links for 2010-07-22
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TD: "ut the failure to confront global warming – central not only to Obama's presidency but to the planet itself – is not the Senate's alone. Rather than press forward with a climate bill in the Senate last summer, after the House had passed landmark legislation to curb carbon pollution, the administration repeated many of the same mistakes it made in pushing for health care reform. It refused to lay out its own plan, allowing the Senate to bicker endlessly over the details. It pursued a "stealth strategy" of backroom negotiations, supporting huge new subsidies to win over big polluters. It allowed opponents to use scare phrases like "cap and tax" to hijack public debate. And most galling of all, it has failed to use the gravest environmental disaster in the nation's history to push through a climate bill – to argue that fossil-fuel polluters should pay for the damage they are doing to the atmosphere, just as BP will be forced to pay for the damage it has done to the Gulf."
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SK: "Blanche Lincoln is pretty much doomed in her Senate reelection bid. Even in what for Lincoln is the best of the new surveys, she still trails her GOP challenger, John Boozman, by 19 points, 54 to 35 percent.... [I]t does reinforce a point I tried to make during Lincoln's campaign against Bill Halter this spring: Democrats would have been better off getting rid of her in the primary... with Halter as their nominee, Democrats would have at least introduced some uncertainty into the fall campaign. With Lincoln, a two-term incumbent and two-decade Washington veteran, there really is none."
