Bumped from the diaries -- Jonathan. Consider this an open thread on the Mexican election, foreign elections in general or Latin American politics.

According to Mexican Newspaper Universal with 80% of the votes recounted AMLO (Lopez Obrador) now leads Calderon 36.69% to 34.67%

I am afraid I can't read Spanish very well so I won't know much else until my Mexican husband gets home- but since this is getting no press as far as I can tell in the American press I thought people might want to know this exciting news!

If any of you know more please add info in the comments.

As some of you may know, I was hired a couple of months ago to serve as campaign manager for Mike Caudle, the Democratic nominee in Oregon's House District 39, which spans Oregon City, Canby and surrounding Clackamas County.

One of the main reasons why I decided to get involved in this race instead of taking another position inside or outside of politics is the fact that Republicans are gerrymandering districts left and right with mid-census redistricting efforts. As a result, I firmly believe that we cannot afford wait until 2010 to win back state legislatures around the country.

In Oregon, Democrats currently control the governor's mansion as well as the state Senate (and all but one statewide elected position). But Republicans still hold the state House by a very narrow 33-27 margin.

House district 39 is a very winnable district and could help put us over the top in the state House. According to the most recent voter registration figures (.pdf), 39.1 percent of the district is registered Republican, 36.6 percent of the district is registered Democrat, and a whopping 21.1 percent of the district is registered as non-affiliated. Yes, it is a conservative district, but Democratic Congresswoman Darlene Hooley and Democratic state Senator Kurt Schrader are both able to win here.

One of the other main reasons why I accepted this position was the fact that the incumbent Republican is Majority Leader, has a lot of money and isn't really taking us seriously (though he has had some bad press as of late). As a result, we have a great opportunity to catch him off guard this fall and surprise the entire political establishment in the state with a victory.

Mike and I have been blogging regularly over at the campaign blog. In the extended entry, I have included his most recent post for you to get an opportunity to get to know him (you can also check out the campaign website or the contribution page -- any help or advice would be greatly, greatly appreciated).

It's rather interesting that Boxer, Salazar, and Biden are going to campaign for Lieberman's primary election.  Not a surprise, really, since incumbents tend to support their own in primaries.  Let's not forget that Hillary Clinton, who has acted appropriately by both supporting Lieberman and acceding to the will of the voters, is technically supporting Joementum in the primary.  Russ Feingold and Hillary Clinton have both done the right thing.

It's quite shocking of course that Salazar is going to support Lieberman.  Oh wait, it's not.  Salazar is one of those fake centrists who likes to showcase his maverick status by voting for corporate giveaways while tut-tutting fellow Democrats over socially liberal policies.  Which makes him, well, Lieberman's base.  Salazar, along with Lieberman, just voted for a corporate 'free' trade pact with Oman, a country with some of the worst labor standards in the world.  10 Senators broke with the bulk of the party to pass the legislation, and I imagine that it's these people who are the most likely indy Lieberman supporters.

Who will stand with Salazar and Lieberman, and against Connecticut voters?  That's my question.

I bet that Obama, who went to Connecticut to stump for Lieberman, really wishes he didn't have to choose.  I imagine it'll be tough for him to go with Lieberman, since Obama's stump speech has as its central plank the importance of voting.  But then again, he voted for the Oman trade deal.  He's somewhat of a maverick himself.

Time Magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan has joined Robert Samuelson in the 'apologist' camp for the polluters causing global warming.  Here's what Sully has to say.  

In both cases, however, the evidence is complicated and hard to pin down with absolute certainty. We know we are at much greater risk now from Islamist terror than we were a decade ago - but measuring how much, and where from specifically, is very hard. Equally, we know that global warming is real, but whether it has reached or will soon reach a dangerous tipping point is not a given. And in both cases, the entire argument rests a great deal on what we do not and cannot know. It seems to me prudent to take both risks seriously, but not so seriously that we abandon objective, empirical judgment. If such judgment had been in more evidence four years ago, the Iraq WMD intelligence debacle might have been avoided.

This is rich.  The rush to war was premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) was superior to that of professional weapons inspectors like Hans Blix.  This turned out to be false.  Now, the foot-dragging on global warming is premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) is superior to that of the global scientific community.

As usual, this is an issue of judgment and trust.  Put Sullivan and Samuelson down as apologists for global warming, those willing to justify inaction so that they can feel, at the end of he day, smugly superior.  In other words, if you like the the people who brought you the war in Iraq, you'll love inaction on climate change.

One day soon, these people will go away, and politics will become more than a parlour game for rich and smug boomer elitist cowards.

It's getting brutal in New Jersey.  

The government is shut down because of a fight between South Jersey boss George Norcross and new Governor Jon Corzine (the shut down order is here).  The gambling portions of the casinos are closed, as are parks and beaches, and non-essential state workers aren't working.  The fight is between Corzine and Assembly leader and South Jersey Democrat Joe Roberts.

Corzine wants to raise Jersey's sales tax (which is more progressive than you might think because of its exemptions) to close a budget gap rather than kicking the can down the road with gimmicks like short-changing the state's pension.  I don't understand why he's not touching an income tax hike, but he's not.  Roberts, who is part of the South Jersey Norcross machine, doesn't want any part of any of this.  There are anti-Corzine flyers being distributed in the statehouse, which are upsetting certain legislators due to their vicious tone.  Bluejersey, which is fast becoming the discussion center on the web for this fight, broke the news that it was Norcross consultant Steve Ayscue who spread these flyers around.  I can't imagine why the Star Ledger didn't mention this little piece of information; it can't have anything to do with keeping Norcross and his ilk as sources.  Nah.

Wally Edge of the anonymous and awesome PoliticsNJ writes that Corzine is considering running self-funded ads in the New York and Philadelphia media markets.  That would be remarkable.  Meanwhile, Senate President Dick Codey has fashioned a compromise, though Roberts is apparently rejecting that one as well.

The early momentum was for Roberts, but it's shifting as legislators learn that Corzine isn't going to cave on this one, and that Roberts has no substantive plan to deal with what everyone knows is a really bad fiscal situation.

Or that's my read, anyway.  I'd appreciate feedback in the comments.  New Jersey politics is quite byzantine.

On Monday afternoon I had the chance to speak with Bob Casey, Treasurer of the state of Pennsylvania and Democratic candidate for Senate.

Over the course of our conversation, which you can read below or listen to here (warning: a very large .wav), Casey and I discussed a number of topics including Social Security, net neutrality, abortion, Iraq, domestic surveillance and Casey's message to the progressive blogosphere.

Jonathan Singer: President Bush recently said that he will renew his effort to partially privatize Social Security during the next Congress. What is your stance towards his plan?

Bob Casey: I've been against it from the beginning for a lot of reasons. One reason is that I really believe that - and I've said this before and it bears repeating - that what that privatization scheme is all about - and I don't think we should call it a plan, it's a scheme - it's a scheme to take away part of a guaranteed benefit from older Americans and replace it with a guaranteed fee for Wall Street. And it's not the way that we should try to approach the challenge that we have as Americans to make sure Social Security is always there for future generations.

There are a lot of ways to strengthen that program, but one way to really exacerbate or further injure that program is to try to privatize it. And I think the people of Pennsylvania have spoken loudly and clearly, but I think they get another chance in November because Senator Santorum has not just been one of the supporters of the Bush privatization scheme but he's been leading the band, so to speak, on that issue.

So I think it's going to be on the ballot to a certain extent this November as Senator Santorum and I square off.

Since I posted that I might focus on global warming, I've started to do research on the existing groups working on the problem.  Here's what I've found is going on, a sort of sketch of the landscape.  Every day brings a new dire piece of news on global warming.  Today, it's acidity in the oceans that threaten to destroy all coral reefs by the end of the century, and with it the underpinning of the oceanic food supply.  Great.  

But there's always a new piece of awful news.  The glaciers are melting.  Polar bears are starving.  New Orleans is ruined.  The glaciers are melting faster.  Tropical diseases are spreading.  The Greenland Ice Sheet is now melting, angry, and just broke up with its girlfriend of seven years.  And so forth.

This has become real and tangible to a lot of powerful people, not just those in West Africa suffering from global warming induced drought.  There seems to be a large coalition that is latent to attack this issue, and they are doing a lot of work on a local, state, and international level where there is the political will to experiment.  These groups are not focused on DC, since it seems like a lost cause.  For instance, Henry Waxman's Safe Climate Act, which is a first national legislative stab at the problem, has only 14 or 15 (it's up to 22 cosponsors), which is a reflection of how there's very little push to get Congressmen to deal seriously with climate change.  

Ironically, bad news doesn't help DC address the problem.  There's a net around DC that effectively prevents bad news from turning on the political system.  So, like a lot of the big problems confronting this country, the states are abuzz with activity to deal with global warming.  Pop culture leaders, the large reinsurance insurance companies, tourism industries, solar industry, environmental groups, hunters and fishers, some evangelicals, the military, and progressives are studying the problem, and working on solutions using various approaches.  The real action is at the state level.

DC though is stuck, and it's because of two distinct but related groups of dishonest men.  The first are the Global Warming Deniers, who lie and distort evidence.  Thinkprogress and ScienceBlogs deal appropriately with this group.  They are largely backed by Exxon and other oil companies, which, with the exception of BP, are directly funding a clumsy denier agenda.  This agenda is powerful enough to get Republicans to push to keep carbon dioxide from being classified as a pollutant, which will make it difficult to regulate under the Clean Air act.

The second group is more pernicious.  These are the Global Warming Apologists, who acknowledge global warming as a problem (though not always its man-made roots), but argue that there is nothing to be done.  It's composed of professionals like Robert Samuelson, an economist who is not funded by industry, but who is nonetheless part of the pundit-industrial complex that houses such other winners as Joe Klein and big Democratic media buyers.  It's important to look at the ages of these people; global warming to a 55 year old looks like a big and vague problem that they won't have to tackle, whereas to people who are younger, it's very real and very now.  These boomer man-pundits are making what's called the 'death bet', that they'll be dead before we feel any really nasty adverse effects.  This is also the reason that they are largely pro-war, since they won't have to fight, and pro-debt, since they get to borrow but their children and grandchildren are the ones who get to pay it all back.  Regardless, the apologists are the ones who keep the Democrats listless on the issue.  

Anyway, enough psychoanalysis.  I've never really paid attention to Samuelson's stuff, because he seemed like another technocratic hack who likes to make money on the cocktail weenie circuit.  Now that I'm paying attention to global warming, the background noise he and his ilk generates looks more problematic.  I see Judd is already delivering a shellacking to Samuelson, but let me deliver my own.  Samuelson uses his platform as an Op-Ed writer for the Washington Post to assert blatant falsehoods couched in clever PR plastic wrap.  And the falsehoods are not your standard anti-science nonsense, they are falsehoods designed for consumption by science accepting elites who need their own excuse for inaction.

Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and -- barring major technological breakthroughs -- we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious.

First of all, this is a second level discrediting of Al Gore.  Since the Deniers couldn't puncture the credibility of his scientifically based assertions, the Apologists are getting to work attacking his political sensibility by incorrectly paraphrasing them.  Contrary to what Samuelson alleges, Al Gore doesn't in fact say that the solution to global warming is recognizing the problem.  That's insipidly stupid, and it's a lie.  It is of course a lie with a purpose, which is to make you think that there's nothing we can do about this looming catastrophe and that Al Gore is crazy, naive, or dishonest for thinking otherwise.  Only, America can do plenty about global warming.  We won't know if what we do works, but that's what happens when you don't have a test planet to experiment on.  America has curbed the shrinking of the ozone layer through good policy and international leadership, and America passed an extremely effective Clean Air Act.  And we will do the same on climate change, it's just a matter of time.  And like with the Clean Air Act and higher CAFE standards, government action and international cooperation will spur technological change.  It already is, in China and in states like New Jersey, where the government takes this problem seriously.  

Overcoming this sense of fatalism, that the problem is too big to fix, is the biggest obstacle right now in working through the politics.  The Deniers are keeping the Republicans on board, and the Apologists are keeping the Democrats discouraged.  The netroots are going to be part of changing this attitude, at least on the Democratic side, and probably on the R side as well.  

And in that, it's the Samuelson's of the world who should know better.  More soon, including how we can all help bust through these hacks.  I'd appreciate comments from engineers, policymakers, and people working on language framing.  And if you know of local or personal initiatives on carbon, leave them in the comments as well.  All of us can do something about this.

Here are the good guys, the 22 co-sponsors of the Safe Climate Act (HR 5642).

McCain, on his opposition to a minimum wage increase:

"I've foregone the pay raise for many, many years, sometimes to the dismay of my family. So I believe that we should sit down and work out this minimum pay raise in order to protect the small businessmen and women who may not be able to afford such a thing and give them a path to being able to stay in business" (ABC, 7/2).

Three weeks ago:

Most of Arizona Sen. John McCain's personal assets are simple -- but his wife, Cindy, owns stock and property worth millions of dollars, according to new financial disclosure reports.

So McCain's family is rich, but he's still using a Congressional pay raise as a political football to hurt the working poor.  

Classy guy.

Update: I should note that McCain says he is for a minimum wage increase. He fits into that category of people who are for minimum wage increases but votes against them.

Update again: I should also note that McCain gets an 'F' from the Drum Major Institute on helping the middle class. Which isn't really fair, since he says he's for the middle class.