The Apollo Program is not the model. The Manhattan Project is the model. Apollo implies a win-win-win we can watch on TV. In World War II we gladly taxed ourselves and lent the rest to the government knowing our lives were at stake -- as they were.
A carbon tax, used to cut payroll taxes, won't pass. Businesses won't wear it. A price floor, which can be adjusted downward for alternative fuels as they come on-stream (and their costs decline), is a better way of getting where we need to go. What solar, wind, and geothermal companies need most is the assurance of a market for long-term investment.
Government intervention must be minimized, not expanded. Set the rules and let the best technology win. We can't afford to let goobers like Boone Pickens hijack this thing and use it as an excuse for subsidies.
My main problem with Gore for a long time has been his making global warming into a partisan divide, and despite his talk about national security this speech maintains that trend. Getting an introduction from Bernie Sanders is nice, but it's partisan.
It's counter-productive. The War Against Oil must be non-partisan in fact, not just rhetorically.
I had a good long argument yesterday. (This is a 1944 Chuck Jones propaganda cartoon for FDR, which I found at Hoffmania. The conclusion is at the bottom of this post.)
A young man came to canvass the neighborhood. It's the fourth time in four years. A different young person each time. This was a Georgia Tech student. He was selling the Georgia Democratic Party.
Georgia Democrats lost the state in 2002, and since have been divided into three distinct groups. The only thing they have in common is that they don't like Republicans, but some can't explain why:
Regular Democrats remember having power, when they ruled by muddying differences with the GOP. I consider them a "yeah, but" party.
Black Democrats have some power, because Republican redistricting assures them some seats. Where their voting power is concentrated, as in Atlanta, DeKalb County and Clayton County, they turn out to be no less corrupt than Republicans.
Netroots Democrats are thin on the ground. They are spread throughout the Atlanta metro area, and you'll find pockets in Athens and elsewhere. They believe in something but they are a minority within their own party, thus powerless.
Divide and conquer has long been the Republican strategy of choice, and it works a treat throughout the Deep South. Isolate blacks and give them enough power so the wackos can act with impunity, then use that against the regulars. Brand the Netroots as commies or nigger-lovers. Watch some of the regulars come over and you can disregard the rest.
In Georgia a very nice, very bland gentleman named Jim Martin was flown in at the last minute to be the sacrificial lamb against Sen. Saxby Chambliss, but he's having a tough time against Vernon Jones, the CEO of DeKalb County. The Emperor Jones' misrule has been so misogynistic that rich whites are taking an out the GOP gave them a few years ago, creating their own cities and leaving the rest of DeKalb to rot. Jones' nomination, in other words, threatens any chance Barack Obama might have to win the state.
But this matters little to me, because Martin doesn't believe in anything. He won't call idiots like Eric Johnson racists to their face. He won't directly attack the sprawl politics that are choking Atlanta's growth. He'll stand against Iraq now, now that it's no longer an issue, but he won't attack the basis of GOP power, and he won't deliver an alternate vision.
My young friend argued that Roy Barnes, who did challenge the GOP hegemony when he was Governor at the turn of the century, was hammered down for it. But you can't organize a bottom-up movement unless you're organizing on behalf of something, I replied, and Georgia Democrats won't offer any.
There are Southern Democratic Parties which stand for something and succeed. North Carolina Democrats stand for something. Virginia Democrats stand for something. Sometimes even Florida Democrats and Kentucky Democrats stand for something. They don't run away from their party, they embrace it. They embrace what it stands for, in bad times as well as good. The test, I added, is embracing principles in the bad times, because that's where real unity comes from.
My young friend didn't buy it. I hope he has a nice life, in another state. I'd hate to see him beat his head against the wall here.
One of the greatest fears the media has about its future in the wake of the Web is it will be atomized. (Here's some good atomization, from Marren Fuel Injection.)
Large audiences will prove impossible to generate. No one will be able to afford real reporting any more. News will become just opinion.
I see this through my work at ZDNet. The business model pays writers based on traffic. The incentives are there to generate heat, not light, and to create troll bait, not detailed journalism. Some readers complain, but every time I try to concentrate on interviews the size of my check goes down.
It's a very Darwinian environment, with more bloggers added all the time, all competing for attention. It's very hard to maintain an audience without being outrageous. Some readers complain, yet their clicks are driving the site toward trivia, on the wings of that rarest of species, a viable online business model.
Blogs in general are harder-and-harder to break into. I look at the traffic patterns here, and if I weren't as dedicated to writing as breathing I'd probably stop. You can't make a living as an individual blogger anymore. You can't break into the top 1,000. You have to associate with someone, something, or try video, which itself is a shared, group-oriented industry.
There's also a model for where this is heading, one the news industry fears even while they can't say its name.
This morning, after dropping my own car at its mechanic for a regular check-up, I walked the mile back home, against commuter traffic.
What I found startled me. The roads are still mobbed. By my count 9 in 10 cars carried just a driver. Many were still SUVs and other low-mileage vehicles. With prices over $4/gallon, most people have not changed their habits at all.
Gas prices aren't high enough.
I know there are people who insist they'll give up their SUVs when you pry them from their cold, dead hands. I don't expect everyone to car-pool, or take mass transit to work. But the freeways around Atlanta were still jammed this morning, and traffic accidents meant it took a full hour to drive from the exurbs into the I-285 Perimeter, at a 10 mph crawl.
Fortunately there is a single common-sense step the next Administration can take, which has the potential to break this logjam.
Offer our own leaders for trial.
There can no longer be any real doubt that our current political leaders are war criminals. The evidence of mass murder and torture, directed from the highest levels of the United States government, keeps mounting. It becomes more obvious each day in the actions of that Administration to cover up what it did and thwart justice.
So open an investigation. Do this openly, transparently, publicly. Offer to share the results with the International Criminal Court, and to respond appropriately to its future requests in the matter.
This is how you win the War on Terror. By proving to the world that we will not be terrorized. Not by anyone. Not even by our own leaders.
Think of this as Volume 11, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
When politics is transformed, once in a generation, the dominant medium changes, and the way the game is played changes.
The media never, ever gets this. It didn't in 1968, which is why conservatives still whine about a "liberal media conspiracy" even though they own the vast majority of media outlets. It didn't in 1932, when journalists didn't get Roosevelt's game at all. It didn't in 1896 or in 1860 -- McKinley was called ineffectual (rather than a progressive) and Lincoln was called a monkey (rather than our greatest President ever).
It's important for those in the Netroots to know this history, and be reminded of it often. It keeps away the heartache.
It's also important, once in a while, to remember where the Netroots came from. It is not The Left. It is not The Anti-War Left. (That's the right's frame for it.)
The Netroots emerged from opposition to one war, Iraq, more generally to one specific type of war, a colonial war for resources. Outside opposition to that war the original Netroots movement was fairly moderate. It liked balanced budgets. It was business-oriented, asking only for honest dealing.
I remember this because I was there. I was among those who responded to the call, nearly 5 1/2 years ago now.
Remember?
What I want to know, what I want to know, is what in the world so many
Democrats are doing supporting the President's unilateral intervention
in Iraq?
What I want to know, is what in the world so many Democrats are doing
supporting tax cuts which have bankrupted this country and given us the
largest deficit in the history of the United States?
<snip>
What I want to know is why the Democrats in Congress aren't standing
up for us joining every other industrialized country on the face of the
Earth in having health insurance for every man, woman and child in America?
For the last week I've watched the Netroots hammer on Barack Obama the way abolitionists once hammered Lincoln, and liberals once hammered Roosevelt.
This was about the FISA Bill, a systematic gutting of the 4th Amendment which passed the Senate today, Obama voting aye.
In a rational world such a bill would never see the light of day. We do not live in a rational world.
What is important about this bill, according to former Nixon attorney John Dean (right -- he was Scotty practically before Scotty was born) is that, while the bill strips the telcos of civil immunity for spying on Americans, it does not strip them of criminal immunity.
Why not? Consider the purpose of the bill, which is not to investigate terrorists but to keep the telcos from squealing on the Bush Administration's crimes. That Administration would never move ahead on any criminal investigation of itself or any friend. It is as hopeless in that regard as the Burmese Junta, and we can only hope it's not as ruthless as the Mugabe Dictatorship. (We cannot assume that, which is something Democrats need to understand.)
If there were no chance of criminal prosecution, the Bush people would have nothing to bind the telcos to it for the duration of the campaign, or to maintain their silence thereafter, assuming they could pull out the election. This was deliberate on their part.
By approving the bill, without mentioning the lack of criminal immunity, Barack Obama is biding his time, waiting for January, assuming that there will be no coup, as he has assumed all along. A Bush coup would mean true civil war, in which case the right of the people to keep and bear arms would become a key ingredient in Democratic strategy. (If you think the NRA would abide a coup against the Constitution you don't know the NRA.)
Upon taking office with the current law intact, President Obama would have the power to learn exactly what has happened under this government, and bring it to light. Bringing the crimes of this time to light is far more important than punishing anyone. Light is a better disinfectant than revenge. Revenge merely leads to more revenge, as we saw with Watergate. Light causes permanent changes in the body politic which can turn today's precedents into cautionary tales.
As much as we want hydrogen power to become an immediate reality we have to be wary of extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Wall Street is agog over T. Boone Pickens' "plan" for alternative energy.
But read it. Read it closely. Know what it is?
It's Communist. Not "let's start a commune and grow organic produce" communist. Stalinist 5-year plan Communist. My way or the Gulag Communist.
Here it is, at the end of his Wall Street Journal piece in Pickens' own words. This is his proposition. I just used some boldface so you would see what he's really saying:
The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar
transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies for economic and
alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are
abundant. I am also calling for a monthly progress report on the
reduction in foreign oil imports, as well as a monthly progress report
on the state of development of natural gas vehicles in this country.
In other words, "Subsidize what I'm already doing. Override any objections to my plan for big windmills and ginormous transmission lines hundreds of miles long. Give me control, and guarantees. Make me Wind Czar and put all your eggs in my basket."
This is why Communism fell, because they bought 5 and 10 year plans from goobers like Boone Pickens. He has claimed all his life to be an anti-communist, but this plan reveals him for what he is. He's not a businessman. He's another lobbyist with his hand out. For Siberia read West Texas.
Fiorina's record as a businesswoman makes George W. Bush's stewardship of his office look slick by comparison.
Fiorina took one of the greatest companies in America, the crown jewel of Silicon Valley, the Hewlett-Packard Co., and within less than five years she brought it to its knees. She ignored its corporate culture, she made one of the dumbest deals in American business history (buying Compaq), she treated anyone who questioned her with contempt, and (worst of all) she lost money.
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