US Elections

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* The "absurd" clarification was in reference to a Daniel Flitton column talking up General Stanley McChrystal as a Republican 2012 prospect.

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But do the presidential hopefuls have it wrong? From either the independence or security perspective, it is substantially underappreciated how much America’s energy position has recently strengthened from discoveries both at home and in the Western Hemisphere.

Natural gas is a key source of energy for electricity generation. Until recently, America’s reserves of conventional natural gas were falling and large scale imports of LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) from countries like Qatar were universally anticipated.

Technical innovation and old fashioned persistence by explorers in Texas unleashed an enormous new supply of gas from shale rock right across America. The technique, known as hydraulic fracturing, involves drilling a borehole and injecting water, chemicals, and sand at high pressures to fracture the rock and liberate the oil or gas. It is environmentally controversial. Nonetheless, from its origins in the Barnett shale region near Dallas, Texas, the boom has spread across the country to the now famous Marcellus structure under western New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

As recently as ten years ago, shale gas contributed around 1 per cent of America’s gas supplies. Today it is 25 per cent of gas supply and could reach 50 per cent in the coming decades. The estimated 3000 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in America could supply current levels of consumption for more than 100 years. 

Oil is the predominant source of energy for transportation. New technologies have made as much as 11 billion barrels of oil recoverable in the Bakken formation under North Dakota and Montana, creating old fashioned boom towns and reducing America’s import needs in the future.

Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, discoveries and rising production promise to substantially lessen dependence on West African and Persian Gulf suppliers. Canada, already the top petroleum exporter to America, expects a doubling of tar sands production to 3 million barrels per day by 2020, with a controversial 1 711 mile pipeline proposed to carry the oil to Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast.

Brazil’s astounding offshore fields are likely to reach production levels in line with Iran — 5.5 million barrels per day — by 2020. Columbia’s production is rising, and Argentina recently made its biggest oil discovery since the 1980s.

The consequences of these technologies and discoveries are not only improved energy security, but when considered in combination with the turmoil of the Arab Spring, may lead to a reordering of geopolitics. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Dr Amy Myers Jaffe contends that it is already taking place. In addition to the discussion above, the potential for US companies to export the new horizontal drilling and fracturing technologies to Europe and China, potentially reducing their demand for Russian and Persian Gulf energy supplies, could have an enormous impact. As Myers Jaffe says, “Watch this space: America may be back in the energy leadership saddle again.”

Cross posted at American Review.

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If administering the ultimate punishment is the most serious use of government power it should at least be treated as such. The gravity of execution and the ability of a state to kill its own citizens is not something over which people should strut, ever.

It makes more sense, though is no less ghoulish, as a celebration of political grit. I linked yesterday to an Erick Erickson post about Sarah Palin, in which he describes the appeal the former Alaska governor had for Republicans:

a lot of us fell in love with Sarah Palin because of her enemies and a lot of us have fallen out of love with Sarah Palin because of her fans. 

This seems a common sentiment among conservatives; someone who enrages liberals must be doing something right. It seems a nihilistic and fruitless brand of politics to me, and while partisans of all stripes can fall prey to the pleasures of point-scoring against the other team, it's something liberals seem to have a lot less interest in. (Is there a left wing leader liberals love "because of her enemies"?) But Perry's triumphalism over the 234 people he condemned and his callous disregard for suggestions that not all of them were guilty won't really matter to the conservative base, whether they value human life or not. The outraged response from death penalty opponents will just make Perry's blithe surety more attractive to Republican primary voters.

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The reasons for choosing whippersnappers such as these are cynical, but compare it to the rest of Washington. The constitution require the president to be at least 35 years of age; senators must have reached 30 and representatives 25. The public has been willing to elect relatively youthful presidents, but the lack of term limits and advantages of seniority has ensured the Senate is a body marked by its decrepitude. Senator Robert Byrd clung to his seat for 51 years and died in office at the age of 92. Ted Kennedy served for 47 years until the age of 77. When John McCain's current term is up, he'll be 80 years old, and 11 senators are even older than he is! This Senate is actually the oldest in history.

If fixed terms for justices would help to reduce the stakes, it might be worth considering, even if it would have the side effect of making yet another branch of government much older than the population it serves. But court appointments are by their nature political, and 18 years is long enough an appointment to make the it worthwhile for partisans to fight very hard for judges of whom they approve. As it is, I can see a real advantage to a system with incentives to put younger people in positions of power.

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His record as Texas' governor proves that he knows you grow the economy with less government, by controlling spending, cutting taxes, reforming tort laws and reducing regulatory red tape for employers. One of the important areas is reigning in over-regulation.

Perry is running for president, and the federal regulations presidents oversee are not the type identified by Friedersdorf that are burdensome to the average American. In fact, the regulations Inhofe points toward, such as those governing the environment and the workplace tend to benefit the general public. The freedom to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, or experience dangerous conditions at work is not one many voters are interested in pursuing.

I suspect though that when politicians like Inhofe talk about "over-regulation," voters have in mind the kind of absurd laws put in place by local governments rather than the standards the Federal government has jurisdiction over. Voters, however, are wont to take out their frustrations on the most visible politicians, whether they are responsible for the problem or not. Presidents get blamed for the actions of Congress. State politicians suffer for economic conditions largely out of their hands. And if voters feel over-burdened by regulation, they may well gravitate to candidates who speak out against regulation, even if those candidates have no jurisdiction over the regulations displeasing voters.

This may well explain why Barack Obama has ordered his administration to review its regulations and remove unnecessary ones. (Though he probably thinks that doing so is just a sensible idea, as well.) The public will be much more amenable to sensible regulations if it isn't regularly stymied by silly ones. But this is a fight the presidents' political allies must also pursue at a local level. A council that makes it easier for someone to run a small business might also make it easier for a president to curb the excesses of a larger one.

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To all this hand-wringing, I shall repeat what I've been saying all year on the matter: No candidate looks better than one who is yet to join the race. Every candidate who comes along is going to be flawed in some way, and it is pointless for Republicans to continue holding out for an übermensch who can satisfy all their political desires. Back in March, I advised that whoever ends up the GOP nominee would "probably have some significant flaws. But as Donald Rumsfeld might advise his party: You campaign for an election with the candidate you have, not the candidate you might want."

As the experience with Perry has shown, dream candidates lose a lot of their lustre when they're forced under the harsh light of a presidential campaign and are required to do the hard work of campaigning. That doesn't mean that they are destined to lose next November. It's just how politics works. It's a tough business.

And the array of fantasy candidates pundits assemble? They're just that. Fantasies. 

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• Chart of the week is this handy Venn diagram by Nate Silver, which breaks down the Republican field's strengths and weaknesses.

• Nate Silver ponders Rick Perry's electability:

Over all, Mr. Perry has won his three elected terms with an average victory margin of 13 percentage points. That’s certainly not a disaster, but it lags the 19-point margin for other Texas Republicans running in those years. In the most recent two elections, Mr. Perry was losing quite a few voters who were voting for Republican for almost every other office.

• Michael Agger explains why the Internet likes President Obama so much.

Obama also benefits from his blackness and perceived coolness. Successful memes often approach sensitive subjects, like race, but stop short of being offensive. Many of the positive memes surrounding Obama emphasize his decisive, almost Shaft-like authority.

• Vogue profiles Jon Huntsman:

But when Huntsman speaks, he doesn’t act like he’s pinned down behind enemy lines or tailor his explanation of why he’s running to the audience. He says he’s running on his rec­ord as a “conservative problem-­solver” in Utah and on his grasp of America’s economic challenges.

• The Daily Beast has a neat infographic listing every book Obama has read while in office.

• Social Studies DC has produced this handy guide to the stereotypes defining different Washington neighbourhoods.

• Sean Fennessey thinks Mitt Romney is utterly compelling:

It wasn't what he was saying—the hybridized big-business conservative rhetoric dancing awkwardly with East Coast liberalism leaves me cold, bored, and sometimes revolted. It's how effortful and cheerily programmed he seemed. It was as if he had never had an actual conversation with a human before, though he had been hardwired to assume the tendencies of someone who had. It was cyborgian.

• Damon Young outlines the phenomenon he calls "Eating while black":

From a race perspective, a manifestation of this mindset is you wondering if all things that happen to you are somehow related to you being black; a too heightened racial awareness that makes it increasingly difficult to discern between legitimate racism and race-based discrimination — both of which definitely still exist — and mere happenstance.

• Conor Friedersdorf suggests what CEO recruiters might ask the Republican presidential field:

[T]he focus among political candidates is often on what they'll endeavor to do if elected, whereas a CEO candidate, brought in for an interview, is inevitably pressed not just on what he or she would accomplish, but how it would be accomplished.

• Song of the Week is from country singer Miranda Lambert's new project, a band called the Pistol Annies. This is "Hell on Heels," and is as fiery as the title suggests.

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Southern politicians did not use [their dominance in all three brances of federal government] to buttress state's rights; quite the contrary. In the 1830s Congress imposed a gag rule to stifle antislavery petitions from Northern states. The Post Office banned antislavery literature from the mail if it was sent to Southern states. In 1850 Southerners in Congress plus a handful of Northern allies enacted a Fugitive Slave Law that was the strongest manifestation of national power thus far in American history. In the name of protecting the rights of slaveowners, it extended the long arm of federal law, enforced by marshals and the army, into Northern states to recover escaped slaves and return them to their owners.

And there's the true subterfuge in Perry's argument: It's based on just enough fact to almost look respectable. The federal government was instrumental in dismantling slavery, but before that it was instrumental in maintaining the institution. But even if it were moral to do so, slavery could never have remained a matter for individual states to regulate. As Abraham Lincoln said, "this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free." Southerners needed to spread slavery to new territories to prevent it from dying out, and no nation could effectively function with some of its people considered citizens in one state and property in another.

This is a mistake too often made when people remember the civil war. It is formulated as a conflict between two sides — the slaveholding South and the abolitionist North — leading to the strange notion of a slaveholding country with no actual slaves. It's better to see the battle as being between at least three parties: The South, who wanted to maintain slavery, the North, who wanted to preserve the Union (and, later, emancipate the slaves), and an entire population of black people who, for centuries, had wanted to be free. And if you were a slave in antebellum times, Perry's idea of states forcing one another's interpretation of the law on each other does not particularly matter. If a government is intent on enforcing your bondage, it's of a little concern whether that government is a state government or a federal one.

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Another Tea Party favourite, Texas Governor Rick Perry skipped the Iowa Straw poll and instead announced his candidacy at a conference hosted by conservative bloggers in South Carolina. Yet at the Fox News debate last Thursday night, at the State Fair on Friday and at the Straw Poll on Saturday, lots of Republicans were talking about him with a certain excitement.

Aside from the Ron Paul purists, most Tea Partiers in Iowa seem to have backed Bachmann until now, but she's no certainty to win the caucuses early next year if Perry catches fire in this state.

At some point, members of the Tea Party movement will have to settle on a candidate, and at that moment we will see their power either magnify or dissipate. Will they stick with Bachmann? The loyalty they showed Ron Paul and the general rigidity of their approach suggests they might. But Perry, as a governor, is clearly more electable than a member of the House of Representatives with no executive experience.

With Pawlenty gone, Perry, not Bachmann, seems set to emerge as the anti-Romney.

And not a single Tea Partier I've spoken to wants Mitt Romney to be their nominee.

As the votes were being counted in Ames, Iowa, six hours south at Wilson's Creek, Missouri, there was a 150th anniversary Civil War re-enactment underway.

The battle saw insurgent Confederate militias overwhelm and rout the establishment Union forces through weight of superior numbers and the firepower of their two-pound cannons.

Thousands died and the rebels were triumphant. Yet though this early battle was lost, the Union's ultimate goal was achieved. Missouri did not join the rebellion and the establishment won out.

Mitt Romney may well hope history will repeat itself once again.

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What does affect Bachmann's campaign is Texas Governor Rick Perry's long-awaited entry into the contest. What Bachmann has going for her is an innate appeal to the religious and economic conservatives that make up the Republican Party's base. What she doesn't have going for her is credibility amongst her party's elite; she is a junior member of the House, with little leadership experience and a track record of saying things that sound absurd to the general electorate. Party insiders who want a candidate who can actually beat Barack Obama in 2012 are looking for anyone but her.

Mitt Romney's goal continues to be the kind of candidate party insiders can get behind on the basis of electability. He's the frontrunner, the next in line, and has gubernatorial experience and a record of economic conservatism. His route to the nomination involves outlasting his competitors. The base may loathe his track record on health care, be suspicious of his flip-flopping on abortion, and fear his Mormon background, but if he's the last man standing, they'll unite around him nonetheless.

Rick Perry makes things much more complicated for Bachmann and a bit more difficult for Romney. Unlike Bachmann, Perry has credibility and experience as a governor, and party insiders can support him. Unlike Romney, the GOP base feels that he is one of their own — and, unlike Bachmann, he hasn't achieved that status by giving nutty interviews to cable networks. I cautioned last week not to assume Perry will be a great campaigner until he actually starts campaigning, and I continue to believe that. He does, however, have a good shot at becoming the unity candidate Tim Pawlenty wanted, but was unable, to be. If he is, Michele Bachmann may well struggle to find continued relevancy.

Look to this article from Ed Kilgore for an indication of the threat Perry's entry poses to Bachmann's candidacy:

Finally, even if Bachmann can maintain her lead in Iowa, she has yet to win over conservative elites, even among those whose views are as reliably extreme as her own. Any plausible path to the nomination for Bachmann includes a win in South Carolina, a state whose Republican voters are a lot like those of Iowa, with the exception that the Palmetto State’s Tea Party movement is highly organized and active. But early indications are that Senator Jim DeMint, himself an important national power-broker, has succeeded in convincing most SC pols and donors to “keep their powder dry” in the presidential contest until such time as he has scrutinized the candidates and made his own choice. Bachmann, who visibly annoyed DeMint by initially refusing to take the “cut, cap, and balance” pledge on the debt limit issue (she eventually relented after previously vowing to vote against the CCB legislation on grounds that a repeal of ObamaCare should also be a condition of any debt limit increase), is not off to a great start in the DeMint Primary. It also doesn’t help her with party elites that she’s closely (if somewhat unfairly) associated with Sarah Palin, and thus might be expected to emulate Palin’s pattern of steadily growing disapproval ratings from political independents and more moderate Republicans.

There's a reason Rick Perry kicked off his campaign in South Carolina. Iowa may seem the be all and end all now, but when its caucuses are over, states with quite different political landscapes will start to matter a whole lot more.  

As for Mitt Romney, his mission is the same as ever, though Perry's entrance has made it tougher: Stay alive until the party has no other real choice.

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• There's an interesting album about African American success in Jay-Z and Kanye West's new opus Watch the Throne, argues Nitsuh Abebe:

It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won.

• America has lost the will to build great stadiums, laments Peter Richmond:

How can the former architectural capital of the globe (the Chrysler Building; Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim; that black cube balancing on one of its corners down on Astor Place in the East Village, about which two generations of stoners are still wondering whether it really moved when they leaned on it or it was just the weed) erect three buildings so irrelevant in design that they were greeted by a collective, global yawn — when they were greeted at all?

• Tumblr of the Week is Sad Guys On Trading Floors, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin.

• Highly informative video of the week: Abraham Simpson lectures on American history.

• A number of conservative states are lightening harsh prison sentences, reports the New York Times:

More than a dozen states in recent years have taken steps to reduce the costs to taxpayers of keeping so many criminals locked up. As crime rates have steadily declined to 40-year lows, draining the political potency from crime fears, the fiscal crunch has started to prompt a broad rethinking about alternatives to incarceration.

• Above: the Center for American Progress illustrates that because the recession was deeper than first thought, the stimulus was far more effective than supposed:

Using the most updated data, we can see that in 2009 there is actually about a $544 billion difference between what GDP would have been had it continued to contract as rapidly as it did during the fourth quarter of 2008 and what it actually was. As Holtz-Eakin points out, the total amount of fiscal stimulus during that year was $260 billion. This suggests the Recovery Act produced about $2.10 in economy activity for every $1.00 in spending or tax cuts. That’s a pretty good multiplier.

• Yoni Applebaum suggests progressives look to the early 20th Century for political inspiration:

At the beginning of the last century, the movement from which modern-day progressives take their name capitalized on a crisis of government legitimacy to increase dramatically the scope, scale and responsibilities of government. If progressives wish to recapture popular support, they might reflect on that earlier example.

• Rick Perry's confidence in the death penalty's infallibility is "downright pathological," writes Radley Balko:

In the Hank Skinner case, Perry has actively fought DNA testing that could confirm the innocence (or guilt) of another Texas man on death row. Skinner was at one point hours from execution before the Supreme Court intervened (the intervening justice was Antonin Scalia, believe it or not). In Skinner’s case, the prosecution actually began to conduct DNA testing on crime scene evidence, then stopped when the first tests confirmed Skinner’s version of events.

• Song of the week is New York singer Lana Del Rey's sublimely melodramatic "Video Games," a song far better than Del Rey's self-description of being the "gangsta Nancy Sinatra."

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Perry is getting attention because he is a plausible nominee: He has solid experience, is charismatic, and appeals to conservatives without instantly alienating moderates in the way Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann do. But that just means Perry's a serious candidate, not an inevitable one. Expectations will be high over the coming weeks as he launches his campaign, and though Perry may be the answer to Republican prayers (perhaps those made at the prayer meeting Perry held in Texas last week?) he could as easily be another Fred Thompson. Thompson, you may recall, was the former Tennessee senator and  "Law & Order" actor who seemed, in 2008, certain to provide relief for the GOP from a weak and uninspiring field. That was until the day he started campaiging and made it clear he'd rather be doing anything but.

And in 2012, Republicans have already looked to apparently exciting unannounced candidates, only to discover them to be significantly less exciting once they actually enter the race. Some were never serious contenders — Donald Trump or Sarah Palin, for instance — but Newt Gingrich seemed ripe with potential until he turned out to be unable to build a following and alienated the party's base from day one. Jon Huntsman looked the perfect candidate on paper, but he's shown a frustrating predilection for moderation that his party has no interest in engaging with at the moment.

Rick Perry might indeed break the streak of disappointing entrants. After all, the eventual winner must join the race at some point. And nor do I want to suggest that he will be a disappointment. However, it's going to be a long race, and Perry could as easily end up a campaign footnote as he could the next president. Let's let the man begin campaigning before we declare him the frontrunner.

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It would be thoroughly unfair to Perry if voters compare him to President Bush because of his speaking style, but he's by no means the only Republican this cycle who may have found his background to be a disadvantage. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, if he had ever seriously contemplated running for the GOP nomination, would almost certainly have found his surname to be a drag on his campaign, and there has been speculation that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour decided not to seek the nomination because voters would recoil at being asked to replace their country's first black president with a white man from the Deep South. Until President Obama won in 2008, it was taken as political gospel that only a Southerner could succesfully campaign for the presidency as a Democrat. As spurious a rule as that was, Dems like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis certainly didn't benefit from their New England roots. Apart from Perry, no serious GOP contender this year is from the former Confederate states. Could Southern Republicans have gained an electoral toxicity of their own?

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• Meet Paul Bridges, the conservative Georgia small town mayor who spends his time defending the rights of illegal immigrants:

Bridges is an unlikely soldier on the front lines of the nation's immigration debate. The 58-year-old native Southerner describes himself as a conservative Republican. For years, he knew little about immigrants but didn't lack strong opinions about them: "They were just low-class people," he recalls. "They weren't even able to speak English."

• Matt Yglesias matches Republican presidential candidates with Get Up Kids songs. I have a few suggestions of my own.

• Mike Barthel says that its the parodic approach of Stephen Colbert's campaign finance stunts that makes them so dangerous:

The Times gets it wrong in saying that his super-PAC originated in a skit but “became real.” The point of parody is that there is both never a joke and always a joke, that the thing is real as soon as it becomes expressed. What the FEC has done is not make it more or less real, but legitimate.

• Fareed Zakaria argues that conservatism has lost touched with reality:

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

• Brandon Soderbergh profiles a new genre of dance music invented in the DC suburbs and nurtured on the Internet:

Moombahton, a blogged-about type of slowed-up electronic dance music, began in a suburban Washington, D.C., basement in the fall of 2009. Dave Nada’s teenaged cousin asked the DJ to spin at a midday “skipping party,” wherein high-schoolers leave class early and go over to someone’s house and party. Nada, nearly twice the age of the kids, wasn’t exactly sure what to play to get them moving. He did, however, notice that they’d been blasting lots of reggaeton. So he fit the more relaxed pace of reggaeton by reducing the speed of Dutch house music ...  “The internet was crucial for its growth and it still is,” Nada says. “‘Born in D.C., bred worldwide’ is the tagline.”

• Frank Bruni outlines how gay visiblity has increased support for gay marriage:

Over the last quarter-century the love that dared not speak its name turned into a veritable motor mouth, to a point where the average American, according to an astonishing Gallup Poll last month, thinks that about 25 percent of the population is homosexual. Hardly. But that perception underscores how visible gay people have become. And familiarity changes everything.

• Ryan Adams's "New York, New York," with its video inadvertently showcasing the World Trade Center in the days before it was destroyed, has become closely associated with 9/11. The lyrics, however, say the singer "shuffled through the city on the Fourth of July/I had a firecracker waiting to blow." Let's enjoy the tune in that light. Happy Independence Day, everyone.

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• Ohio University student Meg Roussos profiles a Buckeye State family of five that lives in a schoolbus, as part of a series on "The Changing American Dream." [h/t Conor Friedersdorf]

• Former Hillary Clinton advisor Mark Penn tells GQ how Barack Obama could lose in 2012:

Obama no longer has national security as a deficit. He's answered the 3 a.m. call. But health care is still a vulnerability. The deficit is a huge vulnerability. Unemployment is a huge vulnerability. The whole economy is a huge vulnerability. If he doesn't get re-elected, it will be because someone really taps into one or more of those four vulnerabilities.

• New Tumblr of the week is the self-explanatory Joe Biden Eating A Sandwich.

• The Wall Street Journal on the chances of a Rick Perry run in 2012:

Our normally reliable Republican source reports that Mr. Perry has surveyed the field and decided to get in the race later this summer, perhaps around the time of the national prayer meeting that Mr. Perry is hosting on August 6 at a Houston football stadium. Our source also reports that Mr. Perry is aiming to compete in the Iowa Straw Poll, even though it occurs just a week later, on August 13.

• Speaking of 2012 contenders, this 2009 story by The New Republic is a great introduction to Jon Hunstman:

To be sure, Huntsman is no Republican In Name Only; his positions on abortion and gun control still hew quite closely to the Republican line. But he sees himself within a broader GOP tradition. "[Republicans] forget sometimes what Lincoln taught us about individual dignity and equal rights, what Roosevelt taught us about the environment and big stick diplomacy, about American power abroad and how we project it," he says, folding his hands beneath his chin and staring out his window. "We have Nixon who created the EPA, for heaven's sake. People forget that."

• Ta-Nehisi Coates on the death penalty, and how Rick Perry's actions may have condemned an innocent man:

Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, the accounts of those who would seek to conceal the results of their theory should be closely checked. If only for that reason, the prospect of Governor Perry as commander in chief induces a chilling nostalgia. Indeed, choosing a leader of the free world from the ranks of those who sport a self-serving incuriosity is a habit, like crash landings and cock-fights, best cultivated in strict moderation.

• Related: Zain Kassam explains why he's opposed to the death penalty.

• Alyssa Rosenberg sees potential in an African American version of Annie:

[S]ince Annie‘s supposed to be a universal American story, I would really like to see a simple, uncomplicated statement that African-Americans, and particularly black men, can be the vehicles for that story. If we can have Jay-Z in gruff mogul mode having his heart melted by a gawky, adorable Willow Smith without having a debate about the state of black fatherhood, or hedging his right to parent her in any way, I think there would be something lovely about that.

• Ice cream flavour of the week is this sadly fictional delight inspired by "Parks and Recreation" character Ron Swanson. [By PanicBasket. Explanation here.]

• Ezra Klein on the tax increase Republicans might accepts and Democrats might refuse:

Over the next 10 years, switching to chained-CPI raises about $300 billion. About two-thirds of that comes from Social Security and other retirement programs. The remainder comes from higher taxes. This reform has a certain amount of support from center-left policy wonks — though they recommend using some of the savings to boost benefits for the poor — but as you’d perhaps expect, AARP and many Democrats don’t like that very much.

• A newly political Katy Perry has told Rolling Stone that it's a disgrace for America not to have free health care, so let's make the song of the week her gleefully vacuous party anthem "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" 

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Now, five years later, attention has turned to the case. This is, in part because of the attention of the media, but also largely because Perry is running for re-election in 2010, and facing off in a tough battle with now-senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. The case has garnered attention already during the campaign, with Perry's actions drawing criticism from his opponent.

Across the blogosphere, people are watching. This could be the first time, since the death penalty was re-introduced in the United States, that a state has admitted error in executing one of its citizens. Writers are divided over Willingham's guilt, over the quality of his trial, and over Gov. Perry's actions in the case.

Gov. Perry's decisions regarding Willingham could prove harmful to his reelection chances. Just 48 hours before the Texas Forensic Science Board was due to review the Willingham case in October this year, the Governor removed three members of the board and replaced them with hard line conservatives. The Willingham hearings were immediately postponed and may now not take place until 2011, long after Perry's reelection battle is over. 

One of the really interesting elements of this case is the way Hutchinson has framed her response. In accusing Perry of a cover-up, Hutchinson took the opportunity to attack him from the right. She has claimed that Perry's actions were irresponsible and could provide fodder for the anti-death penalty activists. The statement her office released stated:

"The only thing Rick Perry's actions have accomplished is giving liberals an argument to discredit the death penalty. Kay Bailey Hutchison is a steadfast supporter of the death penalty, voted to reinstate it when she served in the Texas House and believes we should never do anything to create a cloud of controversy over it with actions that look like a cover-up." (Source: Wonkette)

Hutchinson used the case to display her own pro-death-penalty bona fides. Texas conservatives are apparently so strongly in favour of the death penalty that a case of possible innocence is presented by Hutchinson not as a tragic miscarriage of justice, but a potential attack on the death penalty. It's a remarkably example of the fierce belief many hold in the necessity of the death penalty

Many questions remain regarding the Willingham case: Does the US Justice system work when the accused has arguably inadequate representation? Did Perry abuse his power? If Willingham was innocent, what would that mean for the death penalty?

The most fundamental question though, and one that deserves to be revisited in an official, rather than journalistic, capacity, is did Cameron Todd Willingham murder his children, or did the state of Texas execute an innocent man?

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