At the risk of sounding like Gallagher, why do you sauté stuff in a fry pan, and fry stuff in a sauté pan? I’m no professional, but if I need to sauté something, I’m grabbing the “fry pan,” and if I’m pan-frying something, I’m virtually always grabbing the “sauté pan.” And I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.
It really bugs me how the NHL lists its standings. Setting aside our well-documented objection to the evil OTL point, the fact that the NHL lists standings in terms of points only is just silly. As of Tuesday night, here’s how the Eastern Conference Standings look according to the NHL:
It’s Obama:
U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) today introduced binding and comprehensive legislation that not only reverses the President’s dangerous and ill-conceived escalation of the Iraq war, but also sets a new course for U.S. policy that can bring a responsible end to the war and bring our troops home.
“Our troops have performed brilliantly in Iraq, but no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else’s civil war,” Obama said. “That’s why I have introduced a plan to not only stop the escalation of this war, but begin a phased redeployment that can pressure the Iraqis to finally reach a political settlement and reduce the violence.”
The Obama plan offers a responsible yet effective alternative to the President’s failed policy of escalation. Realizing there can be no military solution in Iraq, it focuses instead on reaching a political solution in Iraq, protecting our interests in the region, and bringing this war to a responsible end. The legislation commences redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007 with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008, a date that is consistent with the expectation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
My issues with Obama have always been that he seems to have a tendency to slip into Clinton-ian triangulation instead of standing for progressive values. Well, there is no triangulation here. Obama has the correct position on the most important issue of the day and he has taken it at a time when the large portions of the press still considers staying the course the height of leadership and manliness. The press is wrong. This is what leadership looks like.
As of right now, Obama is my choice.
How come there’s no “Print” option in my right-click menu? How do I make there be one? IE has one. And I’m at a web page that I’m supposed to print, only it opened in a new window that doesn’t have any menus or toolbars, so without the context-sensitive “Print” option, I can’t print.
Firefox is a wonderful product otherwise. How could they have overlooked this?
UPDATE: Commenter Paul Kim provides a solution in comments. It’s non-trivial, but it’s a solution that works. Thanks!
Gregg Easterbrook makes a reasonable point, here, but I think he gets carried away with himself.
Last week Bush proposed something environmentalists, energy analysts, greenhouse-effect researchers, and national-security experts have spent 20 years pleading for: a major strengthening of federal mileage standards for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks [at the rate of 4% per year]. The No. 1 failing of U.S. energy policy is that vehicle mile-per-gallon standards have not been made stricter in two decades. Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase. Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and, until last week, George W. Bush had all refused to face the issue of America’s low-mpg vehicles, which are the root of U.S. dependency on Persian Gulf oil and a prime factor in rising U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But now Bush favors a radical strengthening of federal mileage rules, and last week to boot became the first Republican president since Gerald Ford to embrace the basic concept of federal mileage regulation (called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard). . . .
Does 4 percent improvement per year sound too modest? According to the EPA, average actual fuel consumption of new vehicles sold in the United States is 21 miles per gallon. . . . Improve on 21 mpg by 4 percent annually for 10 years, and the number rises to 31 mpg. If the actual fuel economy of new vehicles were 31 mpg, oil-consumption trends would reverse—from more oil use to less.
This is a distinct advance, and it is something environmentalists and energy policy wonks have been screaming for for years. In fairness, that deserves to be recognized. But Easterbrook’s main point is that the press have been unfair in failing to fall all over Bush for these moderate steps, long overdue.
This should have been Page One headline material—PRESIDENT CALLS FOR DRAMATIC MPG REGULATIONS. Instead, most news organizations pretended Bush’s mpg proposal did not exist, or buried the story inside the paper, or made only cryptic references to it. In his 2006 State of the Union address, when Bush said America was “addicted to oil” but proposed no mpg improvements, critics rightly pummeled the president. Now Bush has backed the needed reform, and the development is being downplayed or even ridiculed. . . .
Bear in mind that since 1988, Republicans have doggedly opposed stricter fuel-economy rules, denouncing the CAFE system in venomous language as intruding on a supposed “right” to drive wasteful, large vehicles. . . . Now, George W. Bush has embraced the system of mandatory federal mpg standards, asking they become much stricter. For this he’s denounced!
Easterbrook attributes this to . . . (say it with me now) . . . liberal press bias. (”[M]ainstream news organizations and pundits are bought and sold on a narrative of Bush as an environmental villain and simply refuse to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts the thesis. . . . [E]ditors and pundits feel Bush must be ridiculed on all scores . . . .”) But Easterbrook himself notes that it’s the GOP that has blocked any increase in CAFE standards from the beginning, and in fact refuses even to accept them as reasonable policy. Bush has proposed a first-year increase in average fuel efficiency of less than one mpg (while the proposed, delayed, minimal standards for SUVs do almost nothing about their increasingly poor performance). And the benefit to this supposedly heroic plan? Easterbrook calculates that it would finally end the growth of consumption of oil . . . in ten years. (Bush’s overall goal of a 20% total reduction in oil use, mainly by increasing gasahol usage - which is better than nothing, certainly - would move our total consumption to its lowest level since . . . 1991. Great. Let’s not end global warming, let’s just increase global warming at the rate at which it first began to be an obvious problem.) Easterbrook also notes that critics have emphasized that the plan makes no overt effort to address global warming as a goal - its rationale is stated entirely in terms of costs to consumers and foreign oil dependence - and in fact does not even mention global warming. Aside from oil consumption targets, its most important provisions - alternative energy and non-petroleum-powered vehicles - are unspecified and undefined. But Easterbrook can think of no reason for these criticisms than “press bias”?
These are all reasonable criticisms. The plan is a major improvement on stonewalling, oil-industry protectionism, global warming denial, shameless toadying to Saudi oil interests, and rampant anti-environmentalism. But since it was Bush himself who was doing the stonewalling, payoffs, denial, toadying, and destruction, why should he get credit for stopping? And the absolute benefits of the plan - not the degree of departure they represent from his grossly backward policies to date, but the actual degree of good they will finally do - are modest at best. Worse, they do almost nothing to stave off the potential disaster that is the gravest environmental problem of the carbon economy.
This is simply the Bush life story in a nutshell: constantly demanding, and receiving, special praise for the most minimally decent ordinary behavior, and for overcoming problems he himself created. What’s his accomplishment as “the environmental President”? That he’s no longer an obnoxious oil-company shill? (And frankly, the jury’s going to be out a long time on that one, too.) Recall that in the same speech, Bush proposed a plan to elminate the federal deficit - in the last year of his successor’s term in office - without ever mentioning that he had actually inherited a $127 billion surplus from Clinton when he himself took office! He now wants credit for reversing his own environmental destruction policies the same way he wants credit for eliminating his own deficit. In his seventh year in office, his popularity in the tank, having seen his party trashed at the polls through his own bungling, he has now proposed policies that have been blocked by his party for over 20 years and won’t make an immediate, or in the long term decisive, dent in the precise problem to which his entire family owe their wealth and which he has worked to increase throughout his business and political life. A guy who publicly mocks a death-row prisoner’s religious conversion now expects us to take this seriously?
There is a “Nixon to China” aspect of this whole farce: given the GOP’s entrenched anti-environmental, pro-big-business, and pro-oil stance, it may be that only a miserable failure oil company executive Republican President could remove the GOP roadblock to sane policy. But, as with Nixon and China, it was the GOP itself, and notably Bush, who created the anti-environmental mentality that made it impossible for anyone else to implement a reasonable policy. Why they - and Bush above all - constantly get praise for reversing their own stupid blunders I can’t imagine. Let’s be glad for this first step toward a better oil policy, but let’s not lose sight of why it took so long, what it took to force Bush to this point, and what its - deliberately imposed - limitations are.
UPDATE: It’s worse than I realized. Bush is not just demanding credit for undoing his own damage, he’s demanding credit for increasing the damage while lying about it. The actually policy proposal, as opposed to the State of the Union washjob, makes it clear that Bush is committing to nothing while attempting to ease restrictions on automobile manufacturers and eliminate the CAFE statute entirely. See comments.
On a number of levels:
Click for larger image. Taken at my neighborhood supermarket.
I’ve been settling in to enjoy the 2008 Republican primary race. I’ve especially been looking forward to watching the religious whackjobs turn themselves inside out trying to decide if they love Romney for being anti-choice, hate him for lying about being anti-choice, love him for being a religious whackjob like themselves, or hate him for being a Mormon religious whackjob. Watching Romney try to out-crazy Brownback is better than a quarterback matchup at an arena football game, and watching conservatives watch the video of Giuliani’s drag-queen performance is better than a Janet Jackson halftime show. But I’m getting increasingly worried that they’re peaking too soon. We’re starting to see things like this:
GOP Right Sees Lemons in White House Race
. . . What for much of the past year has been an undercurrent of grumbling on the right about the top tier of Republican contenders — Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — is lately on the rise in both frequency and volume. . . .
From consultants to bloggers to talk show hosts, there is a climate of suspicion — at times bordering on contempt — among conservative activists about their 2008 choices.
McCain is courting social and economic conservatives this year, but still faces grave doubts because of his past attacks on conservative religious leaders and his frequent willingness to make common cause with Democrats. Romney, who is positioning himself as the true conservative alternative, faces charges of opportunism because of his recent past as a social moderate. Giuliani’s potential candidacy would test whether a leader with liberal views on abortion and gay rights could prosper in a party whose activists are steadfastly opposed to both. . . .
Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback is trying to get to the right of Romney and emphasizes his cultural conservative bona fides. But for many in the base, his stance on immigration is unacceptable. And then there are those pesky quotes surfacing from his own past that tie him to the moderate wing of the Kansas GOP and raise questions about just how committed to the conservative movement he is.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, another dark horse, is a Baptist preacher by trade with unimpeachable social credentials. Yet Huckabee has already turned off many conservatives because he raised taxes as governor — a cardinal sin in internal GOP politics.
Yes, it’s turning out to be quite a catfight, and I’m lovin’ it! But the danger is that they’ll thin the field too early - finally work out their internal resentments and eject a few of the nuts from the bowl in time for the emerging candidate to put on an actual campaign. That, we don’t want. What we do want is for the Taliban right to go on being a millstone around the GOP’s neck for as far as the eye can see. (Well, assuming we’ve go to put up with them at all.) I want every GOP candidate forever to have to explain that Jesus is their favorite political philosopher. I want general support for gay rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, global family planning, science, education, labor protection, and universal healthcare to go on increasing, year by year and generation by generation while the GOP fields only candidates who hold 16th-century views on all of them. I want every GOP candidate in every race to be the one who was hated least by the small faction of supporters who hate most, and I want it to be as obvious as possible.
And I thought this year would be the beginning of a useful trend. It still can be, if only the various Republican religious factions don’t give up too soon! Go on . . . stick to your “principles”. Don’t settle for a normal human being - hold out to the bitter end for someone like yourselves! The fags are coming! Gay marriage! Plural marriage! Condoms! Balanced budgets! Hold the line! You control the GOP margin for victory! Don’t give in until you get every last thing you want! Compromise is for people who don’t have God on their side!
And Max Sawicky and friends shows why.
There are some rather depressing facts in this survey. The headline grabber, of course, is the 13% of Americans have never heard of global warming, despite the fact that the US is the leading producer of greenhouse gases. More worrisome, only 42% of Americans think that shift in climate is a “very serious” problem — lowest in the world. It is bad enough that 13% of the country is oblivious. it is much worse that less than a majority of the country consider global warming to be a serious problem. the United States is the largest producer of greenhouses gases; there can be no solution that does not involve the United States. And yet less than half the country considers the problem very serious, meaning that there is a not a majority consensus to treat global warming as a top priority. That can only slow down our already pathetic response to global warming, and that can only make the situation worse in the long run.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
