Raymond on Ryan and Romney

Raymond Pierrehumbert scores the top slot on Slate over Paul Ryan's climate denialism and general simplistic view on climate and the environment.  A great read in general but I'll focus on this:

One of the little fantasies that many of us progressives use to fend off the nightmare of a Romney win in November is the idea that he has flip-flopped so much on his way to a presidential candidacy that maybe once in office he'd flop back to the old Romney and give us a Nixon-in-China moment on climate change. There may have been fat chance of that, but with the choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, even that illusory comfort is denied to us.

Yep.  I didn't really have that fantasy for a President Romney, but we have seen a small number of Republicans who started acknowledging climate reality once they're away from office.  A defeated candidate Romney, I thought, might make the switch.  I still wouldn't rule it out sometime for him, but it will take years.

The one I've wondered about is whether a President McCain would've done what candidate McCain promised.  While it wasn't as good as Obama's cap-and-trade, it would be better than what we've got.  OTOH we've already run a movie version of that with candidate Bush in 2000 promising to regulate CO2 as a pollutant if elected.

We'll never find out what McCain really would've done, but the contrast in this election could hardly be clearer.  One party has done something, if not enough, and the other is disastrous.

Still, we will have to have either a change to weaken the Senate filibuster, a climate disaster, or some sitting Republican senators willing to do the right thing before we can get a real national climate policy.  It won't be easy.

McCain record not better than "most Democrats" on climate change

This week's Economist endorsement of Obama gives undeserved credit to John McCain for "having a better record on global warming than most Democrats." I've heard that before and it's not true.

In 2003, Joe Lieberman (who despite his many flaws, remains a good environmentalist) introduced the Climate Stewardship Act, meaning he was mainly responsible for moving the bill forward. McCain was just one of 9 co-sponsors. McCain's name got on the bill because they try to have both a Democrat and a Republican name, but it was still Lieberman's bill.

The bill ultimately failed to pass the Senate on a 43-55 vote, and most Democrats voted for it.

McCain's overrated willingness to buck his party is deserved in this one, very important issue, and for that he deserves credit. That doesn't make him better than most Democrats, though. I suppose he may have put more effort than most Democrats on this bill, but that's a pretty slim reed.

Rauch's "perverse voting" = contrarian = stupid

My grand theory on being contrarian as a general preference is that it: a. only works reasonably well in the business field; and b. even there it only works a minority of the time. When it does work in business, though, it pays off big, addicting some people to the idea that being contrarian in general is more likely to be right than otherwise. Perfect example of this wrong approach:

The Lab's work is guided by two founding principles:

1. Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn't mean it's wrong.
2. But that's a good working theory.

Jonathan Rauch is another example of this, saying that people who want action on climate change should support McCain, because only bipartisan legislation will stay enacted in the long run (Dems would run over minority Republicans otherwise) and because "McCain is running on carbon-emissions limits that are not much different from what Democrats want."

As to Rauch's first point on the necessity of bipartisan legislation, he provides no evidence. I can think of several counter-examples (tax cuts by Reagan and Bush, increases by Clinton) that weren't bipartisan and have been fairly stable. I can't think of dramatic (mono?)partisan legislation that was later overruled.

And on the issue of climate change, they're not the same. Obama would auction carbon permits that McCain would give away freely, and use the money to finance investments in alternative energy. McCain makes fewer promises for alternative energy, doesn't say where he'll get the money from, and his combined Iraq war support plus one-year non-military spending freeze plus tax cuts for the rich would severely limit his budget options.

I agree that McCain could convince Republicans to support climate legislation better than Obama can, but the converse possibility of Republican pressure on McCain to weaken his position is equally likely, as promised by McCain surrogates Tim Pawlenty and Steve Forbes on national television. That's a wash.

Finally, I think it's appropriate to punish the incumbent president's party for malfeasance in office when the incumbent's termed out. If McCain had run on a complete repudiation of Bush that would be one thing, but he didn't. There should be some form of accountability for the disaster that Bush has been on climate.

Being contrarian on the choice of president is like between contrarian on the reality of climate change.

UPDATE: I should add that on a one-time basis, a few scientists have done well with a single contrarian position that's ultimately proven correct, giving them enormous street cred in the science ghetto, with their paradigm shifts and all that. What I'm not aware of is non-crank scientists who consistently take contrarian positions and generally are right. Nor can I think of a single public policy based on a scientific opinion of a tiny minority that's worked out well.

UPDATE II, Feb. 2010:  Well, given the problems in getting climate legislation past, I'm less certain that I was right.  McCain has veered hard right, showing questionable political integrity, but maybe he would've been different in the imaginary world that would have elected him as president.

Health of the mother and late-term abortion

McCain is taking a lot of heat from left blogs for what they call "scoffing" at health-of-the-mother exceptions to bans on late-term abortions. I think we can afford to be fair to McCain given that he's going to lose - he's talking about mental health exceptions that could be so broad as to make the exception swallow the rule.

To be fair to Obama, though, he says he opposes a broad definition of mental health, and implies that clinically-defined mental health disease should be the litmus test. For voters who think that a late-term fetus is/may be a person, I doubt this balances out well, but that's a messier issue regarding abortion.

A tangent - I wrote in February that I thought Obama would win the nomination because "people tended to like Obama more as they heard him more and got used to him as presidential material." I thought that was clear for the Democratic voters, and voter reactions to the presidential debates seem to show the same on the national election level.

Even McCain's fig leaf on torture is a lie

I knew that McCain betrayed his anti-torture principles by allowing CIA to torture while prohibiting the military from doing it. I didn't know that military interrogators could be temporarily designated as CIA officers. There is nothing left of McCain's anti-torture stance.

UPDATE: Somewhat tangential issue regarding Troopergate. Palin's use of her official power to fight her ex-brother in law is unquestionably corrupt, but I had thought it had a modest level of justification in him being a rogue cop. Turns out though that many of the allegations aren't as bad as she says.

Shorter Michael Scherer: what idiot said "by their fruit ye shall know them"?

The headline above paraphrases Time Magazine's Michael Scherer, criticizing the Obama campaign for pointing out McCain's long record of opposition to alternative energy. Scherer points to promises McCain is now making and says these outweigh his record, even if the promises are vague.

Some historical figures may disagree with that analysis. See Gristmill for a different view. I'll just add one additional point, that one can look to a candidate's record for an assessment of his judgment. Even if every promise McCain now makes is sincere, his record of past mistakes is an appropriate argument for voting against him because he has bad judgment.

UPDATE: Scherer admits that examining the record is a legitimate technique, so some credit where some credit is due.

More McCain campaign backing away from cap-and-trade

More retreating from McCain's promise of a weak version of cap-and-trade, by McCain surrogate Tim Pawlenty:

First of all, anything that adds cost to energy prices right now is going to be viewed with a great amount of concern. And so, you notice the cap and trade debate has kind of faded into the background and it’s unclear what that would look like when and if it reemerges. I would also state Sen. McCain supports that approach, but how you do it is really important....you can argue that the world, the globe is warming as it always has for natural reasons. But I think the weight of the science indicates that at least some of it — you know you could argue it’s half a percent or something more substantial, you know — is caused by human behavior. So there are some things that we can reasonably and voluntarily do to reduce the human impact.... in the wake of this energy crisis, where people are, you know, struggling to pay the bills, that debate on cap and trade has fallen to the background for understandable reasons.

Bush waited until after the election to backtrack, but we're seeing it beforehand.

UPDATE: Some good news though - Palin is now waffling about anthropogenic climate change instead of outright denying it, and denying that she previously denied it. Progress through lying! (Though her statement that you need to do something about it regardless of whether it's natural or artificial hardly lends confidence in her ability to analyze.)

Full remarks of Republican National Convention speakers on climate change

Think Progress says the words "climate change" and "global warming" were mentioned all of one time each at last week's Republican National Convention. Neither mentions were by McCain, let alone by his denialist running mate.

I dug up the two references. Here's the first:

In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025....By expanding domestic oil and natural gas exploration and production; by changing the way we power our cars; by investing in clean, alternative sources of energy ... and under President McCain's leadership we will become a leader in the new global green economy; by protecting our environment and addressing climate change; by promoting energy efficiency; and, finally, by cracking down on the speculative pricing of oil.

That grammatically-suspect reference is from the remarks of Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuno.

The other reference:

If John McCain was just another go-along partisan politician, he never would have led the fight to fix our broken immigration system or to do something about global warming.

But he did!

From Joe Lieberman, who apparently failed to notice McCain not leading the fight on Lieberman-Warner, the less-than-adequate climate-change legislation from this year.

That's the extent of attention this issue received, which should give some idea of what priority it would get in a McCain-Palin Administration.

Refuting the lying McCain-Obama comparison email that's going around

Maybe this response will help other folks that have received similar emails from their relatives or friends.

Note that the "sources" the email uses are general info about each candidates, not specific cites. They're counting on people not bothering to click the links and instead just seeing a reputable website and thinking it must be true. In other words, including a few reputable links does nothing to verify the lies.

Finally, I'm including these refutations not because I necessarily agree with the policy positions (I wish Obama supported gay marriage) but because I want to counter deliberate lies meant to elect a far worse candidate.

The text of the email I'm responding to is at the bottom of the post.

1. New offshore drilling: Obama said he would support it as part of a comprehensive plan:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/02/campaign.wrap/

2. Judicial activism: conservative judges are more likely to strike down laws and regulations than liberal judges

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/ask-the-author-cass-sunstein-tom-miles-part-i/

One can go back and forth on judicial activism forever, but basically one person's judicial activist is another person's constitutionalist.

3. Military service: they got this one right! A+!

4. Time served in US Senate: 173 days is not the number of days the US Senate has been in session since Jan. 2005 when Obama joined it, not to mention all the days of Senate Committee work. It's simply wrong. McCain's been there for 21+ years, Obama for 3+ years.

5. Socialized health care: is Medicare socialized health care? If so, then both McCain and Obama count as "yes" here. Obama's program involves insurance subsidies, mandatory responsibility of parents to get insurance coverage for children, and a Medicare-like option, not a mandate, for those under 65.

good info here:

http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2008/03/detailed-analysis-of-barack-obamas.html

6. Supports abortion throughout pregnancy: a lie.

http://www.ontheissues.org/Social/Barack_Obama_Abortion.htm

7. Troops out of Iraq immediately: another lie - Obama said one or two combat brigades a month, roughly equivalent to what the Iraqi Prime Minister has also called for. Obama's left unclear whether and how many non-combat troops would stay. Obama has wanted to increase troops in Afghanistand, which is impossible unless we draw down troop levels in Iraq:

http://www.slate.com/id/2190661/

McCain, by the way, tends to always support more US military involvement - for example calling for US ground troops to intervene in Kosovo in 1999:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/128142.html

8. Gun rights: Obama has for years stated he believed the 2d Amendment created an individual right to gun ownership, although like McCain he supports regulation. The difference between the two is how much regulation.

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/11/obama_my_wife_sees_need_for_ru.html

A big gun nut should support McCain, but this chart shouldn't lie about the difference.

9. Gay marriage: lying liars. Obama opposes gay marriage, supports civil unions.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/issues/issues.samesexmarriage.html

Granted, he opposes the Cal. Prop. 8 initiative too (the initiative would amend the California Constitution to ban gay marriage). Hard to square that position except by Obama's believing that banning gay marriage should be flexible and therefore part of state law but not part of state constitution.

10. Tax increases: see Factcheck cited below, but I'll add that both McCain and Obama would increase deficits, with McCain increasing them far more. McCain's proposed repeal of business health insurance tax deduction is a huge tax increase as Republicans usually define it.

11. Official English: mostly correct! More info here, along with info on McCain's Spanish-language website pandering:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/05/giuliani-spanish-2/ (unsure what Giuliani has to do with it)

12. Social Security for illegals: both McCain and Obama supported an amnesty program that would let illegal aliens join Social Security

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.humanevents.com%2Farticle.php%3Fid%3D24987&ei=a7jCSNa5JJnMsAPu6fX1Bw&usg=AFQjCNE-XqTloKkIyTYXPWKjapOuyRVdfw&sig2=NI3aMDmYTT9v87syNaNGpg

This is related to one of McCain's many flip flop issues, though, so hard to say where he stands now. If someone he believes to be illegal makes fun of his hair, I'm sure he'll be against it.

Okay, taxes. This nonsense has been refuted by Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization that Cheney referred to in the 2004 debates. I'm not going to go into specifics, but they're all here:

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/would_obama_tax_my_profits_if_i.html

It's all wrong, and Factcheck concludes it's a deliberate lie.

Feel free to forward this to anyone you'd like!

Brian
Backseat Driving: http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/

lying email that's being forwarded

2008 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE COMPARISON TALKING POINTS (Ed. note: mostly lies)

ISSUE		JOHN McCAIN	BARAK OBAMA
Favors new drilling offshore US		Yes	No
Will appoint judges who interpret the law not make it		Yes	No
Served in the US Armed Forces		Yes	No
Amount of time served in the US Senate		22 YEARS	173 DAYS
Will institute a socialized national health care plan		No	Yes
Supports abortion throughout the pregnancy		No	Yes
Would pull troops out of Iraq immediately		No	Yes
Supports gun ownership rights		Yes	No
Supports homosexual marriage		No	Yes
Proposed programs will mean a huge tax increase		No	Yes
Voted against making English the official language		No	Yes
Voted to give Social Security benefits to illegals		No	Yes
CAPITAL GAINS TAX
MCCAIN	0% on home sales up to $500,000 per home (couples). McCain does not propose any change in existing home sales income tax.
OBAMA	28% on profit from ALL home sales. (How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes. If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your home or move into a retirement community, 28% of the money you make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.)
DIVIDEND TAX
MCCAIN	15% (no change)
OBAMA	39.6% - (How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama becomes president. The experts predict that 'Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market, yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit.')
INCOME TAX
MCCAIN (no changes)	Single making 30K - tax $4,500 Single making 50K - tax $12,500 Single making 75K - tax $18,750 Married making 60K- tax $9,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250
OBAMA (reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)	Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Married making 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Under Obama, your taxes could almost double!
INHERITANCE TAX
MCCAIN	- 0% (No change, Bush repealed this tax)
OBAMA	Restore the inheritance tax Many families have lost businesses, farms, ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will only lose them to these taxes.
NEW TAXES PROPOSED BY OBAMA
New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet. New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already) New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity) New taxes on retirement accounts, and last but not least....New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!

You can verify the above at the following web sites:

http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/election/2008/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/issues/issues.taxes.html

http://elections.foxnews.com/?s=proposed+taxes

http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourworld/politics/articles/mccain_obama_offer_different_visions_on_taxes.html

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/candidates/barack_obama/

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/candidates/john_mccain/

Obama's role in McCain's veep stumbles

With months to prepare, why did McCain find out politically-relevant information about Palin only two days before the election and had met her only once face-to-face? The Post buried a nugget in the last lines of this article:

But another official said the "process almost by definition is going to be back-end-loaded."

"We expected the last two weeks after Senator Obama made his selection to be pretty frantic," the official said.

In other words, they wanted to do their vetting based in part on finding the best person to match against whoever Obama selected, and waited for the selection. Except that Obama didn't give them two weeks, delaying the announcement so that McCain only had half the time. I think it's possible that the Obama campaign had figured this out and that it played a role in the decision to delay an announcement.

It's questionable judgment on McCain's part to cut down to two weeks what should have been a much more thorough process. Still more alarming is that they apparently failed to react to the unexpected contingency of Obama's delayed announcement when they should've kicked into high gear two weeks before the announcement, regardless of what Obama did.

A little like Edward's infidelity - regardless of whether the controversy should be part of the political process, it's the underlying judgment that's at issue.

And since I don't think it's been emphasized enough, Palin is a climate change denialist who thinks Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. As Mark Kleiman points out, she has a 21% chance of temporarily or permanently acting as President due to McCain's potential for disability or death at his age.

UPDATE: I've since read that the McCains met Palin in early 2008 too, but that hardly improves the vetting process.

Rush Limbaugh, other conservatives insult Cindy and John McCain

Glenn Greenwald found a bunch of abusive quotations from the 2004 election criticizing John Kerry for marrying a wealthy heiress, and implicitly criticizing his wife as someone who patronizes a prostitute.

I assume people like Rush Limbaugh would never be two-faced, so they must be criticizing McCain the same way. To help them out, I took Rush's words, substituted McCain for Kerry, put in the correct dollar figures, and substituted Bush and war for Kennedy and programs. Everything else is just as Limbaugh said, so I'm sure he'd have no objection:

I mean, [McCain]'s been there, but he's basically a
skirt-chaser, folks. He's a gigolo. . . . McCain is cheap. Most gigolos
are. I mean -- I think it -- I think it goes with the, with the definition. . . .
[W]hat do you consider a fair wage? John McCain considers a fair wage a
wife with 100 million. So, he had to find a company that had one. Well,
there aren't too many of these companies that have little heiresses running
around that are single, have 100 million that some guy can marry into. . . .
Because see, Al Gore's daddy was a senator and Al Gore's daddy worked his way
up from wealth and power to wealth and power. I mean, he got more of it than anybody
ever dreamed of for having as little to go on. I mean, he's one of those old
boys. You know how that worked back then. Then John McCain 's daddy is his
wives. (laughter) I mean, he's a gigolo. Everybody knows this. There's
nobody in our party really has much respect for this guy and you can see it
last night, but I can't say that. I mean, you got sugar daddy wife back then. You
got sugar daddy wife now. He worked his way up from a blue blood to a platinum
American Express card, and it doesn't have his name on it.

Another:

[McCain] has lived the life of a millionaire living off
the inherited wealth of his two wives.... [As a]
millionaire who did not have to work for his fortune, Mr. McCain
never had to worry about the money he earned, the taxes he paid, or the war
he and George Bush forced the rest of us to pay for. . . . Mr. McCain is not
effected (sic) when these neighborhoods are destroyed and working class
families lose the largest asset in their retirement plans -- their home's value.

Recently I read at the Corner a whine that Dems supposedly opposed criticizing the wealth of a candidate's wife in 2004 but now embrace it. I think this type of abusive language is inappropriate but I haven't seen the Dems use it. I'd agree that any Dems who said noone's allowed to point out that Kerry was rich in 2004 would be two-faced to do something similar to McCain, but I'd like to see the Corner find an example.

UPDATE: I deleted an Ivy League reference that doesn't work for McCain, who instead was a legacy admit to the Naval Academy.

The Rove/McCain Campaign understands about keeping surrogates on message

They might not be able to control McCain and his occasional verbal wanderings, but the graduates of the Bush/Cheney campaigns know that surrogates can only say what they're allowed to say.

So when "senior McCain surrogate" Steve Forbes says on CNN that "cap and trade is going to go the way of some other things....I don’t think those things are going to get very far," that's because Forbes is being allowed to say it. Bush made similar promises and reversed them after getting elected. Now we're getting a warning.

(And I don't actually question that McCain vaguely wants some kind of greenhouse gas regulations, but I expect Bush actually believed what he was saying in 2000 too. The issue is what McCain would actually do, and it doesn't look good.)

UPDATE: Turns out that McCain policy adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer is from a dirty energy, privately held company (Koch Industries) and ran a climate denialist, astroturf group called Americans for Prosperity. Policy advisers are likely to transition from the campaign to the administration if McCain's elected, so people like her would be in charge of McCain's climate policy. Wonderful.

Ways in which McCain is better than Obama

This post is more intellectually challenging and shorter than one on ways that Obama is better than McCain. I also feel like doing it now before it gets too close to the election to matter. And, Obama has been disappointing lately with the FISA bill and supporting execution of rapists. Also some Democrats are going after McCain for temporarily breaking under severe torture while a POW, an inexcusable tactic that makes me feel contrary.

So:

• The maverick thing - yes it's overplayed and McCain's flipped on a lot of things to get the nomination, but it's also partly real. Where has Obama bucked Democratic Party orthodoxy?
• Ethanol - McCain opposes domestic ethanol subsidies and the 54-cents per gallon tariff on Brazilian cane ethanol. The domestic ethanol is bad while the Brazilian ethanol might be environmentally okay. Obama takes the opposite position on both, and is tied intimately to Big Corn.
• Fighting wasteful military spending - McCain has done this, while I'm not aware of Obama taking on anything yet.

Anything else? This battery thing of McCain's isn't important enough. While I'm not anti-nuclear power, I don't think massive subsidies are a good idea either. I think more free trade is marginally better than protectionism, but that doesn't quite fit the non-partisan criteria I'd like to use here.

Other suggestions are welcome, especially ones that aren't along the lines of "McCain is more conservative than Obama on issue X, and I believe the conservative position is better, so McCain's better."

McCain was asked the C-word question and refused to answer it

There was a minor splash several months ago when Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain, reported that McCain blew up in front of three reporters in 1992 when his wife Cindy was teasing him, and called her the C-word. McCain's campaign denies it happened, but McCain himself refused to answer whether he'd done it when asked at one of his town hall meetings (to listen to him, go to On The Media, start the June 13th show, and advance to minute 11:30).

So where does that leave us? In some cases a refusal to answer is an admission, but in this case it's a harder call. The US News link above states ambiguously that it tried to track down the sources: "An effort to arrange to speak with Schecter's sources was unsuccessful, though the author described in some detail the positions held by the sources at the time of the alleged incidents and their whereabouts today." My guess is that US News thought they had enough info to figure out who the reporters were, but the reporters wouldn't talk.

So I think the ball's in Schecter's court, with the exception that I agree with Mark Kleiman that there's enough legitimacy for the mainstream media to force McCain himself to answer the question. Schecter, meanwhile, needs to go to his sources and say that the campaign has denied it's happened therefore they should do the right thing. Schecter also needs to ask his sources what prominent newsperson they'd trust to preserve anonymity, and get that person to interview them. I've also scrolled through Schecter's prolific blog postings - he mentions the issue once, but hasn't been able to move the ball any further.

One sidenote is how Wikipedia should handle this. It's been discussed and shot down repeatedly at wiki, apparently. I brought it up in the talk section for one article. At this point I wouldn't include it in wiki, but I'm less sensitive to feelings here at the blog.

Finally- if the prominent "newsperson" was Oprah Winfrey and she got it confirmed, that would pretty much be the end of McCain's campaign.

A McCain Court could allow recriminalization of homosexuality

Conservatives think that the potential for making appointments to the Supreme Court will work to McCain's advantage. While I agree that on some issues the public is to the right to the Court's present position, the public is also to the left of where McCain's appointments could take it.

Overturning Roe v. Wade so that abortion is banned outright in some states is one real possibility. Recriminalizing homosexuality is another that's received no attention, and whatever the general public thinks about gay marriage, I don't think they want homosexuals arrested in their homes.

Lawrence v. Texas ended that practice five years ago on a 6-3 vote. Current Justices Alito and Roberts each replaced one vote from the majority and minority of that decision. Had they been on the Court in 2003, it would have been a 5-4 vote for gay rights, leaving Kennedy (whose age will be 75 in the year 2012), Stevens (will be 92), Souter (72), Ginsburg (79), and Breyer (73) in the majority. A single McCain appointment theoretically could flip a future decision and overrule Lawrence.

Two loose ends - first, would they return to and overrule this precedent? Justices don't like to do this, although they might also consider it okay to do so here, considering that Lawrence itself overruled Supreme Court precedent that was 'only' 17 years old. I've no doubt that on the present Court, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia would overrrule. As for Roberts I'm less sure about his willingness to overturn, but it's very possible. My guess is that one appointment by McCain replacing the majority justices makes overruling possible, three appointments makes it virtually certain, and two appointments is a coin-toss.

Second loose end - would they get the opportunity? In law school I learned that it's not clear what happens to laws that are overruled by courts - do they become nullified and no longer exist, or are they existing but are unenforceable? Apparently that hasn't been decided. The Texas law prohibiting homosexual conduct is still on the books, so Texas hasn't done a cleanup and removed the law. I could see a conservative Texas sheriff and conservative Texas DA trying to revive the law during a McCain Administration. A good factual situation for them would be a homosexual rape case where the evidence makes it hard to prove there was no consent - the DA could just bring a homosexual conduct case against the defendant but not the victim. After losing all the way through the Texas Supreme Court, the DA then appeals to the US Supreme Court and we see what happens.

It could be a strange country - gay marriage legal in some states, while gay sex is illegal in others. I don't think criminalizing homosexuality is a winner for the Republicans.

What Obama should say about McCain's climate promises

Obama should continue to tie McCain to Bush, saying something like this:

George Bush, like John McCain today, promised in 2000 to regulate carbon dioxide emissions and to require all power plants to meet clean-air standards in order to reduce carbon dioxide. Two months after he was elected, he broke his promise and fought environmental efforts ever since. On this issue, like so many others, we cannot afford a third Bush-McCain administration.

This puts McCain into a tight spot of dealing with Bush's broken promise. The best he can do is to plaintively say he won't break promises like Bush did, which won't be very convincing to environmental voters and won't exactly energize Republican voters either.

McCain climate proposals vague about India and China

While McCain's climate proposal seems fairly mainstream, if not as good as Obama's, there's been little discussion of his India and China proposals. Here's the text:

....If we are going to establish meaningful environmental protocols, then they must include the two nations that have the potential to pollute the air faster, and in greater annual volume, than any nation ever in history....At the same time, we will continue in good faith to negotiate with China and other nations to enact the standards and controls that are in the interest of every nation — whatever their stage of economic development....Pressing on blindly with uncontrolled carbon emissions is in no one’s interest, especially China’s. And the rest of the world stands ready to help.

So the question is what standards are in the interest of developing nations that McCain acknowledges have little responsibility for the current buildup of greenhouse gases. The good news is that McCain doesn't expressly take the usual hard line position that India and China have to freeze and cut their emissions "equally" with the developed world, despite having per-capita emissions that are one-tenth to one-third of the US emission level. That argument isn't intended to create better regulation - it's intended to kill any possible deal.

On the other hand, McCain doesn't expressly rule out that position. Nor does he take what I'd consider an equitable position - an equal, per capita emission allocation to nations regulating either annual emissions or total contributions to greenhouse gases. Any position by McCain that developing nations should be restricted to lower per-capita emissions than the US isn't going to do well internationally, but whether he'll fight conservatives he point out growing total emissions from developing countries isn't clear. It's vague.

UPDATE: Having scanned Obama's proposal, it's better in general than McCain but no more specific about India and China.

Virtually all of McCain's "gas tax holiday" savings would go to refinery owners

I'm outsourcing this post to Dean Baker. Summary: refineries are the choke point in gasoline production, so they can easily raise prices if the gas tax is lifted. No one else will get the benefit.

UPDATE: I think this is a corollary of a discussion at Gristmill a while back, to the effect that a modest tax on oil imports wouldn't really raise prices and reduce consumption but rather would claw back some profits from overseas producers. In that case, the environmental value isn't so much in the existence of the tax but in what could be done with it.