Dana Blankenhorn

Republicans are Toast

It's time someone admits it. The TeeVee won't, it would be bad for ratings, and when it's a choice between telling the truth and securing ratings the TeeVee lies through its teeth.

The Republicans are Toast. They're done. They're dead. Stick a fork in 'em. They'll be lucky if they survive as a national party after November.

All this assumes, of course, that we're allowed to have a free election. But the margins Democrats are piling up in opinion polls would be tough for even Robert Mugabe to steal away. And Americans don't lie down like the Burmese do and just take it.

The plain fact is that the Republican brand is dead to us. They trotted it out twice in recent weeks, once around Baton Rouge, Louisiana and again yesterday in northeast Mississippi. Both Louisiana's 6th and Mississippi's 1st were deep red districts, the kind a Republican should take without thinking twice about it.

Both times the Republicans sought to nationalize the election. They trotted out Barack Obama as a bogeyman, and in case people didn't get the connection, added Nancy Pelosi. Crickets. In Mississippi last night, Travis Childers won 54-46, a really enormous margin in a district which went for Bush 2-1 and was drawn especially to elect a Republican.

Those Republicans commenting to the state's chief GOP political site, Y'All Politics, were, well, despondent last night. Wrote one who calls himself "Reagan Dem":

Think about that:  the vote from northeast Mississippi will be the same as the vote from Pelosi of San Francisco, which will be the same of that of Barney Frank of Massachusetts, which will be the same as that of John Conyers of Michigan, which will be the same as Jesse Jackson, Jr. of Illinois.

Beautiful.

I assume he meant that last bit facetiously.

If Republicans can't win on their party label in Mississippi's 1st CD, nothing is safe. Alaska isn't safe. Wyoming isn't safe.

There are a few states where the Republicans can expect to clean up this year, thanks to the weakness of local Democrats. Kentucky is one. My own home state of Georgia is another. You can add South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama to that list, although whether Alabama's GOP will survive a Democratic Attorney General is an open question.

But even in the Deep South, Republicans are getting hit right-and-right. Virginia is practically gone Blue. North Carolina too. Democrats are competitive in Louisiana, and they may just grab a Congress seat in Alabama! This is their heartland, for pity's sake!

Some Republican leaders are starting to panic, and their best hope at this point may be for everyone to try and save himself, to recall Tip O'Neill's claim that "all politics is local," and tell their Washington consultants to go stick it where the sun don't shine.

Trouble is, I don't think they can do that. And I question whether it would help.

Now for the bad news...

Thinking of Chengdu

As you may recall, our plans have been to visit Chengdu, Sichuan China starting next Thursday, May 22 through June 4.

I'd say the chances of that happening are now 20%. There's no official word from the tour sponsor, Ms. Ning of the North Atlanta High Chinese Department (who lives in Chengdu and whom we're trying to accompany home) but right now I just don't see it.

NPR got "lucky," in that their anchors were in Chengdu doing pre-Olympic prep when the earthquake hit. Their reports have been nothing short of heart-breaking. I try to imagine how I might feel if the quake had waited, say, 10 days, and I were, say, at the Airport (above) when this happened.

The Airport is quite far from the epicenter, according to Google Earth. The city is situated much like Denver, on a plain with the front ridge of the Himalayas running at a southwest-northeast angle, 60 miles away at the nearest point. It's along this ridge that the quakes occurred, the giant 7.9 quake coming around 1:20 PM local time, when everyone was at work or school, and a long series of aftershocks continuing to this moment, most in the 5-6 range. (Note that the Richter scale is logarithmic -- the first shock was 100 times more powerful than most aftershocks.)

Microsoft's Hopeless Cause

I just got finished reading a big, breathless feature about Microsoft's counter-attack on Google.

It's Clueless. And hopeless. It's amazing that 14 years after the Web was spun a company can be this hopelessly stupid.

What's so stupid? It's Microsoft's reliance on advertising, specifically "display" and "video" advertising. Microsoft is talking to big New York advertisers, telling them they should place their money with Microsoft because they do more big display and video ads on Web sites than Google does.

Well, they do. But advertising isn't sales. And all the nifty tools Microsoft has announced to track the impact of its ads aren't sales.  Otherwise we'd buy stuff of billboards, not Craigslist.

The strength of the Web is not how well it can target advertising, or track advertisements. The strength of the Web lies in how it can replicate the entire marketing process -- everything from making the initial connection to the pitch, through the transaction and customer service.

By focusing on advertising, and advertisers, Microsoft is missing the whole point of the Web.

Advertising is just one flashy piece of a much larger process. It happens to be the one piece that the folks  selling goods and services have total control over. Which is why they focus so intently on it.

But it's just one piece, and a fairly minor piece at that.

Many companies spend up to half their budgets moving their merchandise. This includes the ads, finding the place to run the ads, tracking the ads, making the sale, and handling the returns. How much of that budget can Microsoft earn with this new strategy?

Not much.

But there's a far more important point in play here.

Hope Rising

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In most of the items marked Crisis of 2008 I have emphasized the difficulties in the time we're living with, the problems, the dangers.

But it is also vital, sometimes, to look at the opportunities, and to see the hope rising all around us.

I'm fortunate to find such things often in my work. Sometimes I bring them to you. Here are two just from this week:

• Simple breakthroughs in things like capacitors that can improve the efficiency of electric motors by as much as 300%.
• Breakthroughs in telemedicine which Microsoft is quickly taking advantage of.

Science and engineering are using the benefits of Moore's Law to create progress at a Moore's Law rate. That is breakthroughs are coming faster-and-faster, fast enough (perhaps) to halt the present processes destroying human life on this planet, and even turn them around.

If, that is, they can be brought into the world rapidly enough. The society which brings them to the market most rapidly will have the greatest share in the resulting prosperity.

What we need to make this happen is a process revolution. I am talking about accelerating both economic and political processes. We need to change business' processes so companies make more money solving problems than  causing them, as they have in this decade. And we need to change the way political change occurs at a fundamental level.

A generation ago Republicans talked about making government run more like a business. Now we need businesses to start taking their societal responsibilities seriously.

You do that by changing incentives.

• Right now electric utilities have more incentives to build power plants than to build efficiency into our electrical grid. We can change that.
• Right now drug companies have more incentives to create "me-too" drugs with patent protection than to produce generics we know work. We can change that.
• Right now energy producers have more incentives to withhold product from the market than to produce it. We can change that.
• Right now companies have more incentives to create monopolies than to open new markets. We can change that.
• Right now companies have more incentives to create paper than to see loans are repaid. We can change that.
  

When Al Gore talks about trading carbon credits, this is really what he's talking about, creating an incentive to emit less carbon by simply putting a price on it.

None of these changes are terribly difficult. Most are just a matter of will. And when we put the power of the market to work on the world's problems, pointing to those problems as opportunities with profits going to those who create solutions, positive change can happen quickly.

But that's not all.

My Burma Sorrow

I am sorry about the Burma hurricane. I am sad that its leaders are so paranoid as to refuse aid from the world. I am saddened that so little aid is getting into the affected region and that people are dieing needlessly.

But still...

When I read complaints from our government about the failure to allow aid it's like someone rubbing a balloon before popping it and laughing in my face.

Is it that way to you?

This morning on TV Cindy McCain was complaining bitterly of the Burmese peoples' plight. I have no doubt she felt sincere. But I kept switching back to that picture of her husband, the day Katrina hit New Orleans, standing with our leader, and a birthday cake.

Crocodile tears.

When I see Secretary of State Rice demanding that Burma allow aid in, all I can think of is what she was doing when Katrina hit New Orleans. Shopping for shoes.

When I read about U.S. diplomats bemoaning the destruction of Burmese rice fields, I think about how all they cared about after Katrina was getting the casinos back into operation, and how we're now benefiting from higher rice prices.

Closing the Deal

I'm sort of accustomed to being ignored. But since I often end up being right, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

I'm a bit like the lady to the right in that. As has been noted before, she passed away at the same age I am right now, at 53. And she didn't live one day for how other people saw her. She charted her own path. She was a role model.

So now, despite my distinct lack of qualifications or notoreity, I'm going to explain to Barack Obama just how he closes this nomination deal.

Yo Mama.

Had Stanley Ann Dunham not been felled by ovarian cancer in 1995, she would be turning 66 this year. She would be right in Hillary Clinton's wheelhouse.

So use that. Speak from the heart of how she might feel. This is the time in campaigns where we start getting the full autobiography anyway. This question has to be addressed.

Start by stating the obvious.

Capacitors in The War Against Oil

What if we could shrink every electric motor in the world by two-thirds, essentially doing three times the work with the same juice?

We can. And we can do more than that. (Picture from NG Manufacturing.)

I got this story from an old college buddy out in West Texas. It seems a Mexican outfit, Neuva Generacion Manufacturing, which owns most of the big U.S. capacitor makers, has patented technology to do just this.  It will first go into things like refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as industrial motors, but could be applied anywhere such motors operate.

How do they work? As my friend put it, the key to an electrical motor inefficiency lies in starting the thing. Current technology for starting motors increases the power demand by 300%. The capacitors allow start power to match the running power, so all that extra weight (and power use) goes away.

NGM has the capacity to serve the whole market, with factories in the U.S., Mexico and China. Among their brand names are Commonwealth Sprague, Barker, and Mallory.

To quote from their (admittedly poorly written) press release:

Early U.S. Department of Energy reviews of this new technology have demonstrated drastic improvements in life and dynamic improvements in most motor start applications.  Manufacturing tests have proven that many major components of HVAC and Appliances can now achieve smaller overall size with resulting savings in materials and manufacturing costs when fully integrated with the new NG / PACCAP technology solutions.   

The implications are discussed in an article at Copper.Org. Better capacitors mean more efficient motors, three times as efficient as current models. Even if the new motors merely replace old ones as they wear out, we're talking about savings of:

62 to 104 billion kWh per year in the manufacturing sector alone. This savings is valued up to $5 billion. It would also avoid the release of up to 29.5 million metric tons of carbon equivalent emissions to the atmosphere annually.

Industrial motors consume about 23% of all electrical power in this country. Existing incentives for energy efficiency can increase the turnover rate, and the savings.

Now, how can we get even more savings?

The Road to Chengdu

The tickets are paid for. The visa application is in the mail. It seems likely that my son John and I will be heading to Chengdu, Sichuan, China on May 22, taking his exchange teacher home.  (Not this way, of course.)

A decade ago, I would have gone with great optimism, a representative of American values. Now? Well, consider these two stories, and where in the world they occurred:

• Hundreds of people quietly protest a new refinery, expecting to be heard.
• Regime opponents are subject to political prosecutions, to having their homes torched, while elections are stolen and public opinion is ignored.

The first story is from Chengdu. The second is from Alabama. As others have noted, the Bush war against democracy continues apace, and even seems to be accelerating.

I think it's time for us to get off our ideological high horses and start talking first principles, not just the what but the why.

The Wright Reality

No matter how we feel about "phony" controversies they usually have an important point behind them.

They define the limits of acceptable speech.

Take the Jeremiah Wright mess, which Bill Moyers is still agonizing over. Why is Wright condemned for statements like "God Damn America" while preachers like John Hagee, who (along with Falwell and Robertson) said the exact same things (only with different reasons) go merrily on. Isn't that a double standard?

Well, yes and no.

It's a double standard in that one man's speech is seen as out of bounds and another man's speech is seen as within bounds. True. But the whole purpose of the exercise was to define the bounds of acceptable political speech. It was to make Wright, and everything he says, out of bounds while enabling extremists on the other side free rein. (Actually, free reign.)

In this, as in other phony controversies over the years, the Right has been masterful. Through this process of phony controversy the acceptable discourse within our society has been pushed ever-more to the right, so it's becoming impossible to even publicly utter obvious truths. I'd say that's an important result.

For instance, the following sentence is, politically, completely out of bounds within the American political discourse: