Roundup

A few links without much comment:

Ezra Klein on the energy bill:

Listening to them, you’d think Jimmy Carter was passing his dream energy legislation. That the reality has no increase in CAFE standards and was held up for a year while Tom DeLay tried to retroactively protect MTBE manufacturers from lawsuits is too perfect. This isn’t conservatism. And it’s only sold as progressivism. In reality, it’s modern Republicanism distilled, a perfectly pure mixture of incoherence and corruption publicly aimed at solving a serious problem but privately written to ignore the issue in favor of industry demands.

An uncomfortably plausible letter (to me, anyway) printed by Mark Kleiman:

Thought experiment: if the USA just quit tomorrow, what would the insurgents do? The jihadis would have achieved aim ( b ); since aim ( c ) is suicidally impossible, they would most likely declare victory and move on. That would leave the secular Baathists. The Kurds would stand on the sidelines while the Shia militias crushed them with Iranian help. Ethnic cleansing of defeated Sunnis would be a possibility. End-state: de facto partition of Iraq into two (think Belgium or Bosnia), with an ongoing low-level Sunni terrorist movement (think ETA, IRA) preventing economic recovery in the Arab part but not strong enough to change the regime. US bases? Privileged access to oil? Cosy reconstruction contracts? Forget it. More likely demands for rendition of Abu Ghraib players to face trial on torture charges.

Sony caught in red-handed in radio payola scam. Wow, radio programmers are cheaper than I would have thought.

Ragout offers the hypothesis that the housing bubble isn’t as localized as some people think, but a reflection of a nationalized bubble in land prices.

Finally, Jane Fonda is going to travel the country, in a bus that runs on vegetable oil, speaking out against the Iraq war.

Jesus, don’t do us any favors. For all I know, Jane Fonda might be brilliantly informed. She might be cogent and well-spoken. But she’s still the woman who visited the Viet Cong for a photo op, grinning and laughing as she posed with artillery that shot at American soldiers. People really hate her for that, and I don’t blame them. She will be met with protestors in and out of uniform at every stop, and her skin-crawling clips with the Viet Cong will be contrasted with the veterans’ protests as part of every single local and national story about her tour.

Opponents of the Iraq war have tried very hard to distinguish between their opposition to the war and their support of the troops. Most supporters of the war have tried hard to ignore that distinction. A few years ago, some idiotic war protestors, who no one had heard of and who represent no one, made a sign that said “We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.” Google that phrase, and you’ll see it used over 1000 times, cited as evidence of the America-hating anti-war movement by everyone from FrontPageMag to Sean Hannity to Glenn Reynolds to the Wall Street Journal to the Weekly Standard. All they did was paint a bedsheet.

Now they’ll have Jane Fonda, the most hated symbol of unpatriotic war protests, to use to smear the anti-war movement. She could apologize at every speech. She probably will. It doesn’t matter. With her history, the most useful thing she could do is stay home.

Via Gadflyer, who have some words of their own.