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- It's telling of how outlets like MSNBC view politics in this country that they would choose to preview this finding from a NBC/WSJ poll coming out later this evening: "more than 80% see problems with America's two-party system -- with 31% believing it's seriously broken and that America needs a third party." Insert at this point paeans to centrism and bipartisanship, a middle way between the extreme left and extreme right. But the thing is, the extreme right is already pretty well represented by the Republicans these days. It's been the Democrats who have compromised again and again on legislation to find the illusive "center." And while conservatives would disagree with me on this, the missing third party, as it were, is a left-wing party as committed to its ideological agenda as the GOP is to theirs.
- This is a few days old, but I would like to pull out an important -- and indisputable -- point from Al Gore's piece in The New Republic on the BP oil spill: Ecological devastation aside, expanding offshore oil drilling will have a negligible effect on reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Imagine that ANWR could be explored and brought online overnight with no environmental impact. What would we gain? The mean average estimate is an additional 10.4 billion total barrels which, in a country that consumes roughly 20 million barrels per day and only produces five million domestically, would keep us off foreign sources for just under two years. Time to start transitioning away from a carbon-based economy, guys.
- Yesterday I joked that "serious conservative magazines will immediately question their relationships with the distinguished conservative think tanks" who pay "scholars" to promote insane foreign policy platforms, and looking at the latest installment of National Review's video series "Uncommon Knowledge," I see they have not taken my advice to heart. The promotional post at The Corner offers this teaser from a Hoover Institution senior fellow: "As soon as Barack Hussein Obama came to office, he generally believed that because his middle name is 'Hussein' and because the patron saint of Iranian Shi’ism is Hussein, that he can make a deal with the Iranians." Now to be fair, I didn't watch the whole video, so it isn't clear whether The Corner's editors took the stupidest statement from the interview as illustrative of the whole thing, or whether they consider it an example of "uncommon knowledge."
- Remainders: A week before the primary, Arlen Specter still enjoys the full backing of the Democratic party in Pennsylvania; Obama considers poaching another Democratic governor to replace Elena Kagan should she be elevated to the High Court; some conservatives are quite desperate to find parallels between the British elections and the American midterms; "Originalism is a philosophy of fiery revolution, wrapped in a rhetorical shell of keeping everything the same"; I don't understand what "liberal hunting permits" is supposed to be a "metaphor" for; and we are not Greece.
--Mori Dinauer
