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Saturday, May 24, 2008
A ridiculous claim against Hillary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hillary Clinton has been forced to apologize for mentioning the June 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy while explaining why she is staying in the race. The apology was unnecessary, the outrage is ridiculous. It’s yet another case of groundless gotcha politics distracting us from the important stuff.
Watch it yourself, judge for yourself. Clinton was making the logical point that previous primary battles have gone well into June, so why shouldn’t this one? (The best answer to that question is that this particular race is over, but I digress….)
Clinton was certainly not suggesting that Obama might be assassinated, and it’s disappointing that the Obama campaign chose to misinterpret it that way. That kind of response undercuts Obama’s claim to be seeking a different kind of politics.
UPDATE: This response from Obama is a lot better than the initial statement by an Obama spokesman that Clinton’s remark was “unfortunate” and “has no place in this campaign.” It has the added advantage of being absolutely accurate:
“I have learned that, when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make, and I think that is what happened here. Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it, and I will take her at her word on that.”
11 billion - with a B - miles less in March?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wow! As my dad would say, “Who’d a thunk it?”
WASHINGTON — Americans drove less in March 2008, continuing a trend that began last November, according to estimates released today from the Federal Highway Administration.
The FHWA’s “Traffic Volume Trends” report, produced monthly since 1942, shows that estimated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on all U.S. public roads for March 2008 fell 4.3 percent as compared with March 2007 travel. This is the first time estimated March travel on public roads fell since 1979. At 11 billion miles less in March 2008 than in the previous March, this is the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.
Though February 2008 showed a modest 1 billion mile increase over February 2007, cumulative VMT has fallen by 17.3 billion miles since November 2006. Total VMT in the United States for 2006, the most recent year for which such data are available, topped 3 trillion miles.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that greenhouse gas emissions fell by an estimated 9 million metric tons for the first quarter of 2008.
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