Weekend Roundup: Yet Another Candidate Edition

When I look at the Republican presidential candidate pool for '08, I think to myself, "You know, something's missing. Yes, we have a couple of folks going for the 'authentic Conservative' label, we've got a couple of wannabe liberals, and a bit of obligatory scandal fodder here and there, but still, something's missing. They need some flash, some pizazz... boy, running another movie star would really put some pop in that lineup!" My prescience never ceases to amaze me.

Seriously, my instinctive political commonsense reaction to latecomer candidates — that they are doomed, that the early candidates grab most of the fundraising attention and the money deficit is difficult if not impossible to make up — is slowly being worn down by a little voice in the back of my head that maybe, just maybe, I'm not the only one confused by how early this race has started, and some large donors share that hesitance, and that maybe a latecomer with better presentation than the Three Stooges in the Republican candidate first tier could have a real shot at getting the nod. If this ends up being more than idle chatter with a slim chance of becoming reality, we may finally have someone to be worried about among the Republican nominees — Sen. Thompson could teach just about every current candidate with an R by their name something about playing politics.

As much as this early start has been giving me the heebie-jeebies, one outcome I was fairly sure would happen was that with so much extra time to look at the candidates, there would be plenty of mud on everyone's face by the time they hit the finish line. The Politico looks at almost-first-tier candidate Bill Richardson's answers to accusations of improper behavior around women, and the Times looks at how Romney's been making donations to bolster his right-wing cred, including donations to Massachusetts Citizens for Life, who is all of the sudden calling the ex-abortion rights supporter one of Massachusetts' "strongest assets". And by now I imagine most of our readers have heard about Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention beating up on Giuliani, but if you missed it, you can watch the video at Crooks and Liars.

We're finally starting to hear some answers to the popular question, "how could things in the TYC have gotten so bad without anyone noticing?" As many had originally guessed, this seems to have stemmed from the staffing shortage caused by then-Governor Bush's call for a crackdown on juvenile crime without sufficient resources available to the department to handle the new work. I'm sure I could crack some joke about how that policy sounds familiar from Bush, but it's been made so many times already I doubt I could draw any more humor from it.

The Chron has an op/ed this weekend on how the TXU buyout and the subsequent canning of eight out of the eleven original coal plants TXU planned to build leaves the original problem the Electric Reliability Council of Texas cited of insufficient power to cover our needs in the next few years unaddressed. It makes the bold assertion that sufficient capacity cannot be built in time to cover the 2009 energy shortfall, and stresses the need to manage energy needs on the demand side. I am a big fan of energy conservation, but it seems efforts to encourage conservation haven't ever led to a change in consumption large enough to address — or even put a dent in — a problem of the magnitude the op/ed cites. The piece knocks the popular push for coal gasification and Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle as too expensive to go into widespread usage any time soon, but I'm hoping new advancements in coal gasification technologies will be able to change that in the near future.

Finally, for the hard-hitting news closer of the weekend, we go again to the Politico for an analysis of drinking habits of Democrats and Republicans in DC. My deep-down idealism draws hope from pieces like this that point out common ground between the two parties. Yes, we may have issues with fighting hopeless wars, or with running our educational system into the ground, or with giving more benefits to the top 10% of the American upper class to the detriment of everyone else, but at least we can discuss them civilly over our choice of Anheuser-Busch products.