"The right has been moaning about the coverage of Palin."

No we haven't. We've been exultant. Every day you people waste dreaming up stories about the Vice-President feeding her kids to wolves is a day that Obama speaks to more empty halls. Keep shoveling the nitrogenous wastes, liberals. We guarantee double your shit back.

@jdmf

"Joan -- it's long past time to pull the plug on Paglia's nonsense."

Competing viewpoints are an affront to Maoist thought. Time to expunge them in the name of the Cultural Revolution.

@Walrusman

"More strength is needed, like he showed in the convention speech. No more long, 'nuanced' answers. The American people don't get 'nuance' or rational arguments. Obama grew up in an open minded family, in diverse Hawaii and then had his intellectual awakening in urbane America. Perhaps he doesn't fully grasp of how backwards a large part of America is. Believe me, I know, I grew up in this "red" America."

Go on, liberals! Go on being telling the American public how stupid everyone is but you. That's why you spent your school years having your head stuffed in the girl's toilet, and you'll spend your adult life seeing your candidates lose.

@Voice of Experience

"ALL IS LOST when even camille paglia gets in line to praise palin. i've read camille for a long time, including the BBB book (wonderful), and i always look forward to her salon posts. but today i've been walking around upset and disappointed -- that sarah palin article is so depressing. camille doesn't see in sarah's nastiness and sarcasm a simple-minded wrongheadedness "

Gee, we're sorry! We were not aware that liberals had copyrighted nastiness and sarcasm for themselves. If you'll let us use a fair amount of it during the campaign, we'll give you back your capitals.

@Dissent

"That's why I'm pursuing citizenship in the EU."

I admire a leftist who takes the initiative to fix the problem he/she perceives. Instead of spending your life among people who poke fun at your PBS tote bag, go forth and live in that perfect world you've always dreamed of.

@Beelyl65

"And in my opinion, it is a losing strategy to give these backward dimwits any time and attention that could be spent addressing people who at least have some capacity for abstract thought."

Franklin Roosevelt had no trouble connecting with small-town voters. Neither did Bill Clinton. Why can't Obama?

A better use, even from the AGW-believer viewpoint, for that vast acreage of residential roof space would be solar cells. The cost may still be in trust-fund tinkerer terrain, but it's coming down rapidly.

If you want to engineer climate, a stronger approach would be to "paint the Earth white" by finding ways to increase cloud cover. Clouds, by raising the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet, cool it off.

"Sarah's their oinker."

@BlackCat

"Oil Companies drilling in Alaska (and all US Sites) sell oil & gas to *other countries*. Maybe Palin could mention that in her speeches on U.S. Energy Independence."

Whether a given barrel of American oil is sold in the domestic market or overseas depends purely on logistics. Most Alaska oil is sold to Asia because Asia is closer than the continental US.

What's important is that EVERY BARREL OF US OIL CREDITS OUR BALANCE OF PAYMENTS, whether sold to California or to China.

"I want nothing to do with those people who identify with Sarah Palin; I don't want to be their countryman."

Does this mean that you people are really going to leave this time? It will be nice in Venezuela by late November.

"It's terrifying that so many Americans are so driven by resentment that they will vote against more qualified candidates simply because they seem "different" from them."

Like all your other election articles, this one will elicit hundreds of leftist messages dripping with scorn for the hated great unwashed of flyover country: people who don't drive Volvos, people who shop at Wal-Mart, people with jobs outside of academe or government, and people who shoot intruders instead of trying to get them block grants. All of them, of course, in deepest denial about the culture war ordnance they themselves throw in every spittle-soaked message.

For years now, we have been buying more from overseas than we have been selling. When times get tough and we can no longer borrow on the home equity, we can easily stop buying big-screens from China, but the one import we can't stop buying is petroleum. Our trade deficit in that one commodity is now over $700 billion per year.

We can't afford to wait for the new administration in January. We need a special session of Congress to get unlimited domestic drilling started and to kick the gates to Yicca Mountain open, but that's just a start. To reassure the world that we are getting serious about energy production, we need to put type approval of energy projects in place. This means that for each energy-producing technology, we agree on a set of standards, then mandate that all energy projects that meet the standards for its type would be automatically approved, NO QUESTIONS ADMISSIBLE. Your local zoning board would lose any rights to stop you from putting solar cells on your roof, and Greenpeace would have no standing to block construction of a type-compliant nuclear reactor.

Would we have a transportation industry at all if Boeing had to fight for the right to build each individual airplane? Of course not: once the first 787 is qualified as airworthy, the manufacturer can crank out as many copies as the market will bear. Let's make energy projects work the same way.

"when mankind's ecology shifted from african savanna to city streets, a new word was needed to replace 'law of the jungle'. that word was capitalism. it's not a system, it's a euphemism."

Soooo...China will be immune to financial crashes, then? In the weeks to come, let's see about that.