Steady Tonic

From the Washington Post:

It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

Obama had a few problems with that.

“First of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch ‘em,” Obama said here, drawing laughs from 1,500 supporters in a high school gymnasium. “They should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later.”

If the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government’s sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.

“My position has always been clear: If you’ve got a terrorist, take him out,” Obama said. “Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take ‘em out.”

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’”

The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because we don’t always have the right person.”

“We don’t always catch the right person,” he said. “We may think it’s Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it’s Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.”

Obama turned back to Palin’s comment, although he said he was not sure whether Palin or Rudy Giuliani said it.

“The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It’s because that’s who we are. That’s what we’re protecting,” Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. “Don’t mock the Constitution. Don’t make fun of it. Don’t suggest that it’s not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years.”

He finished with a dismissive comment about his opponents.

“These people.”

I have two thoughts on why this unfortunately may not work on McCain voters. 1) I suspect that there is a sentiment that goes sort of like this: “Mohammed the cab driver shouldn’t be allowed in this country either.” What these people forget is that it’s likely that their great- grandfathers Patrick and/or Luigi the handsom cab drivers experienced the same resentment. 2) The McCain campaign deserves strategic points for realizing that having Palinmania blanket the news (both good and bad coverage) keeps intelligent responses like this out of the spotlight.

However, the McCain campaign loses those point and many more for this:

WCSH Interviewer: “Again you say you’re sure she has the experience to but can you give me one example? What experience does she have in the field of national security?”

McCain: “Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States.”

Wait…what?!?!?! Watch below, and be amazed:

If the Democrats lose this election, I’m pointing a finger at cable news networks. In the last 2 minutes of coverage on CNN, from the 70,000 people in the stadium, they panned to Rosario Dawson, Wilmer Valderrama, Matthew Modine, and a pair of men in turbans.

This is not going to convert the white rural male vote.

I try not to be too political in this space, but I’m glad to see a fair amount of balanced (or at least investigative rather than speculative) pieces being written about the issues dominating the upcoming presidential elections.

This past week the New York Times ran a long, but very interesting piece on the economic policy proposals of the Obama campaign and Obama’s approach to tax policy in general. It’s very worth reading. I imagine that anyone other than the closest followers of the campaigns will learn something.

As a follow up, here’s where you can calculate how the Obama or McCain tax policy proposals would impact your taxes. You might be surprised.

The New York Times has a very interesting, and refreshingly unbiased (IMO), opinion piece today about how vulnerable the US really is to geopolitical causes of oil supply shocks. A key point:

Some policy makers and analysts worry that these emergency stocks are too small. For example, they sometimes compare the American strategic reserve to total American consumption, so the reserves appear dangerously inadequate. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil every day, so the Strategic Petroleum Reserve could only supply the country for 35 days. (Furthermore, the United States could not draw oil out of the reserve at anything approaching a rate of 20 million barrels per day.) This is why President Bush in his 2007 State of the Union address called for doubling the strategic reserve.

But this vulnerability is a mirage. The size of plausible disruptions, not total consumption, determines the adequacy of global reserves. The worst oil disruptions in history deprived global markets of five million to six million barrels per day. Specifically, the collapse of the Iranian oil industry during the revolution in 1978 cut production by nearly five million barrels a day, and the sanctions on Iraq after its conquest of Kuwait in 1990 eliminated 5.3 million barrels of supply. If a future disruption were as bad as history’s worst, American and allied governments’ crude oil stocks alone could replace every lost barrel for eight months.

I found it to be a small haven for thoughtful and fact-based arguments and a good cautionary piece that reminds us not to get too wrapped up in the polemics of either party.

My neighborhood, River West, has developed more slowly than I’d like in my six years living here. Part of the reason for that is the many buildings and plots owned by one man who has refused to sell or fix up his abandoned properties.

On the positive side, street artists have often made these buildings more interesting by tacking their work to the walls.

Recently, one of these street artists, Brendan Scanlon, was murdered in Logan Square. As a tribute to him, his fellow artists peppered one of the abandoned buildings at Grand and Milwaukee. It’s important to note that this appears to be a senseless, random act of violence. Street artists are not to be confused with gang members that tag buildings with graffiti. Here are a handful of the pieces:

So I suppose the real test here is to measure Barry Bonds’ balls.

Explainer: Can Steroids Enlarge Your Head? [Slate]

From the NYT:

A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military officials said.

Does this remind anyone of Afghanistan during the 1980s? Roll tape for Bad Idea Jeans: “We weren’t going to arm these nomadic and disparate tribes against al Qaeda, but then we thought ‘When are we going to be in Waziristan again?’”

There are so many disturbing angles to this story, that one can’t read this without being outraged — nor without hearing boump-chicka-boump-boump and imagining Tara Reid’s star turn after it’s optioned for Skinemax. Via Defamer.