Sometimes it seems like it:

In front of a roomful of 500 General Motors employees — of all places — John McCain paraded his radical Green credentials this morning. McCain embraced California’s lawsuit against the EPA demanding that states be allowed to set their own auto mileage standards.

“I guess at the end of the day, I support the states being able to do that,” he said at the town hall meeting at GM’s Technical Center in Warren, Mich.

California’s policy is strongly opposed by the auto industry because of the nightmare patchwork of regulatory standards such a proposal would set. The industry prefers national standards — a position that McCain had supported until this morning. McCain’s flip-flop on the issue (assuming he meant what he said, and his campaign doesn’t quickly move to correct the gaffe) would put him at odds with the Bush administration and longstanding Republican policy.

No way he has a prayer of winning Michigan (and probably not Ohio, either) if he persists in this stupidity. And it’s not going to give him California, either.

The president has lifted the executive order banning offshore drilling.

This puts Congress in a political fix. He’s calling on them to lift the Congressional ban now, but that would require Congressional action. They can simply ignore it (though at their political peril). The neat thing is that they can’t ignore the issue forever. There is a default position not to their liking. It will expire at the end of September anyway (as it does every fiscal year) and will have to be renewed with a Congressional vote. Usually, this is uncontroversial, but not this year. We’ll see if they’re willing to do it.

…and change. It looks like John McCain may have come to his senses, and dropped cap and trade. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t attempt to revive it after he wins.

Who dare call it fascism? Jeffrey Lord does:

…when faced with a disagreeable problem (in this case the lack of jobs) the answer for Obama always seems to get back to the manipulation of the political process to achieve the desired result.

Are Obamalanders uncomfortable with the free-market driven success of talk radio? Then they will “figure out ways to use the political process” to shut it down. In the case of talk radio, how else to explain the threatening Reid-Obama letter to Rush Limbaugh’s business partner? How else does one explain the attempt to retrieve the “Fairness Doctrine” from the dustbin of history? These are nothing more or less than the “use of the political process” to subvert someone else’s freedom. Period.

Are Obamaland followers hostile to oil? Do they hate SUVs? Do they think you have no right to heat or cool your own home beyond what they consider politically correct? Do they think you should pay $5 — or $6 or $7 or $8 or more — for gas at the pump to ensure you conform to the Obamaland world-view? Yes, they do think all of this and their Obamaland answer is inevitable. They will “use the political process” to stop drilling off shore in its tracks. So too with stopping the use of oil shale or ANWR or anything else that even hints at allowing average Americans their basic freedom to drive whatever vehicle wherever they damn well please whenever they damn well please. In Obamaland it is not only perfectly acceptable, it is gospel from the secular bible that they must use the political process to stop refineries from being built, to keep nuclear power plants from being built, to keep coal from being burned. Use the political process to forcibly mandate the temperature inside every single American home. As a matter of fact, why not just go all the way and nationalize the oil companies — this actually being suggested by Obamaland’s New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey.

He also has the full quote from Obama that I’d missed part of the first time around:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in the desert or we’re living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us. That’s not leadership.”

This is economic idiocy. Why in the world would energy consumption be expected to correlate with population? Yes, we have much higher per-capita energy usage than much of the world (e.g., Africa). But we also produce much greater wealth per capita than much of the world, and much of that wealth goes to make the world wealthier, in many ways. The notion that we should only use energy in proportion to our population is economic ignorance of the first rank. In other words, it’s exactly what I would expect from a Democrat, and particularly Obama. Though to be fair, there are a lot of economically ignorant Republicans as well, including their current standard bearer, by his own admission. But unlike Obama, he at least admits it.