John-Clark Levin CMC '12 on Obama at USC

President Obama gave me quite the birthday gift the other day when he rolled into L.A. to the University of Spoiled Children Southern California to talk about his administration's lack of accomplishments. (Don't worry, the elections in November will make up for it!)

While I was going downtown for a job interview, his minions rolled into L.A. and clogged up the place. It was so 2008.

I didn't listen to Obama's speech -- I was engaged in my birthday celebration -- but apparently my friend, John-Clark Levin CMC '12, was listening with pen at the ready. He writes for the Student Free Press Association:

When President Obama spoke before more than 37,000 supporters Friday at USC, he was clearly running scared.

In the year of his own election, he did everything he could to raise expectations — to convince voters that he really did have a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton and John McCain. But his playbook has changed. Ten days out from a midterm election in which Democrats are sure to take a beating, Obama is subtly trying to lower expectations.

It seems like the President is borrowing from Hillary’s old playbook. Senator Clinton’s campaign acted like Iowa should be taken as the decisive primary until Obama’s poll numbers began surging there in late 2007. Suddenly, Iowa was “just another primary” and Clinton was warning supporters to brace for a long, tough fight.

There seems to be something of a hope that Obama will be Clintonesque. I'm not so convinced. I think he'll be very, very recalcitrant, but we conservatives will relish the fight.

Pitney on Parallels Between 1970s Tax Revolt and Tea Parties

Whodathunkit: Anger has saying power, says Professor John J. Pitney on the website of New York Times.

...One direct ancestor to today’s Tea Party movement was the “tax revolt” of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

That movement started here in California with Proposition 13, a ballot initiative to limit property taxes. A retired businessman named Howard Jarvis was spearheaded the measure. Borrowing a famous line from the 1976 film Network, he liked to shout, “I’m mad as hell!” -- a phrase that would also become the title of his autobiography.

Like today’s activists, Jarvis disdained political careerists, proclaiming: “The general public doesn’t believe a damn word of what any politician says.” Indeed, his rhetoric was virtually identical. “The people will get a chance to vote for themselves for once,” he told audiences. “They did that once before and it was called the Boston Tea Party.”

The tax revolt also used similar tactics. In a 1990 book on the movement, Clarence Lo described this scene: “The residents of Glendale and nearby communities — shouting `Hey, hey, we won’t pay,’ `Hey, hey, we can’t pay,’ and `Taxation without representation is tyranny’ — marched to the branch office of the county assessor and dumped tea bags on the receptionist’s desk.”

A Cool-Headed Discussion on "Climate Change," Please!

Tomorrow there'll be a discussion with Professor Char Miller on Proposition 23 which will, in the supposedly non-biased language of the panel,"forestall California's climate change initiative signed into law in 2006 under Assembly Bill 32." The event is going to be run by those most honest of brokers, the Pomona College Sustainability Integration Office (which banned trays under the mistaken idea that it would be good for the environment), Pomona College Environmental Analysis [sic] and Public Policy Analysis programs, the Interfaith Council (of all people) and the League of Women Voters.

This is quite frankly electioneering of the highest sort -- and it is probably illegal -- given that there isn't insofar as I can tell, a single attempt to have someone on the other side speak on the issue. On that point, might I recommend the fun and knowledgeable, Professor of Chemistry, Anthony Fucaloro, who is, like me, something of a skeptic on the climate change question? 

As many of you know, I'm agnostic on the climate change question, having once been a true believer. (Even your genial correspondent is capable of his occasional blind spots...)

My skepticism comes from three sources:

1.) Uncertainty in forecasting. Part of this change in my thinking came from reading a book about ice ages, which finds that the swing in temperatures is actually quite more often than we've been inclined to suspect, as most models we have go back only to the turn of the last century, which is part of their limitation in predicting the future.

2.) Uncertainty that warming is a bad thing. Assume that the world is warming and that the most radical of the IPCC reports is correct -- it isn't, N. Korea isn't going to be producing emissions on the scale of the U.S. in 2050, but let's assume it is true and that some nations might be under water by 2100. Then what? Well, much of Canada and Russia will have farmable land, more sources of energy will be accessible. That money that is extracted from such mining or farming could be put into a slosh fund to relocate those island nations inhabitants elsewhere. That's just an example, but I would point out that throughout human history warming periods have, in fact, been good for mankind. They explain how the Vikings were able to get to America and how farm yield increased in the run up to to the Industrial Revolution.

3.) Uncertainty that there is anything we can do about it. Even if we could somehow agree that the environment was in peril, it's less than clear to me that there's anything we can do about it that wouldn't make the cure worse than the disease. Sure, sure, people are saying we need to do this for generations to come, but when was the last time folks actually acted on that kind of thinking? We can't even get the national debt under control, which will affect people a lot sooner than so-called climate change. What makes people so sure that 1) an international carbon regime will work and 2) that it is even desirable?