Drill, baby, drill!

Told of President Obama's decision to greatly expand offshore drilling, my wife this morning sighed and said: "He has a whole bunch of Republican in him."

Republicans surely won't agree. And it's important to remember that he told us he would do this two years ago:

Obama said Friday that he would be willing to compromise on his position against offshore oil drilling if it were part of a more overarching strategy to lower energy costs.

"My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices," Obama told The Palm Beach Post early into a two-day swing through Florida.

The problem, from my perspective,is that he's doing this before there's a comprehensive energy policy in place. It's an offering in hopes of getting one. From the NYT today:

The proposal is intended to reduce dependence on oil imports, generate revenue from the sale of offshore leases and help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation.

But while Mr. Obama has staked out middle ground on other environmental matters — supporting nuclear power, for example — the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback. And it is no sure thing that it will win support for a climate bill from undecided senators close to the oil industry, like Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, or Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.

From the perspective of getting a deal on energy and climate legislation, keeping this move in Obama's back pocket for negotiations might've been a little better and he might've been able to get his environmental supporters to understand a little bit. As it is, this decision looks like he's giving away the candy store without any promise of a return.

Can Republicans criticize anything without invoking the Soviet Union?

At The Corner, Sen. Lamar Alexander criticizes a new law that cuts private banks out as middlemen in the student loan process. He's wrong on a lot of the particulars, but the conclusion of his argument is really perplexing:

“It changes the kind of country we live in more than it changes American education,” Alexander concludes. “The American system of higher education has become the best in the world because of choice and competition. Unlike K-12, we give money to students and let them choose among schools, having the choice of private lenders or government lenders. That’s been the case for 20 years. Having no choice, and the government running it all, looks more like a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything. In most of those countries, they’ve been falling over themselves to reject their state-controlled authoritarian universities, which are much worse than ours, and move toward the American model which emphasizes choice, competition, and peer-reviewed research. In that sense, we’re now stepping back from our choice-competition culture, which has given us not just some of the best universities in the world, but almost all of them.”

This is really misleading. What the new legislation does, really, is change the mechanism by which students receive the money that they still use to choose among the schools they want to attend. You can argue that it's wrong to cut out private industry from the lending process, but Alexander is hinting here -- without saying it, exactly, only offering a misleading juxtaposition -- that students will somehow be restricted in their educational choices. And that's not at all true. Not even a little bit.

And to be realistic about the market forces here, it's not as though the government is keeping banks from lending money to students. What's happening here is that the new law keeps banks from profiting from the government lending money to students. This is not an anti-market move; this is a cutting out an expensive middleman move: the result is that more money will be available to help more students go to school. It's using government money more efficiently, and isn't that what we all say we want?

But Alexander's critique raises a real question: Why can't Republicans criticize Barack Obama without invoking the Soviet Union at nearly every turn? They do understand the difference between nationalizing all private industry with an accompanying program of killing/jailing/exiling everybody who disagrees and changing the method by which U.S. government money gets to students, don't they?

Don't they?

It's like I said yesterday about Norman Podhoretz: They probably do understand the difference, and they're just saying things like this for political effect -- in which case they're liars who deserve to be driven as far from power as possible. Or if they don't, they're too dumb to be close to the reins of power. I suspect Alexander and his Stalin-talking-point ilk are lying hacks. But again: I'm open to the possibilities.

For all you Obama-hating deficit hawks out there

Via Paul Krugman, a graphical representation of how the two Bush tax cuts, the Iraq War and the new health reform law impact the federal budget:

Stuff like this is why it's so hard for me not to think of the Tea Partiers as, essentially, sore losers.

The Inquirer and the worst lede ever on a weather story

Seriously, it's hard to top this:

A month after setting new standards for whiteness, the region is setting new ones for wetness.

I mean: Ewwwwwww.

The 'Christian militia' and sedition

My knee jerked a little bit this morning when I read in the New York Times that members of the Hutaree "Christian militia" are being charged, among other offenses, with sedition. My reading of American history is that sedition charges -- usually "seditious libel" charges -- have been brought here mainly in cases where the government sought to punish dissent rather than any real attempt to bring down the government.

Still, if you define "sedition" as the "stirring up of rebellion against the government in power," then the Hutaree -- if you believe the federal government's allegations -- seem to fit it. In the charge of "seditious conspiracy," the government says the Hutaree

did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to levy war against the United States, to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States, and to prevent, hinder, and delay by force any execution of United States law.

These allegation have to be proven, of course. But if true, they do seem to fit the definition.

So why does this seem so ... weird?

I think it's because the term "sedition" does have such a fraught history in this country, used mainly (it seems to me) to punish anti-war dissenters and mostly harmless leftists than genuine revolutionaries. "Sedition" has been a means of punishing thought crimes in this country, in other words.

And it's something that presidents and prosecutors have, in recent decades, seemed to avoid: My quick Google research can find no record of sedition or seditious libel charges for at least a half-century in this country. (UPDATE: A friend points out it's merely been 20 years since there's been a seditious conspiracy charge in this country. Still: That's fairly rare.) That's been true even through the attacks on Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center, and even as Americans like Jose Padilla, John Walker Lind and Adam Gadahn have taken up arms in the service of American enemies.

It seems, at first blush, that the "sedition" label might well fit the Hutaree. But given the history, it still makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And it frankly presents a bit of a challenge to the Obama Administration: It is, politically, continually fighting charges of "tyranny" from the right. Accurately deploying a "sedition" charge does not make Obama a tyrant -- but it will surely make it easier for the righty fringe to portrary him as one.

Netflix Queue: Yojimbo/A Fistful Of Dollars

I guess I knew that Sergio Leone copied Akira Kurosawa, but still it's striking to see these movies back-to-back.And it's even more striking when you think about the career of Clint Eastwood: You mean to say that the foremost icon of late 20th century American manhood -- his squints, his three-day beard, his laconic style leavened with the occasional wisecrack, the jaw stroking and so much more that made Clint Clint -- got his entire shtick from a Japanese guy?

It's like finding out that Dodge muscle cars were based on Toyotas. Really AWESOME Toyotas that you never knew existed.

About that "Christian Militia"

Interesting:

Nine members of the Christian militia group Hutaree have been indicted on multiple charges involving an alleged plot to attack police, including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. Attorney in Michigan announced this morning.

The Hutaree members allegedly "planned to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral."

The indictment continues: "According to the plan, the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which, according to the indictment, constitute weapons of mass destruction."

Just a reminder: Until yesterday, these guys could presumptively walk onto an American plane anywhere in the world with relative ease. A benign medical student from Pakistan? Not so much.