Brilliant Politics

Elizabeth Edwards interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN about her confrontation of Ann Coulter.

Take a look at this poll on Daily Kos. (You have to vote to see the results.) The people who think Obama won the debate are out of touch with reality. He lacked energy and passion. He was hesitant and halting in his responses. On the question about the genocide in Darfur, he escaped into abstraction instead of articulating what decisive action he would take to stop the slaughter. He reminded me of John Kerry in that response, and that association is a nightmare for his campaign. I doubt that many in the largely black audience thought that he won the debate. (more…)

I have to admit that I have become a reluctant admirer of Hillary Clinton. Her strong performance last night in the Democratic Debate at Howard University suggests to me that she has the psychological edge over all the other Democratic candidates. Her responses to questions were typically clear, crisp, and energetic. She appeared the most prepared to make substantive points in the ridiculously short time allowed for answers (sometimes 60 seconds, other times 30 seconds). She and, surprisingly, Dennis Kucinich got the most applause lines during the debate. (more…)

A group of high school students took President Bush to school on Monday.  They also showed the Congress how to do their job, something they have apparently forgotten how to do during the past six years.  The students challenged the president to stop torturing people and ruining America’s reputation around the world.  Maureen Dowd provides color commentary:

A group of high school Presidential Scholars visiting the White House on Monday surprised President Bush by slipping him a handwritten letter pleading with him to not let America become known for torture and urging him to stick to the Geneva Conventions with terror detainees.

The president reassured the teenagers that the United States does not torture. Then the vice president unleashed a pack of large dogs on the kids, running them off the White House lawn, before he shut down the Presidential Scholars program and abolished high schools.

The sun begins to set on the Republican Party as we see it slowly disintegrating from rampant corruption, toad-eating fealty to a chronically unpopular president, and a dismal lack of ideas. Thus, it looks fondly in the rearview mirror, in a delusional reverie of sentimentality, to Ronald Reagan.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sets the record straight on Ronald Reagan in the current issue of Rolling Stone:

Back in the 1970’s, President Jimmy Carter attempted to level the playing field by creating incentives and minimal subsidies to jump-start clean fuels in the marketplace. But then Ronald Reagan took office and ordered the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof torn off. He rolled back fuel standards for automobiles, killed federal incentives that had given America a commanding lead in wind and solar power, and doubled our oil imports. Reagan’s efforts fueled the current oil addiction that has us acting like a crack-house junkie rolling old ladies for drug money. Our jones for petrodrugs has not only superheated the planet, it has embroiled us in the Mesopotamian quagmire and made America a pariah among civilized nations, damaging the cause of democracy across the globe.

See the same RFK, Jr. article to see how market-based solutions will help to solve the Climate Crisis.

-Doc

The 2007 Dim Bulb Award goes to the U.S. government for its negligence in protecting children from mercury, a known neurotoxin, in vaccinations and in the environment.

There was a front page story in the New York Times this week about the controversial link between mercury and autism. The mainstream media often does a lousy job of including the full breadth of scientific debate on this issue, and the NYT article is no exception. The article focuses on a rift within one prominent charitable organization that funds research on the causes of autism. The continuing controversy about the the role that mercury in childhood vaccinations plays in the development of autism first came to national attention in 2005 with the publication of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s article, “Deadly Immunity,” in Rolling Stone and Salon. The RFK, Jr. article exposed the government’s role in covering up the evidence of harm to children. He also called attention to the Center for Disease Control’s continuing negligence in allowing mercury in flu vaccinations for young children, even though mercury was removed from all other vaccines years earlier.

The problem with the NYT article and similar news reports is that they do not address mercury in the environment from coal-fired power plants. A study that tracked mercury emissions in Texas done by the University of Texas Health Science Center in 2005 found that:

There was a significant increase in the rates of special education students and autism rates associated with
increases in environmentally released mercury.

Dan Olmsted’s series of articles for United Press International on the mercury – autism link also implicates power plant emissions as a likely cause of autism in the rare cases documented in American Amish communities.  The Amish do not vaccinate their children, with a few exceptions.

So, coal-fired power plants are not only a major source of greenhouse gas pollution, they also pose a serious health risk to children.  The HBO series Real Sports highlighted how lax government enforcement of pollution laws endangers the health of children with asthma who live near power plants and often prevents them from playing baseball and soccer. It should be an embarrassment to the mainstream media that a sports show had to give this story the public exposure it deserves.

-Doc

Gregg Easterbrook predicted it in his article in the April 2007 issue of The Atlantic, where he discussed the winners and losers of global warming.

My hometown of Buffalo, New York, for example, is today so déclassé that some of its stately Beaux-Arts homes, built during the Gilded Age and overlooking a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, sell for about the price of one-bedroom condos in Boston or San Francisco. If a warming world makes the area less cold and snowy, Buffalo might become one of the country’s desirable addresses.

It is June 16th, and we have had 6 weeks of endless summer before the first official day of summer next week.  The days have been filled with sunshine, with temperatures in the 70′s and 80′s nearly every day since early May.  There have been only a handful of days with rain, and now farmers must be starting to fear a drought.  The largest snow storm in Buffalo this past winter was on Freaky Friday, October 13, 2006.  I kid you not.  October 13th!

Start buying those beautiful old homes, filled with original oak floors and oak woodwork from 100 years ago, in Buffalo now while you can still get them for under $150,000 (in some areas for under $100,000).  The water wars will be raging in the American West and Southwest, while Western New York will be sitting pretty on two of the Great Lakes.  Who wants a drink? Easterbrook joked that Hollywood celebrities would have their summer homes in Buffalo in 2030.  I’ll be laughing, but I won’t be surprised.

-Doc

The Puppy Principle was recently articulated in Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times, where he pointed out:

Finally, we’re beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.

That’s the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.

Kristof was discussing psychological studies that show that people are likely to give more money to charity when one child in distressing circumstances is shown or described rather than a group of children or a mass killing, such as the Darfur genocide.

I would like to extend this line of thinking to politics and suggest that there is an optimal level of emotion that can be stimulated in an audience before compassion fatigue sets in. I heard a speech by John Edwards on June 2nd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that was by turns very moving and quite annoying. The moving part of the speech was when he roused the crowd to consider the Democratic Party’s obligation to stand up for universal health care, ending the Iraq War, and doing something about poverty in America. Then he went on to include AIDS in Africa, global poverty, and unsanitary drinking water in third world countries. Good causes all, I’m sure. But by then he had crossed the line into compassion fatigue. Moving further into that territory will only induce indifference and even resentment in listeners as they are asked to emotionally grapple with immense, perhaps insurmountable problems. Better to just bang them over the head with a two-by-four.

OK, so it must seem that I am picking on John Edwards. I am doing so because I want to see a highly competitive race for the Democratic nomination, and I believe that Edwards could compete and win it. He has the best policy proposals so far, but he is running a campaign that is not as good as his campaign was in 2004. People want an optimistic, positive vision for America. They don’t want to be depressed by all of the overwhelming problems in the world that a “moral and just” America is obligated to fix. The candidate is supposed to wrestle with those existential monsters himself and come back triumphant from the mythological Hero’s Journey, radiant with a vision for renewal of the community. That is the psychological task required of any good presidential candidate.

-Doc

Here is the reply we received from the Edwards campaign, when we asked for the biographical details related to Senator Edwards’ statement that he was “born into nothing.” We were hoping for more specific information and have to wonder if they are being evasive. BrilliantPolitics believes that John Edwards could be more competitive than he is at the present time in the race for the Democratic nomination, and we hope to see that happen. We think, however, that it is unlikely to happen unless he drops the “come from nothing” pitch and begins to understand the Puppy Principle in Politics (which we will explain shortly). We are asking the Edwards campaign for more details.

John Edwards' father worked in textile mills all of his life 

and his family struggled financially when he was young.  

John knows that he has been blessed with opportunity 

and he is running for president of the United States so 

that everybody in this country can have the same kind 

of chances he has had.