Redstate

a Maverick if you will someone who believes what he says and not a panderer...he is just like the rest?...I am shocked I tell ya!

Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion

There is no question about that. And human activity probably caused much of it. Continuing to doubt that is silly and makes those who hold to that position look silly. The legitimate question is what to do about it.

Charlie Hall

McCain is proposing solutions designed not so much to solve a problem for the long term, but to win votes in the short term. That’s politics, and we can accept it to a degree

We can? Maybe that is the problem!

The lesson here is that pandering is not without its price.

I read the lesson more plainly as: don't pander. Say what you really believe is the best for the country, then follow through. Let's hope this temporary gas tax foolishness is the last of McCain's lame ideas.

He has been for cap and trade since 02 or 03. Pandering is the art of pushing something you really dont believe in to get elected (i.e. Huck and the Fair Tax).

McCain '08

McCain has lost his bearings... I voted all my life R and now I think I will vote D so I can blame D for bad policies..

I don't see a contradiction is McCain's proposals. If you start with the premise that we need to lower our energy consumption, a cap & trade regime (or, better yet, a carbon tax) is probably the best way to accomplish that. Now its true that rising gas prices have had a similar effect to what a carbon tax would produce, but in the short-term there is very little that can be done to change our habits. With that in mind, trying to decrease the short-term pain that people are experiencing isn't such a bad move -- as long as people are aware that gas prices will remain high. It's just the latest example of the permanent income hypothesis; people respond to long-term expectations, not short-term changes in their situation. If the public's long-term expectation is that gasoline prices will stay high, they will continue to make the necessary changes in their behavior to reduce consumption even if the government makes gas temporarily cheaper.

If we were to levy a carbon tax right now, the best move would be to start it at a low rate and slowly increase it over a number of years to reduce the pain while still working towards the overall goal. Since we can't directly control the increase in crude oil prices as we could had this been a tax, it isn't that odd a suggestion to find a different way to relieve part of the short-term burden.

Conditional, of course, on accepting the premise.

[For the record, I support a carbon tax in principle, but I have no idea what would be the optimal level of carbon emissions, and see no reason why the optimal tax may not, in fact, be negative. I completely oppose a cap & trade system.]

I know enough of the history of science to know that whenever politicians and ideologues tried to make arbitrary decisions about a scientific THEORY, the result was bad for science, and was often bad for society as well.

The Christian Church refused to accept a geocentric solar system.

The Nazis broke orthodox anthropology to replace it with their crackpot racial theories.

The Stalinist Communists broke orthodox genetics to replace it with Lysenkoism.

And today, I see a whole lot of laypersons who have decided that global warming "must be" a hoax, or that Darwin's theory of evolution "must be" false, or whatever. They're not scientists, and they have selectively filtered out the massive evidence and testimony from hundreds of scientists that these theories are well supported. Instead, they cherry-pick data and statements from a small minority of scientists (or, in the case of attacks on Darwin, pseudo-scientists) to support their preconceived ideological and political notions.

To me, the issue of anthropogenic global warming is a scientific question, not a political one. It is either true or it is false. That is to be decided by competent scientists pursuing the scientific method.

I have no love for Al Gore, believe me. But I'm not going to take my eye off the ball here--I can debate Al Gore but I cannot debate the Federation of American Scientists on this issue. They have the scientific expertise which I lack.

What is a political issue, is the question of what we do about global warming. (Or about pollution or holes in the ozone layer or any other environmental problem)

I always favored a carbon tax. It's the cleanest, simplest, most direct way to deal with the problem. McCain wants cap-and-trade, and we can argue that point.

But to just arbitrarily deny it's happening is going to leave us by the wayside if we turn out to be wrong. We'll end up like the creationists, pseudo-scientists standing in the way of 150 years of scientific progress. And then we'll be totally ignored, and liberals are going to propose all kinds of programs and solutions we won't like. We will have nothing to say because we won't be part of the dialogue on solutions.

This is the same problem I see with health care, the environment, global warming, all kinds of issues: As conservatives, our responsibility is to propose better alternative solutions to what the liberals are proposing. Not try to bamboozle the public that these issues are illegitimate and not deserving of solution.

For liberals, their problem is that the solutions they propose often end up worse than the problem. But I see too many conservatives who refuse to admit that there is even a problem.

I absolutely agree that McCain supporting both a gas tax holiday and cap-and-trade sends a mixed message. In this case, the cap-and-trade is the sensible (though far from optimal) policy; the gas tax holiday is sheer stupidity.

This is one time I absolutely agree with Obama.

McCain likes to pride himself on "straight talk": Evidently his "straight talk" doesn't include reminding the public of the law of supply and demand: Make something cheaper and consumers will buy even more of it.

America is already deeply in hock to a bunch of Muslim oil sheiks, and either unwilling or unable to develop alternative sources of energy here at home. To lower the price of gasoline so Americans can buy even more of it over the summer and empower the Middle East Muslims even more, is the real mixed message. We're empowering Islamist regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia, while at the same time trying to fight a war against--radical Islam?

McCain should remind Americans of the sacrifices their grandparents made on the home front during World War II, to help win that war: They even put up with gasoline rationing.

How hard is it to compare the average temperature this year with the average temperature of preceeding years? I learned how to find the mean average of a number set in 5th grade. Why do I need a scientist who is assumed to be as clean and pure as the wind driven snow to tell me that 2+2 isn't 4 but 5 or 6, or maybe 3? The bamboozle is being done by scientists motivated by research grants. I don't need a scientist to tell me something that isn't true. If I want to do that, I can just listen to Hillary, Barack or John; Edwards or McCain you pick.
Tim Schieferecke