Obama on Pollan

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Remember the Michael Pollan article offering suggestions on agriculture to the next President? I pulled out these bits (and more on greenhouse gases and ag), which I thought were particularly important.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.

Here’s Obama describing what he took away from that article.

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

In find his take fascinating for several reasons. One, he read it. Two, he didn’t acknowledge that Pollan styled this article as a letter to the next President; Obama took advice intended for him, but he pitched it as a more general article (Would he have read it if Pollan had not addressed it to him, I wonder? Did Obama want to hide that addressing calling articles "letters" to the next President make it more likely he’ll read them?). Three, he read it closely enough to synthesize a great deal of the content of the article. And four, he synthesized the article into his more general understanding of the economy–applying the lessons from this one article more generally.

Klein should have asked whether Obama plans on having one meatless day at the White House each week. 

Did McCain KNOW the RNC Bought Palin the Shopping Spree?

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WT has been chronicling Sarah’s extreme makeover, including this picture (AP/Carolyn Kaster) she captions, "YOU told me I could keep the clothing!" I think she’s right–there’s a load of tension there.

And I think several things suggest the breaking news of Sarah’s spree is the precipitating factor in recent chilliness between McCain and his Caribou Barbie.  There’s the terse way McCain responds to questions about it.

Presidential candidate John McCain isn’t happy about having to explain why the Republican Party has had to buy running mate Sarah Palin $150,000 in clothes, hair styling and accessories.

McCain was asked several questions on Thursday about the shopping spree — and he answered each one more or less the same way: Palin needed clothes and they’ll be donated to charity.

There’s the "tenseness" that Chuck Todd notes. Todd’s wrong to suggest McCain and Palin weren’t comfortable with each other, yet–after all there was plenty of chemistry about four weeks ago (at least on the part of McCain; Palin’s always been a little uncomfortable when he leered at her), and they traveled together and hung out in Sedona for a good chunk of that period of time. So I think Todd’s other suggestion–that McCain is blaming Palin for their failing campaign–makes more sense. And given the timing, the blame seems focused on the latest abusurdity of the $150,000 shopping spree.

Add in the well-reported history of McCain–the guy formerly known as a maverick reformer–attacking precisely this kind of campaign expenditure.

MCCAIN: Madam President, the amendment before the Senate is a very simple one. It restricts the use of campaign funds for inherently personal purposes. The amendment would restrict individuals from using campaign funds for such things as home mortgage payments, clothing purchases … and vacations or other trips that are noncampaign in nature. […]

The use of campaign funds for items which most Americans would consider to be strictly personal reasons, in my view, erodes public confidence and erodes it significantly. [emphasis TP’s]

Not that ignorance would exonerate McCain one bit–he still owns resposibility for allowing his campaign to do something that, in his own view, "erodes public confidence." But this signals the degree to which even McCain (who after all has better than average self-delusion skills) has to recognize that his campaign refutes everything the myth of the maverick reformer was supposed to be about.

Read more →

Draper’s Silent Narrative of Resentment

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Two things stuck out for me in Robert Draper’s story of the changing narratives of the McCain campaign. First, he repeats the McCain myth that Obama showed an interest–but no initiative–in McCain’s ploy to do town halls around the country together.

In June, McCain formally proposed that he and his Democratic opponent campaign together across America in a series of town-hall-style meetings. He had in fact suggested the same thing to Joe Biden three years earlier, Biden told me back then: “He said: ‘Let’s make a deal if we end up being the nominees. Let’s commit to do what Goldwater and Kennedy committed to do before Kennedy was shot.’ We agreed that we would campaign together, same plane, get off in the same city and go to 30 states or whatever together.” According to Biden, he and McCain sealed their agreement with a handshake. When McCain extended the same offer to Obama in 2008, the Democrat said that he found the notion “appealing” but then did little to make it happen. Since that time, McCain has repeatedly told aides what he has also said in public — that had Obama truly showed a determination to have a series of joint appearances, the campaign would not have degenerated to its current sorry state.

In fact, Obama responded to McCain’s proposal–with a counter-proposal, to model the debates on Lincoln-Douglas rather than Goldwater-Kennedy. As far as I know, McCain just ignored this counter-proposal. In other words, McCain has been stewing over the fact that Obama did not accept McCain’s proposal in its entirety for four months; or, to put it another way, he’s been stewing over the fact that the younger (and, in McCain’s mind, unworthy) man did not accept McCain’s terms without negotiation.

I find it interesting, then, that Draper doesn’t note Obama’s counter-proposal. It’s tough to say whether it’s just shitty journalism, whether Draper just internalized McCain’s own myths, or whether he simply saw himself repeating what the McCain campaign either sincerely or manipulatively told him. In any case, the silence about Obama’s counter-proposal shows how Draper’s entire narrative takes McCain’s claim to justifiable indignation uncritically.

More interesting still is the other significant detail Draper ignores: the McCain team’s cynical lies immediately after the convention. Nowhere does Draper mention the insistent lies about the Bridge to Nowhere; nowhere does he mention the manufactured outrage over the lipstick on a pig comment. Read more →

Saks Fifth Socialism

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Democratic "socialism:"

Tweaking the tax code to shift the enormous tax break President Bush gave to his "base"–earners in the top 2% of the country–to those struggling to put food on the table and send their kids to college.

Republican socialism:

Taking $150,000 of money at a time when your candidate is taking public financing for a presidential election to buy an over-priced new wardrobe for the vice presidential nominee.

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Republican communism:

Using $150,000 for new duds while receiving public financing when your own family doesn’t pay into the presidential public finance fund.

Update: Corrected to reflect that this money came out of RNC funds, not McCain funds.

Update: Saks corrected to spell it like people who shop there would spell it, per brendanx.

Let the Governance Begin

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Remember how, during the 2000 recount, the Bush team made a visible show of beginning their transition to power? That was about the last smart thing the Bush Administration did. It got people accustomed to the idea of Bush governing even before SCOTUS cast its vote.

In a similar move, Obama is beginning to tailor his events to show how he will govern, rather than just telling how he will do so. I strongly suspect that’s what his half-hour TV buy will do next week–it’ll look and feel like a presidential press conference, and he will presumably introduce what he would like to be included in the post-election stimulus package and beyond to fix the economy.

Similarly, at a campaign event in Florida today, Obama is showing the kinds of people he will listen to–and how he will listen (CNN stream here).  Obama has brought a bunch of swing state governors (Strickland, Granholm, Richardson–and I think Ritter, too), Paul Volcker, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and a small business owner to discuss how they would foster job growth. Sure, Obama got to make a speech about how he would invest in new jobs. And sure, most of the speakers reinforced Obama’s own policies (though, as an example, Richardson is disagreeing with him now, and telling him to ditch NCLB). But it puts Obama in the role he will be in–guiding the discussion of a lot of experts and listening. And he gets to make cracks like this:

I’m going to show the kind of leadership I’m gonna show in the White House. Anyone who wants to can take off their jackets. It’s really warm in here. This is how we’re going to do things in the White House–use some common sense.

All of which provides Obama with an opportunity to further ease the concerns of people who like Obama, but are just not yet comfortable enough he’s got the experience to be President.

To be honest, both of these events (the half hour presser and this jobs conference) are great politics. The presser gives Obama one last opportunity to get a bump from people seeing him and liking his calm on TV. This jobs conference pitches to a number of swing states–Granholm’s Michigan, Strickland’s Ohio, Richardson’s New Mexico, and Ritter’s Colorado. At the same time, it builds the pressure on Charlie Crist for his lukewarm support for McCain, even while providing a new twist on a campaign rally in Florida; in particular, Obama keeps bringing the general points back to issues that apply to Florida.

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OH Secretary of State’s Website Hacked

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This is troubling:

The office of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on Monday afternoon said that it is limiting the functionality of its web site after its tech department had detected a security breach.

“Due to security concerns experienced by the Secretary of State’s website, full functionality of the website has been suspended to protect the integrity of state records and data.  Full functionality will be restored when we are assured that all data has been protected to acceptable levels of security,” said Secretary of State Brunner in a statement issued Monday afternoon.

[snip]

"What we know is our IT department detected a situation with our Web site where there was somehow suspicious activity where someone could have gotten into our site and tried to move things around," a spokesman told The Cleveland Plain Dealer Monday afternoon.

The office’s statement noted that "this is not the first instance of direct assault on the operations of the Secretary of State’s office." [my emphasis]

Click through to read about all the death threats McCain’s legions (presumably) have been making.

There’s more in this Dayton Daily News story.

Fox News Prepares to Go into Opposition by Hiring Judy Judy Judy

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Fox News is preparing for what comes after the election. First came the news that Fox News was hiring Glenn Beck, replacing one of its election shows with yet more wingnuttia.

And now, they’ve hired someone whose greatest expertise is in laundering politically motivated leaks to give those leaks "respectability."

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war."

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. "She has a very impressive résumé," says Senior Vice President John Moody. "We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for."

No, I’m not surprised that Judy Judy Judy has finally ended up at the one place worthy of her, um, talents. But I would invite you to imagine why Fox wants Judy on board.

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Conyers Notices the Similarities to US Attorney Purge, Too

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John Conyers has not missed what we’ve been seeing: a replay of the US Attorney scandal. He talks about the attacks on ACORN, the improper use of prosecutorial resources to intimidate voters, the waste of investigative resources when the FBI is already failing to investigate mortgage-related fraud, and the seeming preferential use of federal investigative resources to target Democrats. But here’s my favorite bit:

Furthermore, it is deeply troubling that, just weeks after the Department’s own watchdogs documented the role that specious agitating on alleged vote fraud matters by New Mexico Republicans played in the firing of United States Attorneys in 2006, in this controversy we see the same figures cropping up again and apparently obtaining a new FBI investigation just in time for the 2008 election. Thus a lawyer named Pat Rogers–described in the local press as "an attorney who advises the state GOP" is apparently playing a key role in pressing these current claims. Mr. Rogers, however, appears repeatedly in the report on the U.S. Attorney firings prepared by the Department’s Offices of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility, which documented his actions making flawed claims of voter fraud and brining unwarranted pressure to bear on law enforcement officials, including Mr. Iglesias, in 2006.

As I glossed the other day, 

Republicans are already under criminal investigation for this stuff. Don’t let them get away with the same kind of criminal conduct again.

Of course, as Kagro X has pointed out, Mukasey can blow off Conyers (as he has Conyers’ request for more urgency on voter protection) precisely because we didn’t get the evidence from Miers and Turdblossom to make this case legally before we got back into election fever.

So here we are, with the subpoenas still unenforced in the case that was supposed to crack the "administration’s" engineering of bogus "voter fraud" allegations against Democrats immediately preceding critical elections wide open, and now witnessing… the "administration" engineering bogus "voter fraud" allegations against Democrats immediately preceding a critical election. 

Like Alberto Gonzales, Mukasey seems to have lost all shame about allowing the GOP to play these games. 

Greene County, OH Young Republican Lays Out Plan to Commit Vote Fraud

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picture-48.pngAfter I noted that Greene County’s Republican attorneys were chasing down voting information on those who recently registered and requested an absentee ballot in that county, klynn found evidence of a "Young Republican" in that county laying out a plan to encourage vote fraud (in case that post disappears, I took this screen shot at around 1:38PM). The post claims that,

I’ve called all my friends in Georgia and Alaska (states that are clearly leaning Republican) and had them register to vote (using the local YMCA’s address) and to apply for an absentee ballot so the ballot will be sent to their homes in GA and AK.

In other words, this self-described Republican claims he (or she) was encouraging friends to commit vote fraud. Now, this post appeared just over a week before Greene County’s Sheriff got Mike DeWine’s buddy Stephen Haller to start digging up records on those who had registered early. So maybe this is why the Sheriff started investigating early voters. Or maybe this was just a plant to excuse such an investigation.

Sara explained why Greene County might have been a target for this kind of attention. 

Two major Historic Black Colleges are located in Green County, Central State University, which is Ohio’s Black Land Grant Institution, and Wilberforce University and Seminary, which was founded by the AME — African Methodist Episcopal Church back about 1845 or so. A former congressman from NYC is the current President of Wilberforce.

I can well imagine that Xenia saw lots of youthful voters during the early voting window last week, that ended this Monday.

A few miles outside Xenia, but still in Greene Country is Cedarville College, an Evangelical (I think Baptist) school with whom the DeVines have a very close connection — I believe both the former Senator and his brother are graduates. Cedarville is much older, but has close links with Falwell’s Liberty University and Robertson’s college operations. Lots of Cedarville students go on to study law at Regent’s. Lots of old connections with Blackwell’s operations in Ohio. [my emphasis]

Now, frankly, I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe this Young Republican is just talking out of his arse. Maybe the Republicans in Greene County are systematically trying to challenge the students at Central State and Wilberforce. Read more →

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