Summing up the GOP field

From Charles Pierce by way of Steve Hart’s The Opinion Mill:

In fact, it’s long past time for simple ridicule to become the default position on the entire Republican presidential field. Romney is deeply, profoundly, relentlessly silly; he appears to be enrolled in a course in Human Being as a Second Language. Rudy Giuliani gets crazier almost by the hour and, at any meeting of his foreign-policy advisory team, he’s the sanest lunatic in the room. Fred Thompson seems to have been unearthed a week ago in the Valley of the Kings. The second tier is populated by people like Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, neither of whom you would hire to park your car. Ron Paul — an authentic libertarian crackpot — is treated as a serious phenomenon even by people who don’t believe that the U.N. is speaking through the fillings in Katie Couric’s teeth. This past week, we had a general all-hands-on-deck attempt to inflict Huckamania! on the general populace as good ol’ Mike announced his disapproval of Charles Darwin. And then there’s John McCain, who’s spent this entire campaign doing things he’d vowed he’d never do in the last one. I swear to God, they all ought to climb into one little black car and drive into the next debate behind jugglers, high-wire acts, and a parade of circus bears. I cannot remember a presidential field in my lifetime — not even the one that coughed up Mike Dukakis in 1988 — that is as publicly hilarious as this one is. How dare a major political party hand this collection of shills, fakes, loons, and mountebanks on the American people? And one of them is going to win. Jesus wept.

I really have nothing to add.

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The Blog of South Brunswick

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Dispatches: A tortured judgmentand an update on Mukasey

Dispatches is up — on the problems with the Mukasey nomination.

And here is an update on the nomination — the Democrats may hold it up pending an answer on the torture question.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Green fight goes to court

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine is tired of waiting for the federal government to approve California’s emission restrictions — a delay that has similar New Jersey rules on hold. So the governor is adding the state to a lawsuit filed by California and several states (New York, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) that seeks to force the issue.

As The Record points out today,

If the permission is granted, New Jersey will require dealers to sell 168,000 hybrids and other low-emissions vehicles in 2009, and more in the future. The cleaner cars are part of a plan to reduce the pollution caused by carbon dioxide emissions 20 percent over the next 10 years. In as heavily trafficked a state as this one, that would have a lot of people breathing more easily — as well as reducing the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Vehicles account for about half the annual greenhouse gas emissions in New Jersey.

This is only a drop in the greenhouse bucket, of course, but it is a start and could encourage other states to move ahead with their own tighter regulations. That, in turn, could get the federal government moving — which would make it a lot easier to convince nations in the developing world to pay attention to climate change.

In the end, global warming can only be addressed by a worldwide commitment led by the world’s biggets polluter — the United States.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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