DoodleBlog

So I was out walking about and I figured out that Sarah Palin’s views on humanity’s contributions to global warming are about the same as the oil companies’ views - that as long as a scientist claims or can be paid to claim that human contributions might not be a significant factor and that there’s a sliver of a possibility that the rise in temperatures is due to natural fluctuations she won’t support taking the action that most scientists argue we need to take. Throw this in with the category of economists who for the past couple of decades have been arguing that the national debt is in fact a good thing and we see the road to ruin clearly.

So McCain has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate which on the surface looks like a solid choice. On the record she seems to be a person who acts according to her principles, which McCain has of late not done, and can help persuade him to not go into a binge of tax cutting with the mistaken idea that as taxes go to zero economic growth and federal revenues go to infinity. Maybe some of that executive experience can also convince him that he’s not going to balance the federal budget on his cloudy spending cuts. Maybe she can convince him that the single most important national security issue we face in the next twenty years is the economy - and that nobody’s going to listen to him rattle his saber if the American economy can’t back up the talk.

In any case, it looks like McCain is positioning all of his hopes on “doing better than” in the debates. I am filled with utter dread at the thought of him pulling “to quote a great American president, I won’t hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him” out when Obama makes a procedural mistake.

While I’m not swoony eyed about the Obama nomination, and still have many reservations about the massive tax and rebate plans he’s outlining, and am vehemently opposed to cap and trade and the nebulous secondary markets it will create instead of implementing a straight carbon tax, I am heartened that Senator Joe Biden has been added to the ticket. I imagine that there will be times that Obama will be talking to his advisors and they’ll be nodding like bobble heads and Joe will say “what the hell are you talking about? I have no idea what you’re talking about! Listen, the numbers don’t add up!” Does Biden have drawbacks? Oh my yes. But on the whole he’s been a good legislator and has added some tough questions to the hearings he’s participated in.

Nicolle Wallace on John McCain not being in a cone of silence during Obama’s interview at Saddleback Church:

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.” link

This is truly a puzzler - I mean, what’s the reasoning here? Are the two - being a prisoner of war and being a cheater - mutually exclusive? Without regard for whether McCain heard the questions before taking the stage, this response is truly deeply ridiculous.

So, one would assume that the bump in the CFTC’s numbers on the participation of oil speculators to about 50% means that Morgan Stanley, who for some reason have oil storage facilities, have been reclassified as speculators even though they can take physical delivery of product. They predict the prices, they help make the prices by buying futures, they can resell their contracts or sock them away - and now they’re taking a minority stake in Dubai Mercantile Exchange, so they’ll also get a cut of the trades themselves. If the financial markets weren’t in such a mess I’d assume there’d be some form of investigation, which would be hard to do since the commodities markets are opaque and Morgan Stanley doesn’t report earnings from commodities separately. The scary bit is what if the bump isn’t a reclassification of Morgan Stanley - what if they’re listed as hedgers meaning that true speculative involvement was even larger?

It is an unwritten rule, just like the let one in rule when traffic narrows, that cops get freebies while on the beat. Seems Starbucks had a little trouble with the concept or the officer had some trouble with proper freebie etiquette - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-starbucks-cop-web-aug08,0,6874669.story. I’m tending towards Starbucks being in the wrong - maybe a non-native didn’t understand the rules.

“The military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, had already said that he planned to give Mr. Hamdan credit for the 61 months he had been held, meaning that Mr. Hamdan could complete his criminal sentence in five months. After that his fate is unclear, because the Bush administration says that it can hold detainees here until the end of the war on terror.”

Again, when is that? What are the criteria for having won? How can we hold a person for a specific crime with a specific sentence for an indeterminate amount of time? We have never been told what winning means or if there is any possibility of winning. Fortunately, the Bush administration comes with an expiration date and one can only hope that the next president will release this unwarranted power and provide some measure of clarity.