Citizen's United II - the other foot

[kandrathe]

This kerfuffle is about two potential Hillary Clinton biopics. This is none of: unlimited third party funds, swiftboating, smearing, or libelling.

I was commenting on that which will be beyond the idyllic biopics.

However, political ads are, by their nature, combative. You are trying to convince people to vote for you rather than the other candidate. Sometimes, that means saying nasty things. I agree with you that lying is something no campaign should do, on basic ethical grounds. Nor should they support their proxies in lying. But that's an entirely different argument, which has nothing to do with unilateral disarmament in campaign finance. To make that clear: Parties can lie in any medium. Should they forsake them all, because they could conceivably be used badly?

It is the tension between successfully proving libel and slander in a court, versus the accelerated pace of the election cycle. It's much like the retraction in a newspaper, buried on page 7 that no ones sees. But, meanwhile, mission accomplished on the smear. I don't really have a good practical, constitutional solution. We either hold people to a higher standard of discourse, or we stifle speech.

His campaign staff included someone who toasts to John Wilkes Booth's birthday, right up until it became a major scandal. Is this really "ideologically sound"? Sounds like the same total inability to escape the lunatic, racist, sexist, homophobic fringe that has marked (or even defined) his father's career.

Campaign staff on both sides are frought with rabid insiders who come from legions of volunteers, and etc. But, a conservative shock jock like Jack Hunter or Hillary's aide Mark Penn, are people with pretty rabidly partisan histories. I mean, we've never even been allowed to read much of the President's written work either, which is strange for a someone attending Columbia who was pursuing writing. Then again, I burned my Comp 101 essay on "How to be a Good Cowboy" -- who was that 17 year old?

This is baffling. You hate coal. Presumably, that means there are good reasons to hate coal. And yet, when Obama goes after coal, you can't think of a possible reason for it, except to "score political points"? Maybe he hates it for some of the same reasons you do?

It could be and I'd hope it to be true. But, you don't change in 4 years what has been a mainstay industry over 150 years. You have industry, built upon industry and like a Jenga tower, it needs to be undone carefully, and thoughtfully. They need a publicly supported plan;

• Ensure the stability of generation costs
  
• Implement retraining programs for displaced workers
  
• Provide long term, low interest loans for conversion away from coal generation

Otherwise, the burden of these costs will fall onto those who can least afford it.

This pretty much sums up my position on coal, and clean coal technology. Coal is our tragedy of the commons. No society really consciously chooses to be showered with toxic poisons for a lifetime in exchange for a little energy today. I'm upset with many things our ancestors did to our environment, and there is little we can do to quickly repair it. But, I don't think it needs to be a knee jerk thing done to us quickly before the political winds shift. What we lack in the US, is any political discourse beyond the attention span of a 24/7 CNN news cycle. It's boring... We heard two sides argue... No easy answers... Move on.

On the practical side, gas seems to be coming online fast enough to make coal irrelevant in pretty short order.

With little organized government support for the transition from coal fired plants to NG. I think many in our government are opposed to replacing one CO2 emitter for another. But, these are the ecologically minded idealists who fail to understand the economic damage of a 30-50% reduction in power generation. Politically, its the modern day Marie Antoinette indifference to the suffering of the masses. And, with our global economy, the ripple effect extends to the desperately poor in the third world. Much like the morally bankrupt political support for ethanol, it drives up the costs of food for those who can least afford it. They suffer in order to de-facto prop up American farming subsidies and give feel good political cover for psuedo-environmental positions.