Obama had the balls to admit he voted for it and it was a mistake. He also had the guts to say it did very little to help consumers.

But, as with all things, you'll give Hillary a free pass.

Obama used to support a gas tax holiday. Then he saw it doesn't work and he changed his position. It shows that, unlike your candidate, he's not just a panderer and he's capable of admitting his mistakes and learning from them.

Admittedly the clean coal does worry me, but I don't see Hillary taking a stand against coal.

And people still say he doesn't have experience?

As an advocacy jouranlist Erica is immune to these petty things.

That Frost article is a piece of shit and linking to it twice doesn't make it better.
The Illinois gas tax moratorium was applied at the pump, unlike the tax which which Clinton/McCain are going after which is collected during production. In Illinois most of the savings were passed on to consumers. It was pandering, but at least it mildly effective at actually benefiting those it claimed to help. The federal tax is collected during production and very little of those savings would ever make it to consumers. The tax holiday amounts to an enormous check being written to Oil companies.

Secondly, "clean coal" has nothing to do with extraction techniques and everything to do with carbon-sequestering coal-fueled power plants.

I'm not saying that Obama's support for gas-tax moratorium in 2000 or "clean coal" are good things. They are run of the mill political ploys.

Clinton's gas-tax plan is so idiotic that it almost seems like bait.

I really think you may have become delusional.

If she plans on building her energy policy and her foreign policy around the Republican idea that cheap gas is an American birthright, shouldn't we be paying attention?

Just saying "But, Obama..." whenever Hillary says or does something stupid doesn't answer the question.

and i could do without her declaring that she refuses to listen to expert opinion when it doesn't jibe with her position. after the past 7 years, that kind of talk scares the living shit out of me.

While Sen Clinton refuses to?

Um, which one sounds like King George ...

I'm gonna say Sen Clinton wins the George Bush Prize for Moronic Insistence on Unreality Despite All Proof To The Contrary Award here ...

A vote for Obama is a vote for Bin Laden.

VOTE AMERICA!!!

VOTE HILLARY!!!

There are surprisingly few estimates of the effect of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. Further, along both sides of a state border, a change in one state’s sales tax can shed light on the nature of competition, as a subset of firms effectively experiences a change in its marginal cost. This paper considers the suspension, and subsequent reinstatement, of the 5% gasoline sales tax in Illinois and Indiana following a temporary price spike in the spring of 2000. Earlier laws set the timing of the reinstatements, providing plausibly exogenous changes in the tax rates. Using a unique dataset of daily, gas station-level data, retail gas prices are found to drop by 3% following the suspension, and increase by 4% following the reinstatements. After linking the stations to driving distance data, some evidence suggests that the tax increases are associated with higher prices up to an hour’s drive into neighboring states.

But to confine the analysis to microeconomics is to engage the issue at the level of dogs watching tennis. Politically, the Clinton proposal (which will not pass) cuts the inferior McCain proposal (which likewise will not pass, but which would otherwise exert political traction throughout the fall campaign) off at the knees. That's a good thing.

Obama has blindsided himself with a sanctimoniously high-minded take that will cede importnat vote shares to his opponent, should he become the nominee.

Note finally that economists, to their collective embarrassment, are demonstrably abysmal predictors of the economic effects of economic policy. (The reasons for this would take us beyond the topic at hand.)

I suppose Lee will be along momentarily to label me "insane" for sharing these observations.

BTW, If you were First Lady, went to Yale, and are serving in the Senate guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING ELITIST!!!!!

(source: not the National Don't Wake Up Fnarf To Wikipedia Unreality Day web site, but today's print edition of the Wall Street Journal, multiple sections, not including the ones on the EIGHT FRICKIN PLUG-IN HYBRID MODELS being produced worldwide for US consumption, two of which are for sale in 2008 and four of which are for sale in 2009 ....)

I've noticed that you never actually cite sources; you only drop hints like this that suggest the source exists but you expect me to go on a wild goose chase to find it. And most of the time I find nothing.

Why is that?

But I'll bet you never checked beamline times using HTML 0.1 ...

Your reality is being manufactured on the Internets, where we're busy selling wood to be used for cellulosic ethanol.

Oh, Will. So it has no URL whatsoever, even for paid subscribers? Or a title and page in the dead-tree edition? Does it just magically appear in a browser tab for WSJ subscribers when their brain wills it so?

But I'm not going to sift through every issue beacuse Will said somewhere in there is his source. And I'm not going to just trust your say so. Sorry, Will, but you don't have the credibility for that so you need to give author name, date and article title if you have a source.

In truth you turn out to be right some of the time, but I'd still rather check.

This is why I don't do links.

Entire sectors of the economy are based on getting only a few pennies from one person but getting them from many persons.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/betsyreed

"...what is most troubling--and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement--is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right--in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country--seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign's use of this strategy has many nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul."

I'm sorry, did you have a point?

Those blogs haven't said it's a great idea even at a state level. Just that more of the benefit of the tax cut goes to consumers of gasoline.

"Johnny, stop kicking the table!"
"But Susie is picking her nose!"