Hillary's Assassination Talk

Hillary's assassination comment is regrettable, and it is rather sad that she is getting pilloried for it. Frankly, she deserves it. Many americans probably believe that we do not have a history of political violence of any note. I think that is mistaken on two fronts. First, we do have a long history of assassinations and assassination attempts against presidents in the United States. Secondly, we have a long long history of other political violence.

In the first instance, every president since Nixon have had at least one assassination attempt, according to the ever reliable wikipedia. Now, some of those are less credible than others, but that doesn't make them less important. For example, the plot to blow up George H.W. Bush in Kuwait or the guy shooting at the White House hoping to kill Clinton are not the same as Squeaky Fromme trying to shoot Ford, or Hinckley trying to impress Jody Foster. The fact still remains that while Eisenhower and Johnson were both not shot at, every president since Roosevelt has had some form of attempt on their life. That seems like a pretty decent history of political violence regarding assassination of presidents.

The second history of political violence is much less talked about. Within this group would be America's history with lynchings at the end of the 19th century through the early 20th century. This history is not was much discussed within the polity of the United States and has much greater bearing on why Hillary's comments are so offensive. In light of this history of white people attacking black people simply wanting to be americans, the statement should not be made.

I know that Clinton's point was not to suggest what came across, but she should have been more mindful of the context of this election, and the history of the United States, before she made the statement.

Lost in the When will another woman run fray.

So over at Salon, Katharine Mieszkowski writing on Broadsheet wrote THIS

With Hillary Clinton less likely every day to be the Democratic nominee for president, the guessing game is to try to predict when the first American woman will serve as commander in chief.

I have seen much more of this discussion lately, wherein feminist commentators discuss when we will see the next woman to run for President, and whether or not it will be another "generation" till it occurs like the 24 years between Ferraro and Clinton.

I have several issues with this discussion. First, dabbling within the identity politics kiddie pool, this commentary seems to almost lament the fact that Clinton's not getting the nomination is going to set women back for another generation. How this operates I do not know, and is rarely explained. This line of commentary does not assess real factors, like the differences in the numbers of women politicians in 1984 and 2008. I am assuming that there has been a real increase in the number of women politicians holding potentially presidential springboard offices since 1984. In the specific article above, the author describes a hypothetical next woman presidential candidate with the admonishment that "she might not even exist." I am sorry, but Kathy Sebelius, Janet Napolitano, and Claire McCaskill are all future potential presidential candidates for the Democrats. At least, they should consider themselves such.

Another issue I have with this feminist handwringing is that, again playing identity politics, blacks have NEVER gotten as close as Ferraro did in 84, or as Obama has now. A fair question is who would be the next black candidate in the position of Clinton or Obama? To be fair, I would say Deval Patrick and Harold Ford might be in that position, but I think neither are as close as the three women I mentioned.

War and Resources

One thing that occurred to me this morning upon reading Andrew Leonard's latest post at How the World Works at Salon was how wrong those who predicted resource wars have been. The standard claim, grossly oversimplifying, is that as resources run out, countries would go to war to secure resources necessary to their economies. Resources like oil. I personally do not know if we are at peak oil or not. I just don't feel qualified to make that determination. I do know, however, that the United States is not going to fight wars to secure oil in the future. The basic calculus has to be the cost of a war to secure oil versus the price of alternatives to an oil based economy. The reality is that the cost of war, including the physical costs and reputational costs, is simply too high for such a war to be an effective instrument of policy. It will simply be cheaper to develop alternatives in the United States and on the world market than to use an expensive blunt instrument of state policy such as war to secure energy for the economy of the future.

What of the Iraq war? I know many on the left see the Iraq war as exactly the type of war I am saying will never happen. The fact of the matter is that the primary motivations for the Iraq War did not develop out of the board rooms of the administration's oil buddies, but instead came from the think tanks of the neoconservative hawks. The claimed benefit of using Iraqi oil to pay our costs in the was not a motivating factor, but instead just some lagniappe.

CNN's Headline T-Shirts

CNN.com now has a feature where you can order a T-Shirt with a headline from cnn.com on it. This makes me wonder if now that they have an even greater financial interest in their headlines, are they going to start coming up with loony headlines simply to sell T-shirts? I think we have the first evidence in a headline they have up today to a story that has been around for a couple of days. The headline says "Crazy ants chew through electrical cords." The story has been about an ant infestation in Houston, Texas.

Frankly, I think this is a great development for news organizations.

Banner Year for Democrats?

A banner year for Democrats or a banner year for Liberals?

A lot of people in the proverbial liberal blogosphere have looked at the recent victory by the Democrat in the Mississippi special election as evidence of the impending liberal landslide in the fall. I think many in the blogosphere are conflating a Democratic landslide in the fall with a liberal landslide in the fall. They are two different things, and this distinction needs to be constantly kept in mind or liberals are setting themselves for grand disappointment in 2009 when their agenda doesn't get enacted in its entirety. Now, normally, I don't care about individuals' levels of disappointment. However, in this instance, I think this issue is important because of what it can mean for the Democratic party. To provide an alternative to the Republicans the Democratic party needs to show itself to be different in many ways. Simply becoming doctrinaire and dogmatic as to what the party believes is a surefire way to repeat the mistakes of the Republicans. The Democratic party needs to be inclusive of those more moderate to conservative members of the party who are going to be entering it as the Republicans continue to collapse. Part of the distinction the Democrats can draw is as a party that respects intellectual and political difference within reason and as a place of respectful discussion of issues and national policy. I am not talking about tolerating Joe Lieberman's though. Lieberman is a specific example of someone who has used his position as a Democrat (in the past) to attack other Democrats, and the Democratic agenda, by playing to the repentant sinner archetype in American politics.

A link

I want to throw this up and I will comment on it after while.


http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/29/autos/gas_engine_improvements/index.htm

I put this up a week or so ago, because what I found most interesting was the "Experts" cited in the article. All of them are from the American automobile manufacturers. No independent experts, no Japanese experts, no German experts. All of these "experts" come from companies who have been hemorrhaging money for some time now, and whose primary products are singularly unsuited to a world of high gas prices. Of course they are going to reach the conclusions they reach in the article, that the gasoline engine is here to stay. If you are GM and you don't have 10 years experience building hybrids like Toyota, you are going to see hybrid technology as expensive and complicated. The article was hilarious.

Oil Independence

I think it is time we change our rhetoric on oil independence. It has been common since 9/11 for many people to talk about the need for foreign oil independence because the money going to the middle east helps fund terrorism. On a geopolitical level, this logic makes sense. In fact, some version of this idea has been around since at least the 1970s with the first oil shocks, in that it has been viewed as a bad thing for the United States to be so dependent upon foreign oil. I think it is time for a change in the way we think about this issue though. Namely, we need to stop talking about getting off foreign oil, or achieving foreign oil independence, and start talking about achieving oil independence in general.

It seems readily apparent that tying our economy to one commodity such as petroleum has been a terribly bad idea as we begin to see the effects of that choice upon the broader economy. Reduced consumer spending is going to become a reality as long as we live in a period of the 100 dollar fill up. It is obvious to me as well that slowly things will simply change. Humans have lived through periods of expensive energy before, namely any period before the invention of the automobile and the exploitation of petroleum as a means to power those automobiles, and will be able to adjust to a new reality of expensive petroleum based energy sources. It is likely though, that this period will be economically painful. These reasons make the necessity finding new energy bases for our economy imperative. One place I think we should start is instead of talking about independence from foreign oil, we should be talking about moving away from using oil altogether. Changing our rhetoric will be easy. However, I do not know how we will ultimately achieve the specific change in policy, and at the risk of sounding flippant, I am sure something will come up.

What I mean more accurately is increasing costs of petroleum energy sources make alternatives much more viable as technological and market development reduce costs of those alternatives. The result of this is two cost lines on a graph, one the increasing cost of oil based energy sources and the other a decreasing cost of bringing certain technologies to market that will coalesce around a new point that will be how society then becomes based. For example, from say 1920 to 1960, roughly, trains and streetcars were the primary mode of transportation for many people in this country whether locally or long distance. Following the beginning of construction of the interstate highway system, and all federal highways in general, and the development of the jet liner, the system of transit in this country moved to an automobile/bus/airplane equilibrium. We are now in a position, due to rising oil prices, in which that equilibrium is unsustainable, and will change again.

Hopefully it will change back to trains.

I like trains.

Okay to be Racist!

So, talkingpointsmemo.com has the headline up that Obama loses working class whites to Clinton in a landslide.

What is interesting to me about this to me is that I think the Jeremiah Wright business has obviously hurt Obama amongst working class white voters, but not quite in the way most people think. Frankly, I think that the Jeremiah Wright business has given working class voters a reason to vote on their baser instincts. Namely, voting out of racism. Any squeamishness those voters would have had about Obama before could have been swallowed to vote for him in absence of the Wright controversy. However, since Wright has been all over the news, those voters can now say to themselves and the media, well I really don't agree with Wright, so I am not voting for Obama for that reason. In reality they were uneasy voting for a black guy in the first place, and are just using Wright as convenient excuse. The reason I believe this to be true is that if Wright was really as damaging to Obama overall as it appears based off Obama's loss amongst working class whites, then Obama would have lost whites across the board, and just not within that one subset of the white vote. Obviously, Obama hasn't lost support amongst whites across the board, so it leads me to think that the Reverend Wright business is operating only amongst working class whites for a reason beyond just what Wright has said. The intervening variable I believe is operating is latent working class white racism. The Wright controversy has made it okay to express that racism by giving it the veneer of reasoned argument of "well I really disagree with what Wright said."

On another note, I was listening to one of the things Wright said at the national press club about the way white kids and black kids learn and think. At one point, Wright claimed that white kids primarily think and learn with the left brain, whereas black kids think and learn with the right brain. I trust that Wright is educated enough to have read a study on this point somewhere. The problem with this logic, and any study designed to show this, is that it is impossible to prove. Well, maybe not impossible, but damn near. In complicated bio-chemical reactions like what takes place in the brain, one would expect to find some type of structure that leads to this claimed differentiation. However, I almost guarantee no such a morphological difference exists between the brains of white and black children. I suppose if one really wanted to test this proposition, one could try teaching children of both races the same topic and use one of them fancy machines (MRI? EKG?, I dunno, hence fancy machines) to see if there is any difference in the areas of the brains stimulated by that topic. I would be willing to make a hefty bet that there wouldn't be such a difference.