Republican Scorpions in a Bottle

Ronald Brownstein, the political writer for the L.A. Times who also writes for MSNBC, has a story up on the MSNBC website dated November 30, 2007 in which he compares the Republican presidential candidates to scorpions in a bottle. This is a quote from the article:

Why is the conflict so much more dispersed in the Republican race? The biggest reason is that every other Democratic candidate understands that he cannot win the nomination without getting past Clinton. None of them have an incentive to challenge each other unless they can weaken her first.

No Republican, by contrast, has emerged as a clear national front-runner comparable to Clinton. Five candidates (Romney, Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, and Sen. John McCain) have a chance to win at least one of the three key early states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Personally, we at the MCDAC love bitter Republican primaries so much, we want there to be 50 of them, but if we can't have 50, we will settle for 10 or so. As James Carville says, "when your enemy is drowning, throw him an anvil."

Global Warming Forcing Millions to Flee Homes?

A reader sent us this link and we wanted to pass it on:

50 million on the run from deserts, warming?
Desertification represents one of the "greatest environmental challenges of our times" and could set off mass migrations of people fleeing degraded homelands, a United Nations report warned Thursday.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19479607/from/ET/

This is a quote from the article:

The report said about 2 billion people, a third of the Earth's population, are potential victims of desertification, which is defined as land degraded by human activities like farming and grazing.

If the problem is left unchecked, some 50 million people could be forced from their homes over the next decade, the report said.

The report, the work of more than 200 experts from 25 countries, said policies on preventing desertification are often inconsistent, frequently not implemented at local levels or inadvertently fuel conflict over land, water and other resources.

This article reminds us of a conversation we had a with a friend last week who said that he didn't see what all the problem was with global warming because if the predictions are true, he will be able to play golf more of the year. When it was pointed out to him that Florida might be underwater, he said that since he didn't like Florida, that really didn't strike him as a big problem. We were shocked at his answer and so didn't ask him if he felt that way about Iowa, Nebraska, and other states that are our and the world's granary.

Thanks for Ed U. for sending us this article.