In a recent The Atlantic blog post, blogger Matt Yglesias inexplicably writes he "100% agrees with" a Jonah Goldberg recommendation to turn Meet The Press into a panel-show hosted by Chuck Todd.

A Matt Yglesias commenter (in a comment typical of those on the thread) writes: "I think Chuck Todd would be a great choice. Cerebral, likeable, not overtly ideological, not a blowhard, projects competence."

But Chuck Todd is a typical corporate media shill who uses his position in the mainstream-media to trim the facts presented to the public and to promote Republicans!

I wrote in my inexpert-way about peak oil recently in a few diaries. If you haven't read them, they're here, here, and here (links in chronological order).

Here are a few more thoughts.

...In which case it's a little like the Mafia.

Yesterday, I wrote this post about peak oil, about thinking about responding to our oil running out, and about the oil and gas industries' recent moves. Obviously, the oil will inevitably run out, and when it does, what will happen to all of us or to our kids and grand-kids (oil likely won't last any later than that) will differ greatly depending on how we respond to the problem now. Whether you've noticed my posts before on this subject, or are noticing it for the first time, read on.

From a person named Armory Lovins, here is an idea Kevin is highlighting:

For cars, the most effective thing would be a "feebate": In the showroom, less-efficient models would have a corresponding fee, while the more-efficient ones would get a rebate paid for by the fees. That way when choosing what model you want you would pay attention to fuel savings over its whole life, not just the first year or two. It turns out that the automakers can actually make more money this way because they will want to get their cars from the fee zone into the rebate zone by putting in more technology. The technology has a higher profit margin than the rest of the vehicle.

We are hearing plenty of lines about anti-woman prejudice from the media-- now that Hillary has lost, and it doesn't make a difference whether anyone concedes that there was anti-woman prejudice or not. Sure, many of the criticisms of Hillary during the primaries were mysognistic, but were they made because of misogyny? I'm not so sure.

I know that Saturday or Sunday is usually the day we reserve for posting about non-political topics, but I just felt like putting this up somewhere. And what better place to put something to make sure it gets seen by a bunch of cool people than on Daily Kos? Anyway, it's Friday, so I guess in a "TGIF" sort of way I am not too far off from the liberal-blog tradition of cat-blogging and the like.

I have been looking for a list of horror movies (being a movie / horror movie fan) like this one the Internet and didn't find one I thought was quite good enough, so I decided just to make my own. Please offer me your own suggestions!  

BEFORE YOU POST A COMMENT, READ THIS: Kos' latest fumble is more than a waste of space-- it makes us all look bad. If you want to criticize me for writing a post on this when other people already did, make sure you write Kos first, and tell him to clean up his behavior.

In his mid-day open thread, Kos is once again defending his bizarre teeth-whitening post. Kos writes:

It's amazing seeing the party that gave us Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's stagecraft is now so amateurish that they've given us green screen backdrops in major speeches in half-empty gymnasiums and -- yes -- yellow teeth. Image and stage handling are critical components in modern presidential campaigns, and have been so since Nixon sweated it out in his infamous debate appearance against a young, fresh-faced looking JFK. Pretending that it's not something that should be discussed, or that there's something unseemly about it is silly.

Everyone has their flaws. The effective campaigns know how to smooth those over while accentuating their candidates' strength.

Emphasis added.

Via the Carpetbagger report, a computer programmer is using a computer program to try to determine whether evolution led to spiritual beliefs:

The model assumes that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn’t spread unreal information. The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people — those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when [James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan] included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

UPDATE: I finished some edits at 1:08, so if you read this post right away, you may want to check it out again.

Neil S. on Washington Monthly writes:

I tell you this because it brings to mind one of the lesser costs of the Iraq War -- the disruption it imposes on the lives of able and intelligent people who have to put their educational plans and careers on hold for years. While everyone else is advancing, they're away fighting a war.

It seems like everyone is trying to twist their brains around the problem of high gasoline and oil prices lately. Kevin's latest ruminations, involving the impending decline of the natural oil supply, are here. Mine are in this post.

Kevin wrote:

Both the Sunni Awakening in Iraq and the recent experience of Pakistan demonstrate that terrorists are often their own worst enemies in this regard. The more they target civilians, the less support they have in the surrounding population.

I'm sure some of you have started to notice that the conservatives often employ a woman or a minority to do a column like the one CB reports on here nowadays.  

Today Kevin gave his opinion about Hillary for Veep. Here are my two comments in response.

UPDATE: To all the people who complained that I wrote another "Hillary Clinton as veep" diary when a bunch of others did, I am a regular diarist (over 30 recent diaries, always receiving comments and recs) and people may want to see my point of view on this rather than have it be buried among 400 other comments. I am not going to keep quiet like a whipped dog on this just because trolls gang up and write 30 diaries on whether Hillary should be veep to keep anybody from writing an even moderately pro-Hill diary on this. I definitely remember all the ridiculous investigations the Republicans poured millions of dollars into when Bill was in the White House. I know who our enemies are and I know they do not like the Clintons, but those Republicans can take a hike as far as I am concerned.

Kevin asked about sex-ed and the war on science today. Here's my answer.

UPDATE: I added and changed some things on this post until 9:22 AM.

How do you get people to watch or read the political news that effects their lives so much, and how do you drive them away from it? The conventional wisdom is that it's the people's fault, that the people just don't watch the news because it doesn't include enough sex-scandals, and images of Britney Spears dancing for the camera. But the conventional wisdom probably disserves us.

We, as rational individuals, surely, surely, do not allow the possibility that things can be rigged by people and that our media is being taken over by the right-wing. Surely. That is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out there- so impossible, like UFOs or Bigfoot being real. It could never ever happen that anything could be corrupt, or anyone could scam anybody, infiltrate an organization, or that anybody could be bribed, intimidated, or blackmailed. It's not like it's happened before! But, as open-minded individuals, let's just preserve our reputations as thinkers for a sec by going through the motions of examining the unusual events of the Kentucky Derby. Our kids will thank us for phoning it in like this.

I just wanted to add my contribution to discussions of a couple of things I have seen on the blogs recently.

UPDATE: I added a paragraph to the Coulter part.