Obama Affirms Climate Change Goals
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: November 18, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama, in strongly-worded remarks to a gathering of governors and foreign officials on Tuesday, said he had no intention of softening or delaying his aggressive targets for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet. Speaking by video to a climate conference in Los Angeles, Mr. Obama repeated his campaign vow to reduce climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and invest $150 billion in new energy-saving technologies.
“Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

Some industry leaders and members of Congress have suggested that Mr. Obama’s climate proposal would impose too great a cost on an already-stressed economy — having the same effects as a tax on coal, oil and natural gas — and should await the end of the current downturn. A bill similar to Mr. Obama’s plan failed to clear the Senate earlier this year, largely because of concerns about its impact on the economy. Mr. Obama rejected that view, saying that his plan would reduce oil imports, create jobs in energy conservation and renewable sources of energy, and reverse the warming of the atmosphere.

“My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process,” Mr. Obama said. State officials and environmental advocates were cheered that Mr. Obama choose to address climate change as only the second major policy area he has discussed as president-elect. In a press conference and television interview last week he said that his first priority as president will be to revitalize the economy.

GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility.

“It allows us all to dream a little,” said Oswaldo Calvo, 58, a Venezuelan political activist in Caracas, in a comment echoed to correspondents of The New York Times on four continents in the days leading up to the election.

Tristram Hunt, a British historian, put it this way: Mr. Obama “brings the narrative that everyone wants to return to — that America is the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen.”

But wonder is almost overwhelmed by relief. Mr. Obama’s election offers most non-Americans a sense that the imperial power capable of doing such good and such harm — a country that, they complain, preached justice but tortured its captives, launched a disastrous war in Iraq, turned its back on the environment and greedily dragged the world into economic chaos — saw the errors of its ways over the past eight years and shifted course.

Rachel Maddow, a woman who does not own a television set, has done something that is virtually unheard of: she has doubled the audience for a cable news channel’s 9 p.m. hour in a matter of days. More important for her bosses at MSNBC is that “The Rachel Maddow Show,” her left-leaning news and commentary program, has averaged a higher rating among 25- to 54-year-olds than “Larry King Live” on CNN for 13 of the 25 nights she has been host. While the average total audience of her program remains slightly smaller than that of Mr. King’s, Ms. Maddow, 35, has made MSNBC competitive in that time slot for the first time in a decade. The channel at that hour has an average viewership of 1.7 million since she started on Sept. 8, compared with 800,000 before.

Given that advertising dollars — and the reputations of networks — rise and fall on prime-time ratings, Ms. Maddow’s rise has been closely watched by media executives.

“I’m pinching myself,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who used to caution that it “takes two or three years for a show to find its audience.” That was certainly true for Keith Olbermann, whose five-year-old “Countdown” program at 8 p.m. (which leads into Ms. Maddow’s program) now beats CNN in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic segment every evening.

Mr. Griffin said that Ms. Maddow’s advantages included her regular appearances on “Countdown” and her popularity on the Internet, where, he said, “word spread like wildfire” about her new show. Ms. Maddow, a former AIDS activist, was also presumably helped by her four years on the Air America radio network.

A significant source of Reagan's support came from the newly identified religious right and the Moral Majority, a political-action group founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. AIDS became the tool, and gay men the target, for the politics of fear, hate and discrimination. Falwell said "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals." Reagan's communications director Pat Buchanan argued that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."

With each passing month, death and suffering increased at a frightening rate. Scientists, researchers and health care professionals at every level expressed the need for funding. The response of the Reagan administration was indifference.

Reagan's ignorance in this area is personified by James Watt and Anne Gorsuch, the leaders he selected to head the Department of Interior and the U.S. EPA, respectively. "Never has America seen two more intensely controversial and blatantly anti-environmental political appointees than Watt and Gorsuch," said Greg Wetstone, director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who served on the Hill during the Reagan era as chief environment council at the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards "on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers -- efforts which took Congress two years to defeat," according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan's legacy.

As some Americans mourn the death of Ronald Reagan, let us recall that the two-term president was no friend to America’s cities or its poor. Reagan came to office in 1981 with a mandate to reduce federal spending. In reality, he increased it through the escalating military budget, all the while slashing funds for domestic programs that assisted working class Americans, particularly the poor.

Reagan’s fans give him credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. But whatever economic growth occurred during the Reagan years only benefited those already well off. The income gap between the rich and everyone else in America widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, which were boon times for the rich, the poverty rate in cities grew.

His indifference to urban problems was legendary. Reagan owed little to urban voters, big-city mayors, black or Hispanic leaders, or labor unions – the major advocates for metropolitan concerns. Early in his presidency, at a White House reception, Reagan greeted the only black member of his Cabinet, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce, saying: “How are you, Mr. Mayor? I’m glad to meet you. How are things in your city?”

Reagan not only failed to recognize his own HUD Secretary, he failed to deal with the growing corruption scandal at the agency that resulted in the indictment and conviction of top Reagan administration officials for illegally targeting housing subsidies to politically connected developers. Fortunately for Reagan, the “HUD Scandal” wasn’t uncovered until he’d left office.

Reagan also presided over the dramatic deregulation of the nation’s savings and loan industry allowing S&Ls to end their reliance on home mortgages and engage in an orgy of commercial real estate speculation. The result was widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions that ultimately led to a taxpayer bailout that cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Barack Obama is set for a landslide victory over John McCain in the presidential elections, according to his senior aides.

Optimism in the Democratic camp is so high that aides believe Obama will surpass all current predictions in the race to enter the White House.

The confidence from the Democratic campaigners has emerged from information given from private polling and the strong political support Obama has developed in the key swing states.

The Senator's own optimism has sprung from a belief that the strength of first time Democratic voters in several key states has been underestimated – by the media and the Republican party.
...

Obama aides now believe he has a good chance of winning nine states won by George W.Bush in the 2000 election, including Republican monopolies like North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana – who have not voted Democrat for at least a generation.

WASHINGTON — John McCain's campaign is in crisis. The Republican presidential candidate must quickly reverse recent sharp declines and recapture the momentum in this election race if he is to avoid falling fatally far behind Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent.

The most recent survey, by Gallup Tracking, has Mr. Obama eight points up. And while many pundits, including this one, thought Mr. McCain outperformed Mr. Obama during the foreign-policy part of Friday night's televised debate, viewers disagreed. Three separate snap polls –by CBS, CNN/Opinion Research and USA Today/Gallup – confirmed that it was actually Mr. Obama's night. In the USA Today/Gallup survey, for example, 46 per cent of those polled thought Mr. Obama had outperformed Mr. McCain, while 34 per cent thought the opposite. Fifty-two per cent picked Mr. Obama, when they were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country's problems. Thirty-five per cent picked Mr. McCain.

In many respects, national opinion polls are meaningless, because the election will be decided in a dozen or so key battleground states. Mr. Obama was in one of them, Michigan, Sunday, while Mr. McCain traveled to another, Ohio. But the polls tell a tale there, too.
In battleground states that went Republican in the 2004 vote, either Mr. McCain is ahead by the narrowest of margins (1.2 percentage points in Ohio, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregate; 1.6 in Florida; 1.7 in Nevada) or he is behind. Mr. Obama has an aggregate lead of nine percentage points in Iowa, six in New Mexico; 5.4 in Colorado and 1.8 in Virginia.
Mr. McCain isn't leading Mr. Obama in any battleground state that went Democratic in 2004. His campaign, in other words, has become entirely defensive.

Then there is the Palin Effect. It's a whole new effect. And Ms. Palin dulled some of her lustre last week when her answers in an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric were, at times, so incoherent that comedian Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live simply cribbed them in her mocking sketch.