“We all know what needs to be done. We just don’t know how to be re-elected when we’ve done it”.
Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and president of the Euro group of prime ministers, quoted in the Economist, Nov 17, 2012.
Category Archives: Politics
It’s the data, stoopid
This morning’s Observer column.
Which brings us to the Obama election campaign. In 2008, it was obvious that his people were significantly more internet-savvy than the McCain-Palin crowd. (Not that that would have been too difficult.) Obama harnessed the internet to crowdsource fundraising, for example, and used social media to get the vote out. And he used YouTube to bypass the TV networks and get his message directly to voters – as with A More Perfect Union, his Philadelphia speech tackling the problems raised for him by the inflammatory views of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. A More Perfect Union is a long (37-minute), serious speech which would have been reduced to a set of soundbites by the TV networks. By using YouTube, Obama ensured that millions of US voters heard his unexpurgated version.
But none of this was rocket science. The interesting question this time was what the Obama crowd would do next. Now we know, thanks to a fascinating piece of reporting by Michael Scherer in Time, published just after the election result was clear. Basically, it comes down to numbers…
How the news came to Colorado
What is wrong with these people?
DENVER, Colo — “Welcome to Hell!”
The shout broke a brief quiet inside a lounge of Denver’s Sports Authority Field, where the Colorado GOP held its election-night watch party. Fox News had just officially announced that Obama won Ohio, and with it the nation. Karl Rove was another thing, but it was a short moment of quiet, as supporters here processed the fact that not only had the president won the race, but after millions of dollars of advertising and weekly traffic jams from the candidates’ nonstop visits, Colorado ultimately did not matter in the final count.
“What is wrong with America?” one supporter murmured under his breath.
Debbie Cohen, 56, wept.
“I am deeply, deeply distressed. I have two grandbabies, and I look at this and I know there is no turning back,” she said, through tears. “How can America pick a man like that? I have been through many, many elections, but I have never known the desperation that I know now. I feel devastated. I feel hopeless.”
Cohen, a teacher, said she’ll probably feel better tomorrow, but for now, she needs to grieve.
“I don’t know where to go, except on my knees to God,” she said.
The Real Real America
Paul Krugman sums it up.
Tomorrow — or I guess today — comes the cleanup; when thousands, perhaps millions, of right-wing heads explode, it makes quite a mess. Also, notice that the polls were right. I wonder if I can get invited when Nate Silver is sworn in as president?
OK, somewhat more seriously: one big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the “real America”. And it’s also the election that lets us ask, finally, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”
For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.
And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big.
Notice too that to the extent that social issues played in this election, they played in favor of Democrats. Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way.
A huge night for truth, justice, and the real American way.
Bjørn Lomborg on climate policy
First of all, he says we need to recognise that just continuing with current policies won’t work.
The Copenhagen Consensus is a think tank that ranks the economically smartest approaches to a variety of issues. In 2009, we asked 27 of the worlds top climate economists to identify the costs and benefits of the top climate solutions. A group of eminent economists, including three Nobel laureates, ranked the smartest ways to fix the climate. Their answer was: Dont continue to expand current policies. Trying to make fossil fuels so costly that no one wants them is bad economics, in addition to being bad politics.They suggested instead three changes to the way the United States approaches climate change. First, we should aim to make green energy so cheap everyone will want it. This will require heavy investment in research and development of better, smarter green technologies. Such an investment has much lower costs than current climate policies like the EU 2020-policy, but a much greater chance of allowing the entire world to make the switch to green energy in the long run.
A good example is the innovation of fracked gas, which has made the price of natural gas drop dramatically — allowing a switch in electricity production away from coal. This in turn has singlehandedly caused the United States to reduce its annual CO2 emissions by about 500Mt, or about twice as much as the entire global reductions from the last 20 years of international climate negotiations. Moreover, it has not cost the United States anything — in fact, U.S. consumers are saving about $100 billion per year in cheaper prices. That’s a policy that is easy to sell around the world.
Second, we should investigate (but not deploy) geoengineering as a possible insurance policy to runaway climate change. Cooling the planet with slightly whiter clouds over the Pacific could completely counteract global warming at the cost of $6 billion, according to research by Eric Bickel and Lee Lane for the Copenhagen Consensus — between 1,000 and 10,000 times cheaper than anything else we are considering today.
Third, we should recognize that there are huge lags between our actions and their effects on the climate — no matter what we do, it will only affect the second half of this century. Thus, if we want to tackle climate impacts such as Hurricane Sandy, we need to step up adaptation and make our societies more resilient. This is mostly an inexpensive no-brainer.
Yep. Wonder if the good citizens of New York are thinking along those lines too. And what about the good citizens of London Town, much of which is as vulnerable as Manhattan
The Two Cultures — again! But this time the other way round
53 years ago this year, C.P. Snow gaves his famous Rede Lecture
After the attack on Iran, then what?
From chicagotribune.com.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are agreed on one thing: If Iran refuses to give up its apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons, at some point we will have no choice but to intervene with military force. The discussion, to the extent there has been one, is just about where that point lies. But an attack on Iran would not be the end of matter. It would just be the start.
So says retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, who stopped by the Tribune last week to talk about what might happen after U.S. and/or Israeli planes carry out a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The question he wants to ask those in charge, he says, is: “Do you understand what you’re getting into?” As head of Central Command, which covers the Middle East, he gave questions of that kind a lot of thought.
An American president might have in mind a brief campaign that would cripple the Iranians. But the Iranians have the option to strike back in all sorts of ways. “What if they lob a missile into Fifth Fleet headquarters?” he asks. “Or we have another 9/11?” He advises, “Don’t think it’s necessarily limited.”
Zinni notes that Iran has mobile missiles — which it could use to hit Israel, Europe or U.S. bases in the region. It could send suicide boats to fire cruise missiles at our Navy ships. They could lay mines in the Persian Gulf, which would disrupt shipping and send oil prices through the roof.
If Iran escalates, he says, the president needs to know he will respond. In an expanded war, we might find ourselves forced to try to bring down the Iranian regime. For that, ground forces may be unavoidable. Can he envision using 100,000 troops to march on Tehran? “You’d have to plan for it,” he warns — not assume it will happen, but be ready for the possibility.
Zombies for Romney
Lovely. Thanks to Robin Stenham for the link.
Love or nothing: The real Greek parallel with Weimar
Fantastic blog post by Paul Mason setting out the similarities — and differences — between contemporary Greece and the Weimar Republic. Difficult to summarise, but very measured and perceptive.
Of all the operas written during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-33), probably the most haunting is the last.
Kurt Weill’s The Silver Lake, written with playwright Georg Kaiser, tells the story of two losers – a good-hearted provincial cop and the thief he has shot and wounded – as they make their way through a society ruined by unemployment, corruption and vice.
After spending a week again in Greece – amid riots, hunger and far right violence – I finally understood it.
Well worth reading in full.