Andrew Sullivan gushes over Chris Steiner’s concept of  $20 per gallon gasoline.

$20 a gallon is about the only thing that could unleash the genius of the market in energy innovation. And nothing else will really do anything to abate climate change. Bring it on!

Now, it’s quite conceivable that the forced innovation would indeed make our lives better in ways that I can’t imagine.  For upper middle class yuppies living in our urban centers, it might be really swell.

But the transitional impact would be absolutely devastating for most people.   Even Steiner admits that whole industries — from airlines to amusement parks to sushi restaurants — would go under.   Almost all homes outside urban centers would be simultaneously unlivable and unsellable.   Only the independently wealthy would be able to travel abroad.  Essentially, we’d set our lifestyles back a hundred years.

We’re not going to all be in utopian walking neighborhoods in big cities, either.  They’re incredibly expensive already and the competition will only increase.

Further, Steiner’s notion that everyone would migrate into “energy-related startups” is an absurd fantasy.  Few people will have the intellectual capacity, much less the training and education, to do anything but menial work at the cutting edge of science.

Since this is my last entry in the debate, I’d like to thank Bernard Finel for what I think has been an excellent, interesting, and informative debate. I’ve accomplished what I set out to do when I was moved to propose this debate: I’ve established that complete disengagement with the Middle East (the resolution of the debate) would be imprudent and Bernard agrees with me:

Engagement and disengagement are not binary values. My call is not for zero presence, but rather for a diminished visibility of our role in the region

That’s not what I drew from Bernard’s article that prompted my suggestion nor is it what I drew from his affirmative case. I still don’t have a clear idea of what Bernard is proposing. I do see that he’s dissatisfied with things as they are, a view I share.

I also believe that he and I agree that we should de-emphasize our military commitment to the Middle East somewhat. Where we appear to differ is in what the nature of our continuing engagement with the Middle East should be.

I’ll now consider some of Bernard’s arguments seriatim.

Oil

Let’s dispense with the oil issue first since it’s the easiest. The spreadsheet of oil prices that Bernard produced is highly informative but rather than proving his case it proves mine. Policies aren’t arrived at by averages but by events. The price spike of 1979-1980 was produced by the deteriorating security situation in the Middle East I sketched in my argument. The price spike of 1986 was caused by the so-called Tanker War during the Iran-Iraq War. That each of those was followed by an increase in U. S. military involvement in the Middle cannot mean that they were caused by that involvement although that increased involvement may have had increased hostility to the United States as a secondary effect. I think the message is rather clear: if the states of the Middle East want us to reduce our military engagement

There is currently no way for us to avoid dependence on oil. Even if we produced every single drop of oil that we consumed, since oil is fungible, the Gulf states are major oil producers, and they are the lowest cost producers we would still be dependent on Gulf oil. An oil price shock would affect us under those circumstances as much as it would now. The quantified effects of closing the Straits of Hormuz are estimated to be around $200 billion per year, i.e. more than the cost of the military engagement that Bernard has cited.

There is no alternative to oil at hand and will not be for the foreseeable future. There is no production-ready electric car, there’s no reason to believe that a practical one will be producible in production quantities at a reasonable cost for the foreseeable future, and if neither of those were true we’d still remain dependent on oil for the foreseeable future for two reasons.

It rarely makes discussions of oil independence but even if a production electric car were ready it will take twenty years for us to turn over the complete oil-burning vehicle fleet. That’s a matter of mathematics and economics as well as logistics. 100 million vehicles at $40,000 a pop (on average) cost $4 trillion. If you can produce the batteries in those quantities which nobody knows how to do yet. A price shock in oil would be an economic catastrophe for us for every year of those twenty years.

And even that’s not the whole of it. Our current electrical grid doesn’t have the excess capacity to handle the additional load required to recharge all those electric vehicles, it will take us decades to update our grid, and it will cost trillions more.

But that’s a parochial view. Our investment in stability in the commerce in oil through the Gulf maintains price stability not only for us but for our European and Asian allies and, equally importantly, for every poor country in the world that is far less willing to pay for turning over its vehicle fleet or upgrading its electric grid than we are. Our investment keeps those countries stable and the world at peace.

Terrorism and security interests

There’s little reason to believe that disengagement from the Middle East will result in a reduction of the threat from terrorism. As my good friend Mark Safranski put it, that’s not merely counter-intuitive, it’s lacking in real world evidence. Terrorists have their own intrinsic motivations; they aren’t merely responding to our actions although those may be among the explanations they present for their actions.

The most dangerous, awful anti-American regimes in the world aren’t those with whom we have high levels of engagement, they’re those, like Iran and North Korea, with whom our engagement is very limited.

It isn’t disengagement that will lead to a more positive view of America and Americans but more engagement as the polling data I’ve linked to suggests. Here’s an additional example.

Recent arrests in Belgium have rounded up members of a terrorist ring who apparently were planning an attack in Brussels. Belgium hasn’t been part of the coalition in Iraq and its military involvement in Afghanistan has been nominal. Both its footprint and its fingerprint in the Middle East are quite small. Nonetheless the Belgians are a target for terrorist activities.

Israel

Israel doesn’t figure prominently in my own calculus of American interests in the Middle East and I wish that the nature of the relationship between Israel and the United States were somewhat different than it is now. Howsomever it remains that Israel is our closest ally in the Middle East, there is a substantial constituency in the United States that would render major disengagement from Israel politically impossible, and I have little reason to believe that such disengagement would produce more security for us, the Israelis, for the Middle East, or for the world. In particular I don’t see how major disengagement from the Middle East would motivate the Israelis to arrive at a settlement with the Palestinians nor do I see how relinquishing our strongest bargaining chips—our engagement with the Middle East—would strengthen our hand in achieving such a settlement.

Increased engagement

Bernard wrote:

Our embassies are massive concrete structures, set back from the road, with triple rings of security barriers. Our businesses operate behind barbed wire and are protected by private security. Americans travel in armed convoys and stay in secluded hotels that also feature fortress-like precautions.

Does that describe Egypt, Jordan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates? Or many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa? Perhaps someone better informed than I could comment.

I think that’s a description of Iraq. We can’t undo the harm to our long term interests in the Middle East that our invasion of Iraq has caused. Nor am I prepared to argue that on net the invasion was a good thing.

Over the next several years we’ll be removing something like half of the troops we have in Iraq which I support as the security situation there has clearly improved substantially.

Bernard scoffed at the possibility of trade with the Middle East. Let’s take a single example: Jordan. Currently the European Union does something like $4 billion per year in exports to Jordan. The U. S. does something like $650 million, only about 6% of the total. It certainly looks to me as though there’s a market there and room for improvement on our part. There’s a similar pattern throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Emphasis on trade liberalization and increased trade with the Middle East will not only improve the people who live there’s opinion of us but it will improve their way of life, making them more prosperous and happier. And that in turn will make all of us more secure.

Conclusion

The reason I proposed a debate on the subject was simply because the format of a debate calls for the burden of proof to fall on the affirmative. That’s not a trick; that’s the definition. Debating requires the affirmative to meet the burden of proof. I’m not surprised that Bernard doesn’t much care for the format because the real world evidence points the other way.

In the final analysis it actually appears to me that Bernard and I have many points of agreement: we shouldn’t disengage from the Middle East completely, our military engagement with the region is too great. I see no way to reduce our “fingerprint” on the region for the foreseeable future and think that our best interests lie in increased engagement. That’s our historical experience and that’s what the opinions of people all over the world support.

We need to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it and the Middle East is no exception to that but the engagement should not be so heavily in the form of military engagement. More butter, fewer guns.

Question 1 (Finel): You write: “I believe the evidence speaks clearly: the increased U. S. engagement in the region has overall been a stabilizing force.” What is the precise benefit to the United States of this increased stability? Are American interests in the region more or less secure today as a result? Or is this purely a altruistic argument on your part?

Schuler: I won’t deny that my motives are partly altruistic but that’s not the only reason we should want stability in the Middle East. Avoidance of oil price shocks doesn’t just benefit the United States but every country that buys oil whether they’re in South America, Africa, or Asia. Some of the governments in these places are holding on very tenuously as it is. An oil price shock could send them over the edge. We recently saw risks of that in Pakistan.

Pakistan recently applied for a World Bank loan because of the high price of oil. The significantly higher price spike caused by an interruption in Gulf oil might well have sent them over the edge. That presents a very real direct security threat to us. The Pakistani government is bad enough at preventing terrorist training camps from operating in the country as it is; a failure of that government would make matters even worse. Additionally, our supply lines for Afghanistan run through Pakistan. A collapse of the Pakistani government would be a very bad thing for our troops there.

Repeat that in Central America, South America, and Africa and you’d aggravate the poverty and misery in the countries in those areas. People in poor, chaotic places can be driven to great lengths. They resort to piracy as in Somalia or drug production and trafficking as in Afghanistan. They go where they think they might find work or relief—here, France, Italy, the United Kingdom. That places strains on our health and educational systems among others, not to mention social stresses.

And people living in prosperous countries make better customers for American goods and services than people in poor, chaotic countries do. Improving security is a fine example of doing good while doing well.

Question 2 (Finel): You quote from Sayyid Qutb. What evidence can you produce to show that Qutbism is followed by anything more than a tiny sliver of the population of the Middle East?

Schuler: A recent Pew poll suggested that roughly 8% of Muslims living in the United States expressed opinions which I’d interpret as radical Islamist ones. The number of foreign-born Muslims, particularly Arabs, who expressed such views among the whole was somewhat higher. I wouldn’t be surprised if 10% of the population of the Middle East had such views. That’s tens of millions of people.

The membership of the Muslim Brotherhood is certainly estimated to be in the millions. I don’t think there’s any doubt that his teachings are very influential.

I’m not certain whether the absolute numbers are particularly important. There weren’t a lot of Japanese who believed that Japan should attack the United States sixty years ago and only a very small number actually took part in the attack. We engaged in total war against the Japanese anyway. My point is emphatically not that we should be engaging in total war but that a relatively small number of people can create a lot of misery.

Question 3 (Finel): How would you guarantee the security of “American tourists, American products, American students, and, especially, American businessmen”? Which of the security measures undertaken after the 1998 embassy bombings would you reverse in order to encourage greater contact between these groups and the people of Middle Eastern countries?

Schuler: It’s certainly a problem and I’m open to suggestions. I don’t know that I’m advocating reversing any of the post-1998 measures. I’m not advocating a sudden flood of Americans but a gradual increase. American businesses aren’t doing as much business as they could be in the Middle East and North Africa and real as opposed to perceived security concerns probably aren’t the most important reason for that.

Clearly, some places are riskier than others. Iraq would be pretty darned risky. However, to the best of my knowledge there’s only been one murder of an American in Jordan over the period of the last 20 years. There are all sorts of places in the Middle East and North African where American tourists and businessmen aren’t in considerably more danger than British or French tourists or businessmen and the British and French are doing quite a bit of business in the Middle East.

It would also help if there weren’t exaggerated and mistaken impressions given in our own media. For example, the early reports of the attacks in Mumbai last month emphasized that the terrorists were after Americans and Britons. Later reports tended to refute that. There’s never been a definitive answer to whether that was the case and our media accounts have left us with the impression that Americans were particular targets whether that was the case or not. That makes it hard to assess the actual risks.

The most recent Pew Survey of Global Attitudes found that people in other countries who had more personal exposure to America and Americans were also more likely to have a favorable attitude towards America and Americans. We aren’t going to improve our security situation by barricading ourselves within our borders. Ignorance and isolation are our enemies not our friends.

Question 1: What evidence do you have that reducing our “footprint” and “fingerprint” will result in a reduction of radicalism in the Middle East?

BERNARD FINEL: Obviously, it is impossible to prove a hypothetical, so there is no direct evidence to support my contention that reducing our visibility will reduce radicalism. Indeed, I don’t think it is likely to reduce radicalism at all—what I believe is that it will reduce anti-American radicalism, which is a slightly different argument. I also want to point out that we need to think through carefully the evidentiary requirements of the case for a policy change. If our current policies were working well, then there would be a strong argument for the presumption against a major departure, and hence a high-standard of proof would be required. In the current case, where our Middle Eastern policy is, I think, self-evidently unsatisfactory, the standard of proof for change is lower. That said, I agree with the implicit assumption behind these questions, which is that the first principle ought to be to first do no harm to American interests.

As to the evidence. I come to my conclusion on the basis of both an analysis of public opinion data and by comparison to other countries. First, opinion data: There is deep, deep skepticism of American motives. According to a survey done by Shibley Telhami of opinion in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, 83% of respondents held an unfavorable view of the United States in 2008. Of that 64% held a “very unfavorable” view. The fundamental reason for this unfavorable opinion is skepticism of American motives. When asked whether the U.S. goal was to “weaken and divide Islam” a worldpublicopinion.org poll in 2007 showed 78% of Moroccan believed that was the U.S. goal, as did 92% of Egyptians and 73% of Pakistanis. This is a common belief in the Middle East. Indeed, it is one of the few obvious sources of anti-American sentiment, along with support for Israel and the Iraq war. On the whole, the public in the Middle East responds positively to American “values”—such as democracy, freedom, and so on. And on the whole, these same publics reject terrorism. So, I think we can infer, from this, that it is the American role in the region that prompts anger and resentment.

Second, do a comparison with other countries. If the issue if “who we are” rather than “what we are (perceived as) doing,” then why are we more unpopular than our European allies who share most of our values. There is no correlate between level of democracy and unpopularity. There is no correlation between percentage of Christians and unpopularity. Muslims in the United States are, on the whole, better integrated into American society than are Muslims in Europe, and yet in the Middle East that is not reflected in a different in public opinion.

If you can explain 83% unfavorable ratings—in countries that are largely American allies—with some other data point, I’m open to reconsidering my argument. But I just think the data leads one to the conclusion that it is American involvement that is generating a backlash.

Now, as a policy matter, does that imply that reducing our footprint would ease this challenge. I really don’t know. I can’t see how it could hurt. But I am also not sure it will help. Just as anti-Semitism often exists even in the absence of Jews, it is possible that anti-Americanism has become so ingrained in modes of political analysis that even if we reduce our presence, we will still be blamed for negative developments in the bizarre conspiracy theories that seem to dominate political analysis in the Middle East. I think reducing our footprint and fingerprints is the best option, but I would not bet the mortgage on it.

Question 2: what evidence do you have that reducing our “footprint” and “fingerprint” will result in enhanced security for Israel or a greater likelihood of the Israelis and Palestinians reaching a mutually agreeable settlement of their differences?

BERNARD FINEL: Actually, I don’t think it will do either of those things, and I apologize if I gave that impression. About Israeli security — my view is that the Israelis can take care of themselves. They are a nuclear armed state with the best conventional military in the region. Deterrence should hold against state actors. In terms of non-state actors, I think the answer lies in multilateral non-proliferation initiatives — fissile material cut-offs, international nuclear fuel banks, and so on. Unilaterally whacking countries that might someday become a threat to Israel seems to me an inefficient approach, and one that will make the U.S. and Israel increasingly unpopular thus feeding the problem we seek to resolve.

About the Israeli-Palestinian dispute… actually, I don’t think there is a negotiated solution available, and I just think that it is mistake to be so involved that we get blamed when no agreement arises. I also think it is a mistake to raise false hopes. My view here is that we should acknowledge we have no power over the situation, offer our assistance if requested, but otherwise try to break the notion that the road to peace in the Middle East somehow runs through Washington.

Question 3: what evidence do you have that pursuing “alternative energy, oil exploration at home, better fuel efficiency from cars” will result in a substantial reduction in oil use in the near term in the United States let alone in the long term? How large a reduction and in what time frame?

BERNARD FINEL: My argument is a long-term one actually. I come at the issue from the reverse perspective. Is there any reason why, even given today’s technology, we “need” to use oil? No. Replacing the roughly 9% of electricity generated by oil-fired power plants is within easy reach by a combination of coal, nuclear, solar, and wind. The bigger issue is the use of oil in the transportation sector. Here there are again plenty of existing solutions — plug-in electric, hydrogen-powered, natural gas, etc. The big challenge in making a switch is primarily infrastructure. The cost of building out this infrastructure is massive… but so is the cost of fighting wars in the Middle East and maintaining power-projection capabilities for regional contingencies there.

According to Energy Independence Now, converting all of California’s gas stations to carry hydrogen would cost roughly $5 billion. Extrapolate that to the rest of the country and we are looking at maybe a $50 billion price tag. Add in investments in generation capacity—maybe twice that again, so another $100 billion. We spend roughly $150 billion in purchasing foreign oil every year (the figure varies with prices, of course). For the money we spend in a single year on foreign oil, we could make a major dent in a hydrogen infrastructure. Hydrogen is still more costly than oil if you don’t take into account the political and military costs associated with oil dependency. If you do, the gap closes. But you don’t need to replace all oil. Just reduce our use and exposure to the point that we don’t feel compelled to be a regional policeman.

Just a caveat—the numbers on energy independence are all over the map. It depends on how quickly you do it, which technologies, assumptions about economies of scale, etc. My point is, we spend $150 billion on foreign oil, we spend perhaps another $100 billion annually in supporting military capacity and political engagements to reduce risk in access to that oil, and we spend tens of billions more a year in mitigating the consequence of this dependence. There is a massive amount of resources locked up in the status quo. Oil dependence is not cheap.

A colloquium on the Freakonomics blog asking, “What Is the Future of Suburbia?” generated insights from a wide range of experts, a few of whom have apparently been reading too much science fiction or over-indulging in recreational drugs.

James Kunstler, for example, opines that,

There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

[...]

The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment. Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end.

Thomas Antus informs us that,

Government services such as police, fire, health, and public works will increase exponentially. To pay for the expanded services, taxes will also increase exponentially to the point where individual paychecks are made payable to the government and deposited directly in the general treasury. All individuals will have to use credit cards for all living expenses, going into massive debt and having to work until they are 90 years old, thus saving our Social Security system.

Others are somewhat more optimistic.  John Archer, for example, tells us that,

Modern suburbia evolved in the early eighteenth century along with Enlightenment ideals of private selfhood and capitalist economics. As such, suburbia — not the city — became, and remains, the perfect social and geographic apparatus for bringing fundamental ideals and principles of our culture to fruition, for better or worse.

Ideals of privacy, property, and selfhood — overoptimistically embodied — in those helicopters, are splendidly realized in the single nuclear-family detached house, set in its private surrounding yard. And no matter the threats of global warming or energy shortages, the solutions that we pursue are going to adhere to those ideals.

[...]

With advanced methods of modular construction and individualized product design, suburbia, like capital, will learn to be flexible: instead of holding the same shape for 60 years, at the mercy of demographic shifts and mortgage-finance crises, houses can become resizable and reconfigurable to suit residents’ changing needs. Neighborhoods will evolve, instead of turning over, thus enhancing community and social capital.

Planning will become flexible as well, so that infrastructure of all scales can smartly adapt to changing demographics and advancing energy, water, transportation, and other technologies. Again, the flexibility of capital as an investment will be registered in the form of more flexible real-estate instruments — which, as different clusters and neighborhoods evolve in different ways over time, will afford more occasions for aesthetic and demographic diversity.

My guess is that Archer is closer to the mark than others but the real answer to this question, as with most prognostication about the distant future, is Who the hell knows?  There are simply too many variables at work and too many unknowns.  Fantastic technological innovations could obviate our energy and transportation problems, while other developments could solve some of the problems that make urban life unattractive or unaffordable.

Matt Yglesias points out that these choices don’t happen in a vacuum and that public policy will shape them considerably.

The past half century or so has been dominated by rules about maximum lot occupancy and minimum lot size, parking requirements, and floor area ratio caps that were designed to produce something like the suburbs as we know them. Insofar as we keep those rules, the future will resemble the present. Insofar as we change them, things will change.

Zoning rules, school zones, and all manner of other governmental constraints impact people’s choice.  But, as Kevin Drum rightly notes, suburbs aren’t an invention of government.  Beyond that, he notes, even a ridiculous increase in the price of gas  could be absorbed by most middle class Americans:

Today, the average American spends about $2,000 per year on gasoline. So, if the price of gas goes up to $25, but consumption of gasoline goes down by two-thirds, that means the average person will be spending about $4,000 per year on gasoline. That’s a difference of $2,000 — not pocket change by any means, but certainly something that most suburbs can live through. They may be suburbs with more light rail and better bus service — as well as more apartment blocks and taller office buildings — but they’ll still fundamentally be suburbs.

One of Kevin’s commenters makes an excellent point, too: “In many places the only way to select your public school is by living in the right neighborhood. Unless the annual price of gas becomes greater than the annual tuition at a private school, middle class families aren’t going to be moving into downtown Washington.”

And here’s a sentence I don’t write every day:  I fundamentally agree with Duncan Black.  He proposes five broad policy ideas for dealing with some of the more obvious externalities caused by bad planning:

1) More money for mass transit, including, where appropriate, subway, light rail, better bus systems, commuter rail, and high speed medium haul trains. In development corridors, right of ways should be preserved for future rail lines, with strong commitment to build them when the population moves in.

2) Changing land use rules especially around transit stops and stations, encouraging higher density and mixed used zoning.

3) Better pedestrian integration between nearby lower density development and higher density development near transit stops.

4) Reverse trend of construction of single access road development.

5) Within existing urban areas, a reversal of the car-centric planning which damages the urban streetscape.

This, incidentally, isn’t particularly radical.  Indeed, as my colleagues Dave Schuler and Dodd Harris noted in a previous discussion, their home cities of Chicago and Louisville, respectively, already have many of the best features of both suburban (single family homes with yards and good schools) and urban (neighborhood commons and walkability) living.

Photo:  Ben’s Public Gallery

This morning, Glenn Reynolds linked to this bit of news from Popular Science regarding a discovery that could lead to greater efficiencies in solar cells:

MIT engineers have recently helped up the feasibility of widespread solar power by developing a new “solar concentrator.” The concentrator, which is a flat glass panel spread across a large area, gathers light at the edges of its surface. Expensive solar cells only need to sit on these borders – a difference that lowers costs and increases efficiency by 10 to 15 percent.

Scientists rerouted light to the panel’s edges by painting the surface with two or more organic dyes. By joining forces, these dyes absorb light from different wavelengths, thus harnessing as much power as possible. The panels can even be placed on existing solar-power systems – which could increase each cell’s power-capturing ability by 50 percent.

This is just one more bit of good news in an increasing series of good news for the future promise of solar energy. Solar cell prices are on a downward trend, Google plans on building a solar thermal plants, and companies all over the place are developing new techniques for cheaply manufacturing solar cells.

When you couple the advances in solar energy with the possibility that wind power could be providing up to 20% of power output in the U.S. over the next 20 years, there’s a lot of good news here. The best part about solar, from my perspective, is that as solar cells get cheaper, there’s a great opportunity for them to supplement the grid through sheer ubiquity. If energy from coal and natural gas keep going up while solar cells get cheaper and more efficient, you’re going to see a lot more solar cells on rooftops. That’s a good thing.

Photo: Chance Gardener’s photostream

President Bush isn’t alone in being unpopular: Congress is down to 14 percent approval, the lowest in the history of the Gallup poll. While the approval numbers are the worst ever, there is a silver lining: “The 75% currently disapproving of Congress is just shy of the record-high 78% in March 1992″

Lydia Saad calls these numbers “extraordinary.”

Approval of Congress has fallen below 20% only six times in the 34 years Gallup has measured it. Including the latest reading, four of those have come in the past year: in July, June, and May 2008, and in August 2007. The two additional readings were from March 1992 (in the midst of the House bank check-kiting scandal) and June 1979 (during an energy crisis that resulted in surging gas prices and long gas lines), when either 18% or 19% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.

The most recent decline comes almost exclusively from Democrats, whose approval of Congress fell from 23% in June to 11% in July, while independents’ and Republicans’ views of Congress did not change much. As a result, Republicans are now slightly more likely than Democrats to approve of the job the Democratic-controlled Congress is doing (19% vs. 11%).

Emphasis mine.  That, more than the low overall approval ratings, is simply stunning.  It gets better!

The 11% of Democrats now approving of Congress is slightly lower than Gallup found in 2006, toward the end of the Republican-led 109th Congress. Democratic approval of Congress initially surged after the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House and Senate, from 16% in December 2006 to 44% in February 2007, but by August 2007 it had fallen to 21%. Democrats’ approval of Congress rebounded to 37% later that year, but has since been in a nearly continuous decline.

Yes, Democrats were happier with the Republican Congress that got thrown out on its ear in 2006 than they are with their own leaders in charge!   Presumably, this is an artifact of greater general dissatisfaction with the state of the country than with Reid, Pelosi, and company per se.  Still, an absolutely amazing finding.

Saad makes two other very interesting points:  President Bush’s numbers seem to have a floor of about 28 percent because of “a core group of Republicans nationally who continue to stick by him” and that “Congress may simply be less able to engender this kind of political loyalty.”  She ends with this depressing observation:

Finally, 2008 now looks an awful lot like 1979, and for some of the same reasons: mounting inflation, record-high gas prices, and a looming recession. Public approval of President Jimmy Carter in mid-July 1979 was 29%, very similar to Bush’s current 31%. And approval of Congress was also comparable: 19% in June 1979 vs. 14% today.

Frankly, it doesn’t feel like 1979 to me.  Inflation is higher than it’s been in years but it’s still low by 1970s standards and unemployment and interest rates are much, much lower.  Gas is ridiculously expensive but we don’t have long lines or rationing.  We’re sort of being held hostage by Iran again, albeit in a much less palpable way.

Another huge difference between now and then is that the incumbent president isn’t eligible for re-election. The question is whether Barack Obama will be able to make his “John McCain is a third Bush term” meme stick or, to keep a strained analogy going a bit, whether McCain can instead successfully push the “Obama would be a second term for Jimmy Carter” theme.

It seems that the leading man-made cause of global warming is environmentalism; specifically, efforts to improve air quality by reducing pollution, New Scientist reports.

Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone. Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from six locations in northern Europe, measured between 1986 and 2005, and compared them with solar-radiation measurements over the same period. Aerosol concentrations dropped by up to 60 per cent over the 29-year period, while solar radiation rose by around 1 watt per square metre (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034228). “The decrease in aerosols probably accounts for at least half of the warming over Europe in the last 30 years,” says Rolf Philipona, a co-author of the study at MeteoSwiss, Switzerland’s national weather service.

Say Anything’s Piligrim finds this terrifically amusing:  “Well now, there’s a moral dilemna for you. If we go back to eating roots and berries and living in pre-industrial all natural bliss, one with nature and all that, we might end up with a warmer planet than if we just went ahead and enjoyed ourselves.”

Of course, clean air is a good thing in and of itself.  I was, however, under the impression that the rationale for getting rid of aerosols (or, more accurately, the hydroflourocarbons that propelled them) was because we thought they were destroying the ozone layer and thereby increasing harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.  It would be quite odd, indeed, if our solution to the problem yielded the same results in a different way.

UPDATE:  Commenters tell me that, in this case, aerosols have nothing to do with aerosol spray cans but simply particulates in the air.  Oddly, the report in New Scientist Environment is entitled “Cleaner skies explain surprise rate of warming” and the linked abstract is unhelpful. Is the Web headline misrepresenting the article itself?

I’ve updated the headline and illustration to eliminate confusion, although I remain somewhat confused as to what the study actually reports.

UPDATE II: A reader has sent me a PDF copy of the entire journal article which I’ve uploaded here.  I’ve made a quick scan and, frankly, still don’t understand it.

Illustration:  NASA Earth Observatory

Some gas stations are secretly charging credit card users more, ABC News reports. (Video here.)

Many Americans have taken up a new hobby — hunting for the gas station with the lowest prices. But the hunt has gotten exponentially harder as the price of oil has skyrocketed and the posted price may not even be advertised, especially if the consumer wants to pay with a credit card.

To combat the hefty fees that card companies are charging gas stations, many owners have passed the costs on to the consumer by charging more per gallon if the payment is made with plastic instead of cash. The card giant Visa, for instance, typically charges a 2 percent fee for each credit card transaction to the station owner. If the price of a gallon of gas is $4.11, that translates to about 8 cents a gallon, which is then passed on to the consumer who pays with a credit card. But sometimes, as ABC’s New York affiliate found, some gas stations take the opportunity to charge even more exorbitant increases — as much as 50 cents per gallon.

But increased profit from credit card customers is not the only reason to raise prices for those who pay with plastic. As more people use cash to save at the pump, they are forced to come inside the store to pay, which creates another opportunity for the gas station owner. “Because while you’re in there, you’re going to also pick up a coffee, a soda, maybe even a sandwich,” Mount said.

Those of us who were buying gas twenty years ago recall this practice, although it was almost always posted in big signs by the pumps. It was also widely outlawed, prompting some station owners to offer a “cash discount” rather than the illegal “credit card surcharge.”

Indeed, many stations are doing that again. It’s a practice that makes sense, really, given the skyrocketing price of gas and the low margins at the station level. With most of us now swiping our cards and never entering the mini-mart to pay, station owners are getting squeezed.

But hidden fees? Let alone 50 cents a gallon?! That’s certainly criminal.

via l0ckergn0me

Jonah Goldberg has sparked a minor blogospheric furor for a recent column in which he castigated Barack Obama, John McCain, and others for promoting a compulsory national service program, which he compared to slavery.

There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

For those who don’t remember, the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime … shall exist within the United States.”

Most of the outrage directed at this column deals directly with these two paragraphs. And, frankly, I do think that Goldberg did employ some bad rhetoric here. But it’s bad rhetoric used to make an excellent point. Namely, that there’s something un-American about compulsory national service. As Goldberg points out:

In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would “set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year.”

Now, Obama’s plan, like most plans of this type, doesn’t outright mandate that all students perform national service. It merely makes such service a condition for federal education dollars. So in a technical sense, these types of plans probably don’t run afoul of the 13th Amendment. But they’re still pretty appalling, and I think that Goldberg does make an excellent point here:

This is the real problem with national service mania: It seeks to fix what ain’t broke. No, national service isn’t slavery. But it contributes to a slave mentality, at odds with American tradition. It assumes that work not done for the government isn’t really for the “common good.”

I agree with this sentence wholeheartedly. Both Obama and McCain’s service plans serve the nefarious idea that people ought to be forced to help somebody else, which is something that is anathema to the rights of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” that this country was ostensibly founded upon. I can’t be the only one who shook his head in disbelief at John McCain’s essay about ‘patriotism, in which he said:

Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything. [emphasis added]

Yes, in John McCain’s worldview, country reigns supreme. Above religion. Above conscience. Above the human race as a whole. At least, that’s the conclusion you have to reach if you take his words at face value. But that’s the very ideology that drives the clamor for compulsory service–the idea that the lives of young people are not their own. That their dreams and their ambitions should be shunted aside in the name of some vaguely defined “greater good.”

Look, if a kid wants to spend 50 hours a year volunteering at a soup kitchen or building a house for habitat for humanity, then more power to him. If she wants to spend that time playing video games or basketball, or even *gasp!* holding down a part-time job well, that’s her choice, too. The point of America is that you got to make the choice about what you want to do with your life, not have some bureaucrat decide for you.

Clunky prose aside, I think that Goldberg was dead on in condemning compulsory service. It’s an antiquated, un-American notion that should by no means make its way into federal law.

Ezra Klein believes a recent NYT Magazine profile of Rush Limbaugh is a “puff piece.” He lists, for example, Rush’s “presidential platform” as published:

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.

3. Privatize Social Security.

4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.

5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.

6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

Ezra’s analysis:

If liberalish conservative intellectuals seek a Sam’s Club Conservatism, then #2 and #3 are the more traditional variant: Mercede’s conservatism. #4 is a bad public policy idea, but it is a public policy idea. But #1 #5, and #6 speak of a largely bankrupt movement: They’re pure resentment politics, mixed with a toxic distaste for empiricism. The stereotypical liberal loves the environment, so Limbaugh will drill up the shelf, a policy that won’t do much to increase the oil supply, but will presumably piss off Al Gore. And you know what will really piss off Al Gore? Doing nothing about global warming. Denying its very existence. Oh, and for good measure, screw Jimmy Carter.

I was an avid listener to Rush’s show once upon a time but hardly ever catch it these days owing to a combination of scheduling and the fact that I grew tired of the schtick some years back.  Still, this “platform” shows quite well why Rush is so popular with middle America.  And, no, it’s no ressentiment.

#1 and #6 have nothing to do with poking liberals in general or Al Gore in particular in the eye.  Rather, it’s a much more basic populist appeal:  “You’re paying four bucks a gallon for gas and these liberal do-gooders are more worried about the spotted owl than your ability to take care of your family!”

#2 and #3 aren’t about making the rich richer.  Frankly, while that would be great for Rush, he of the recent $400 million contract extension, you don’t get 20 million listeners by appealing to the top one percent of income earners.  Most Americans hate the tax code and, especially, the burden of keeping records and filing their taxes every year.  Pretty much everyone thinks it’s way too complicated and nobody knows whether they’re paying “their fair share” or not.  Indeed, most everyone suspects People like me are getting screwed while everyone who makes less or more than they do is getting over.  Social Security?  Most people support the idea behind the system — making sure granny can feed herself and keep the lights on — but they resent the huge amount withheld from their paycheck combined with a growing (if almost certainly incorrect) sense that they’ll never actually see any retirement dividends from the system.

#4 is about culture more than about education.  Middle America thinks the schools are brainwashing their kids to reject parental values rather than teaching the so-called “Three R’s.”  Beyond that, there’s a real sense that schools aren’t very good and that having to teach to the lowest common denominator is robbing their own kids (all of whom are above average) of a decent education.

#5 is a joke.  Rush doesn’t actually want to deport Jimmy Carter, he just enjoys poking fun at him. Republicans of a certain age find Jimmy Carter very funny.

Limbaugh’s appeal is that he’s simultaneously Everyman, expressing the values and frustrations of Regular People who believe their values and way of life are under assault from elites in Hollywood, the news media, higher education, and inside the dreaded Beltway as well as a very bright, humorous, entertaining fellow.  People enjoy spending parts of the three hours a day he’s on listening to him.  Whether they are giving him mega-dittos, shaking their head in disbelief, or screaming at the radio, they’re not bored.  Rush is more engaging than Sean Hannity, more comfortable than Michael Savage, funnier than Gordon Liddy, and less preachy than Laura Schlessinger.

His act wears thin if you’re an intellectual.  But he can afford to lose a few hundred people.

Photo: Nigel Parry for The New York Times

The Manufactured Outrage of the Day comes to us from Joe Stephens and his page A3 piece for today’s Washington Post, “Obama Got Discount on Home Loan.”

Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern Trust in Illinois.

The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a “super super jumbo.” Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.

Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama’s rate could have saved him more than $300 per month.

Why, that’s not right! A millionaire Senator getting a more favorable home loan than some average schmoe? How could that be?!

Actually, that’s rather a question that answers itself, no?   Nate Silver issues an “Irresponsible Journalism Alert” and points out that:

[T]he amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount.

How credit worthy was Obama?  Well, aside from being a United States Senator, a steady gig if ever there was one, and having just received a $2.27 book deal, he and his wife combined to make around half a mil a year.  Not Rush Limbaugh money, to be sure, but he was probably a decent credit risk.

Ed Morrissey wants to know, “Can the lender identify (anonymously) any other borrower during the relevant time period that got the same favorable rate and, if so, what was the basis for setting the rate that low for the other borrower(s)?”  Not an unfair question especially, as Ed notes, when “Obama has spent plenty of time castigating credit lenders in this campaign for their capricious practices and bad management.  He has rung the populist bell, saying that ordinary Americans can’t get a break from lenders while the powerful play by different rules.”  But, yes, I’d be willing to bet that other well-heeled folks got these kind of rates.

Obama’s spokesman claims, “Obama received the same rate as would have been available to anyone with his financial profile and with an offer from another institution.”  I’m inclined to believe him.

To the extent this has legs it will, like the Cindy McCain back taxes scandal, be because it draws attention to the fact that the Obamas and McCains make a whole lot more money than regular folks and get treated better because of it.  But who didn’t already know that?

Major caveat:  Larry Johnson promises that “shortly, we will reveal additional details.” Given how famous he is for doing that, I’ll be refreshing that page every few minutes.*

Other responders at memeorandum: The Crypt’s Blogs, TownHall Blog, Redstate, MSNBC, Flopping Aces, michellemalkin.com, puma pac, Right Wing News, The Caucus, The Campaign Spot, Fox News, Confederate Yankee, Salon, Ben Smith’s Blogs, TBogg, Brilliant at Breakfast, Political Machine, Comments from Left Field, TPM Election Central, The Swamp, JammieWearingFool, Macsmind, Bark Bark Woof Woof, The Political Carnival, Whiskey Fire, Washington Monthly, The Campaign Spot, and Jack & Jill Politics

____________

*Yes, this I’m being ironic here.   Like a pony.

Fareed Zakaria contends that, President Bush’s attempts to brand himself as a “war president,” the United States isn’t really at war.

America (and before it, Britain) has felt it was “at war” when the conflict threatened the country’s basic security—not merely its interests or its allies abroad. This is the common-sense way in which we define a wartime leader, and by that definition the politicians in charge during World Wars I and II—Wilson, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, Churchill—are often described as such. It’s not a perfect definition. The United States has been so far removed from most conflicts that even World War I’s effects could be described as indirect (incorrectly in my view). But it conjures up the image of a threat to society as a whole, which then requires a national response.

By any of these criteria, we are not at war. At some level, we all know it. Life in America today is surprisingly normal for a country with troops in two battle zones. The country may be engaged in wars, but it is not at war.

Of course, by that standard, the United States hasn’t been at war since, oh, 1865.  Sure, we had gas rationing and whatnot during WWII but the homeland wasn’t in danger.  Hawaii was merely a territory in 1941, after all.  Yes, a U.S. naval base was attacked and, yes, military response was warranted.

By contrast, the current wartime posture is a response to a direct attack — more precisely, a series of them — on the U.S. civilian population.  Virtually everyone supported war to remove the Taliban in 2001 and there’s strong bipartisan and international consensus that the ongoing mission there is vital.  (There’s less consensus that it’s achievable.)

Now, are we subjecting our citizens to the same privations we did during WWII?  No.  We’re a far wealthier country than we were six decades ago and we’re much less hesitant to borrow.  So, no gas rationing, no paper drives, no war bond drives.  We’ve got a large standing military rather than relying on conscription.   We buy weapons systems ahead of time, keeping them for upwards of twenty years, rather than taking over the civilian manufacturing sector to gear up in midstream.  But just because this isn’t WWII doesn’t mean it’s not “wartime.”

He continues:

It is by now overwhelmingly clear that Al Qaeda and its philosophy are not the worldwide leviathan that they were once portrayed to be. Both have been losing support over the last seven years. The terrorist organization’s ability to plan large-scale operations has crumbled, their funding streams are smaller and more closely tracked. Of course, small groups of people can still cause great havoc, but is this movement an “existential threat” to the United States or the Western world? No, because it is fundamentally weak. Al Qaeda and its ilk comprise a few thousand jihadists, with no country as a base, almost no territory and limited funds. Most crucially, they lack an ideology that has mass appeal. They are fighting not just America but the vast majority of the Muslim world. In fact, they are fighting modernity itself.

Of course, al Qaeda was a small group on  September 11, 2001, too; that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.   Are they an existential threat to the United States?  Not unless they get a large nuclear arsenal, no.  Then again, the Soviets presented an existential threat to the United States and Zakaria doesn’t consider that era to be “wartime,” either.

He then goes on to argue that the next president needs to be more like Ike:

Eisenhower refused to follow the French into Vietnam or support the British at Suez. He turned down several requests for new weapons systems and missiles, and instead used defense dollars to build the interstate highway system and make other investments in improving America’s economic competitiveness. Those are the kinds of challenges that the next president truly needs to address.

Then again, the United States already had a huge economic and military advantage over the Soviets during the Eisenhower years.  The same is true, of course, vis-a-vis the Islamists.  The latter seem less amenable to traditional modes of deterrents than the Soviets, however. Beyond that, where’s the evidence that we’re failing to build highways because we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Photo credit:  GlobalSecurity.org

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his gang of mullahs are said to be “seriously considering” the latest EU 5+1 proposals on resolving the international standoff on the Iranian nuclear program and are telling President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to pipe down.

Warren Strobel:

Iran’s senior diplomat said Tuesday that Tehran was seriously considering a new offer from six world powers to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program, and he praised the package as “constructive.” The unusually positive remarks by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to a small group of reporters raised hope that a negotiated solution can be found to defuse the crisis.

[...]

During a 90-minute luncheon at Iran’s United Nations mission, Mottaki dismissed the growing speculation that Israel or the United States will strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities during President Bush’s last six months in office. He described news reports to that effect as part of a long-running campaign of “psychological warfare.” The chance that Israel will attack Iran “is almost nil,” Mottaki said. As for a U.S. strike, he said there was little public support in this country for a new conflict. “The consequences of such an attack cannot be predicted,” he said.

Mottaki is a much keener observer of American politics than most Western observers, it would seem.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, conveyed the offer to Tehran two weeks ago. It essentially repackages a two-year-old proposal by Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States to give Iran political, economic and security rewards if it “verifiably suspends its enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.”

Presumably, the passage of two years has made it plain that no better offer would be forthcoming. Mottaki’s colleague, Ali Akbar Velayati, who serves as the top foreign policy advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered some amusingly twisted logic as a face-saving explanation:

“Americans wanted Iran not to accept Solana,” Velayati told the hard-line daily newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Therefore our interests imply that we should embrace Solana.”

Whatever works, I guess. This, though, is what got everyone’s attention:

In a sign of apparent high-level debate in Iran, a top aide to the country’s supreme religious leader made a veiled swipe Tuesday at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s used belligerent rhetoric to defend Iran’s nuclear work. “Officials … should avoid illogical and provocative sloganeering,” Ali Akbar Velayati, a foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in published remarks, Reuters reported. His remarks seemed targeted at Ahmadinejad, although he didn’t mention the president by name.

While Ahmadinejad is the public face of the Iranian government, he’s by no means its most important player, despite the obsession with him by the media and some American politicians. As has been the case since the 1979 revolution, the clerics run the show with the Supreme Leader as the first among equals.

This, via Laura Rosen, strikes me as a fair read:

“What Velayati is presenting is a softening up of Iranian opinion as to why Iran might accept some sort of suspension without him going into that,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, interprets Velayati’s remarks. “And then Velayati goes on to say that under the current circumstances, Iran can do this because of the fact that the international community has recognized Iran’s right to enrich. So in effect, Velayati is saying, Iran can declare victory and compromise, and that if it doesn’t do this, there will be a stronger case for war against Iran and a continuation of economic sanctions, which it’s very clear are hurting Iran’s economy.”

Of course, as Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of the Iranian atomic energy organization, reminds us “as in everything in Iran, things could change tomorrow.”

Photo credit: Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty via TIME

Update (Dave Schuler)

I believe Iranian acceptance of this offer would be a benign development for all sorts of reasons of proverbial prudence including “jar-jar is better than war-war” and “half a loaf is better than none”. The offer should have a sell-by date or I see no reason that they’ll not deliberate it forever.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly enough. The Iranian regime really needs to be more forthcoming about their past and present nuclear development activities for us to have any confidence that whatever nuclear development activity they cease is the nuclear development activity they have. Otherwise we’ll just be subsidizing their R&D.

The greatest danger I see in it is that European countries, blinded by a fog of Euro signs, will see Iranian acceptance of this baby stuff as big enough to take the pressure off Iran. 43% of Iranian imports are from the EU. That dwarfs China, the next largest vendor, by a considerable amount.

However, Iran’s import partners who are probably most able to influence the regime may well also be those necks are most on the line in the face of rising Iranian power in the region, Oman and Saudi Arabia (13th and 17th on the list, respectively). I don’t have detailed stats on the exports of these countries to Iran but I suspect their exports are mostly gasoline. Most of what Iran uses it does not refine itself.

Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google’s terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they’re able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service.

After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”

Larry Johnson and others charge that this is a coordinated effort by “Obama supporters,” a rather nebulous group, but they have no proof as of yet. Certainly, nothing yet ties this to Obama or his campaign team. Sister Toldja says “it wouldn’t be surprising to find out this indeed was happening, considering how so many far left Obama supporters react at the slightest hint of criticism of Barry Oh.”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine, given the pattern, that “Obama supporters” aren’t behind this. I’d be surprised, indeed, if Obama or senior campaign staff had any knowledge of this. Unless some major news comes out toward that end, then, the Obama angle is only tangentially interesting.

The crucial issue here is the ease with which electronic speech can be stifled. Jim Geraghty observes that “Google may need to revisit its policy in managing Blogspot,” snarking, “At the very least, the system should inquire if the person making the complaint has adopted the middle name “Hussein”. And Warner Todd Huston reminds us that this isn’t a unique occurence, with many conservative blogs having previously fallen victim to Google’s policies.

The power of Google in the marketplace is troubling. I say that as someone who’s an avid user of their products, especially Gmail and Google Search, and who derives some small income through Google’s AdSense program. On the other hand, I also, like most other bloggers, am at the mercy of Google — by far the biggest player in Internet search — for ranking in their system and referred traffic.

As I’ve recounted previously, I’ve been the victim of BlogSpot myself. More than a dozen niche blogs that I had on that domain, including the original incarnation of Outside the Beltway, was summarily “disappeared” and I was unable to get a non-automated response out of Google. I’ve said it before and I repeat: If you’re serious about your blog, get your own domain.

It doesn’t end there, though. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides that those who claim copyright infringement on material published on the Web merely have to lodge a formal complaint with the server and the host is obligated to take the material down in short order. The burden of proof is on the publisher, not the claimant, to prove that they have a right to publish the content. That power could easily be abused in an election cycle.

YouTube (which has been absorbed into the Google collective) and various other highly influential online outlets have adopted similar “guilty until proven innocent” rules. I have received several notices from YouTube informing me that a company has claimed a copyright on a posted video and that, while the video I posted would remain operational, all statistics and so forth would be credited to the claimant.

[Claimant] claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with [Claimant] and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between YouTube owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

In fact, the videos in question were legitimately copywrited and I’ve got no quarrel with the outcome. I only posted them to my account to preserve them, having posted videos on OTB only to have the original poster remove them and screw up the post. But the policy here is bizarre: YouTube will take action based on a claim but they provide zero recourse!

Given that online communication is increasingly important in politics and business, we’re going to need a better, more efficient means of dispute resolution than we currently have. Right now, it’s far too easy to do mischief.