Cascajun

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s party suffered a crushing election defeat and his resignation is reportedly only days away. What will follow?

“President Musharraf’s political party (PML-Q) has been heavily defeated at the polls by a coalition led by two major opposition parties. The opposition has probably won enough seats to form a new government. The Telegraph reports Musharraf’s exit is now days, not months away. And the man with the power to determine the shape of the new government is a man with close ties to AQ Khan, presided over the development of Pakistan’s nuclear program and has just returned from exile in Saudi Arabia.”

What would/will be the policy of President Obama, or Clinton, of McCain be towards the new Pakistani coalition government?

UPDATE:

Zaffar Abbas writes in Dawn, an english language Pakistani internet publication, Musharraf down but not out — and why.

“With his opponents openly asking him to step down and even some well-wishers suggesting a kind of ‘graceful exit’, President Musharraf may well be under tremendous pressure. Yet signals emanating from the president’s camp indicate that despite the heavy odds, he is determined not to throw in the towel — at least not in the initial few rounds.”

These two pieces outline some very real problems facing Obama, and Democrats in general.

The Opacity Of Obama

Barack Obama has run on the message that he wants to change Washington politics. Indeed, “hope” and “change” have been almost all we’ve heard from the Obama campaign, and his success in these themes show just how much the American electorate agrees that DC has to change its methods of operation.

But who will be the candidate who can deliver that change? Will it be the Senator who promised transparency in earmarks but didn’t deliver, not even in the short time he’s been in Washington? Or will it be the Senator who doesn’t earmark at all and promises to veto any appropriations bills that have earmarks?

What Barack Obama and Milli Vanilli Have in Common

For all the hype, Barack Obama is making his way though the Democratic nominating process by merely lip-syncing old liberal standards borrowed from those who came before him. When potential voters begin to notice the lack of originality behind the hype, the “change” candidate may find his fall to be just as meteoric as his rise.

It’s clear to me the electorate is sick of ‘politics as usual’. What isn’t clear is that there has been some massive shift to the left. While Bush may be hugely unpopular, that doesn’t mean moderate Democrats and independent voters won’t vote for a Republican candidate, especially one with authentic centrist credentials. I think that will become clear in the next two or three months.

I’ve heard some speculation that large portions of conservatives will probably sit this election out, presumably because of McCain’s ‘mavrick’ history. While there is a real risk that large segments of conservative voters might do so (it’s certainly happened before), I haven’t seen anything suggesting that will happen. The most recent example of that would be the 1996 election when Dole/Kemp failed to ingnite any enthusiasm in the Republican base and, consequently, lost to Clinton/Gore.

However, 2008 isn’t anything like 1996. The comparison pretty much ends with the simplistic observation that Dole/Kemp ran as ‘Democrats lite’ and lost. The political & economic environment in 2008 are vastly different. To paraphrase Rudy Guiliani, “Everything has changed.”

Clinton/Gore won running as a moderate ticket. G.W. Bush won running as a moderate, or at least as more of a centrist than both the Gore (2000) & Kerry (2004) campaigns.

The 2008 election is shaping up to be a contest between a moderate Republican and a flaming, far left liberal Democrat. As I noted previously, I don’t believe there has been a shift in the electorate that will carry a flaming, far left liberal Democrat into the White House. I certainly haven’t seen any polling that suggests such a shift.

UPDATE: More analysis from Real Clear Politics.

The Democrats are convinced that the GOP is a divided, listless party this year. They see talk radio show hosts with little enthusiasm for the Party’s presumptive nominee, or outright hostility towards him. They see much lower turnout in the GOP contest than in the Democratic nominating process, and much more money raised by Democrats than Republicans across the board. If conservatives and religious voters are unenthusiastic about McCain, there is concern among Republicans that they will not have the ground game that delivered 62 million votes for George Bush in 2004, a full 14 million more than he received in 2000.

Despite all of this, McCain is within striking range of Obama, the Democrats’ strongest general election prospect (at the moment), and the closest thing to a political phenomenon seen in decades.

2008 is not 2006. The Iraq War is going much better than it did in 2006. John McCain appears to have been right to call for and back the surge. Many may think, once they are informed of the matter, that Barack Obama was wrong to call for a quick withdrawal and ignore the advice of the new commander on the ground, General Petraeus. It certainly was not Obama’s long military experience and national security background that gave him the judgment to trump the advice of Petraeus or McCain. The economy is weaker than in past years, but Obama’s solution appears to be the same old liberal dirge: massive federal spending and much higher taxes.

When he shares a stage with McCain, if both are the nominees, he will be challenged on these things. It is not the same as a campaign event, when the floor just belongs to you. McCain will be able to contrast his notion of national service and call for individual sacrifice, with Obama’s call for making the government the solver of all problems. There will be a contrast between a basically optimistic vision of what Americans can do and achieve, including the role of the free market and individual achievement, with welfare state dependency and a basically gloomy reading on the state of the country and its people. In recent decades, when the issues have been framed in this way, Republicans have more often won the day.

Robert Bryce writes an excellent essay on the global warming debate in which he disregards the scientific and political arguments over the issue and simply asks, “If more CO2 is bad…then what?”

That is, if political leaders agree with Gore and others who believe too much carbon dioxide is bad, then what are we going to do? Fossil fuels now provide about 85% of the world’s total energy needs. Even more important is this corollary: Increasing energy consumption equals higher living standards. Always. Everywhere. Given that fact, how can we expect the people of the world–all 6.6 billion of them–to use less energy? The short answer: we can’t.

[…]

I no longer care about the left-right/liberal-conservative distinction. I’m tired of the political correctness game. When it comes to energy issues, I’m a liberal who’s been mugged by the laws of thermodynamics. And those laws have turned me into a realist about energy issues. For years, I ignored the immutable laws of thermodynamics. But in the course of writing my upcoming book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence,” I had to pay attention. And in doing so, I was forced to accept the fact that there are no silver bullets, no easy answers, when it comes to energy.

Thus, when it comes to global warming and energy consumption, there are three main issues to be addressed: technology, morality, and the scale of global energy use.

Bryce then goes on to detailed discussion of those three issues.

Technology – (1) we can’t simply rely on energy efficiency, as the Jevons Paradox states, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” This paradox is illustrated by recent energy-consumption trends in the U.S. Since 1950, the amount of gross domestic product produced per unit of energy consumed has doubled–and yet during that same time span, energy consumption in the U.S. has risen threefold. (2) Alternative fuels will not be a vialble candidate to meet global energy demands in the foreseeable future. Additionally, biofuels like corn-ethanol and biodiesel may be more harmful for the environment than fossil fuels.

Morality – Today, 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricity in their homes. Some 2.5 billion people use wood, dung, or other biomass to meet their cooking energy needs. According to the World Health Organization, about 1.3 million people per year, most of them women and children, die because of the pollution caused by indoor biomass stoves. Only HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, and lack of clean drinking water and sanitation are greater health threats than the problems of polluted indoor air. What the energy-poor need most are common fuels like kerosene, propane, and gasoline. And just like us, they want reliable electricity. The people in the industrialized countries have a moral obligation to help the energy-poor get cheap, reliable energy. And it is undeniable that the cheapest and most reliable forms of energy, for now, and for the foreseeable future, are fossil fuels.

The Scale of Global Energy Use - Energy consumption in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan (the Big Five, in terms of the worlds most populous contries) is soaring and will double over the next decade or two. The belief that the world can drastically cut global carbon-dioxide emissions at a time when about half of the people on the planet are still living in relative energy poverty borders on fantasy. Moreover, the industrialized countries in general, and the U.S. in particular, have no moral standing from which to tell the developing countries that they should slow the growth of their energy consumption.

Back to Robert’s question, ““If more CO2 is bad…then what?” Humans must adapt.

Bringing hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty–and, thus, into higher standards of living–means providing them with access to cheap, plentiful energy. Like it or not, that largely means fossil fuels, and increased use of fossil fuels will mean further increases in carbon-dioxide emissions. And the hard truth is that the people of the world are going to have to adapt to whatever happens next with regard to the world’s climate–regardless of the causes of those changes.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an article about two studies recently published in Science:

Greenhouse Affect

The ink is still moist on Capitol Hill’s latest energy bill and, as if on cue, a scientific avalanche is demolishing its assumptions. To wit, trendy climate-change policies like ethanol and other biofuels are actually worse for the environment than fossil fuels. Then again, Washington’s energy neuroses are more political than practical, so it’s easy for the Solons and greens to ignore what would usually be called evidence.

[…]

The researchers break new ground by exposing a kind of mega-accounting error: Prior studies had never credited the carbon-dioxide emissions that arise when virgin forests, grasslands and the like are cleared to grow biofuel feedstocks. About 2.7 times more carbon is stored in terrestrial soils and plant material than in the atmosphere, and this carbon is released when these areas are cleared (often by burning) and the soil is tilled. Compounding problems is the loss of “carbon sinks” that absorb atmospheric CO2 in the bargain. Previous projections had also ignored the second-order effects of transferring normal farm land to biofuels, which exerts world-wide pressure on land use.

So, incredibly, when the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline. In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol “pays back” the carbon released by land-use change. As they say, it’s not easy being green.

I’m not strictly opposed to biofuels, however it is becoming increasingly apparent that they are not the panacea that environmentalists or ‘green-thinking’ people make them out to be. We do need to reduce our dependency on imported petroleum. Burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. However, we need to recognize the true costs of alternatives that, according to this research, may actually be worse than fossil fuels.

My friend Doug is a paraglider and gave me some of his video footage. I put this short film together this morning.

Recently published research in Science states that, by displacing corn and soybeans grown for food, biofuels are doing more harm than good.

Converting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report in a pair of new studies in Science, but also would do little to slow global warming—and often make it worse.

I’ve suspected as much. While biofuels may reduce our dependence on imported oil, they have many negative externalities their proponents don’t acknowledge.

My enthusiasm over the 2008 presidential election wanes daily. The race for the nomination of both major parties has narrowed to two candidates in each field, none of which I find myself drawn to support.

The Republicans are likely to nominate John McCain. John McCain 2008 reminds me of Bob Dole 1996. They both represent the Republican party leadership’s chosen successor for parties nomination, rather than a real leader or visionary. Aside from that, I disagree with both McCain and Romney on a variety of issues.

There is a palpable air of inevitability that a Democrat will be elected. And now, with Obama & Clinton in a virutal tie, it appears quite possible that neither will have a majority of the pledged delegates going into their presidential nominating convention in August. Should that happen, the Democrat’s choice of nominee could be made by the party’s 796 superdelegates. Superdelegates are delegates are not legally bound by the decisions of party primaries or caucuses. Rather, they are current elected officeholders, current party officials, former elected officeholders, and former party officials. How democratic is that?

Furthermore, I’m continually discouraged when following coverage of the race because it focuses largely on the horse race aspect. Who is ahead in the polls and leading in which demographic segment of likely voters, rather than the candidates positions on the issues and how they differ from one another.

I was reading up on the various presidential candidates positions on foreign policy and found this statement by Mike Huckabee compelling.

In response to a question about the US role in ending the genocide in Darfur, Huckabee responded: I think we have some role to play in it, but I guess what disturbs me even more, we have not even addressed the genocide that’s going on and the infanticide in our own country with the slaughter of millions of unborn children.

I decided to see how well the facts supported that position. Here’s what I found out, only looking as deep as the Wikipedia article linked below.

Abortion in the United States

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legal induced abortions in the US in 2003. When exploring why so many US women elected to have abortions, studies by the Guttmacher Institute have found that pregnancies from rape or incest account for less than 1% of legal abortions. Abortions due to health risks, either fetal or maternal, account for only 6%. The remaining >90% were for reasons of convenience:

• Want to postpone childbearing (25%),
• Cannot afford a baby (21%),
• Has relationship problem or partner does not want pregnancy (14%),
• Too young - parent(s) or other(s) object to pregnancy (12%),
• Having a child will disrupt education or job (11%),
• Wants no more children , or no children at all(8%).

In my opinion, electing to have an abortion for any of those reasons is equivalent to choosing abortion as a method of birth control. Thus, approximately 760,000 unborn children are aborted each year in the US because they are outcome of an unwanted pregnancy.

So yeah. I can see Huckabee’s point. Why should we risk the lives of American troops to intervene in the affairs of a foreign nation to prevent genocide when we are, in fact, doing very little to prevent the infanticide right here on American soil?