Exxon is betting Americans will never again purchase as much gasoline as they did in 2007.

A post at Grist looks at energy issues in the North Carolina senate race.

Nighttime politics.

* Great chart from Ezra Klein and Grist about the incredible insignificance of off-shore drilling.

* "Bush Doctrine" is the buzzword coming out of Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson—she seemed to not know what it was.

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view?

GIBSON: No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell-bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership -- and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense; that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

Here's the video. A lot of people are quoting Marc Ambinder's Twitter feed on this: "deer-in-the-headlights." A Republican in P.R. gives her a B- at TNR, writing:

I would give her a B or better, B-. I liked her confidence, combativeness but the answers were scripted, she had to repeat one mantra over and over again. What it shows about the way McCain's people are handling her is worse: they are trying to get her to memorize answers rather than being honest, within limits, about what she doesn't know.

* Sarah Palin dropped the thanks-but-no-thanks-for-that-Bridge-to-Nowhere lie from her speech today in Alaska. Pandering, or did she just know they'd see through it?

* Maybe the last word on Sarah Palin: Rasmussen reports she's bombing with moderates.

Among all voters:

39% very favorable
17% somewhat favorable
14% somewhat unfavorable
26% very unfavorable

Gee, approval ratings are just a few points off of 60% for the "wildly popular governor." But, let's look a little closer at those numbers. Conservatives love her, but what about moderates? Those numbers paint a different picture:

20% very favorable
15% somewhat favorable
26% somewhat unfavorable
35% very unfavorable
3% not sure

* Switzerland: the greenest country in the world.

* Followup on themes from the week: More numbers that suggest McCain can't win outside the South. Meanwhile, Daniel Nichanian at the Huffington Post talks more about the underappreciated importance of Obama's ground game.

Nighttime links.

* Weekly retro illustrations of Mad Men episodes. At right: "Joan and the Xerox."

* Ten things you didn't know about the Earth.

* Noise Artists for Obama. (via PClem)

* Obama's on Letterman tonight. He'll talk about lipstick and pigs.

"Keep in mind, that technically had I meant it this way she would be the lipstick," Obama said. "The policies of John McCain would be the pig."

* John McCain isn't such a good campaigner without Sarah Palin to hold his hand.

* And the Department of the Interior scandal is the perfect story. It's got everything: oil, sex, drugs, corruption. Drill, baby, drill.

More and more evidence mounts that the McCain camp didn't actually vet Palin at all. They didn't read a single article in the Wasilla newspaper, and they didn't talk to Walt Monegan, the man at the center of her still open abuse of power ethics investigation—nor, apparently, did they talk to anyone else. They've been pushing as one of her few notable accomplishments her opposition to the "Bridge to Nowhere," which has turned out to be, well, bullshit. Nearly recalled as mayor, she left the small town of Wasilla over $20 million dollars in debt. That's after she tried to censor the town library and fire long-time town employees without cause for "not fully supporting her efforts to govern."

Oh, and her husband works for BP, one of the largest employers in Alaska, which is not in any way a conflict of interest.

And those are just the highlights. Given all this, I get a sinking feeling when I see how much attention the already ubiquitous, totally moronic baby smear is getting. Even Andrew Sullivan is pushing it now, though he's careful to hedge his bets. That's just not a basket in which I want to put Barack's eggs; it's the raw irresponsibility of John McCain's cynical and poorly thought-out VP pick—a roll of the dice from a chronic gambler—that we should be talking about, not whether a seventeen-year-old girl does or doesn't have a "baby bump" in a given photo.

The Juno/Juneau parody poster on Gawker made me laugh, but that's the only upside here. I don't think we'd want anything to do with the baby thing even if by some impossible chance it all turns out to be true.

John McCain says he made this decision because he looked into Putin's Palin's eyes the one time they met and saw a soul mate. The only thing we should be saying about Palin is that this is not the way to make the most important decision of your candidacy. The Palin pick is stone-cold proof that John McCain has neither the judgment nor the temperament to be president.

So leave her kids alone. Keep your heads on straight, netroots.

Everybody's raving about Brian Schweitzer, who managed to get the crowd fired up about energy and about Obama after Warner put them to sleep. (Everybody! Benen, Marshall, Kos, Giordano.)

One of the still-underappreciated stories of this election, I think, is the national hunger for a honest conversation about energy and the environment, something we've been entirely denied by coal-industry-sponsored debates in the primaries and Exxon-sponsored convention coverage in the general.



In the cheap seats, stand up!

More eco and politics links.

* From the comments comes a link to drive55.org, a web site devoted to popularizing the largely defunct 55 mph speed limit in the name of carbon efficiency. A thing like this is long on science but short of politics—I don't think I know a single person who voluntarily limits their speed, and I know a whole lot of hippies and eco-freaks. Better to advocate policies that eliminate people's need to drive, like functional light and high-speed rail systems, than to try and rewrite human nature.

* Has the high price of oil put the brakes on globalization?

* John McCain: "A surprisingly immature politician."

* See also: Multiple Oil Company Executives Gave Huge Contributions To Electing McCain Just Days After Offshore Drilling Reversal. More at Grist, including a sharp new Obama ad.

* Why Kaine over Sebelius?

So far as I can tell, Kaine's advantages over Sebelius consist of these: his swing-state residency (not useless, but I thought consensus is that picking veeps for their regional influence is so last century), his faith (he's Roman Catholic), and his Y chromosome.

Update: Several readers point out Sebelius is also Catholic.

It's a good case, even if it shoots my Virginia Strategem to hell; the more I find out about Kaine the more I sour on him. More here.