunctions about it, feel no shame. They'll see it as a necessity brought on by the curse of living in the same world as lesser beings. They'll see themselves as Ollie North martyrs.

There are some who will beg for pardons. Alberto Gonzalez, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, and Doug Feith would fit in this category. They're out of power now, and don't have the access they once had.

Pardons seem likely for both of the above categories.

But there might be another category. Suppose there were actually members of the Bush Administration whose moral compasses didn't point downward. Suppose there were people who thought, "Oh, my God. These people are lunatics, what should I do?" And suppose they decided, "I need to stay right where I am, because if I leave, I'll surely be replaced by someone with no character at all."

And by staying on, they made themselves vulnerable to prosecution, as well. Powell? Ashcroft? Rice? It would take a mind reader to know for sure.

The same character that caused the best to make themselves vulnerable might keep them from requesting, or accepting, a pardon. How's that for bitter irony?

Finally, where do you stop? At what level of the bureaucracy? At what level of malfeasance? And how do you keep the next level -- the first unpardoned level -- from going before the Senate investigating committees and singing their songs?

It's a dilemma.

Commander in Chief

Give this column a read. It's spot-on, as the Brits would say.

Department of High-Class McCain

The grin at the end is especially revealing. He finally found out what Republicans like: Slander.

Update: Joe Klein noticed it too.

Whither Goest the GOP?

The Alan Keyes watch continues.

It's a Long Time to November ...

... but it sure is fun right now!

NBC's political reporter Chuck Todd on Meet the Press says the McCain crowd is worried:

MR. TODD: Republicans are panicked about this trip because they think that this is going to be a home run. And arguably, you’ve got some Obama folks who actually think he ought to come home right now. It’s never going to get as good as it’s gotten in the last 48 hours. You’ve got McCain suddenly in the White House parroting what Obama has been saying in Afghanistan. The McCain folks will say, “Hey, we’re not parroting. We’ve been there before.” But they clearly caught McCain flat-footed there. And then what Maliki did, even in the backtrack statement that the spokes–the government spokesperson over there said, he threw in the word “timetable.”

Video at Crook & Liars.

The Sky's the Limit

Ranking blogs by their number of hits, Technorati puts Sempringham at 4,485,324th.

Actually, that's an improvement!