Eliza Gilkyson on the Incompetence of the Neo-Cons

From my piece in the Ventura County Reporter, available here, on Eliza Gilkyson. This fascinating folk-singer had some tough words for the neo-cons:

“When we elected the neo-cons, I think we all expected that they would
be able to keep the balls in the air a little longer than they have,”
she said. “I thought the timing of this record would be all wrong, and
they would be able to maintain a semblance of normalcy at least until
the election.”

Off to see some more music (Neil Young, Death Cab, etc). Back Tuesday…

Quote of the Week

From the ever-marvelous Joel Achenbach:

There
isn't one pundit in America — not one human being, for that matter —
who could have predicted that a black man would run for president in
2008 and would wind up being called an arugula-eating, passionless
elitist who doesn't know what it's like to be a plumber. We live in
mysterious times.


Achenbach ignores all the other mud thrown at Obama — terrorist, socialist, defeatist, etc. — but his point stands. It's worse to be an elitist today in public life than it is to be a black man. Guess you call that progress.

The Closed-Door President

Has this ever happened before in American electoral history? President Bush is so unpopular that he has not appeared in public in a single event in support of a Republican candidate this election year.

According to CBS News:

Not once this year has President Bush appeared in public at a campaign rally for the Republican Party or any of its candidates…It makes it laughable what McCain said seven months ago in the
Rose Garden with Mr. Bush: “I intend to have as much possible
campaigning events together, as it is in keeping with the President's
heavy schedule. And I look forward to that opportunity.”

It might prove to be the biggest whopper McCain has uttered during his presidential campaign.

[pic from Yan Zhang, via Flickr]

Bush

Why Sarah Palin Needed a $150,000 Makeover

According to Federal election campaign records found by Politico, Sarah Palin has spent over $150,000 in the last two months on clothes and hair styling, including $49,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and $75,000 at Neiman-Marcus. (By contrast, the most Hillary spent on clothes in her long campaign was $3,000.)

Why so much? Maybe this picture from Getty Images, via the Los Angeles Times, offers a clue…

Valleytrash

How Paul Wolcker Helped Obama Foresee the Meltdown

An absolutely fascinating piece in today's Wall Street Journal reveals why Obama was so prescient about the housing crisis. In brief:

When he was still a longshot candidate, long before the first primary, he met and impressed Paul Volcker. Volcker was chief of the Federal Reserve back in Reagan's era. For years Volcker's reputation has been eclipsed by Alan Greenspan's, but now that Greenspan is in disrepute for allowing the deficit to explode and the economy to meltdown, people are remembering Paul Volcker more fondly.

Volcker, in turn, impressed Obama.

The result? Obama foresaw the housing crisis, and spoke with it when the government could have stepped in avert a crisis — back in September of last year, long before the meltdown. The gist:

The bond between Messrs. Obama and Volcker started with a dinner
invitation. In June 2007, Mark Gallogly, co-founder of Centerbridge
Partners, a New York private-investment firm, and an early supporter of
Sen. Obama, invited a dozen financial executives to meet the senator,
including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. President Gary Cohn, Merrill Lynch & Co. President Greg Fleming and Mr. Volcker.

Along with the invitation, Mr. Volcker received from Mr. Gallogly a
"briefing package" containing some speeches by Sen. Obama and news
articles about him. Mr. Volcker also read the two books written by the
senator.

In the private dining room at a Capitol Hill restaurant, Mr.
Gallogly seated Mr. Volcker directly across from Sen. Obama, who at the
time was considered a long shot to win the Democratic nomination over
Sen. Hillary Clinton. Returning late that night on a flight to New
York, Mr. Volcker told the group he was "genuinely impressed" with the
Illinois senator.

That message was eventually passed along to Sen. Obama's advisers in
New York, Michael Froman, a friend from Harvard Law School and a Citigroup
Inc. executive, and Jenny Yeager, a fund-raiser. Ms. Yeager told Obama
headquarters in Chicago that Mr. Volcker seemed "interested" in the
candidate, but in two months no one had followed up with the ex-central
banker for fund raising or anything else.

When Sen. Obama's economics adviser, Mr. Goolsbee, heard about Mr.
Volcker's interest, he immediately got excited. "Paul Volcker is a
legend! We don't want to use his contacts for money, we want to pick
his brain," he recalls saying to a campaign operative.

Starting in late summer 2007, Mr. Goolsbee had regular discussions
with Mr. Volcker. He incorporated Mr. Volcker's ideas, including his
early concern that the housing downturn would snowball into a larger
financial crisis, into Sen. Obama's policy positions. In a September
2007 speech at Nasdaq, Sen. Obama predicted that because of oversight
lapses and abusive practices that cause the public to doubt financial
results, "the markets will be ravaged by a crisis in confidence."

Or, as they say in the Bush administration…something "no one could have imagined."

[pic of Paul Volcker from a few years ago, delivering report to UN on oil-for-food program, via adamroam]

PaulVolcker

 

Good News Friday: Global Warming Lessening Santa Ana Wind Conditions

Don't have time to get into the nitty-gritty of the details today, but here's the gist: a team of researchers at UCLA led by Professor Alex Hall is reporting that anthropogenic global warming is reducing by about one-third the pressure in the Great Basin that builds every year and leads to dangerous Santa Ana wind conditions.

As the pressure gradually decreases, the frequency and intensity of these winds is decreasing as well. Santa Ana winds depend on a build up of high pressure systems over the Great Basin in eastern California, Nevada, and Utah in fall and sometimes in winter. This pressure builds and is drawn towards  low pressure systems over the ocean off Los Angeles. But as the land warms, fewer icy desert nights reduce the difference in temperature between the air over the desert and the air over the ocean. This inhibits the production of the most powerful of these hot, blustery winds.

The risk is not eliminated — as the Porter Ranch fire this week shows — but Hall's team says the research "suggests the reduction in the frequency [of Santa Ana winds] could lead to reduced wildfire in Southern California."

Here's a link to a page where the study is available, under the title Anthropogenic Reduction of Santa Ana Winds.

More soon in the VC Reporter. For now, take a look at a chart at a declining trend (the black dotted line) in the high pressure on its home turf in the Great Basin during the Santa Ana season over the past several decades, a trend the researchers are confident will continue to strengthen.

(Admittedly, one could cherry-pick a very different and much more ominous trend-line, from the low in l982 to a high in 2003, but that would fly in the face of what the physics projects.)

Reduction in high pressure over Great Basiin

Inside, Outside, and Giggling at the GOP Bubble

Inside the GOP bubble:    DRUDGE POLL WHO WON THE FINAL PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE?...

MCCAIN
74% 103,957

OBAMA
25% 35,541

NEITHER
1% 1,785

Total Votes: 141,283

http://polls.eproof.com/78.jsOutside the GOP bubble (via TPM)

In the CBS poll of undecided debate-watchers, 53% say Obama won, only 22% say McCain won, and 24% say it was a tie.

The CNN poll was just read on the air, surveying all debate-watchers
in general. It shows 58% saying Obama won, to 31% saying McCain won.
Barack Obama's personal ratings are 66% favorable to 33% unfavorable,
way ahead of McCain's score of 49%-49%.

Late Update: Some more numbers from the CNN poll were just
read on TV. Obama was seen as stating his ideas more clearly by
66%-25%, was seen as the stronger leader by 56%-39%, and was more
likable by 70%-22%. McCain did win in one category: He's the candidate
who launched more attacks on his opponent, by a whopping 80%-7%.

Late Late Update: Independents, who made up 30% of CNN's sample, gave it to Obama 57%-31%, essentially the same as the overall margin for Obama.

Best Wrap-Up of the Night (Gail Collins):

Obama is like the coolest, most popular camper [at summmer camp]. You can’t wait to see
him again after school starts. Then you discover that back in real
life, he’s founder of the Model Boat Society and the president of the
Safety Club. And McCain is like the head counselor who led all the
hikes and who you wished was your older brother. Until you realized
that he spent the cold weather hanging out at a biker bar and watching
reruns of “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

Best Visual Snap of the Night (via Ezra Klein):

Yes, John, they're firm and well-shaped. But you can't touch.

Firm and well-shaped

Conservatism Loses Its Head

From an intriguing Los Angeles Times op-ed this Monday:

In the early 1960s, writers at William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review
knew that conservatism, like all political movements, needs a head as
well as a heart. In a confidential memo, Frank Meyer, the National
Review's leading theorist, made distinctions between the "establishment
of responsible leadership" and "instinctive" conservatives who followed
the call of "know-nothing leaders." A responsible conservative
leadership, Meyer said, needed to tame the "vital forces" of the hard-core populist right.

But nearly half a century later, that generation is gone or fading
fast, and McCain's campaign choices should make us all wonder who is in
charge of America's conservative party now: its heart or its head? It's
not clear that anyone on the right has stepped up to become today's
"responsible cop of the conservative beat," as one historian described
Buckley.

In his 2005 book, "Democracy and Populism,"
conservative historian John Lukacs expressed his fear that democracy is
degenerating into ersatz populism, which tends to unite people more on
the basis of whom they despise rather than what they believe in.
Contemporary conservatives, he wrote, have learned to muster majorities
by evoking disdain not against foreign but domestic enemies. He
suggested that the movement is in the hands of two contending factions:
those whose "binding belief" is their contempt for their enemies, who
hate them more than they love liberty, and those who love liberty more
than they fear their enemies.

Sound familiar? Put that book on my Abebooks list…