MICKEY KAUS: “Who Says the Press Isn’t Covering the Issues? We’re Covering Who’s ‘Electable’!”

VIRGINIA POSTREL IS BACK TO BLOGGING: Welcome back to the ‘sphere, Virginia. We missed you!

I GUESS I SHOULD REMIND YOU that James Lileks’ new book is shipping now.

Otherwise, terrible things might happen: “If it doesn’t do well, I will have to give up the Bleat for a year to write something that will make money for (G)Nat’s college fund.” (Bumped, because Gnat needs to go to college, and we need The Bleat.) Also, Lileks will be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today at about 4 Eastern.

PARIS RIOTS: Now with shotgun-toting “youths!”

LIBERTARIAN ROBERT BIDINOTTO on Ron Paul’s noninterventionism.

GREENHOUSE UPDATE:

The IPCC Conference on Climate Change is taking place this Dec 3-14 in Bali, Indonesia.

The conference will have about 12,000 participants from 189 countries, and since Bali is in the middle of nowhere we can assume that the average participant flies 1/4ths of the Earth’s circumference to attend, or about 6,000 miles.

Passenger air travel costs 0.18 kg CO2/passenger-mile, for long-distance flights. Of course, many participants will be taking private jets, which will throw this calculation way off.

So the total carbon emissions for travel to-and-from the conference are 26 MMT CO2 (million metric tons).

The average American emitted 24.1 MT CO2 in 2006, so travel to-and-from the Bali conference is equivalent to 1.1 M American-years of carbon expenditure. Or about what the city of Portland, Oregon spends in two years. . . . This is just for travel, and does not include travel on private jets, which is likely to be large.

They’re certainly not acting like global warming is a crisis.

UPDATE: But David Appell’s math is wrong. I should’ve noticed, but I hadn’t had my coffee yet. But reader Bill Sommerfeld emails:

Check his math; it’s off by a factor of about 1000.

0.18 kg/mile * 6000 miles/person = 1080kg / person (~ 1 metric ton)

Double that because folks will be flying both ways: 2160kg/person

2160 kg/person * 12000 people = 25,920,000 kg = 25,920 metric tons =
0.02592 million metric tons. This is ~1100 american-years or what the
city of Portland emits in 17 and a half hours.

But it’s an underestimate because it doesn’t include private jets.

That said, I agree with your basic point.

I think David’s units got mixed up between kilograms and metric tons at some point, but I’m still on coffee number one, so . . . Anyway, the carbon-hogging isn’t as bad as he makes it sound. Perhaps our planet will survive a bit longer. But it’s still a big waste when they could do the whole thing via Internet videoconference.

And don’t ignore all those private jets, so numerous that they’ll overload the Bali airport.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh: “Let’s just say I doubt the salt march would have been quite so successful had Gandhi been carried the whole way by Sherpas.”

JOHN MCCAIN: Don’t hate me because I’m smarter than you.

ED MORRISSEY WONDERS WHY THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT RETAIL SALES is being ignored:

Retailers expected a boost between 4-5% on “Black Friday”. They got almost twice that, as shoppers flooded the malls on the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional kickoff of the Christmas shopping season. Consumers shrugged off the credit crunch and the rhetoric of the doom-and-gloom Democrats, who promise that poverty lurks just around the corner.

One might think that this would make headlines — but despite the AP’s report, few of its clients appear to have selected it for the Sunday papers.

Hmm. This sounds familiar. Where have I heard something like it before? Oh, yes, right here:

I have found over the years that there is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs. Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy through the eyes of the national media. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency based on worries about the economy, the statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth. . . . In his 1996 State of the Union speech, President Clinton said we had the best economy in thirty years — a statement that sent a flurry of reporters to check actual statistics rather than popular political movements and sweeping, politically motivated statements. The more people looked at the facts, the more they agreed, and six months later, there was near-unanimity that the economy was in good shape. Had the economy changed? No, what had changed was knowledge about the true facts of the economy.

Hmm. Wildly incorrect ideas about the state of the economy in 1992. A focus on facts that showed the good economic news in 1996. What could account for that change? And why does it seem to have worn off in the 2008 season?

THE SECOND TIME AS FARCE: Steve Chapman looks at communism’s comeback in Latin America. This part seems clearly true: “If the Venezuelans who go to the polls next month give Chavez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.”

ETHAN DAVIS: A toast to the free flow of liquor across state boundaries. I’m for that!

TURNING IRAQ INTO KOREA?

ABU MUQAWAMA: “If there is good news to report from Iraq these days, the situation in Afghanistan grows worse.”

Michael Yon’s been saying that for a while, too.

DESPITE CLAIMS OF MY “LIKELY INVOLVEMENT” let me be clear: I have never had a lesbian affair. Er, or perhaps I’m getting my rumors confused. At any rate, where Huma Abedin is concerned the prospect seems more than usually appealing.

BIRTH OF A GADGET: A look inside the industrial design process.

A ONE-WEEK REVIEW, by Robert Scoble, of the Amazon Kindle. He’s fairly critical, but concludes: “Would I buy it? Yes, but I’m a geek.” The customer reviews seem similarly mixed.

Meanwhile, Brannon Denning emails with praise for the underappreciated Sony Reader:

As an (uncharacteristically, for me) early adopter of the Sony Reader, I have to say that I am very pleased. It has a long battery life, is easy-to-read, light, and extremely portable. I traveled a bunch during the month of October, and found it indispensible for waiting out delayed flights and would-be talkative seatmates.

Kindle looks like it’s trying to do too much. Who cares if I get wireless access to books; I need a PC to download music into an iPod. And do I really need another device that texts or sends e-mails . . . or even one that plays music? (The Reader plays MP3s and you can look at pics, but I doubt I’ll ever use these features.) It’s also uglier than a man’s ass, as my father-in-law would put it. Advantage: Sony Reader!

My one hope is that more academic publishers begin formatting e-books (and maybe journals) to be read that way, and, perhaps like Kindle, that Reader 2.0 will allow one to annotate the text.

My problem is that the Kindle looks like it would be a great portable web browser, but I don’t think it’ll do that.

ERIC SCHEIE HAS A POLL: Where would you be more likely to need a gun — Iowa, or Philadelphia?

IS NORTH KOREA on the verge of collapse? I hope so, but I’ve been hearing that for a while. Eventually it’ll be true — but two things we know about totalitarian regimes are that they tend to hang on longer than they should, but that when they go it’s often with astonishing suddenness.

J.D. JOHANNES: “When one guy with a camera is beating Hollywood in rate of return and almost beating Hollywood in gross receipts–Hollywood has a problem.”

Yeah, the Insta-Wife’s movie has outgrossed and outdrawn Redacted, too.

WSJ VIDEO: Looking at “Cyber Monday.”

My thoughts are here.

FRED THOMPSON: A “leave me the heck alone” conservative?

ARE MAGLEV TRAINS THE FUTURE? Well, they have been for my whole life, but maybe the future is drawing closer.

PAUL LOEB: “When Democrats worry about Hillary Clinton’s electability, they focus on her reenergizing a depressed Republican base while demoralizing core Democratic activists, particularly those outraged about the war, and thus maybe lose the election. But there’s a further danger if Hillary’s nominated–that she will win but then split the Democratic Party.” Check out the HuffPo comments. [LATER: DailyKos commenters have a similar take.]

Plus this: “Democrat Hillary Clinton would lose to all major Republican White House candidates, according to a hypothetical election matchup poll Monday, reversing her months of dominance over potential 2008 challengers.” I wouldn’t make too much of that poll — it’s from Zogby — but it comes as another blow to her inevitability-based campaign.

UPDATE: Obama smells blood.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s on!

TOM MAGUIRE on 9/11 conspiracy theories. Anyone who thinks the Bush Administration could keep that kind of thing secret hasn’t been paying attention. [That’s what they want you to think! — ed. Good point.]

A “DELICIOUS FIELD ROAST:” I’m sure it’s good, but I’ll bet the pot roast I made last night was better.

PATRICK RUFFINI: “He won’t win the nomination. He won’t win any primaries. But for Ron Paul’s quixotic bid for the White House, it’s ‘Mission Accomplished.’ . . . Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians.”