The Aroma Of Sheer Panic

I'm way behind the curve on this one, but I think it needs to be addressed. The co-chair of Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire campaign has issued a rather astonishing warning. Billy Shaheen has warned that Barack Obama's self-admitted dalliance with some drugs will be a target for Republican 'dirty tricks.' The rank, fetid aroma of sheer panic is being emitted by Camp Clinton.

DOVER, N.H. — Billy Shaheen, the co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire, raised the issue of Sen. Barack Obama's past admissions of drug use in discussing the relative electability of the Democrats seeking the presidential nomination today.

In an interview, Shaheen said, he remains perplexed about why, at this fraught point in history, voters and the media are not giving more attention to experienced Democratic candidates such as Sens. Chris Dodd and Joe Biden and are instead elevating into the first tier alongside Clinton a pair of candidates with less experience in Washington, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Shaheen also expressed his personal misgivings about whether Obama or Edwards would be electable if they became the party's nominee.

Among his concerns about Obama as the nominee, he said in an interview here today, is that his background is so relatively unknown and that the Republicans would do their best to unearth negative aspects of it, or concoct mistruths about it. Shaheen, a lawyer and influential state power broker, mentioned as an example Obama's use of cocaine and marijuana as a young man, which Obama has been open about in his memoir and on the trail.

"The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight … and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use," said Shaheen, the husband of former N.H. governor Jeanne Shaheen, who is planning to run for the Senate next year. Billy Shaheen contrasted Obama's openness about his past drug use — which Obama mentioned again at a recent campaign appearance in New Hampshire — with the approach taken by George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, when he ruled out questions about his behavior when he was "young and irresponsible."

Shaheen said Obama's candor on the subject would "open the door" to further questions. "It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen said. "There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

Shaheen's remarks were some of the most direct to date by Clinton campaign officials in addressing the issue of Obama's past drug use as a potential problem in the general election. This week, the Clinton campaign has been focusing on the broader issue of Obama's electability, arguing that Democrats would be better off nominating a tested candidate like Clinton. The Obama campaign declined to comment on Shaheen's electability remarks.

This from the campaign of the spouse of Bill "I didn't inhale" Clinton? I think the wheels have actually come off and Clinton's campaign is careening down the ditch throwing up mud rooster tails. I don't even recall any of the right leaning blogs I read mentioning this as an issue - but Hillary and company can't wait to bring it up when their polls slip. Since Clinton's camp raised it, they better be ready for some digging into her past activities. It will come, it will be ugly and the Clinton machine has reached a new low.

Thompson Wins Debate

So says Dean Barnett of The Weekly Standard, while excoriating the moderator of the forum, Carolyn Washburn. editor of The Des Moines Register.

HERE WE WERE on Wednesday, a nation of political junkies gathered around our televisions to watch the candidates debate each other one last time, and we had as a moderator one Carolyn Washburn, the editor of the Des Moines Register. I don't mean to go all East-coast-elitist on you; I'm sure there are people in Iowa who could capably moderate a presidential debate. Unfortunately, and obviously, Carolyn Washburn is not one of them.

The bulk of the post-debate analysis will probably focus on how maladroit Washburn was at the job. She did the impossible–she moderated the last Iowa debate between the Republican candidates before caucuses and yet saw to it that none of the candidates engaged each other. In other words, the moderator ensured that the debate would be as lively as a 12 part PBS series on "How Grass Grows." A personal aside to the Des Moines Register–"boring" is not synonymous with "serious."

The problems went beyond Washburn's lack of mad moderating skillz. From the outset, Washburn announced that the candidates would not be discussing either Iraq or immigration. Swell! It's the biggest debate of the season, so let's take the two biggest issues off the table. For what it's worth, Washburn brought all the charm to her assignment of a latter-day Nurse Ratched.

I was otherwise occupied today and did not watch. But Barnett's favorite moment from the debate is this gem:

THE WINNER was Fred Thompson. Fred came to play. He also had the obvious moment of the day when he took on the officious moderator, refusing to go along with one of those idiotic "raise your hands" questions. Given the hour that the debate took place, a lot of people will probably see only a highlight package of the debate. The unquestioned highlight was Fred slapping down the moderator. Even putting that aside, Fred had his best day of the campaign. He was serious, thoughtful, and authoritative. It was a wonderful day for him.

Which is already up on YouTube:

To say that the 'show of hands' type question is lame is to be extremely kind. This is the editor of the largest newspaper in Iowa and this is the best she can come up with? Allowing no discussion, just raise your hand for a  'gotcha' moment later in the campaign. Thompson deserves applause for refusing to play stupid media tricks. Barnett is exactly right here. The people and the political process are ill-served by allowing inept journalists into it this way. The reporters/talk show hosts/editors should not be injecting themselves into politics this way and the candidates should refuse to tolerate it - from either party. This crosses into making the news rather than reporting the news and the journalists themselves should be against it. There has to be a better way to do this.

The Beast Of Bolivia Strikes Again

Not Bolivia the nation, Evo Morales isn't in this story. No, we're talking about Bolivia, North Carolina here. A mysterious, unidentified animal has been munching its way through various pets in Bolivia, including the latest incident where a family's pit bull was savaged. At least five dogs have been killed so far - and nobody has a clue what animal is doing this.

Residents in the Midway Road neighborhoods of Brunswick County are fearful the so-called Beast of Bolivia has returned to threaten their pets.

An unknown predator attacked a pit bull Tuesday afternoon at the residence of Shelby Sellers, who lives on Albright Road off Midway. Sellers returned home from work at the Brunswick County Government Center to find the family's 3-year-old pit bull mauled, with claw marks and wounds on its hindquarters and paws.

She rushed the dog, named Rosie, to a veterinarian's office in Supply.

"This had to happen during the day because the dog stays in the house at night," said Joey Brown, a family friend of Sellers and her 10-year-old daughter, Shana. The girl discovered the injured dog, shivering and bleeding, on the front porch of the house when she came home from Bolivia Elementary School.

"Rosie's back end was sliced, and so were (her) paws," Brown said, as if the animal had tried to fend off the attacker. As he spoke, Sellers was with the veterinarian tending to Rosie's wounds.

"She's going to make it," he said of the dog.

Brown said two puppies reported missing earlier by Sellers' neighbor were found dead Monday, apparently killed in an area behind the two houses on Albright Road.

In mid-September, three dogs were confirmed killed by an unknown predator in the area of Midway, Brown and Gilbert roads.

People are speculating that it could be a panther, a cougar, a really big bobcat, a black bear or a wolf. But we are fairly certain it is none of those things. Here at Blue Crab Boulevard, our long history of calm, thoughtful reporting on all things related to animals is legendary, if not completely fictional. We covered the Demon Hell Hound of Turner, Maine with our trademark insight. We provided careful analysis of the Hellspawn Deer of Lafayette, Louisiana. Most recently, we covered the Galloping Goatsuckers of Cuero, Texas.

Our considered judgment is that the creature who carried out the attacks is none other than an Ivory-Billed Bigfoot Elvis.

Utter Disarray Among The Democrats

This is beginning to resemble a really badly written farce at this point. Nancy Pelosi has backed away - frantically - from the proposal she firmly supported just yesterday to strip all the earmarks out of the omnibus spending bill. The Democrats are in total disarray at this point and do not appear to be able to accomplish anything.

In the face of stiff opposition from powerful fellow Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has abandoned a proposal she supported less than 24 hours ago to eliminate lawmakers’ earmarks from the omnibus spending package.

Pelosi told the Democratic chairmen of the House Appropriations subcommittees, the so-called appropriations cardinals, that earmarks would stay in the omnibus and that Democratic leaders would accede to cut spending to levels demanded by President Bush in order to save 11 spending bills from a veto, said sources familiar with a meeting that took place in Pelosi’s office early Wednesday morning.  

The House Democrats’ tentative plan is to finalize the package for passage in the next day or so, said sources.

By leaving earmarks largely untouched and agreeing to Bush’s budget ceiling, Democrats have capitulated in their spending battle with Republicans. In the end, Democrats realized they would not be able to muster enough Republican votes to override Bush’s veto. The president vowed to reject any spending package that exceeded the $933 billion limit he set.

Pelosi is actually trying to paint this as victory. That's putting three-foot thick coat of lipstick on a pig. The bottom line, Congress will meet the budget limit set by Bush and will have to cut money from somewhere to pay for the pork festival. That isn't a victory for the Democrats or the American people.

Want To Live Longer? Move.

There's an old joke where a mom tells her son (in a letter) that the father had read that most automobile accidents occurred within 25 miles of home. So, the punchline goes, "We're moving." Oddly, a new study indicates that there are certain areas where you are statistically more likely to die younger and other areas where the odds are that you will live longer. Researchers have no clue why this is so.

Mortality, like real estate, can be all about location.

People living in the parts of the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, the Coastal Plains along the southern East Coast, as well as residents of northern Nevada have the highest mortality rates nationwide.

Alternatively, if you're committed to longevity, your best locational bet is a move to the certain counties in Montana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota and South Dakota, according to a new study comparing mortality rates in counties nationwide.

Sociologist Lynne Cossman of Mississippi State University describes the situation in this month's issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

It's a mystery as to exactly why lifespan is related to where you live, she said.

"There's no easy way to explain, so far, how death is rooted in place," Cossman said. "But, place matters; that's clearly the case."

Cossman wonders if it might be related to access to health care. But that doesn't seem to make sense - it isn't like there is a clinic on every corner in North Dakota. Even if there were, it can be a long way between corners up there. Armed with this study, some sharp entrepreneur will start hyping a retirement village in one of the long-life expectancy areas.

Hmmm. Blue Crab Village. It has a certain ring to it…. Anyone want to buy some stock?

An Observation

A word of advice. Don't schedule a physical examination on your birthday. The doctor may decide to give you the gift of "the works" at the exam. And the nurse may give you another one by looking at your EKG and saying, "Uh oh."

That's always fun.

Led Zeppelin Or Lead Balloon?

Dueling reviews this morning from two papers about the Led Zeppelin reunion concert in London last night. The Washington Post carries a review by Erik Huey, a lawyer from the US, who praises it to the moon and back:

I'm an attorney now, staring down the barrel of 40. But think of the person you were decades ago — adolescent, unshackled by cynicism and Weltschmerz, full of youthful abandon and an unblinking belief in the sheer possibility of things. And if you grew up in the '60s, '70s and '80s, Zeppelin may well have been the soundtrack to your adolescence.

As they launch into the opening chords of "Good Times Bad Times," the band seems to acknowledge the limitations brought on by the passage of time. "In the days of my youth/I was told what it means to be a man,/Now I've reached that age/I've tried to do all those things the best I can." Indeed, they're doing pretty well, for old guys.

By the time they finish their second and third songs — "Ramble On" and "Black Dog" — it is becoming clear that, even if they are not gods who walk the Earth as men, these are no mere mortals before us. And this is going to be no mere rock show. We are witnessing history.

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail has a review by James Delingpole that is somewhat less than enthused:

No matter how proficient Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, the three survivors of the Seventies' heyday, played, no matter how good it is to see them back on stage still breathing and vaguely compos mentis, there is something deeply sad and unedifying about rockers who go on rocking past their natural sell-by date…..

….Ah yes, Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven. Let us suppose, as many think, that it really is the greatest rock song ever written.

Is that sufficient justification for its three surviving originators - one now looking like an accountant, one like a Muppet in a white fright wig, one like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard Of Oz - to creak back on stage and play it not quite as excitingly as they could in 1971, 1972 or 1973 for an audience of mostly staid, pot-bellied, middle-aged men in a smokeless environment named after a mobile phone company?

And if they insist on doing so, shouldn't it be renamed Stannah Stairlift To Heaven?

Stairlift to Heaven. I like that. That's even better than Stairway to Freebird. Which review is right? Well, they probably both are, at least to some extent. A lot depend on what you expect from these performances by old bands that reunite. If you expect them to sound exactly as they used to, you will likely be disappointed. To a younger audience, these guys would seem hopelessly dated and well past their prime. But doubtless some people will be thrilled - and would pay big bucks for tickets, even to see a Muppet in a fright wig.

The Winter Campaign

The only candidate making any campaign appearances the past few days in Iowa has been what the Russians call General Winter. The Washington Post reports that the howling winter storms that have wracked the midsection of the country have caused cancellation of campaign events, closed schools, cut off electricity to hundreds of thousands and caused at least 23 deaths so far. Oklahoma and Missouri are in declared states of emergency.

Most of the Iowa campaign events scheduled for Tuesday were canceled, including appearances by Michelle Obama, Ann Romney and Bill Clinton. Events for presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee, John Edwards and Fred D. Thompson also were called off.

"I'm a Southern boy. When we see weather like this, we shut everything down," Huckabee joked to reporters covering his campaign.

Along with Iowa, parts of Nebraska, Wisconsin and other states were hit hard by the storm, which started over the weekend with freezing rain and proceeded across the region with alternating waves of snow and rain, and temperatures hovering around freezing.

The storm followed snowy weather that hit much of the Midwest on Thursday. The earlier snowstorm was blamed in an auto accident that killed a television cameraman on his way to cover the mall shooting in Omaha last Wednesday. Most of the storm-related deaths recorded since the weekend have been in traffic accidents.

"This is the most devastating electrical outage the state has ever experienced," said Andrea Chancellor, spokeswoman for the Public Service Company of Oklahoma, which reported 251,000 customers without power.

More than 2,000 utility workers and tree trimmers are coming in from other states to help repair hundreds of downed lines, Chancellor said. The workers will use temporary housing at the state fairgrounds.

"Trees are bending over and touching the ground. The least bit of wind knocks them over because of the weight from the ice," Chancellor said. "With ice, you can't tell if there's a power line wrapped up in your tree or not. It is so dangerous."

One official quoted in the article points out that they have had to cancel school in wide areas at the earliest date in at least a decade. It isn't over yet, either. Accuweather points out that the northeast can look forward to a howling nor'easter as the system heads that way. A very bad nor'easter that could bury the region in heavy snow. Brace yourselves, folks.

Cynical Manipulation

Robert Samuelson discusses the skyrocketing cost of food globally and points out the disaster that is heading for the underdeveloped countries as a result. The culprit is food being diverted to the production of ethanol and the result will be increased starvation globally. It is a case of cynical manipulation for the gain of a few special interests. The price will be paid by people. In the past 45 years great strides had been made on hunger throughout the world as evidenced by the doubling of global population in that time period. Food production had been out-pacing population. It is not these days because of the advent of biofuels.

Higher grocery prices obviously make it harder to achieve economic growth and low inflation simultaneously. But if higher food prices encouraged better eating habits, they might actually have some benefits in richer societies. The truly grave consequences involve poor countries, where higher prices threaten more hunger and malnutrition.

To be sure, some farmers in these countries benefit from higher prices. But many poor countries — including most in sub-Saharan Africa — are net grain importers, says the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank. In some of these countries, the poorest of the poor spend 70 percent or more of their budgets on food. About a third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That proportion has barely changed since the early 1990s. High food prices make gains harder.

What's disturbing is that the present run-up doesn't seem to be temporary. Of course, farming is always hostage to Mother Nature, and drought in Australia has cut the wheat harvest and contributed to higher worldwide prices. But the larger causes lie elsewhere. One is growing prosperity in China, India, other Asian countries and Latin America. As people become richer, they improve their diets by eating more protein in the form of meat and dairy products. The demand for animal feed grains rises. This has been going on for years and, until recently, was met by the steady gains in agricultural output from improved technology and management.

It's the extra demand for grains to make biofuels, spurred heavily in the United States by government tax subsidies and fuel mandates, that has pushed prices dramatically higher. The Economist rightly calls these U.S. government subsidies "reckless." Since 2000, the share of the U.S. corn crop devoted to ethanol production has increased from about 6 percent to about 25 percent — and is still headed up.

Samuelson points out that the embrace by politicians of this cynical subsidization to benefit a few special interests has, at best, dubious impact on anything the increased use of ethanol is supposed to address. If 100% of American corn production were diverted to ethanol production, it would replace only 12% of petroleum fuels used in the US. In other parts of the world Rainforests are being burned to the ground to make way for palm oil plantations. The net effect of all this is actually worse for the global environment.