The Blog

Colleen Dealy and Taylor Baldwin: Sex And The American Mom: 1 In 3 Report Getting Action On The Side

2008-05-13T12:32:07Z

You or someone you know is having an affair. We know, it sounds surprising, shocking even, but apparently that is the case. Cookie Magazine and "AOL Body" did a survey on the subject and 30,000 people responded. As far as surveys go, that is a big number, and it's even bigger when you consider that their questions were aimed solely at married women with children. Yep, lots of mommies are getting action on the side.

The survey, "Sex and the American Mom," revealed that 34% of these married moms is in the midst of, or has already had, an affair. Think of three married moms you know and ask yourself, "Which one is cheating?" We tried this and Colleen came up empty. Taylor could think of one or two, but not one out of three--that number seems staggering. Are we just naïve? In the dark? Out of touch? Which of our friends has managed to stray without anyone knowing (and when do they find the time and where they hell do they go?)?

Another somewhat mind-blowing result of this survey was that 77% of the respondents said they want more sex. That's more than three quarters of the 30,000 women asked who said they aren't getting enough. Again, we ask, who are these people? And are we to conclude that so many stray because they are not sexually satisfied?

Cheating seems to be a direct result of not getting what you need, be it sex, attention, openness, what have you. If there is a void, and it can be filled by someone else, chances are it will be. Affairs used to almost guarantee a trip to divorce court. Today, however, the "cheatee" might experience a sense of betrayal, but the "cheater" is not necessarily stigmatized socially, and often both agree to at least attempt reconciliation. It has even been viewed as a "wake-up call" -- one that can actually save a marriage, with each person expressing a sense of shared blame.

As a society, it seems as though we've become less judgmental about affairs in general. Maybe we've realized how hard marriage is and have simply gotten more realistic. But, maybe the scope of the issue is bigger, and what's happening is that we're in the midst of redefining marriage as we have known it.

The stereotype, of course, is if there's someone sneaking around in a marriage, it's the guy. In general, no one is surprised to hear that men cheat on their wives. However, when it comes to wives cheating on their husbands, while not entirely new, it is much more common than we thought. When we told men that one in three married moms cheat (or have cheated) on their husbands, and that a solid majority are actually looking for more sex than they're having at home, most mens' eyes light up with surprise and certainly curiosity. Some even joked about where they might find one of these gals. But, what we didn't hear was "Yes, I can understand that. I'm not in the mood very often and I'm probably not satisfying my wife's sexual desires."

Could the American male be suffering from a proverbial "headache?" Maybe the insatiable male sex drive is just a myth? After hearing what Michelle Weiner-Davis, an internationally recognized relationship therapist and the Director of The Divorce Busting Center, had to say in an interview with Psychology Today, this may not be far-fetched. She thinks we don't hear a lot about the man's lack of sexual interest because, "Men are so ashamed of speaking up about [it]." Estimating that it affects, "at least 20 to 25%" of adult males," Michelle adds, "...low desire in men is America's best-kept secret."

Please don't confuse our effort to understand what's going on here with male-bashing. When a couple's sex life changes, for better or worse, generally both parties are complicit. For the record, we love men and we're aware that sex is complicated. Let's face it, marriage is complicated, and it only becomes more so after having kids. If mom or dad feels rejected by the other, he or she may cheat. And if you're married and you've got kids, you know that sex, or lack there of, can be loaded with a lot of other emotions and agendas that don't have anything to do with lust, or even love.

As the Hook-Up Generation grows up and gets married, chances are affairs may even go mainstream. It's hard for us to believe that this won't lead to hurt feelings and collateral damage (remember the kids), but maybe that's because we're from a different generation.
We understand that the person who lies just outside of the daily grind--the one who's not figuring out how to pay the mortgage that month; the one who isn't angry about spending too little time with the kids--can seem like a vacation worth taking--at least once.

We're glad to hear that women want more sex, because frankly, it's good news that the female libido is alive and well. As for the affairs....If we could add one question to the poll it would be this: "Is/Was the Affair Worth It? "

Sandy Tolan: Bush In Israel: Standing With One Side

2008-05-13T04:49:01Z

Air Force One is traveling back in time Tuesday, banking low near the southern Mediterranean coast and touching down on contested soil where the past is always present. In the Holy Land, the battles over historical narrative -- above all, the meaning of the founding of Israel in 1948 -- are as hard-fought as the contemporary struggles over West Bank settlers, Palestinian refugees, and negotiations for a two-state solution. For the observer, or self-described "honest broker" in a long and bitter dispute, identifying with only one side's history carries profound meaning of its own.

Yet when President Bush steps off his plane to help Israel mark its 60th birthday, he will stride firmly into the past of one side. Officials of the Jewish state will sweep the president into their own powerful and compelling narrative: The birth of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust on May 14, 1948; the invasion of the state, a day later, from Arab armies marching from the north, south, and east; and the loss of fully one percent of the Jewish state's population, in a fierce defense that evokes Israel's unofficial motto: Never again.

What the president won't hear is the Palestinian story. He won't be told that one side's "War of Independence" is the other side's "Nakba," or Catastrophe. And no one is likely to mention that Israel's heroic survival was, to the Arabs, a dispossession in which 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes.

Here, then, is a brief "Nakba" primer for the President, a chronicle of the untold to accompany him on his visit to Jerusalem.

In the spring of 1948, waves of fear gripped Arab Palestine following the April 9 massacre of more than 120 unarmed Palestinians by extremist Jewish militias in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. Thus, even before the war officially began, Arab villagers were fleeing for safer ground, fully intending to return when the fighting stopped.

Later that month in the Galilee, Yigal Allon, commander of the elite Jewish brigade known as the Palmach, implemented a plan to spread more fear among the local Arabs. Allon would write later that he gathered Jewish leaders "who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that giant Jewish reinforcements had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages...[and] to advise them, as friends, to flee while they could...the flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective."

The next month, May 1948, a similar campaign took hold in the village of Na'ani, according to local Arab and Israeli sources, when a Jewish neighbor rode into town on horseback, shouting "The Jewish army is coming! You must leave, or you will all be killed!" The villagers fled en masse, many coming a few miles north to the Arab town of Ramle. There, they hoped, it would be safe.

Two months later, on July 12, Israeli forces overwhelmed local Arab defenders and occupied the refugee-choked Ramle (now the Israeli city of Ramla) and neighboring Lydda (now Lod). The same day they began expelling the Arabs of the two towns. According to the memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin, then a young Israeli major, the orders came directly from Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Three days later, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, "there are 30,000 refugees moving along the road between Ramle and Lydda..they are demanding bread..."

The people of Ramle and Lydda had left in haste and packed little, unprepared for a long hike across stony ground of cactus and Christ's thorn in mid-summer temperatures that reached 100 degrees. Decades later, old men and women in refugee camps would recall, above all, thirst: of quenching it with stagnant water found in old wells; with the drying kernels of a leftover corn harvest; and, in some cases, with their own urine. John Bagot Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion, would write that "nobody will ever know how many children died."

Sixty years later, the Nakba lies at the core of Palestinians' identity, and of their view of history and justice. Official U.S. ignorance of that, passed down through generations and embodied in President Bush's visit only to the Israeli side, has, unsurprisingly, angered Palestinians.

"It's a slap in the face," said Diana Buttu, a prominent Palestinian analyst in the West Bank, adding that the U.S. is essentially saying: "You have no history, and your past does not matter."
But more than the insult or even stupidity of such a one-sided position is the tactical bungling of an administration that wants to be seen as a fair arbiter of a long-standing dispute. That's pretty hard to do, if all you can see is one side's pain and glory.

Paul Rieckhoff: Congress: Money for War, But No Money for the Troops?

2008-05-13T04:25:44Z

When it comes to hypocritical "Support the Troops" rhetoric, I thought I'd seen it all. But I was wrong. This week, a small group of Democrats are using back door dealings to torpedo the widely-supported new GI Bill. For anyone new to the issue, here's the bottom line up front:

In 1944, FDR signed the original GI Bill, which gave every veteran a chance to go to college. It paid for tuition, fees, and books, and gave veterans a living stipend. The GI Bill helped the "Greatest Generation" readjust to civilian life, it helped pull us out of a post-war recession, and it helped build the middle class. Every dollar spent on educational benefits under the original GI Bill added at least seven dollars to the national economy.

Today, 1.7 million troops have come home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but the GI Bill no longer covers anything like the cost of college. So a bipartisan coalition of veterans now serving in the Senate introduced a new GI Bill, modeled on the World War II legislation. This bill recently got added to the war funding bill currently in Congress.

In the real world, two things are obvious:

1) If you send troops to war, caring for the veterans who come home is an unavoidable and necessary cost of that war.
2) The GI Bill is a proven program, and a smart financial investment that pays for itself.

It just makes sense. That's why the 300-plus Senators and Representatives from both parties and all the major veterans organizations in America have endorsed the legislation.

In Washington, however, it seems like nothing is ever easy. A couple of Congressmen, including Rep. John Tanner (D-TN), Jim Cooper (D-TN), and Allen Boyd (D-FL), all members of the Blue Dog Coalition, have gotten together to OPPOSE paying for the GI Bill this week. (If you live in their districts, you can urge them to support the GI Bill by clicking here.)

As Representative Tanner quipped, "Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it's butchers, bakers or candlestick makers." Really? Does the Congressman usually explain major policy decisions by quoting Mother Goose?

Seriously, though--by saying that the GI Bill shouldn't be in the war funding bill, Representative Tanner is supporting the war, but not the warriors. That kind of thinking used to only appear in parodies. Moreover, these Representatives insist on referring to the GI Bill as a "new entitlement" - even though we've had a GI Bill for more than 60 years. But the most remarkable logical pirouette they've offered so far is that they oppose the GI Bill because they are "fiscal conservatives."

Our government has been paying for basically the entire war "off-budget"--the equivalent of racking up billions in credit card debt. Everyone thinks this is a bad way of doing business. But it's not the whole supplemental that these Congressmen are threatening to vote against; it's just the GI Bill. For those of you playing along at home, here's what that looks like:

This circle is the spending bill we're talking about. The big red part? That's spending that is A-OK with these Congressmen (more than $180 billion). It's that tiny blue sliver that represents the GI Bill, and that's the dealbreaker for these folks ($780 million).

It's absurd. Anyone who can find the money to fund the war has no excuse for voting against the tiny fraction of money needed for veterans' education benefits. The fiscal conservative argument seems even more ludicrous once you realize that even five years of spending on the GI Bill would only cost as much as nine weeks of war in Iraq.

While their arguments seem asinine to anyone outside the Beltway, they are putting a serious speedbump in the way of the new GI Bill. Do I think sanity will prevail on this issue? I hope so. One of the leaders of the Blue Dogs is Representative Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD), a dedicated supporter of veterans. She may be able to get her troops in line. If not, I'd love to see those members of Congress find a way to explain to their constituents in an election year that they voted for a $170-billion war bill, and then also voted to nickel-and-dime the troops who are fighting that war.

As President Roosevelt said, the GI Bill "gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down." Please help us show these members of Congress that Americans' support for our troops is no different today than it was 60 years ago. You can join us at www.GIBIll2008.org.

Tom Gregory: All We Are Saying is Give Peace Your Pants

2008-05-13T03:54:38Z

Born from the beatnik era and fermented in the fervor of the Vietnam War, hippie culture was anti-establishment, pro-peace, groundbreaking, and a sweeping tie-dyed movement for change.

In San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, dressing hippie-style was the uniform for the protesting counter-culture individualists -- or at least oxymoronically, for the group that defined themselves as individuals. Flowers, headbands, peace symbols, and loads of fringe were "unisex," while mini and macro skirts mixed with halter-tops, saris and sarongs, blew the girdle off the Donna Reed set. Natural, handmade, embellished and braless, hippie couture wounded the department store while the thrift store and, ironically, the army surplus boomed.

Americans who had known the reason for WWII called for conservative patriotism, conformity, and haircuts as even greater numbers of young Americans and Vietnamese were being slaughtered in our senseless Southeast Asian war. Dead bodies were strewn across the nightly news because freedom of the press was not squashed by executive order. Peter Arnett's famous editorial quote, "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it," helped drive home a need for an end to the folly of death.

Thirty-eight years ago this month, the Kent State slaughter killed four students wounding nine others. Hundreds of campuses closed due to angry student strikes and protests. The youthful innocence that had been drafted to kill overseas was at war with the American establishment. Every college and high school campus resonated with student strikes, dissent, and chants for peace now. Young America flexed its muscle with fortitude in a single-minded cause even as thousands and thousands of their numbers were being drafted to kill the enemy. It was no more tumultuous than today's Iraq war, but since there is no draft, today only a few are hitting the streets.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono's week-long honeymoon bed-in produced the infamous plea to "give peace a chance." The world has yet to follow that sensible call, although at Christmastime we hypocritically wish it upon civilization. The free spirited rebels abhorred mendacity. Sixties' youth practiced a sexual, societal, and cultural openness that celebrated their free spirit honestly instead of constraining them with a life lived with lies and half-truths.

The hippie culture was beset with problems, I'm not denying that, but one can't help but believe that the movement's heart is beating it's energized blood into the millions of Americans who are looking for hope in Barack Obama.

With longing to find our hippie remnants, I went on an archaeological dig through vintage stores, fashion magazines, and the internet. Romulus, whose shop recreates the bohemian fashion the counter-culture wore while they demanded change. His small workshop is buzzing with optimism for tomorrow as he handcrafts his leather and denim designs. In America's run to cheaper and less expensive goods, it's refreshing to see that made in America is still stamped on our most rebellious and expressive clothing.

Watch my video here.

Lionel Beehner: The Politics of Counting the Dead after Disasters

2008-05-13T03:03:49Z

The casualty counts from the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar are staggering. What's interesting, however, is that whenever a natural disaster strikes, the number of casualties first reported is always deceptively low but creeps upward as more information is made available. Interestingly, the opposite tends to be the case after a man-made disaster (i.e. a terrorist attack or nuclear meltdown) occurs. Recall the reports of tens of thousands dead on 9/11.

So what explains this discrepancy?

After any tragedy, of course, there is a fog that makes it difficult for survivors to ascertain facts. When the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, the original casualty count was the haphazard guesswork of eye-witnesses and aid groups on the scene, and thus much lower than the final tally. Also, governments struck by natural calamities, especially those in the developing world, are often too inefficient or negligent to tally reliable data and must rely on the numbers provided by disaster-relief organizations. Plus, natural disasters span a wider breadth, where it takes longer to fully realize the scope of the damage, whereas terrorist attacks occur in small crowded areas, which accentuates the hysteria, making people think the tragedy is greater than perhaps it really is.

But the real reason may owe itself more to politics. When natural disasters strike, there is an incentive for governments to downplay the disaster to avoid outside opprobrium. This occurred in Turkey after the 1999 earthquake, in Iran following its 2003 quake, and in Pakistan after its 2005 quake in Kashmir. High casualties are a tell-tale sign of shoddy construction and poor preparedness -- there's a reason why earthquakes in Japan usually result in casualty stats in the hundreds, not the thousands.

On the flipside, with man-made disasters, when some loony is at fault and not the government, there's an incentive for states to hype the casualty count. Why? For a number of reasons: maybe to warrant either a) retaliation against the perpetrator, b) sympathy from the outside world, c) money from the outside world, d) money from insurance claims, or d) to rally the troops (see option a).

After the 2003 Madrid bombings, reports surfaced that more than 200 died (the number was eventually lowered to 191). After the Chernobyl meltdown, it was predicted that thousands would perish from radiation poisoning, yet according to a 2005 IAEA report, fewer than 50 people actually died from the accident. That is not to downplay the significance of these acts (or to equate the two, given that the former was deliberate and latter was a result of gross negligence and incompetence), only to point out a behavioral tick in how we respond to natural versus man-made calamities.

Are we forever bound to overplay acts of man and underplay acts of God?

Jeff Biggers: Thomas Friedman's Green Pie in the Sky

2008-05-13T01:53:25Z

Instead of a pie in the face, which Thomas L. Friedman ducked at Brown University a couple of weeks ago, the student pranksters should have tossed a few tough questions to the bestselling author about his fading green bona fides.

For starters, take his ill-informed understanding of coal. Using his New York Times bully pulpit column, Friedman had the audacity to tour a strip mine in Montana last year, and then declare that our "green" future rested on the mirage of "clean coal," a delusional corporate slogan that blithely overlooks any environmental destruction (including the crime of mountaintop removal in Appalachia), transportation problems, major groundwater and waterway issues or an enduring mining safety crisis before the coal train even arrives at some futuristic power plant.

In an exciting period when Friedman's truly green counterparts in the rest of the world -- from Germany to Spain to Israel to the republic of Google -- are seizing the moment to pursue the daily breakthroughs in renewable energy sources, Friedman has tossed his green sensibilities out of the window by hopping on the dirty coal bandwagon and even cheering the development of still prohibitive and emissions-boosting coal-to-liquid technology.

As the self-proclaimed re-namer of the "new idea of green," Friedman should know better. He should have learned his lesson as a one-time cheerleader of ethanol. A couple of years ago, Friedman chided our nation for refusing to put our energy future into the corn and sugar basket. Just like his belief in the chimerical vision of "clean coal," Friedman failed to consider the environmental costs of ethanol, (including deforestation in Brazil and other regions for expanded cultivation), costly water use, and the ensuing tragic food staples shortage in his short-term vision.

Beyond our energy policies, perhaps the most telling aspect of Friedman's misleading green vision goes back to The World Is Flat, his 600-page roller-coaster version of globalization that has baited and hooked a vast readership, including the academic hosts of those pie-throwing yahoos at Brown University and at schools around the world.

In an exhaustive account of "how and why globalization has shifted into warp drive," Friedman describes the short swift time of information technology on earth, the complexities of globalization, the "triple convergence" of the free market, and the explosion of wealth in China and India that is "challenging the rest of us to run even faster."

In his theory of the triple convergence, Friedman holds up a small game company in Bangalore, India, as the perfect example that has enjoyed "enormous success" creating a game called "Saloon," based on a barman cleaning up a saloon in "an American Wild Wild West." Within a backdrop of 5,000 years of history and cultural achievements, in a country booming with green initiatives for sustainable development and village revitalization, Friedman claims this is "one of the most dynamic young pluggers and players" he has ever met in India.

Dynamic players? The next time he visits Brown University, or any campus, Friedman might want to sit in on a course on the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the towering literary figure in India who pioneered reforestation efforts and the sustainable village movement nearly a century ago.

After dazzling his readers with an impressive breakdown of world markets and technological innovations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Friedman arrives at page 460 in The World Is Flat with a moment of truth:

"To put it bluntly, I don't know how the flattening of the world will come out. Indeed, let me go even further and make a deeper confession: I know that the world is not flat.
Yes, you read me right: I know that the world is not flat. Don't worry. I know.

I am certain, though, that the world has been shrinking and flattening for some time now, and that process has quickened dramatically in recent years. Half the world is directly or indirectly participating in the flattening process or feeling its effect."

Friedman informs us that "as exciting and as visible as the flat Indian high-tech sector is, have no illusions: It accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India. Add those Indians involved in manufacturing for export, and you get a total of 2 percent of employment in India." In essence, out of a billion souls in India -- 70 percent of whom still live in agricultural-dependent villages -- over 980 million are not plugged in and playing on his flattened field.

The "bad news," Friedman concludes, "in Africa today, as well as rural India, China, Latin America, and plenty of dark corners of the developed world, is that there are hundreds of millions of people who have no hope and therefore no change of making it into the middle class." For Friedman, the only hope for these "dark corners" is to enter the flat world of free markets, service and industry, get an English education and join the urban infrastructure.

And it is here that Thomas Friedman's hugely bestselling work is not only dead wrong, but dangerously ill-informed, outdated and an anathema to the green movement (and to students and faculty at campuses across the country).

"While he was sleeping," as Friedman entitles his first chapter, he overlooks the fact that more than 150,000 Indian farmers committed suicide during the same period of this high tech boom, due to debt, unfair trade practices, and the upheaval from corporate-controlled genetically modified seeds and cash cropping -- one of the most devastating assaults on green development in rural areas. In the process, on a worldwide level, more than one billion dispossessed people -- a third of the world's urban population -- have tacitly followed Friedman's advice and moved into the phenomenon of the global slums, without any possibility of work or future, creating what the United Nations has recently defined as a "silent tsunami" and irreversible urban disaster of choking pollution, waste and desperate violence.

Nearly a decade ago, The International Institute for a Sustainable Future in Bombay (Mumbai), anticipated Friedman's reliance on the most misguided and outdated anti-green urban legend: The urban world and high tech economy will ultimately absorb and integrate the rural villagers into the flat world. Instead, as the International Institute wrote in one of their reports: "The situation continues to worsen in every major city of India, as it does in the major cities of other Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia, where one out of three urban inhabitants lives in gruesome settlements. By and large, the urban conditions of the majority of people in the cities of Africa and Latin America are as mercilessly cruel as in India and Asia -- the only difference being the magnitude and the level of poverty...The dreams of the millions for ease and material abundance, has become a nightmarish curse. What is our vision of the kinds of cities, towns, and villages in which we want to live? How do we create human settlements that function as self-sustaining eco-habitats?"

Far more than a pie in the face, these are some of the hard questions from the green movement -- especially on his disingenuous touting of "clean coal" -- that Thomas Friedman has been ducking for too long.

David Sirota: Health Care As the New Terrorist to Fear

2008-05-13T01:27:27Z

Thanks to America's health care system, today was a very stressful day for me. My story is so typical as to be boring -- which is a really sad commentary.

This morning, while thumbing through some routine paperwork, my wife discovered that I have no health insurance. Without going into the details, we missed a bi-annual deadline for payment -- a deadline that the company buried in fine print, and one that the company didn't even bother to tell us was approaching, or even missed after the fact. They just ended my coverage, with not so much as a letter or a phone call.

Fortunately for us, we discovered the situation before a 60-day continuity-of-coverage window closes, and I got temporary insurance. Of course, for bureaucratic reasons that I don't understand, I'm not allowed to re-enroll in the same plan I thought I was on. I have to wait to do that. Put another way, the health care company that had been gouging me, and then tossed me away without so much as a peep, is perfectly fine leaving me without coverage -- even if I'm willing to pay for it.

My initial reaction this morning was raw panic. Until the situation was resolved, I felt like I was going to periodically break down and cry because I felt so completely helpless. But now that the initial shock has passed, I can say I'm lucky in all of this.

I am a sole proprietor so I get gouged on health care, but my wife and I have worked hard to save diligently to pay for coverage through her graduate school (and to those who have flippantly claimed that because I'm a columnist and writer I make a whole ton of money, I will only say that the term "struggling writer" didn't come out of thin air - I ain't complainin' but I also ain't swimming in money). We have the resources, and thankfully, we caught this problem in time. But for every one of me who discovered the problem and had the resources to rectify it, there are probably 10 or 20 who either never figure out the problem until it's too late, can't pay to rectify the situation - or both. Just as frightening is how tiny an error you can make to watch your entire health care safety net be ripped away from you and your family.

Had I, say, been in a car accident in that time period that I didn't know I was cut off from coverage, I would have been bankrupted, and possibly not been able to pay for medical care that I needed to stay alive. That's not an exaggeration. Had I needed any kind of serious medical care in that time period, its very possible it would have cost me my entire life savings -- and the reason would be that we innocently missed a bureaucratic deadline that a company didn't even bother to warn us about -- or warn us that we had missed.

In a world of unending email and junk mail -- a world where the average person is flooded with paperwork -- this is an unacceptably small margin of error, especially considering what is at stake. I mean, we're not talking about losing a gym membership or a magazine subscription or your cable television for missing a deadline -- we're talking about losing access to life and death medical coverage. And yet, the margin of error that could lose you your coverage is less than the margin of error that a gym or a magazine or a cable company will grant you for their services.

This situation is emblematic of a health care system that is both immoral and broken. Throwing people off their health insurance with no warning because they accidentally misread fine print is sick and wrong -- and should be criminal like it is, say, with housing. In many localities, landlords have to give you at least some warning before evicting you for a missed payment. But unbelievably, that's not the way it is with health care.

The behavior is perfectly legal thanks to government policies that allow health insurance companies to do whatever they want, to whomever they want. And the behavior has created a whole new culture of fear. We now not only have to be afraid of Al Qaeda and hurricanes and evildoers, but also of the health insurance companies that we are customers of - and executives from these companies still have the nerve to go before Congress and publicly wonder why so many people hate their guts.

That this fear is now becoming an anger-based political uprising shouldn't be surprising. A population forced to live under this kind of terror -- and that's what it is -- is one that will start fighting back when the survival instinct kicks in. And by the looks of the polls on health care, the survival instinct has most definitely kicked in. Better late than never.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

Michael Standaert: China's Troubles: How to Help

2008-05-13T00:44:57Z

BEIJING: It's only five months into the year and it has been a pretty difficult one already for the Chinese. Massive snowstorms caused havoc earlier this year, then there was the turmoil in Tibet and the aftermath following the Olympic torch relay around the world, lately this EV71 virus that has killed over 30 and sickened thousands -- and now this major earthquake. The updated news on the massive 7.8 earthquake yesterday in Sichuan near the city of Chengdu is that close to 10,000 have died in an area populated by ethnic Han Chinese, Chinese Tibetans and Hui Muslim Chinese. The number of deaths will likely surge throughout the day and heavy rains are starting to make rescue efforts difficult. Premier Wen Jiabao's words just a little while ago don't sound very promising.

Here in Beijing at about 2:30pm yesterday I suddenly felt sick, like a bad case of food poisoning, and wondered if it was something I'd eaten for lunch. My wife messaged me that she thought it was an earthquake, and growing up in Taiwan she's had a lot of experience with them. That's when I noticed all my coworkers looking around at each other trying to figure out what was going on. People started saying an earthquake had hit so we filed out of the building and stood outside for several minutes before coming back in. When I found out the quake was in Sichuan I knew it must have been pretty bad. Beijing is pretty far away for us to have felt that much of it.

Through the afternoon I followed the data on the USGS website. Some interesting maps over here and according to their tally, there have been 25 aftershocks after the main earthquake, the latest being only a couple of hours ago and registering 4.8. That's not big, but I worry that even these small ones could bring down buildings already damaged by the main quake. With heavy rains starting to hit the area, the threat of landslides will certainly be a problem.

Some coincidences? I'm not superstitious but some of my Chinese friends are. One sent me this photo of frogs massing on Sunday in Jiangsu province, a day before the quake. I later found out that there is an old Chinese earthquake device called the "dragon jar" which has frogs on the sides that catch a ball in their mouths which corresponds to the direction the earthquake came from. As for numbers, which mean a lot in China ... usually the number 8 is a lucky number, but not yesterday. According to the Chinese calendar it was the 8th day of the 4th month of the year and 88 days before the Olympics. Add in that it was Buddha's birthday and you have a perfect storm of superstition going on.

Thankfully the Three Gorges Dam is safe. The rescue effort is ongoing and will likely take a while. Offers for assistance from the rest of the world are coming in.

So the reason I meant to write this in the first place was to point you to a few places where you can donate and also follow what's going on in Sichuan. If you want to help, there's information on how to do so at China Crossroads and Shanghaist.
The latter also has a good timeline of coverage from yesterday starting after the quake until early in the morning. Also check in at Global Voices, which has translations of bits of news from the area.

Early on, much of the news was coming across not through major media but via YouTube and Twitter. See coverage of this here, here and here.

Pres. Charles H.P. Smith, aka David Mamet: A Modest Proposal

2008-05-12T23:30:43Z

The Jews, kicked from pillar to post for two thousand years, have managed, as part of their eternal eviction, to get something right. At Christmastime, when the rest of us are preaching Good Cheer, and watching It's a Wonderful Life these outcasts gather on the dining room floor and gamble.

The game they play is called "dreidl." Now, a "dreidl" is a top with four sides. And each of the sides has a letter, and each letter, landing uppermost, tells the spinner the reward or penalty to which he is now subject.

What about if, in our ongoing contest of seemingly irreconcilable differences, instead of our interminable "legislative process," each side merely elected a Champion, and they "spun the dreidl?" Imagine: Four sides, for example: Abortion for All; Abortion for None; and, as two sides would be left over, Kiss the Hostess, and Imitate a Squirrel. Thus, that process productive of nothing but rancor would be recast as a parlor game. And everybody loves a parlor game. Remember "Post Office?!"

Your President, Charles H.P. Smith

www.novembertheplay.com

Stephen Ducat: Revenge of the Wimp Factor: The Ironies of Proving Manhood in the Democratic Primary

2008-05-12T23:10:25Z

Hi, I'm Hillary Clinton. But tonight, in honor of the WWE, you can call me Hill-Rod. This election is starting to feel a lot like "King of the Ring." The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman. -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, from her opening monologue prior to a World Wrestling Entertainment "joke" match between Clinton and Obama look-alikes.

What has become disturbingly evident in the last few months of the primary campaign is that Hillary Clinton is not merely carrying the torch of the "old politics." She is also the ironic bearer of the old masculinity, a knuckle-dragging version of manhood that is defined in terms of domination. In this view, "the man" is whoever can stick it to the other. It is the one who can eviscerate his or her enemy most savagely and with the least remorse. It is the one on top in a zero-sum world. In this curious mutation of patriarchy, anatomy is not destiny. But being a dick is.

Much is made of the penis. We talk about how to keep it hard, how to make it bigger, and who envies it. The public secret we keep from ourselves -- but at a deep level understand -- is that it is not the penis that matters most. That modest organ is, after all, vulnerable and easily deflated. The phallus is what most men and even some women in a male dominant culture covet, envy, think they possess, fear losing, or try to get back (usually, each of these at different times). In our still patriarchal world, this symbol, in blatant or subtle forms, shows up in our dreams, editorial cartoons, commercials, and political ads. It is often used to represent absolute domination, insensate hardness, omnipotence, unlimited wealth, invulnerability, untrammeled growth, or freedom from all dependency - and sometimes all of these unattainable qualities.

The problem, of course, is that this ancient archetypal monolith of manhood is an illusion. Nobody has one; it only exists if someone sees it. In spite of being an evanescent hallucination, political consultants spend much of their time trying to paint a phallus on their candidate. A line from the Tom Waits song "Step Right Up" could be read as a concise description of what a successful campaign does: "It gives you an erection. It wins the election."

In most electoral contests, the question is often "who's the man?" And the manner in which political manhood gets displayed is tiresomely predictable: macho chest beating, posing with the fetish objects of anxious masculinity (trucks, big machines, and even bigger weapons), humiliating your opponent with castrating insults, calling into question his or her ability to be tough, ruthless, and merciless with the designated enemy of the moment -- in short, phallic strutting. These are the bread and butter performances that keep the 24-hour cable infotainment channels in business, and frequently eclipse the issues of the day.

There is an astonishing irony in Senator Clinton flashing her "Hill-Rod," and striking poses that, in the admiring words of North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, make "Rocky Balboa look like a pansy." During her career as First Lady, Mrs. Clinton was widely reviled by her conservative detractors as a gender outlaw. Being smart, outspoken, a savvy investor, a policy wonk, and a woman who insisted on an egalitarian relationship with her husband, she was seen as a profound threat, a wife who did not know her proper (i.e., subordinate) place.

These sentiments got represented in numerous editorial cartoons that depicted her in male drag, using a men's urinal, and as a riding-crop-wielding dominatrix. Slick Times, a right wing humor magazine, featured jokes about her preferred method of birth control (vasectomy) and the reason she doesn't wear miniskirts ("so her balls won't show"). The cover of the October 1995 issue of Spy Magazine even retouched a photo of her to depict a discernible penile bulge under her clothing. This image accompanied an investigative article on her "dubious investments" that "performed extremely well." The headline, "Hillary's Big Secret," in equating the penis with money, revealed the phallic meaning her powerful financial dealings had for the authors, as well as for many of her conservative male critics.

During this same period images abounded of Bill Clinton as castrated, cross-dressing, feminized, and physically dominated and abused by his powerful wife. Interestingly, once the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfolded, things reversed. He was portrayed in cartoons and late night TV comedy monologues as studly, powerful, and potent. Hillary, now the wounded women standing by her man, was widely depicted in sympathic and stereotypically feminine terms. What may surprise many is that the approval ratings for both the President and the First Lady soared following the scandal. Many citizens, especially men, seemed relieved to see the gender order restored, and the phallus returned to our male leader. But if, unlike the lowly but attached penis, the phallus has a tendency to move around, this can open up opportunities for female politicians to overcome the still lingering impediments of misogynist bigotry. Gender, our cultural experiences tell us, is really only loosely associated with bodies, not tethered to them.

What could not be tolerated in Hillary the political wife turns out to be a significant advantage for Hillary the politician, or so her campaign managers seem to believe. In fact, Senator Clinton appears to have been positioning herself early on to wield the political phallus. Her vote for the Iraq war resolution seems less a mistake based on inaccurate information -- the data was readily available to her antiwar peers in the Senate, not to mention many national security scholars, as well as millions of ordinary Americans -- than a political calculation. She wanted to show her "testicular fortitude," as a supportive labor leader recently gushed at a campaign rally. It's the same reason "fight" has become her favorite verb. Last week she autographed a pair of red boxing gloves at a rally. Perhaps the most disturbing gesture of macho posturing has been her repeated threat to "obliterate" Iran if that nation's leaders attack Israel. Given that the Iranian people are unable to really make their leaders accountable, her threat is not only a genocidal one, but, were she to act on it, would constitute collective punishment.

Hillary Clinton seems not only willing to annihilate Iranians for political gain. She also appears happy to depopulate the Democratic Party in order to ensure her nomination. As I write this, news outlets are revealing her plans for what Thomas Edsall is calling the "nuclear option." In other words, she intends to use her influence on the members of the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee to force the votes that were gathered in the "outlaw" primaries of Florida and Michigan to be counted.

Some may ask a very reasonable feminist question that could challenge this argument: why must toughness, Machiavellianism, combativeness, or even swaggering bellicosity be viewed as masculine? They certainly needn't. But it is, as we have seen, Hillary Clinton herself, along with her surrogates, who have explicitly gendered those traits in the campaign. As the oleaginous Clinton loyalist, James Carville, has said, if Mrs. Clinton gave Obama one of her testicles, "they'd both have two."

What is so interesting and illuminating is that Hillary Clinton is not just engaging in a performance of martial hypermasculinity as a way of shoring up both her phallic and national security credentials. She is also donning the mantel of working class hero, aping every conceivable stereotype of white blue-collar manhood -- from beer swilling to gun toting to preening pugilism -- and, where possible, doing so from the back of a pickup truck. It must be said, however, unlike the many multimillionaire Republican men in power, such as George W. Bush and John McCain, she plays the good ole boy with convincing if increasingly unhinged gusto. Perhaps this is because men in politics so often make the worst male impersonators.

But beyond that, Hillary Clinton has long revealed an intuitive talent for masquerade, an ability to lose herself in whatever role a situation required. Her instincts as a protean politician enabled her to seamlessly shift from feminist intellectual and powerhouse lawyer deriding stay-at-home cookie bakers, to the betrayed housewife still loyal to her man, and beaming with pride over her cookie recipe. She can play the verklempt victim of male critics one moment, and a macho political predator the next. On a dime Senator Clinton can morph from a well informed authority on the nuances of economic policy to a we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-economists anti-intellectualism in response to the near unanimity of expert opinion criticizing her bogus gas tax "holiday" scheme.

Her double masquerade of gender and class has been so compelling to some working class male voters because it taps into a deep vein in the American collective political unconscious that dates from the founding of our nation, and one that Republicans have understood and effectively exploited for decades. In the 1840 presidential campaign, Martin Van Buren said his opponent, William Henry Harrison, was "a man who wore corsets, put cologne on his whiskers, slept on French beds, rode in a British coach, and ate with golden spoons from silver plates." Here in this example of early negative campaigning we have a clear illustration of the link American men have always made between effeminacy and aristocratic manners and privilege. It was, after all, George H. W. Bush's patrician patois and upper class mannerisms that led Newsweek in 1988 to suggest his greatest political vulnerability was "the wimp factor," and thereby coin a term that would become a permanent part of our political lexicon. Not only did this feminine attribution haunt the public career of Bush 41, Bush 43, as many have observed, has struggled to defend against and compensate for this legacy.

More recently, we have the example of Barack Obama, the black candidate raised by a poor single mother, being called an "elitist" because of his grace, equanimity, intellect, dismal bowling performance, and reluctance to completely inhale his Philly cheese-steak. This, along with his willingness to negotiate with enemies, we are told, should lead us to question whether he's man enough to be commander in chief. The Clinton crew, along with their chief ally, John McCain, have made strenuous efforts to define Obama as a cosseted and effeminate toff, whose pretty words only confirm his deficient manhood, and thereby his unfitness to lead the nation. When you think about it, Clinton's complaint against her opponent -- "you always want to talk" -- sounds oddly like the familiar kvetch that so many emotionally constricted sexist husbands direct at their more relational spouses.

In applying the GOP approach to feminizing male opponents, and directing class resentment away from the real elites, Hillary Clinton has gone beyond her more familiar adoption of the ruthless, sociopathic say-anything, dirty tricks politics of her erstwhile Rovian right wing enemies. She is reinforcing the conservative attempt to equate manhood with belligerence and predation. In addition, she is trotting out the well worn but still effective propaganda technique employed by this country's actual ruling oligarchy of wealth -- reducing class to personal style, taste, or the specific products people consume (brie versus Velveeta). Those who actually own or wield control over our shared resources are rendered invisible in this rhetorical sleight of hand.

Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Clinton campaign. His guiding political ethos has always been one of bridging but not overlooking divisions, while privileging dialogue, debate, and negotiation over conquest. This is not only a new politics. It is a new masculinity, one that is inclusive of those panhuman qualities previously disowned and projected onto women. It remains to be seen if Hillary Clinton, with her Hobbesian hard-on, will succeed in turning the Denver convention into a war of all against all. If so, the life span of the Democratic Party may be nasty, brutish, and short.

Stephen J. Ducat, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and has published widely on the psychology of politics. His most recent book is The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity.

Charlie Rose: My Conversation with Susan Schwab

2008-05-12T23:09:43Z

Trade has become a hot and much discussed political topic. Both Democratic candidates have criticized NAFTA and other free trade agreements for hurting U.S. workers. Last month the Bush administration's proposed Colombia free trade agreement was blocked in the House of Representatives. Other proposed trade deals with South Korea and Panama could also face tough scrutiny. I talked about the issue recently with the U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab.

Todd Gitlin: Russert Watch 5-11-08: In Which Hillary Surrogates Get Got

2008-05-12T22:06:01Z

[From the Columbia Journalism Review]

What’s a Sunday morning show to do when it specializes in political prophecy and the expectation is a foregone conclusion? Bring some players on, ask them routine questions, register their spin, try to trip them up when the spin is ridiculous, and move on.

By all conventional measures, the news is that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is sinking beneath the weight of arithmetic. Senator Chris Dodd, an Obama supporter, came on Meet the Press and said so, and since the arithmetic is on his side, he didn’t present any trip-up potential. Clinton proxy Terry McAuliffe, on the other hand, crammed himself into the absurd position of sticking up for the remote possibility of a game-changing event that could resurrect the expiring Clinton campaign. When he plumped for counting the Michigan votes in a primary where Obama’s name was not on the ballot, all McAuliffe could summon up in support of that argument was to insist that Obama had taken himself off the Michigan ballot. Russert countered with a passage from McAuliffe’s own book insisting that when it comes to the way the party chooses its delegates, “The rules are the rules.”

This is the sort of gotcha moment where Russert’s research staff excels, and McAuliffe must have known it. Russert offered no more than a perfunctory nod in the face of McAuliffe’s feeble prayer—for a bolt from the blue—he offered the pathetic historical precedent of a onetime come-from-behind victory by (surprise!) the Buffalo Bills. Nice try but no cigar.

The other morning “issue” was Clinton’s maladroit remark May 8 about “white Americans.” She referred to an Associated Press poll "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." Russert confronted McAuliffe with the thunderous objections from her supporter, Representative Charlie Rangel, and from The New York Times’s Bob Herbert, in the Saturday paper, charging her with arousing white West Virginia voters to see her as their champion and, in effect, to vote their race prejudice. Curiously, thrust into a corner, a possibly ill-briefed McAuliffe scrounged around but scraped up nothing but boilerplate to toss back.

He could have offered a defense to the effect that Clinton garbled her words. It could have been argued—myself, I’d be inclined to argue—that Clinton meant to say two distinct and true things, and erred when she crammed them into a single sentence: first, that she does better than Obama so far among white working-class voters; and second, that working class Americans are “hard-working.” This benign interpretation would hold that she was merely pandering-as-usual, though even so, this sort of constituency-calculating is the sort of thing that a candidate best leave to journalists and academics. It’s her business to present herself as potential president of all the people, not a slicer and dicer of factions. But I can’t believe that she was impugning black voters for not being “hard-working.”

Well, it’s not Russert’s job to untangle a candidate’s garbled syntax. (On the Stephanopoulos show, Harry Reid stumbled around trying to cast a rosier light on her words and then flatly gave up.) If she gaffes it up so badly that her surrogates can’t put out the fire, then maybe she’s not just “TOAST,” as the New York Post screamed last week, but burnt toast.

Sen. Carl Levin: Skyrocketing Energy Prices

2008-05-12T21:24:05Z

This afternoon, I'm speaking on the Senate floor about high energy prices. Unless something is done to make energy more affordable, the record-high prices will continue to reverberate throughout our economy, increasing the prices of transportation, food, manufacturing and everything in between. Skyrocketing energy prices are a threat to our economic and national security, and the time for action is long past.

One of the major causes of our energy crisis is the failed policies of the current administration. In January 2001, when President Bush took office, the price of oil was about $30 per barrel. The average price for a gallon of gasoline was about $1.50. Since President Bush took office, crude oil prices have nearly quadrupled, natural gas prices to heat our homes have almost doubled, gasoline prices have more than doubled, and diesel fuel prices have nearly tripled.

One key factor in price spikes of energy is rampant speculation in the energy markets. Traders are trading contracts for future delivery of oil in record amounts, creating a paper demand that is driving up prices and increasing price volatility solely to take a profit. Overall, the amount of trading of futures and options in oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) has risen six-fold in recent years, from 500,000 outstanding contracts in 2001, to about 3 million contracts now.

Speculators in the oil market do not intend to use crude oil; instead they buy and sell contracts for crude oil just to make a profit from the changing prices. Many speculators simply buy and hold whole baskets of commodities including energy commodities, just like other speculators hold a variety of stocks in a mutual fund, in the expectation that prices will continue to rise. The number of futures and options contracts held by speculators has gone from around 100,000 contracts in 2001, which was 20% of the total number of outstanding contracts, to 1.2 million contracts currently held by speculators, which represents almost 40% of the outstanding futures and options contracts in oil on NYMEX.

In January of this year, as oil hit $100 barrel, Mr. Tim Evans, oil analyst for Citigroup, wrote "the larger supply and demand fundamentals do not support a further rise and are, in fact, more consistent with lower price levels." The president and CEO of Marathon Oil recently said, "$100 oil isn't justified by the physical demand in the market. It has to be speculation on the futures market that is fueling this."

My Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has conducted four separate investigations into how our energy markets can be made to work better. Last December, we had a joint hearing with the Senate Energy Subcommittee on the role of speculation in rising energy prices. As a result of these investigations and hearings, for several years I have been advocating a variety of measures to address rising energy costs and the rampant speculation and lack of regulation of energy markets which have led to sky high energy prices:

• Put a cop back on the beat in the energy markets to ensure these markets are free from excessive speculation and manipulation;
• Stop filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve until prices are lower;
• Develop alternatives to fossil fuels to lessen our dependence on oil; and
• Impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies that have profited from the unjustified price increases.

Because the administration has proved itself unable and unwilling to take the necessary steps to provide affordable energy supplies to the American people, it is up to the Congress to try to jumpstart a comprehensive solution to skyrocketing energy prices.

Crossposted at MichiganLiberal.com.

David Fiderer: Republicans Are on a Different Planet, Posing Problems Into 2009

2008-05-12T21:06:45Z

George Bush's approval rating among Democrats is 1%. Among Republicans it's 67%. And among Independents it's 14%, according to the American Research Group poll last April. Every other poll shows substantially the same partisan disparity. News outlets talk about Bush's approval levels approaching "Nixonian" levels, but they shy away from acknowledging the obvious -- that the GOP has become marginalized from the American mainstream.

George Bush's Job Approval
CBS News: Democrats 12%. Independents 22%, Republicans 55%
Rasmussen: Democrats 11%, Independents 28%, Republicans 70%.
Gallup: Democrats 7%. Independents 26%, Republicans 60%

Disapproval of Bush's Job Performance
ARG: Democrats 95%. Independents 78%, Republicans 27%
CBS News: Democrats 87%. Independents 67%, Republicans 29%
Fox News: Democrats 82%. Independents 63%, Republicans 28%

As we begin to deal with the failures of the past eight years, will the political landscape be defined by a permanent Democratic majority and permanent Republican obstructionism? Democrats and Independents are on the same page; Republicans are on a different planet. Literally. Less than half of all Republicans believe there is solid evidence of global warming, compared to 84% of Democrats and 75% of Independents, according to a recent Pew poll. Republicans still support Bush's handling of the economy and believe that we should stay in Iraq until "we complete the mission."

Approval of Bush's Handling of the Economy
ARG: Democrats 1%, Independents 15%, Republicans 65%.

Respondents who say we should leave Iraq within a year of sooner:
Rasmussen: Democrats 89%, Independents 60%, Republicans 30%.

Respondents who say we should stay Iraq to complete the mission:
Rasmussen: Democrats 8%, Independents 34%, Republicans 66%.

Why did Republicans become so estranged from the rest of us? Because they still listen to the lying crackpots who got us into this mess. Facts never seem to discredit the likes of Charles Krauthammer or Fred Barnes because, as Arianna details in her book, the mainstream media still treats them with undeserved respect.

So David Brooks could offer up the same old nonsense in a different wrapping last Friday. "Newt Gingrich wrote a highly influential piece this week in Human Events, Brooks told The NewsHour,"where he said you can run that kind of event, that kind of [traditional Republican] campaign. [But] we know it does not work." What would work? Gingrich's "Nine Acts of Real Change That Could Restore the GOP Brand," which included:
"Repeal the gas tax for the summer,"
"Declare English the official language of government,"
"Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically," and
"Remind Americans that judges matter."

This is what Gingrich calls real change. And this is what David Brooks deems to be highly influential. Last year Gingrich told Fortune, "I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling and so deeply drawn upon the American people that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen." Which is more stunning, his grandiosity or his intellectual feebleness?

Republican spokesmen not only get indulged by the mainstream, they have a sanctuary in their own cable network, which sends the message that the other side is not to be believed. As a Pew survey noted last August, "being a Republican and a Fox viewer are related to negative opinions of the mainstream media." Gingrich appears on Fox News almost every other day. And only 41% of Republicans have a favorable view of national newspapers, versus 79% of Democrats.

Though the Republican party keeps losing support, Fox News holds on to its viewers. And since those viewers are older, they are more likely to show up at the polls. Historically, turnout has been more reliable among older voters than with any other segment. About 75% of Brit Hume's viewers or Bill O'Reilly's viewers are outside of the 25-54 age range coveted by advertisers. (I assume that few of the non-25-54 viewers are younger than 25. Most young people get their news from the internet.)

The GOP seems incapable of reforming itself. Its base is in deep denial. So-called moderate Republicans -- John Sununu, Norm Coleman, Gordon Smith -- are the ones with the dimmest prospects for reelection. In any event, the moderates have proved to be spineless and ineffectual, as we saw when Arlen Specter declined ask Alberto Gonzales to swear under oath, and when Susan Collins refused to subpoena the White House when investigating Katrina. And of course, there's John McCain, who doubled down on the Bush tax cuts and on the Bush surge. He opposed opportunities for bipartisanship when he rejected the Baker-Hamilton Commission recommendations, and when he rejected Senator Webb's bill on veterans' benefits.

McCain and the Republican leadership remain wedded to Gingrich's last-man-standing style of politics, which sacrifices the greater good for the sake of making the other side, i.e. Congress, look bad. That approach has been largely effective, in the sense that disapproval of Congress is consistent across party lines.

Congressional Job Approval
Fox News: Democrats 20%. Independents 27%, Republicans 22%

"Congress is doing a good or excellent job"
Rasmussen: Democrats 18%. Independents 10%, Republicans 10%

In 2009, when we have a new president and Democratic majorities in Congress, we will be able to confront the Bush legacy and deal with our problems. But there's every reason to expect that Americans will be in a recriminatory mood. Irrespective of blame, the cold facts are that the U.S. Army has been substantially destroyed, Social Security has been bankrupted, Iran's influence in Iraq will expand as U.S troops are forced to withdraw, the mortgage crisis will not be over, economic competition from China and India will accelerate, and global warming will trigger more humanitarian crises. And Republicans are very effective in stirring up resentment and in thwarting compromise. This is what Gingrich's Republican revolution was all about.

Despite all the talk about the GOP hearing a wake-up call, we should expect more of the same. Remember, the McCain campaign consults with the White House and receives advice from the new political analyst at Fox News, Karl Rove.

Joseph Romm: McCain Climate Plan a Fraud, Relies on Unlimited Hot Air

2008-05-12T20:53:05Z

Sen. John McCain announced his long-awaited climate plan today. Ironically, he made the announcement at a Danish wind turbine company in Oregon -- ironic because like so many conservatives before him, he has worked hard to kill off the domestic wind industry (see here).

Much worse, though, his plan's cost-containment strategy for his climate policy is a fraud. It substitutes a huge amount of low cost, phony emissions reductions both here and abroad -- called offsets -- for actual domestic emissions reductions. Offsets are "credits for reductions made from sectors of the economy outside the trading system."

Such an offset strategy is little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and would "involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions," according to a recent analysis by Stanford. Ironically, one of the carbon offsets that McCain explicitly cites, no till farming, does not actually offset carbon emissions, according to the latest science.

KEEPING CARBON COSTS LOW

Every major cap & trade bill needs a strategy to keep the cost of the emissions permits as low as possible to minimize economic pain and to stop politicians from trying to undo the entire system, by, say ... oh, just hypothetically now ... demanding a carbon price holiday whenever prices get too high or the economy starts to slow (see "McCain reveals cynicism, hypocrisy with call for summer gas-tax holiday, energy budget freeze.")

Progressives like Sen. Obama typically embrace aggressive clean energy deployment strategies as well as smarter regulations that promote efficiency (see "Could a President Obama or Clinton stop global warming?"). Sen. McCain, like most conservatives, does not support such strategies and indeed has routinely oppose them (see Part 1). Unfortunately, without such policies, the price for carbon could easily reach hundreds of dollars per metric ton (as I explain in "No Climate for Old Men"), causing economic harm and a political backlash.

Another strategy for cost containment is a safety valve, a ceiling on the permit price. A safety valid is a terrible idea that undermines the whole point of a cap & trade (see here and here). Fortunately, McCain opposes a safety valve, as he explains in the newly released "Q&A: John McCain's Climate Platform." You can also read his new talking points and fact sheet and the speech itself. But the "Q&A" is the most important of all those.

This leaves McCain very few options if he wants a bill that keeps costs low. Sadly, he takes absolutely the worst possible option -- unlimited offsets.

A TITANIC EMBRACE OF OFFSETS

A new report from Stanford, "A Realistic Policy on International Carbon Offsets," quantifies what many of us have been saying for a long time -- offsets are mostly junk. That's why they are so much cheaper than real reductions. Coauthor David Victor, Director of Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, has explained the study shows

... "between a third and two thirds" of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) -- set up under the Kyoto treaty to encourage emissions reductions in developing nations -- do not represent actual emission cuts.

The study's stark conclusion:

... any offset market of sufficient scale to provide substantial cost-control for a cap-and-trade program will involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions.

With that context, let's look at McCain's policy as elaborated in his Q&A:

Q: Your support of unlimited offsets in the early phases of required GHG reductions could be considered by some to be "cap busters" if they are not accurately measured and verified. With the difficulty in measuring things like soil carbon sequestration, will these credits be real?

A: Yes, the offset credits will indeed be real, measurable and verifiable -- or they won't be certified and allowed into the market.

The advances in understanding soil carbon content and new technologies that literally scan the soil and measure the baseline soil carbon content and any changes that occur over time provide the ability to measure and monitor soil carbon sequestration.

Offset credits from methane are easily measured. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent in terms of global warming potential, than CO2. When methane is captured from manure -- through an anaerobic digester or by burning it, it is ultimately turned into CO2 -- a much less intensive GHG. Methane capture also allows for the creation of bio-gas, a potential alternative to natural gas -- and an extremely low carbon fuel since it is generated from waste. Offset credits generated in this way are permanent and easily measured.

[Note: The fact that methane emissions reductions are easily measured are precisely why they don't need to be offsets, but in fact can easily be made part of the actual cap & trade system.]

The issue of measurement, monitoring and verification of agriculture and forestry offsets has been worked on at great length and in cooperation with multiple universities. The research basis is there for recognizing these kinds of reductions -- and we will continue to inform the policy of offset accreditation according to the latest agronomy and environmental science.

[Yes, McCain loves soil offsets. The feeling is not mutual, as we will see.]

Q: Why is Senator McCain proposing unlimited offsets in his climate plan?

A: Offsets permit significant reductions in compliance costs. In the past, it has been shown that unlimited offsets would reduce compliance costs by 71 percent. Offsets are a very important bridge, especially in the early years, to the time when we have lower-carbon technologies available on a commercial wide scale.

Unlimited offsets would not weaken the cap because the offsets will be certified, measured, and verifiable. The science of climate change supports the use of offsets.

[Uhh, note to McCain -- not really.See Stanford report and below.]

John McCain's plan would seek to establish a dedicated and focus plan to ensure that offsets are real, measurable and verifiable. We must ensure the public and the markets that a ton of carbon reduction purchased is indeed a ton of carbon reduction.

Q: A recent McKinsey report said there is very low-cost "low hanging fruit" that can be used to reduce green house gas emissions. Does your plan capture those reductions?

A: The "low hanging fruit" refers to those emission reductions that are easy and inexpensive to make. These reductions can be achieved by industry doing a range of things from tightening of valves and no till farming to changing to more energy efficient light bulbs.

[Here is where McCain gets very confused. He mixes energy efficiency (tightening valves, better light bulbs) -- a crucial cost-reduction strategy that can only be achieved at large scale with smarter regulations and technology deployment strategies that McCain does not support -- with classic offsets (no till farming), a non-strategy.]

A: The voluntary carbon market in North America is continuing to grow and is now over $250 million according to a report from New Carbon Finance North America. The World Bank has reported that the global carbon market is over $64 billion. Needless to say, these are significant numbers.

[Yes, and the leader in the voluntary climate market, the Chicago Climate Exchange, itself uses no till farming projects as an offset -- and their offset effort is very controversial, as this Washington Post article explains.]

A: It is in the best interest of the United States and industry itself to achieve any reductions possible. Achieving these reductions will only make the nation and industry more efficient which helps tremendously from a competitive perspective.

My policy would allow for unlimited use of offsets. Because many of these offsets are less expensive to achieve, they would be more cost effective than limiting the compliance options for industry in making their emission reductions. This flexibility is proving to be very effective in reducing the cost of the cap and trade program as well as providing us a bridge to the time when we can commercialize lower-carbon emissions technology, such as nuclear power and carbon capture and storage.

[Note to McCain: Uhh, this may come as a shock to you, Senator, but nuclear power is commercial. It ain't low cost, but it is commercial! Was that a bizarre Freudian slip by the McCain team?]

NO EVIDENCE NO TILL FARMING OFFSETS CARBON

What McCain fails to understand is that the reason offsets are so much less expensive than actual emissions reductions is because they are junk. Many if not most of the offsets don't actually offset anything at all, as the Stanford report argues, and as I myself have repeatedly argued on this blog (see the many posts in the "offsets" category).

The perfect example of this is the offset that McCain himself touts the most -- no till farming. Now while McCain's imaginary questioner notes "the difficulty in measuring things like soil carbon sequestration," the conservative nominee seems unaware that soil science has completely passed him by. Here is the abstract of a major review article from 2006/2007 in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, "Tillage and soil carbon sequestration--What do we really know?"

It is widely believed that soil disturbance by tillage was a primary cause of the historical loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) in North America, and that substantial SOC sequestration can be accomplished by changing from conventional plowing to less intensive methods known as conservation tillage. This is based on experiments where changes in carbon storage have been estimated through soil sampling of tillage trials. However, sampling protocol may have biased the results. In essentially all cases where conservation tillage was found to sequester C, soils were only sampled to a depth of 30 cm or less, even though crop roots often extend much deeper. In the few studies where sampling extended deeper than 30 cm, conservation tillage has shown no consistent accrual of SOC, instead showing a difference in the distribution of SOC, with higher concentrations near the surface in conservation tillage and higher concentrations in deeper layers under conventional tillage. These contrasting results may be due to tillage-induced differences in thermal and physical conditions that affect root growth and distribution. Long-term, continuous gas exchange measurements have also been unable to detect C gain due to reduced tillage. Though there are other good reasons to use conservation tillage, evidence that it promotes C sequestration is not compelling.

Doh! In short, there is no scientific evidence that no till farming offsets carbon emissions. In that sense, I'm afraid, it is the definitive carbon offset.

If emissions reductions can be done through a rigorous and verifiable process, then they can and should be included in the overall cap. The probability that there are offset-like emissions reductions floating around the ether that are both abundant and cheap is quite small. That is why a major offset-based strategy would "involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions," as the Stanford study concluded. That report's policy conclusion:

We argue that the U.S., which is in the midst of designing a national regulatory system, should not rely on offsets to provide a reliable ceiling on compliance costs....

Offsets can play a role in engaging developing countries, but only as one small element in a portfolio of strategies....

The entire foundation of McCain's climate plan is built on quicksand.