The cost of energy is a big concern on people's minds and naturally figures heavily in the electoral rhetoric heading into November and it will only get heavier. But, of course, that's about all it will do. The blunt reality of it all is that nothing either McCain or Obama have in mind will lower energy costs in the short term....and pretty much for the longer term. This is of course is not really a shocking revelation to many but it does put on damper on the hopeful and uplifting feeling many will get when listening to their preferred candidate speak on the matter.

About time someone called him out on his Campaign tactics... I hope this is not to vague to understand....

* Hausa farmer, Niger
Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly


Let’s take a step back, put more of the landscape in the frame. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll attempt to lay out Trotsky’s point. Nations, then and now exist at various states of development. More precisely, they exist in various states of backwardness and they’re all trying to play catch-up. Backward countries need capital, and they’ll do almost anything to get it. It’s a sad fact of life: backward countries are badly led. A good measure of how badly a country is led is the percentage of subsistence farmers. Workers aren’t a whole lot better off: they leave the farm, only to spend their days doing manual labor in the factory, getting a fraction of the profits, but hey, it is a step up and don’t blame the capitalist, that’s the way these things work. These backward countries can’t wait around for bad leaders to die off and better ones replace them.

Countries with fewer farmers have the luxury of plenty of capital. An enterprising worker can run down to the bank with a good idea, get a loan and buy the means of production. Once he’s got a nice little company running, he can expand his business. If it’s a really great idea, a venture capitalist will fund him into the big leagues. The subsistence farmer has no such options.

The following has cropped up here and elsewhere, and appears to be a whisper smear campaign against McCain; the story goes, 'he's the father of a black child'… no wait! That was the South Carolina whisper smear campaign from 2000. Sorry about that, but they are oddly related, because there seems to be a correlation between the types of people who routinely say, "Bush is despicable, look at what he did to McCain in South Carolina" and those pimping this latest one. Now, before anyone assumes I'm only speaking of the port side, I'm seeing it from people on both the left and the right.

So Senator McCain, as part of the now-familiar Pimp My Bio effort, frequently tells the moving story of the cross in the dirt that gave him courage and the will to go on. Funny thing is, this extraordinarily cinematic tale wasn't part of McCain's earliest recounting of his POW experiences. Even funnier? It's very similar to a story told by the greatest man of the previous century, Alexander Solzhenitsen.

Hey. Maybe that's not actually funny.

Andrew Sullivan noted this first. He's now asking a relevant question. When was the first time McCain told this moving biographical anecdote?

Betcha there's some folks digging, and digging hard, right now. And yes, I'm sure it's all true and I'm sure we'll get some kind of confirmation in the next few days because I know Senator McCain would never ever inflate or embellish like that. Any more than he would use his POW experiences as a campaign prop. He's just not that kind of man.

Unless he did, of course. And then...?

Heh.

UPDATE! Speaking of embellishing, hey, if nothing else? It wouldn't be the last time. Here.

BONUS UPDATE! At last night's Saddleback Forum, Pastor Rick made it clear that Senator McCain was in a 'cone of silence' so that he would not reap undue advantage, eg know what questions were coming before they were asked. Senator McCain even joked about trying to listen through a wall. Heh. Except it turns out McCain wasn't even in the church during the first half hour of Obama's hour long segment. Gee. That's not quite an embellishment, but. Oh never mind.

BONUS BONUS UPDATE! The Story of the Cross begins to spread. Hey, remember Senator Clinton and the tarmac? Heh.

* Iskra Offices
37a Clerkenwell_Green
London

Trotsky’s escaped from Siberia and fled to London in 1902. Why London? It was a magnet for Russian exiles and other personae-non-grata. Lenin had also escaped to London and was editing Spark magazine, Iskra in Russian. Trotksy began writing for Spark, as were several other raffish ex-prisoners of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias. All would figure large in the years to follow. This little magazine would be the fulcrum upon which Marxism would teeter and totter. With a smaller circulation than many college newspapers, around 8000, struggle for control of its editorial board would have consequences far beyond anyone’s ability to predict at the time. I give you the cast of characters, for Trotsky cannot be understood without them.

Trotsky had married while in prison. He had left his first wife and two daughters behind in Russia of necessity: escaped prisoners don’t usually go back to their families, and his wife understood completely. Trotsky met his second wife in London, took her name and had two more children. The children of Trotsky’s first marriage were raised on their grandfather’s estate. His first wife would later die in the gulag of Kolyma, mining gold in the Arctic. She was last seen in 1938 and has vanished from history. Varlam Shalamov describes the mass graves where she was doubtless buried in his Kolyma Tales, left as an exercise to the reader. Solzhenitsyn said Shalamov, not he, saw the worst of the Stalinist evil. In 1903, Stalin was in Siberia, a young sociopath and thug in training, soon to return to Georgia to a career of robbing banks and extorting money for the Bolsheviks. But this would be far in the future.

Frank Rich has an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times that answers the question, "Why isn't Obama leading in the polls by double digits?". LINK

While Democrats of all kinds are humming along in upbeat fashion toward what they hope will be a triumphant return to the White House this fall, there's a very underdiscussed facet of it:

WHO exactly is on board in this wave toward hopeful victory and what exactly are they expecting?

In some polls--and I think we can all agree without resorting to Harley's PhD dissertations (complete with flow-charts) that polls provide only the sketchiest outline of the electorate--as many as 20% of voters are considering voting for a third-party candidate in this election; this from the weakest field of such pretenders in recent history. Yet given both the obvious relative disaffection for both candidates by the general public, what can be done? Are there no alternatives to the deeply flawed, unfit, and untrustworthy John McCain and Barrack Obama?

It is an article of faith among the faithful that Senator McCain is, unlike his uppity opponent, modest to as fault and never ever one to presume. A simple man who only wants to save America from those who would not-save it. That reputation has taken a couple dents this week, primarily due to the Viagra-like boost the crisis in Georgia has given the senior senator's long dormant Cold War manhood. Daily phone calls to the region, sending his own crack diplomatic team to stand around and get their picture taken. It's all rather, I dunno, presumptuous. And heaven help Barrack Obama had he done anything like this -- as mentioned previously, such actions would have caused a chain of exploding heads in the right wing blogosphere.

Hey. At least he's still modest to a fault, almost heroically so, when it comes to his time as a POW. That too is an article of faith among the faithful. And if his heroic travails have been cited in many of his campaign ads over the years, that's just politics. It has nothing to do with the man.

Anyhoo. When Walter Isascson asked Senator McCain what he was thinking when he cited ABBA as one of his favorite musical influences at the Aspen Institute confab, McCain was quick to answer:

Well played, Senator! Cuz if you're going to pimp your biography it's worth doing so no matter what the context, no matter how innocuous the question. The trick is to get credit for never doing so.

Oh, and by the way. ABBA didn't hit the airvaves until well after the Senator's imprisonment. So it would have been more accurate to say:

Though I'm assuming that part of his bio is something less, uhm, pimped.

Happy Weekend!

(Via Matt Yglesias)