Jerome 'Swift Boat' Corsi Taken to Task, Arrested in Kenya

Alcoholic Jerome Corsi was arrested in Kenya yesterday (and will soon be deported) evidently in the midst of a publicity stunt regarding Obama's extended family.

But he and I did a bloggingheads session last week that is up today on the website. Over the course of the discussion, we establish that:

a) He was paid by Dick Cheney's henchwoman Mary Matalin to write a book on Obama
b) The book was bulk-bought by Freedom's Defense Fund (the same outfit that launched the Kilpatrick/Wright ads against Obama) and that's how it earned its way onto the New York Times bestseller list
c) Despite many inaccuracies in the book, Matalin never called Corsi and suggested he make any corrections
d) Seven of the first nine footnotes in the supposedly heavily researched and documented book refer back to himself; others link back to Andy Martin, who called a judge a "dirty, slimy Jew" and doesn't necessarily think the Holocaust was a bad thing.

You can watch the whole thing here.

At one point I got to ask him how he felt about the fact that Swiftboating now referred to a malicious attack by a pack of liars. It was very satisfying.

PS of Pointer: He is no racist... He goes also after white men who don't hate blacks.
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Fact Check: Is Obama 'palling around with terrorists'? No, but McCain is.

The Statement: Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin said Saturday, October 4, that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is "someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

Watch: Is Obama a terrorist's pal?

Get the facts!

The Facts: In making the charge at a fund-raising event in Englewood, Colorado, and a rally in Carson, California, Palin was referring at least in part to William Ayers, a 1960s radical. In both appearances, Palin cited a front-page article in Saturday's New York Times detailing the working relationship between Obama and Ayers.

In the 1960s, Ayers was a founding member of the radical Weather Underground group that carried out a string of bombings of federal buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, in protest against the Vietnam War. The now-defunct group was labeled a "domestic terrorist group" by the FBI, and Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn — also a Weather Underground member — spent 10 years as fugitives in the 1970s. Federal charges against them were dropped due to FBI misconduct in gathering evidence against them, and they resurfaced in 1980. Both Ayers and Dohrn ultimately became university professors in Chicago, with Ayers, 63, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Obama's Chicago home is in the same neighborhood where Ayers and Dohrn live. Beginning in 1995, Ayers and Obama worked with the non-profit Chicago Annenberg Challenge on a huge school improvement project. The Annenberg Challenge was for cities to compete for $50 million grants to improve public education. Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, and Obama was recruited onto the board. Also from 1999 through 2001 both were board members on the Woods Fund, a charitable foundation that gave money to various causes, including the Trinity United Church that Obama attended and Northwestern University Law Schools' Children and Family Justice Center, where Dohrn worked.

CNN's review of project records found nothing to suggest anything inappropriate in the volunteer projects in which the two men were involved.

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told CNN that after meeting Obama through the Annenberg project, Ayers hosted a campaign event for him that same year when then-Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced the young community organizer as her chosen successor. LaBolt also said the two have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Obama came to the U.S. Senate in 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they encountered each other on the street in their Hyde Park neighborhood.

The extent of Obama's relationship with Ayers came up during the Democratic presidential primaries earlier this year, and Obama explained it by saying, "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood … the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago — when I was 8 years old — somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."

The McCain campaign did not respond Saturday to a request for elaboration on Palin's use of the plural "terrorists."

Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now "palling around," or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.

BUT...
Yesterday morning on CBS's Early Show, McCain-Palin campaign spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer attempted to defend Gov. Sarah Palin's (R-AK) debunked claims that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has been "palling around" with former radical William Ayers. Referencing a recent New York Times article, Pfotenhauer claimed that if McCain "hung out with somebody who had bombed abortion clinics" it would be a legitimate topic of discussion. She explained:

PFOTENHAUER: The article also concluded that if Senator McCain had hung out with somebody who had bombed abortion clinics, no one would consider [raising the issue] illegitimate.

Watch it:
Pfotenhauer's invocation of abortion clinic bombers in defense of McCain is ironic given that McCain has repeatedly voted against protecting Americans from domestic terrorists in the anti-choice movement. On multiple occasions throughout his career, McCain sought to limit the government's ability to punish violent anti-choice fanatics by:

- Voting against making anti-choice violence a federal crime. As the Jed Report notes, McCain voted in 1993 and 1994 against making "bombings, arson and blockades at abortion clinics, and shootings and threats of violence against doctors and nurses who perform abortions" federal crimes.

- Opposing Colorado's "Bubble Law." McCain said he opposed Colorado's "Bubble Law," which prohibited abortion protesters from getting within 8 feet of women entering clinics [Denver Post, 2/27/00]. The law was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

- Voting to allow those fined for violence at clinics to avoid penalties by declaring bankruptcy. NARAL Pro-Chioce America notes that McCain "voted to allow perpetrators of violence or harassment at reproductive-health clinics to avoid paying the fines assessed against them for their illegal acts by declaring bankruptcy."

Evidential links:
John McCain's domestic terrorism problem
Hill v. Colorado
McCain on the issues

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Name 'Palin' Used to Draw Attention on Religious Controversies

On YouTube the title of this video is: Sarah Palin Supports Religious Persecution


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From the GOP's New Guard, the Audacity of Nope

Sure, 91 House Republicans finally voted to pass a tweaked version of the financial bailout bill Friday. But for the GOP's big honchos, last Monday's defeat in the House of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.'s plan was still the most stinging humiliation they've suffered in years. To unlock the mystery of the earlier bill's stunning rejection, consider two numbers: 82 and 0. The first is the percentage of retiring Republican representatives who voted for the bill. The second is the percentage of Republican freshmen who did.
Think about that for a moment. The GOP's retirees, the people who finally no longer have to make anybody happy, went overwhelmingly for the bailout, but a grand total of zero GOP freshmen agreed to back the plan that their party's president, Treasury secretary, House leader, whip and ranking member on the Financial Services Committee all begged them to support. John Boehner, the House minority leader, even teared up before the roll call as he choked out the pleading words, "Vote yes." It's basic math: If Boehner could have controlled his freshmen, the bill would have passed. In a political season overwhelmed with claims to audacity, it was one heck of an audacious coup.
What the GOP's next generation did Monday was the political equivalent of a family's babies shaking off their daddy and their mommy and their grandpa and every elder within eight branches of the family tree. But their gesture of defiance was bigger than a $700 billion bailout bill. It was the big reveal to a question we've been asking ever since the GOP flubbed the 2006 midterm elections and embarked on a journey of reinvention: What will the Republican Party's new guard look like? The answer lies in that most extreme and uncompromising of numbers: zero. The new guard is fiercely stubborn, gutsily insubordinate, drama-loving and -- compared with the 82-percent-for-compromise old guard -- unadulteratedly ideological. And it could take the GOP off an even higher cliff than the one the party lurched off two years ago.
Therapists often say that hitting bottom can be a blessing in disguise because it gives you the chance to redefine yourself. And in the aftermath of 2006, when the Democrats retook both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, downtrodden Republicans had big dreams of redefinition. Some held onto that old-time Reagan religion. But the scribes at National Review imagined a Republican Party repackaged around pragmatic voters prone to "talk more about health care than about the budget." Washington Post columnist and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson hoped that the Republican brand could become more compassionate.
The 2007 presidential primary promised to provide a swift survival-of-the-fittest test for the competing new visions. When Sen. John McCain prevailed, it seemed that the winning philosophy was one that, in the main, dumped Republican orthodoxy in favor of solutions-oriented practicality. (In case you've been living in a spider hole this year and haven't heard, McCain likes calling himself a maverick, a doer, a wooer of independents, a post-partisan.)

But McCain's triumph actually hid the fact that, at the lower levels of the party, the emerging center of gravity is more conservative, not less. In the House, such young members as Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), Mike Pence (Ind.) and their ideologically purist soulmates on the Republican Study Committee (which absorbed most of the GOP freshmen) began to influence the party's agenda from the right, clamoring to make pork-busting the GOP's focus, demanding legislation to lower taxes and even mounting a prank revolt on a war-funding bill in May, just to flex their muscles. "The American people thought Republicans weren't acting like Republicans," Hensarling explained.
Across the Capitol, Hensarling's ideological allies in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, hauled their own caucus rightward, forcing appropriations freezes, waylaying an intelligence authorization bill that required the administration to report on its secret CIA prisons and killing the moderate immigration reform bill backed by Bush and McCain. DeMint recently launched a political action committee that donates only to senators who have their right-wing bona fides in order. Over the last two years, these new-guard conservatives -- all of whom were awarded a perfect "100" rating from the American Conservative Union in 2007 -- have arguably fashioned themselves into the most listened-to Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The bailout bill was the new guard's biggest show of force yet. Hensarling's Republican Study Committee ("The Caucus of House Conservatives," proclaims its Web site) gave those GOP freshmen the political cover to buck their leadership. They made it clear that their revolt was more over principle than over details, a stand on behalf of what one GOP Hill staffer calls "true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservatism." Hensarling derided the bailout as the "slippery slope to socialism," while his ally Tom Feeney (Fla.) insisted that the crisis was actually produced by a failure to adequately venerate deregulation. Another young Turk, Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), even compared the bailout to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. (I suppose that makes George W. Bush a communist. I told you these guys were audacious.)
Not every Republican is happy about the rise of the new conservatives. Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz wrote last week of "a veteran of a past Republican administration" who "could barely spit out his contempt Monday for the actions of the House Republicans. 'They would rather be right in their views -- that ideology counts more, that ideology is crucial in any decision -- rather than making incremental progress.' "
But Republicans like that guy will have to get used to the growing influence of the conservatives. They have enthusiasm and demographics on their side. Moderate Republicans are getting offed all along the Eastern seaboard; eager grassroots activists are nominating right-wingers such as New Mexico's Steve Pearce and Virginia's Jim Gilmore in Senate primaries; and the American Conservative Union's congressional ratings dramatically show which way the wind is blowing. The Republicans who are retiring this year got an average ACU rating of 78 in 2007, placing them squarely between conservatism and centrism. But by my calculations, the Republican freshmen -- the vanguard of the generation that will be replacing these fleeing moderates -- got an average rating of 97.
If you're a true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservative, you're probably happy about all this. As a card-carrying moderate weenie, I'm not, obviously. But it's not just the policies of the GOP's new guard that spell trouble; it's the attitude. What these young Turks do share with McCain is a taste for the grand gesture and the attention-getting stunt, the determination not to go gently into defeat and the psychological pleasure derived from creating a whole lot of political Sturm und Drang. After their May revolt on the war-funding bill, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) challenged Mike Pence about why on Earth his faction had bolted on what was supposed to be bipartisan legislation. "Never stop fighting," Pence replied.

But all this drama, fun as it is, doesn't make you look like you're ready to be at the governing wheel. (See McCain, John, and recent polling.) And it's this attitude -- the thrill of doubling down on ideology, of damning those torpedoes -- that helped get people such as Pearce and Gilmore nominated in states that obviously won't support their degree of conservatism. They'll probably lose in November, and Republicans will be two Senate seats closer to being ideological irritants rather than the Democrats' serious rivals.
If the GOP's ultimate goal is to take down the Democrats and regain power, then I'll let Jeb Hensarling make the case against his new guard's strategy in his own words. After the 2006 defeat, Hensarling laid out how he thought the GOP should proceed: "Like mosquitoes in a nudist colony," he said, "Republicans will have more than enough opportunities to show the voters we deserve our conservative brand back." It's just the strategy of ideological irritation and provocation he went on to undertake.
An attack of mosquitoes in a nudist colony would, quite literally, be a frightful pain in the bum. But who thinks that nudism will meet its end because of mosquitoes?

Is this the end of US capitalism?

James S Henry, economist, author of The Blood Bankers
This certainly changes the nature of US capitalism. It is not the the end of it, but it is the beginning for a new more carefully regulated financial and housing sector and I think with much more government oversight.
We have allowed basically a more or less hands off policy towards major financial institutions at the core of the economy. We've deregulated and now we must regulate.
The system as we know it exercises enormous political and economic power and we should have learned about the perils of this kind of "laissez-faire" approach.
Every time we act as if this has never happened before when actually lessons could have been learned much earlier.
Years of neglect
Is either political party tread to take a new approach? Many are ideologically beholden to the neo-liberal approach of financial capitalism.
But there is a whole new generation of younger ecomomists who will be more activists and less free market oriented.
"Ironically, we've had all kinds of government intervention but it's been on the side of the institutions - what's the national interest there?"

James S Henry, economist: There are enormous ramifications for developing nationsas the US is a main trading economy. People from Mexico and the Philippines come here to send back billions in remittances but those flows are declining.

Trade will also suffer. We're a big market for industrial countries such as China, Japan and Canada. Middle tier countries such as Brazil and India may also notice some immediate impact.
And from the standpoint of Europe, there has been a major loss of net worth to lots ordinary investors and homeowners, so it will have real impact on the main street economy in the first world,.
The sources of credit people have lived off for year are drying up and will have big impact on consumption.
I don't think we need to worry about collapse, it's more like stagnation, many years of trying to work off loans and bad debts.
We are suffering from years of neglect, we'll learn that you need a market economy that is led and regulated intelligently, with strong government institutions with smart people not hostage to the institutions they are regulating.
Berlau says the housing crisis has not hit as many as thoughtJohn Berlau, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
Is this the end of US capitalism? No, because we haven't had pure capitalism for a long time.
Our banking system is heavily regulated, but we have outdated rules for banks and we should be getting rid of these rules for banks so they can compete [in rob steal and fraud] with hedge funds.
More competition is needed, everyone is bashing the short sellers but they are heroes - they were right and we should have been listening to them years ago.
Savings and mutual funds should be able to short bank funds as well. I think one way of lessening risk is letting common investment vehicles use those strategies, if more had been shorting we would not have a bull market now.
I think we need a modernisation of regulation and an updating of rules but that does not mean more.
'Moral hazard'
The Bush administration is hardly deregulatory – they put in rules after the Enron scandal which cost companies billions of dollars and also had accountants chasing after minutiae and not the big stuff.
We have had some regulation and it did not turn out to do much good. So examining what makes sense and doesn't could be good.
The US housing crisis has not impacted as much as some might think. It is only if people were involved in real estate or had to sell now. Oil prices increasing and inflation would have much more effect on lives of everyday Americans than the failure of a big banking firm.
It was right to let Lehmans to let them go bankrupt and not right to bail out AIG, how is that aiding ordinary Americans? It's a moral hazard if we bail out everyone out.
Failure is a part of capitalism but we also have to be responsible for the outcomes.
No 'scapegoats'
People who took risks and got big loans should learn their lesson. I have sympathy for those who were deceived and the government should punish fraud but the people who gambled should have live with the consequences and neither should a borrower be bailed out.
We should look at accounting rules and what makes regulatory sense, so if one bank sells a bad loan and others are spreading that contagion that should be looked at.
The government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as implicitly government supported so they were not as careful as other firms, they inflated the bubble.
Polititians also pushed this idea that everyone should have a home, some of the laws they created encouraged banks to abandon underwriting standards and accusing them of discriminatign against the poor, it must be more transparent.
Everyone is looking for scapegoats but it is about the antiquated rules, not more or less regulation, and what makes sense for the 21st century.

Mark Weisbrot, co-director, Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
No, the US Federal Reserve has the capacity to provide enough liquidity so this crisis can be smoothed over.
But it's not going to end the bankruptcies of institutions that are financially insolvent, including some major banks.
The problem is the real economy [ie. not the financial markets], which is on a downwards path because of the housing bubble, and it will continue even if banking crisis is resolved.
There have been a lot of crisis in the last 40 years and this happens to be the worst one since the US depression (in the 1930s) but I wouldn't exaggerate it.
It is not like the 1930s, we have learned from that period. This time the Fed and banks have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidity into the market and as long as they are willing to do that we should be able to minimise the impact of the credit crunch on real economy.
'Serious recession' fears
The economy will slow down because consumers are not borrowing against their homes as they did since 2001 when the last recession ended, that is what drove the last recovery - rising home equity. That process is now in reverse.
The solution is fiscal policy, the government can make up for slowing demand - it did some work with the stimulus package and if willing to do more the US can neutralise the effect of recession.
However, I don't think they'll be smart enough so there will be a serious recession.
The most affected are those who have lost jobs, people who have lost homes, millions losing equity or life savings - these are top the three negative impacts.
Should the US rethink its policies? No doubt. Even John MCain is acknowledging that must be a change of policy?
The most important question not being asked is a simple one – why was this housing bubble allowed to grow to catastrophic portions? This shouldn't have happened.

I think we can blame media irresponsibility to an extent, as the journalists that report should have looked at the numbers, but I think they were following Alan Greenspan [former chairman of the Federal Reserve] and he had to know there was a bubble.
Unemployment in the US is continuing to rise
Gerald Friedman, economics professor, University of Massachusetts
The end of US capitalism? I really doubt it.
This is a very serious financial crisis and if mishandled could become a serious recession even a depression, but it is unlikely to be as bad as the Great Depression of 1929-40 as the authorities have learned to co-operate in crises.
More importantly, a capitalist system - or any social system - can only be brought down by an opposing system supported by a rising economic class.
There is no such contender on the horizon right now to challenge capitalism. So, we'll continue to muddle along.

Still, it will be bad all around unless we change direction. An effective anti-depression strategy would help those with bad mortgages so that they will be able to make payments on their mortgages and keep their houses; such a policy would help the banks by allowing for a "trickle-up" effect.
Instead, the Federal Reserve is trying to hold back the tide of defaults and foreclosures by helping the top.
At best, this will transfer the costs to average Americans, who lose their homes, watch their neighbours lose their homes, and will in many cases lose jobs when construction and other businesses fail.
Foreigners will be hurt too because many banks and other financial institutions outside the US have invested heavily in US securities including mortgages and stocks and bonds in US investment banks.
Helping the people
We need a trickle-up strategy: Help the financial barons by helping the people.
The US should provide major help to people holding mortgages to renegotiate these and to make some payments so that people can stay in their homes and banks will be able to continue to carry these mortgages on their books.
There should also be a major increase in unemployment benefits so laid-off workers are protected and can continue to buy things and make payments on their debts. This, too, will help the banks.
We should also have a major public works programme to employ laid-off construction workers in overdue infrastructure building and have strict new transparency requirements on banks and other financial institutions.
The Fed, the Treasury, and foreign central banks (especially the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan) should announce that they will stand behind every major bank and financial institution so that average investors will be absolutely protected.
This will end panic selling and allow the markets to stabilise.
At the same time, the Fed and others should take an equity stake in these institutions to to pry open the accounting records and to enforce new regulations that would clearly separate normal business operations from the speculative activities of the last decade.

website
James Galbraith, economist, professor at University of Texas, Austin
This does not mean the end of the United States' position in the world economy.
The US dollar has not moved, which does suggest that the position of the US government is still very much intact.
I think what it means is that in the future the big firms will have a smaller presence.
The years when the US government took the position that financial firms can run the country as they see fit and that regulation could be dismised is finished. There will be a major examination of how the financial markets are regulated.
Such financial events will have a lagged effect on everyone ... its most likely consequence is that the credit crisis will get more intense and the foreclosure crisis will get worse.
We will have to wait and see. But people do not learn from mistakes. How many times do we have to go through this?
'Enormous mess'
A well-functioning financial system has rules and it's when the rules are relaxed that shady practices and get rich quick schemes abound, which is what happened in the [sub-prime] mortgage system in 2005 and 2006.
The banks' behavior was conditioned by Bush. [He] sent a clear signal that they could get away with everything, [that there was] no more effective supervision so go ahead and make toxic loans, we won't stop you, then everyone made a bundle and left an enormous mess.
The evolution of good conduct is defined by effective rules. John McCain [the Republican presidential candidate] lectures on the morals of Wall Street but they are no more or less corrupt than other humans.
A full recovery will only begin with a new administration with a different philosophy seriously committed to ... bringing in new people, giving them adequate resources and the legal authority.
I would argue it is impossible for McCain to do it. Even if he is a genuine convert to prudent regulation which he has opposed thoughout his career, who would believe it?
He has been an enabler of the most speculative elements of banking system.

I think Barack Obama [Democratic presidential candidate] appreciates the severity of the issue and has the judicious temperament.
This is not a job for zealots or revolutionaries, it's for serious people to build institutions that can last for a long time.

Palin Nixes Nuclear Energy for Iran

By Glenn Kessler
During last Thursday's vice presidential debate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to break with the Bush administration's current policy on Iran: "Now a leader like [Iranian leader Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad who is not sane or stable when he says things like that is not one whom we can allow to acquire nuclear energy, nuclear weapons."
From Palin's statement, it wasn't clear if she meant Iran cannot have nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, or if she was simply correcting herself, replacing "nuclear weapons" after first mistakenly saying "nuclear energy."

But Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy director for the McCain-Palin campaign, said in an e-mail that Palin "stated Sen. McCain's and her position accurately" when she said Iran should also not have access to nuclear energy.
"There is no circumstance under which the international community could be confident that uranium enrichment or plutonium production activities undertaken by the current government of Iran are purely for peaceful purposes," Scheunemann said. "Given the Iranian regime's history of deception with regard to its nuclear program, its continuing lack of cooperation with the IAEA, its still unacknowledged work on weaponization, its defiance of international norms with regard to support for terrorism and threats toward Israel, and the lack of any serious economic justification for the program in the first place, Iran has forfeited any plausible claim to be pursuing a 'peaceful' nuclear energy program."
Scheunemann's comments seem to place McCain and Palin to the right of current Bush policy, suggesting that an incoming Republican administration would revert to the position taken during Bush's first term, when the president and his aides were scornful of Iran's quest for nuclear energy.

In 2005, during Bush's second term, the administration made an important shift in its position, largely at the request of European allies. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that Iran had a right to nuclear energy -- just not control over the fuel cycle that might allow for the diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.
"Iran can have civil nuclear energy, if that's what they want," Rice explained in an interview last week. "We have talked with the Europeans about even some of the most advanced civil nuclear technology to Iran if it will forgo enrichment and reprocessing. So this is not an issue of denying Iran certain technologies. There's plenty in this for Iran."

Scheunemann, in his e-mail, did hint at some flexibility on the question of nuclear power for Iran. "The simple fact is that Iran does not need to be able to produce nuclear fuel in Iran; there is no reason it cannot rely on an International Uranium Enrichment Center (IUEC) along the lines that Russia has proposed, or other foreign sources of supply," he wrote.
However, he and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers have not responded to repeated inquiries since Friday to explain whether the door was partially open to nuclear energy for Iran -- or if Palin's categorical statement stood as the campaign's final word on the subject.

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A Gift From the ’70s: Energy Lessons

The presidential candidates claim to see America’s energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They’ve revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.
The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants — the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.

As a rule, it’s not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in “Terrestrial Energy,” his history of the hard-soft debate.

The initial debate over nuclear power seemed to end not long after the partial meltdown in 1979 of the reactor at Three Mile Island. Utilities canceled orders and stopped building reactors, partly because of public fears, but perhaps mainly because of rising costs. Mr. Lovins and his allies liked to say that nuclear power, once promoted as “too cheap to meter,” had now become “too expensive to matter.”

The soft path seemed to be the way to go, particularly when some of Mr. Lovins’s predictions about energy conservation came true. As Americans cut back in response to higher prices and new incentives, the growth in electricity demand slowed. Some public officials, most enthusiastically in California, told utilities to stop building large power plants. Instead, they subsidized wind farms and solar power, which were supposed to be cheap and plentiful alternatives once the technologies matured.

Instead, they remained so costly and scarce that Californians’ electricity rates were among the highest in America. They endured rolling blackouts in 2000 while paying astronomical prices for power from nuclear and fossil-fuel plants in other states. The crisis was attributed to price controls and Enron’s market manipulation, but the underlying problem was a shortage of power that forced the state to start building old-fashioned fossil-fuel plants for itself.

Meanwhile, there was a surprise on the hard path, too. Once utilities stopped building reactors, the share of electricity from nuclear power was projected to decline steadily as the oldest reactors were retired. But then several new “merchant energy” companies began assembling fleets of reactors sold off by local utilities. The new owners standardized operations, retrained workers and brought in human-factor engineers to redesign the famously indecipherable control panels.

Under the old owners, the reactors were balky white elephants operating only 60 percent of the time. By improving maintenance and preventing mistakes, the new owners kept them running 90 percent of the time and won permission to upgrade their capacities. So even as the nuclear industry was shrinking in the last two decades as the oldest reactors shut down, the remaining ones were profitably generating an increasing share of the country’s electricity.

Today about 20 percent of electricity in America is generated by nuclear power, which is about 20 times the contribution from solar and wind power. Nuclear power also costs less, according to Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University. After estimating the costs and factoring out the hefty tax breaks for different forms of low-carbon energy, he estimates that new nuclear plants could produce electricity more cheaply than windmills, solar power or “clean coal” plants.

The outlook could change, of course, if new nuclear plants turn out to be more expensive than expected, or if engineers make breakthroughs in other technologies. (To debate these possibilities, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.) Given the uncertainties, Dr. Metcalf cautions, it would be risky to bet everything on nuclear power as the answer to global warming.

But it seems even riskier to bet on just the soft path, as so many greens are doing, either by flatly opposing nuclear power or by setting so many conditions that no plants could be built for decades, if ever. (Mr. Obama says nuclear power is necessary but should not be expanded until security and safety issues are addressed.)

“The nuclear debate is still stuck back in the 1980s,” says Mr. Tucker, the author of “Terrestrial Energy,” the new brand he’s trying to affix to nuclear power. If people started associating nuclear plants with natural radioactive processes in the Earth instead of atomic bombs, he says, they might be persuaded that it’s the most environmentally benign form of energy, particularly compared with wind farms that cover scenic ridges and the vast solar arrays proposed for “empty” land in deserts.

Mr. Tucker, a journalist who has been debunking environmental alarms for decades, says he has come around to Al Gore’s view on the danger of global warming, and he’d like environmentalists to rethink their views, too.

“Even when greens give grudging support to nuclear power,” he says, “they add the caveat, ‘But first we have to make sure the plants are absolutely safe’ — as if reactors haven’t been operating safely for 25 years. Nobody recognizes the complete overhaul that has occurred in the industry or how it’s now pumping out twice as much electricity from the same plants with a vastly improved safety record.”

By scaring people about the tiny levels of radiation emitted during the normal operation of a nuclear plant, Mr. Tucker says, greens have effectively encouraged the construction of coal plants that actually release more radiation because of the traces of uranium in coal dust. He argues that the risks of terrorist attacks and nuclear waste have been exaggerated, particularly by the environmentalists who objected when the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste depository was being designed to guarantee a level of safety for only 10,000 years.

They successfully sued to enforce a safety standard extending one million years — which, in an ideal world, would be a very nice standard. But if you believe global warming is a planetary crisis that must be addressed immediately, should you really be obsessing about hypothetical dangers near one mountain in A.D. 1,000,000? If there’s already a proven technology that doesn’t spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, why fiddle while coal burns?

Palin Talk

Are the media really that annoyed with how Sarah Palin talks? Or is it what she’s saying?
A quick perusal of the Internet shows that maybe it’s a bit of both. Even after surpassing all expectations on Thursday night in the debate against Joe Biden (admittedly expectations were quite low), it doesn’t appear that Palin has many friends in the media.

No respect, I tell ya’
The late comic Rodney Dangerfield used to cock his head, grab his tie, bulge his eyes and say, “Tough crowd, I’ll tell ya, tough crowd.”

Although she is a bit more telegenic than Dangerfield, Sarah Palin could easily pull off the same routine if she were to read the nation’s editorial pages. And according to Palin, she reads ‘em.

Too much
The criticism? She’s too inexperienced. She’s not up for the job. She’s a gimmick. She’s way too conservative. She’s too attractive.

Regardless of the specific criticism, one thing seems to unite the critics: her voice. That’s the common ground. Rarely do you read a column on Palin without the author throwing in a “you betcha” or a “darn right.” It’s great material. It gives the very talented Tina Fey a lot to work with as she does her dead-on impersonation of the governor.

Tina Fey
And Fey delivered again last night. Asked by Gwen Ifill (played by Queen Latifah) how a McCain-Palin ticket would deal with the financial crisis, Palin (Fey) responded:

“You know, John McCain and I, we’re a couple of mavericks. And gosh darnit, we’re gonna take that maverick energy right to Washington and we’re gonna use it to fix this financial crisis and everything else that’s plaguin’ this great country of ours.”

Not laughing
Great comedy. But the media aren’t laughing. They aren’t the laughing sort. But it doesn’t stop them from throwing in a Palin’ism or two. Or three.

We’ll start with the Providence Journal. Not only do they not like the talk, they don’t like the walk. Alaska isn’t just for Alaskans, say the editors from the Ocean state.

We were not won over by her irrelevant populist rifts and appeals, the “betchas,” the “darn rights,” the references to Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms or the “kids’ soccer game on Saturday.” We were certainly not amused by her divisive pitting of energy-producing states against East Coast politicians, who by the way, have every bit as much right to oversee federal lands in Alaska as do Alaskans living next to them.

Do you think the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd has an opinion? Always. And it’s scathing…

“Being mush-mouthed helped give the patrician Bushes the common touch. As Alistair Cooke observed, ‘Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque.’
“Darn right. And that, doggone it, brings us to a shout-out for the latest virtuoso of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart, the governor of the Last Frontier. Her reward’s in heaven.
“At Sarah Palin’s old church in Wasilla, they spoke in tongues. Maybe that’s where she picked it up.”

Dick Polman at the Philadelphia Inquirer isn’t that impressed with the Palin’isms either. He, like many, spots a similarity between Palin and a character in a cult-classic.

“Folksy, for sure: ‘…go to a kid’s soccer game…I betcha….darn right it was the predatory lenders…Joe six pack…hockey moms across the nation…a heckuva lot…darn right we need tax relief…now doggone it…’
“After awhile, I started to think I was listening to Marge Gunderson, the pregnant hick cop in Fargo.”

Jon Meacham, although not nearly as brutal as others, still throws in the obligatory Palin-speak in a cover story for Newsweek.

“Perhaps Sarah Palin will somehow emerge from the hurly-burly of history as a transformative figure who was underestimated in her time by journalists who could not see, or refused to acknowledge, her virtues. But do I think I am right in saying that Palin’s populist view of high office—hey, Vice President Six-Pack, what should we do about Pakistan?—is dangerous? You betcha.”

It is safe to say that Marjorie Eagan at the Boston Herald genuinely dislikes Palin altogether. There’s nothing Palin could do to get on Eagan’s good side. Nothing. Ever.

“She is perky, peppy, bubbly, one of those shiny, happy glass-half-full types whose folksy ‘betchas’ and ’shout-outs’ to third-graders and winks would be welcome in the nurse wheeling you from the operating room or the flight attendant reassuring you as your jet bounces at 30,000 feet. Her style would go over great debating for student council.
“But in a person who could be president? It’s just weird, childish, silly, even patronizing, as if we voters are third-graders ourselves. And that relentless chipperness, real or faux? Enough already.”

Even Peggy Noonan, over at the Wall Street Journal, was critical. Not terribly critical of Palin, but appears to be more irritated at the McCain campaign.

” ‘It’s time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency,’ Mrs. Palin told talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. This left me trying to imagine Abe Lincoln saying he represents ‘backwoods types,’ or FDR announcing that the fading New York aristocracy deserves another moment in the sun. I’m not sure the McCain campaign is aware of it—it’s possible they are—but this is subtly divisive. As for the dismissal of conservative critics of Mrs. Palin as ‘Georgetown cocktail party types’ (that was Mr. McCain), well, my goodness. That is the authentic sound of the aggression, and phony populism, of the Bush White House. Good move. That ended well.”

Bill Curry, in the Hartford Courant, also brings up Fargo but is over-thinking this a bit. Certainly he’s not seriously believing the Palin-speak is a Rovian tactic, is he?

“Why then did Palin take a drubbing in the polls? It may have to do with the very personality that brought her to the ball. You may recognize it: it’s Marge Gunderson, from the darkly comic Coen Brothers film ‘Fargo.’
For her portrayal of the small-town sheriff forever saying ‘golly’ and ‘you betcha,’ Frances McDormand won an Oscar. So should Palin. The resemblance is uncanny. Some reporter should find out if Palin talked that way before the movie came out.”

Even across the pond over at the Daily Mail, they had their opinions too — although they didn’t seem to get caught up in the Palin-talk, they are certainly more blunt over there. Surprising? Maybe not.

“Crashing bore meets dingbat Mom. That, to be brutal, was the line-up in the U.S. vice-presidential candidates’ debate. … Mrs Palin is clearly not a member of the Beltway tribe. She spoke of foreign presidents like a woman who has just learned to pronounce the name of exotic mushrooms.
“At one point she denied the charge of ‘naiveté’ but made it sound like a range of ladies’ evening garments.
“Plenty to play for, and these two are only the sidekicks. But the score from Missouri, folks: Bore 0, Dingbat 1.”

Not everyone was brutal, however. Ellis Henican from Newsday and a political analyst for Fox News (there ya’ have it) sympathizes with having a prominent accent, but isn’t afraid to make fun it anyway.

“When I first moved up North, I tried to hide my Southern accent. I thought it made me sound, you know, ignorant - like the kind of guy who’d marry one of his cousins and then insist on turning up at the wedding in a baseball cap. I don’t try to hide my accent anymore.
“Winking warmly at the camera. Filling the silence with actual words. Steering the conversation to taxes and energy, the two political topics she’s most comfortable with. It was far from a brilliant debating performance. But the Alaska governor has this much: She beat the low bar of expectations by a North Country mile.
“She wasn’t nearly as bad as most people thought she’d be. You betcha, y’all!”

.

Video-ducument of the Keating Five

Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator

Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment.
By Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

John McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning in 1960 when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings.
McCain recounted the accident decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.
The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded.
The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.
In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout, according to McCain's own account as well as those of naval officers and enlistees aboard the carrier Intrepid. In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia.

After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967. Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner. He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war.

As a presidential candidate, McCain has cited his military service -- particularly his 5 1/2 years as a POW. But he has been less forthcoming about his mistakes in the cockpit.
The Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War. This examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.
In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out.
"Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?"
Jeremiah Pearson, a Navy officer who flew 400 missions over Vietnam without a mishap and later became the head of human spaceflight at NASA, said: "That's a lot. You don't want any. Maybe he was just unlucky."
Naval aviation experts say the three accidents before McCain's deployment to Vietnam probably triggered a review to determine whether he should be allowed to continue flying. The results of the review would have been confidential.

The Times asked McCain's campaign to release any military personnel records in the candidate's possession showing how the Navy handled the three incidents. The campaign said it would have no comment.
Navy veterans who flew with McCain called him a good pilot.

"John was what you called a push-the-envelope guy," said Sam H. Hawkins, who flew with McCain's VA-44 squadron in the 1960s and now teaches political science at Florida Atlantic University. "There are some naval aviators who are on the cautious side. They don't get out on the edges, but the edges are where you get the maximum out of yourself and out of your plane. That's where John operated. And when you are out there, you take risks."
The young McCain has often been described as undisciplined and fearless -- a characterization McCain himself fostered in his autobiography.
"In his military career, he was a risk-taker and a daredevil," said John Karaagac, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and the author of a book on McCain. "What was interesting was that he got into accidents, and it didn't rattle his nerves. He takes hits and still stands."
McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, had a privileged status in the Navy. He was invited to the captain's cabin for dinner on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise in 1962, a perk other aviators and sailors attributed to his famous name, recalled Gene Furr, an enlisted man who shared an office and went on carrier deployments with McCain over three years.
On another occasion, McCain was selected to make a commemorative landing on the Enterprise and had his picture taken in front of a cake in the officers' galley, Furr said.
McCain's commanders sarcastically dubbed him "Ace McCain" because of his string of pre-Vietnam accidents, recalled Maurice Rishel, who commanded McCain's VA-65 squadron in early 1961, when it was deployed in the Mediterranean. Still, Rishel said, "he did his job."

Here is a closer look at those three incidents:

Corpus Christi, Texas, March 12, 1960
McCain was practicing landings in his AD-6 Skyraider over Corpus Christi Bay when he lost several hundred feet of altitude "without realizing it" and struck the water, according to the Naval Aviation Safety Center accident report on file at the Naval Historical Center in Washington.
The plane, a single-engine propeller plane designed for ground attack, sank 10 feet to the bottom of the bay. McCain swam to the surface and was plucked from the water by a rescue helicopter.
While he has contended that the engine quit, investigators collected extensive evidence indicating otherwise. Cockpit instruments that froze on impact showed the engine was still producing power. When water quenched the exhaust stack, it preserved a bright blue color, showing that the engine was still hot. And an aviator behind McCain reported that the engine was producing the black smoke characteristic of Skyraiders.
Investigators determined that McCain was watching instruments in his cockpit that indicated the position of his landing gear and had lost track of his altitude and speed.
The report concluded: "In the opinion of the board, the pilot's preoccupation in the cockpit . . . coupled with the use of a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn were the primary causes of this accident."

Southern Spain, around December 1961
McCain was on a training mission when he flew low and ran into electrical wires. He brought his crippled Skyraider back to the Intrepid, dragging 10 feet of wire, sailors and aviators recalled.
In his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain briefly recounts the incident, calling it the result of "daredevil clowning" and "flying too low." McCain did not elaborate on what happened, and The Times could find no military records of the accident.
When he struck the wires, McCain severed an oil line in his plane, said Carl Russ, a pilot in McCain's squadron. McCain's flight suit and the cockpit were soaked in oil, added Russ, who nonetheless said McCain was a good pilot.
The next day, McCain went to the flight deck with his superior officers and some of the crew to inspect the damage. A gaggle of sailors surrounded the plane.
Clark Sherwood, an enlistee responsible for hanging ordnance on the squadron's planes, recalled standing on the deck with McCain. "I said, 'You're lucky to be alive.' McCain said, 'You bet your ass I am,' " Sherwood said. "He almost bought the farm." Sherwood, now a real estate agent in New Jersey, said he considered McCain a hero.

Calvin Shoemaker, a retired test pilot for the Skyraider's manufacturer, Douglas Aircraft, said extended low-level flights are difficult in any aircraft and for that reason Skyraiders were seldom flown at altitudes below 500 feet. After hearing a description of McCain's record, Shoemaker said the aviator appeared to be a "flat-hatter," an old aviation term for a showoff.

Cape Charles, Va., Nov. 28, 1965
Over the Eastern Shore of Virginia, McCain descended below 7,000 feet on a landing approach in a T-2 trainer jet, according to accident records. He said he heard an explosion in his engine and lost power. He said he tried unsuccessfully to restart the engine.
He spotted a local drag strip and considered trying to glide to a landing there but finally had to eject at 1,000 feet. The plane crashed in the woods. McCain escaped injury and was picked up by a farmer.
In his autobiography, McCain said he had flown on a Saturday to Philadelphia to watch the annual Army-Navy football game with his parents. The accident report does not mention Philadelphia but rather indicates that McCain departed from a now-closed Navy field in New York City on Sunday afternoon and was headed to Norfolk, Va.
In a report dated Jan. 18, 1966, the Naval Aviation Safety Center said it could not determine the cause of the accident or corroborate McCain's account of an explosion in the engine. A close examination of the engine found "no discrepancies which would have caused or contributed to engine failure or malfunction."
The report found that McCain, then assigned to squadron VT-7 in Meridian, Miss., had made several errors: He failed to switch the plane's power system to battery backup, which "seriously jeopardized his survival chances." His idea of landing on the drag strip was "viewed with concern and is indicative of questionable emergency procedure."
The report added, "It may be indeed fortunate that the pilot was not in a position to attempt such a landing."
McCain also ejected too late and too low, was not wearing proper flight equipment and positioned his body improperly before ejecting, the report said.
The official record includes comments from pilots in his own squadron who defended McCain's actions as "proper and timely."
About two weeks after issuing its report, the safety center revised its findings and said the accident resulted from the failure or malfunction of an "undetermined component of the engine."
Edward M. Morrison, a mechanic for VT-7 who is now retired and living in Washington state, said that the plane McCain checked out that day had just been refurbished and that he knew of no engine problems.
"McCain came to the flight line that day, carrying his dress whites, and said, 'Give me a pretty plane,' " Morrison said. "Nobody had ever asked me for a pretty plane before. I gave him this one because it was freshly painted. The next time I saw him, I said, 'Don't ever ask me for a pretty plane again.' I think he laughed."

In Vietnam
McCain was a pilot on the carrier Forrestal, off the coast of Vietnam, when one of the worst accidents in Navy history killed 134 crew members and damaged or destroyed various aircraft, including McCain's.
On July 29, 1967, he and other pilots were preparing for a bombing raid when a Zuni rocket from one of the planes misfired.
The rocket hit the plane next to McCain's, killing the pilot, igniting jet fuel and touching off a chain of explosions, according to the Navy investigation. McCain, who jumped from the nose of his jet and ran through the flames, suffered minor shrapnel wounds.
Three months later, McCain was on his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when a surface-to-air missile struck his A-4 attack jet. He was flying 3,000 feet above Hanoi.
A then-secret report issued in 1967 by McCain's squadron said the aviators had learned to stay at an altitude of 4,000 to 10,000 feet in heavy surface-to-air missile environments and look for approaching missiles.
"Once the SAM was visually acquired, it was relatively easy to out-maneuver it by a diving maneuver followed by a high-G pull-up. The critical problem comes during multiple SA-II attacks (6-12 missiles), when it is not possible to see or maneuver with each missile."
The American aircraft had instruments that warned pilots with a certain tone when North Vietnamese radar tracked them and another tone when a missile locked on them.
In his autobiography, McCain said 22 missiles were fired at his squadron that day. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers, 'jinking,' in fliers' parlance, when I heard the tone," he wrote. But, he said, he continued on and released his bombs. Then a missile blew off his right wing.
Vietnam veterans said McCain did exactly what they did on almost every mission.
Frank Tullo, an Air Force pilot who flew 100 missions over North Vietnam, said his missile warning receiver constantly sounded in his cockpit.
"Nobody broke off on a bombing run," said Tullo, later a commercial pilot and now an accident investigation instructor at USC. "It was a matter of manhood."