This is a sweet little election gimmick. It estimates what Barack Obama — who clearly is already the GOP’s main target — would spend in his first term, if he were to keep his campaign promises. Even adjusted for partisan bias, that’s a pretty hefty budget. He sure wasn’t kidding when he told his California supporters that, “I suspect a lot of this crowd — it looks like a pretty well-dressed crowd — potentially will pay a little bit more. I will pay a little bit more.”

(Hat tip: Ed Morrissey @ Captain’s Quarters)

Update: Over at the Tygrrrr Express, Eric has a great post arguing that the GOP isn’t going after Obama because they see him as the presumptive nominee, but because they’d rather fight Hillary Clinton in the election, and are salivating over the prospect. It includes this lovely paragraph:

The Clintons could deck Obama’s children, take their candy, and make them cry, and James Carville would mumble, “that’s just Arkansas politics.” The republicans would get blamed.

Despite his admitted lack of evidence for why Clinton will defeat Obama, it’s a worthy theory, and expressed (ha ha) with his usual from-the-gut flair for ranting eloquent.

The annual SA Blog Awards, organised by the good folks at Cherryflava, Ideate and WebAddiCT(s), are upon us, and nominations are open. I’m not hinting, of course. I would never.

Nor do I have a sordid fascination with the intricacies of competition rules, but after selflessly researching the matter in some depth, I can disclose the very interesting fact that there are a range of categories, such as best post, best original writing, best politics blog, best new blog, most controversial and most humorous blog, and most bestest blog of all. I’m no expert, but my reading of the rules is that multiple blogs can be nominated in each category, and the top-ten nominated blogs in each category go on to general voting and judging. Also, the overall winner gets R20.08 in prize money, which I hear goes a long way towards buying a beer in Cape Town. The colourful button on the right is just something colourful I put up there because it’s colourful, and on this site colourful things, like most things, tend to end up on the right.

If the spike wins in the best green blog category, I’ll fall off my chair, and immediately make a donation, exceeding any prize purse, but not exceeding my means, to the little fellow on the (ahem) right. I do, after all, advocate private charity in pursuit of one’s social and environmental goals, and as a life-long fan of some of the rarer wild felines and canines, I think the De Wildt Cheetah and Wildlife Trust does good work, and is worth a few farthings.

So make this colonialist warmonger lizard king free-market nutter fluffy kitten happy, and go vote. In the green category. But check out the other categories too. They may be surer bets and after all, you might detest small furry animals.

Update: The button on the right was wrong. Now, now, no sniping from the left, please. There was an extra http tag in there that hundreds, or possibly thousands, of fluffy furball fans have had to remove manually since the nomination button went up two days ago. My thanks (and that of the cheetah cub) to Wouter J for pointing out the problem. Teach me not to proofread widget code.

No plan to fix the power catastrophe in South Africa will work overnight. The crisis is deep and wide and will have grave impacts on economic growth, inflation, and poverty alleviation for many years to come. (I’m usually reluctant to bandy about terms like “catastrophe” and “crisis”, but they’re justified in this case.)

This proposal, relatively simple in principle, is from Advocate Hendrik Schmidt, a parliamentarian for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. He makes a good, concise case, of which the essence is this:

Eskom’s monopoly over electricity supply is one of the main causes of South Africa’s electricity crisis. The permanent solution to our energy future lies in dismantling this monopoly. Until independent power producers (IPPs) are allowed to enter the market to expand and diversify the sources of power we have access to, and until we are relieved of the burden of having to rely on Eskom’s outdated and dilapidated processes and infrastructure, local demand for electricity will continue to exceed supply.

This should have happened ten years ago. Even at this late stage, however, combined with short-term market-based efficiency measures, it offers the best hope for as rapid and complete a recovery as possible.

A return to state-controlled insularity and an “emergency plan”, funded by billions of public money, could work too, of course. But it would be expensive, it would be far more risky, it would be wide open to corruption, and it would be implemented by people with a disproven track record. And even if it does work, it will likely leave the country worse off in the end (albeit without an alternative future with which to compare it).

Usually, pricing electricity for the poor is raised as the core objection to permitting the free market to prove its mettle. Capitalists will simply raise prices, they say, and profiteer from the crisis. For a while, that is probably true. FA Hayek wasn’t wrong when he noted that the cure for high prices is high prices. They attract competition by signalling that supply must rise to meet demand. In a free market, in which legislated monopolies do not control supply, this results in downward pressure on prices.

But those who think that the concern of high prices is justified should lobby for a simple subsidy for the first X kWH of electricity metered. Or call for a “progressive electricity pricing scale” that works just as progressive taxation does. I’m not saying those are great solutions. My fear would be that price regulation for poor consumers will discourage companies from serving markets that are expensive to serve. But to satisfy those in government and elsewhere who fail to grasp this logic, such policies will overcome the most common populist objections to liberating the market. And at least they won’t break the market mechanism entirely. At least they won’t leave us all critically dependent on a dysfunctional and inefficient state-run industry.

As if he doesn’t have enough trouble because he demonstratively (and provocatively) refuses to bow to the orthodoxy of wearing a stars-and-stripes lapel pin — suggesting some who do are hypocrites — a TV image of the interior of a volunteer Obama campaign office in Houston, Texas, threw up a new reason to be wary of this fellow.

Yep, that’s a Cuban flag, with an image of Marxist revolutionary, fraud and murderous thug, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, superimposed on it. Obama called the flag “inappropriate”, but clearly some of his supporters are the kind of people that go in for romanticising such icons of often-militant opposition to the free world. NewsBusters has a good roundup of analysis, noting that Obama himself didn’t hang the flag, and that the image is a symptom of little more than juvenile radicalism. Still, the association should worry the rest of his supporters.

Meanwhile, the best headline on the subject is from Ed Driscoll’s blog: Sixties Radical Chic, Frozen In Amber.

Mark Helprin has written an excellent piece on the opposition to John McCain from right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and other thorns in the liberal side, such as Ann Coulter. The latter has threatened to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain wins the nomination, a show for which I want front-row tickets.

His writing is sparkling — note the line about “bloody ink of a dying industry” — but the most intriguing of his points concerns the ratings boost that would come from bitching about a Democratic presidency, as compared to relentless defence of all things Bush. I fail to see how campaining for Romney or Huckabee gibes with such a motivation. Either way, that allegation is also the point that Michelle Malkin takes the most exception to.

Here’s a cut version of Helprin’s column, followed by Malkin’s rebuttal. Great reading, on both counts. Now, where were the claims of some monolithic right-wing dogma, or some vast right-wing conspiracy?

What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.

As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.

As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.

Ostracism following tests of “right thinking” is a specialty of the left. Not that it doesn’t exist on the right, blooming with great malice especially on the radio. But in light of their prospects, conservatives have no room for it. For by their neglectful forfeit they have lost the battles of culture and education, and to remain other than an occult force they must express their beliefs through politics, from which, after November, they may be for a time excluded.

[…]

[The protracted Iraq war] and the economy threaten to throw the conservative enterprise back to where it was before Ronald Reagan or even William F. Buckley. Along comes John McCain, who has an 80% positive rating from the American Conservative Union but who as a truly independent soul does not fit, at the margins, some of the transient notions of what makes a conservative. Because of his independence and flexibility, he is the only Republican candidate who has a chance of winning, and thus preserving the core principles of conservatism, in relation to which he is unimpeachable. They are national security (in particular the strength of the military after Iraq and vis-à-vis China and a resurgent Russia), Constitutionalism (as in individual vs. collective rights), and the economy (free markets vs. government industrial policy).

One can agree or disagree with his peripheral positions, but political orthodoxy is political death. If those who are in a hissy fit about Sen. McCain would rather have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they will get Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton … and they will wake up to a great regret, as if in their drunkenness they had taken Shrek to bed.

But, guess what? Even if, as the country veers left, living conservatives gnash their teeth and dead ones spin in their graves, a small class of conservatives will benefit. And who might they be? They might be those whose influence and coffers swell on discontent, and who find attacking a president easier and more sensational than the dreary business of defending one. They rose during the Clinton years. Perhaps they are nostalgic. It isn’t worth it, however, for the rest of us.

So, rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party ostensibly for its impurity but equally for the sake of their self-indulgent pique, each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man. And that would apply equally as well to the gorgeous Laura Ingraham and the relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter.

And from RealClearPolitics, parts of Malkin’s response:

The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It’s disgusting.

[…]

It’s one thing to hear such petty snark coming from the left. Outraged that conservative talk radio has succeeded in the marketplace while liberals have bombed, and unnerved that new media outlets have upended mainstream journalism’s monopoly apple cart, liberals have long crusaded against the medium. […]

But now, we have establishment Republicans parroting liberal ad hominem rhetoric: Talk-radio hosts are talentless blabbermouths. Their listeners are mind-numbed robots. Or, as supposed free-market conservative and McCain supporter Phil Gramm put it in his broadside against talk radio in the Washington Post last week: “They say they have principles, but some of it is their ego and power, too. They’re well-known, and they’re used to having power.”

Funny. These trash-talking GOP politicians and pundits had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to help kill Hillary Clinton’s massive government health care takeover in 1994. They had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to galvanize support for the Republican revolution, two Bush presidential campaigns and the war in Iraq.

[…]

Helprin accuses conservative talkers who oppose McCain of rooting for a liberal presidency because their “influence and coffers swell on discontent” and they are “nostalgic” for the Clinton years. Translation: They’re all just greedy self-promoters who care more about themselves than the good of the country. Gramm leveled the same attack: “They’re people who put their dogma in front of the interests of the country.”

Cocooned conservative establishment snobs denigrate talk-radio hosts for preaching to the choir. But these same critics have no problem using the medium to market their own work. Ask their publicists. The message of the anti-conservative conservatives dissing talk radio: Self-interest for me, but not for thee.

No need to wait for a Clinton to take the White House. Clintonism is alive and well among conservative talk-radio haters on both sides of the aisle.

Excuse me while I fetch the popcorn.