Dana Blankenhorn

The Sheikh of Reykjavik

Given their abundance of wind, water, and geothermal energy sources, places like Hawaii and Japan should be part of the next OPEC.

Iceland, however, is taking the lead.

Iceland sits atop a geological oddity, the Atlantic Rift Zone, from which the European and North American continents continue to spread outward. It has volcanoes, geysers, and tons of hot springs.

Olafur Grimsson, the country's  President, is working to exploit this energy. While the country's Constitution offers him little power, he is using the equivalent of the "bully pulpit" to push for extensive geothermal projects.

Grimsson told Time Magazine that when he was a child the sky around Reykjavik was coal-black, and it was his job to get coal for the family. Now the country is producing enough geothermal energy to talk about running an aluminum smelter on it.  He has endorsed an experiment in which carbon dioxide-laden water is being pushed into rock, which would pull the CO2 out of it.

The Next Move On Iraq

A lot of the supposedly-smart types in the media are buzzing today that Democrats have painted themselves into a corner.

Bush is going to veto the Iraq bill, he's going to demand full funding with no conditions, a complete blank check, but the Democrats will knuckle under.

Here's a very simple way they can win.

That is, pass a "clean" funding bill, just what the President wants, but with only enough money, and with funding authority, through September 30, 2007. That's the first deadline mentioned in thei original withdrawal plan put forward by the House, which envisioned all troops being out by September 30, 2008.

This Week’s Clue: The Power of a Name

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 14 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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On the Internet names are important.

Coming up I didn’t much care for mine. When I was young it was called a “girl’s name,” since after the 1950s most American kids given the name Dana were girls. The last name was a drag, too. It was filled with “n’s” and frequently misspelled – Blakenhorn, Blankenship, Blankehorn.

But a rose by any name, if it’s your name, does smell sweet. And I learned, over time, that what my name lacked in charm it made up for in branding.

In the Internet Age a unique name is a valuable advantage. If your name is Johnny Jones you’re going to remain hard to find no matter what you do. All the other Johnny Jones’ make each individual anonymous.

I don’t have that trouble. Recently I learned why.

Bush Is Not The Problem

I want to start today by getting liberals a little angry at me.

George W. Bush is not an idiot. George W. Bush is not the problem.

George W. Bush is, in fact, nothing more than a symptom, both of the Nixon Thesis which birthed him and the autocratic imperative which drives him. The problem is not Bush, but those who follow him.

Yes, I'm looking at you.

Ritter's Gamble in War Against Oil

Democratic Governor Bill Ritter of Colorado signed two major renewable energy bills yesterday.

You would think I would be happy. Worried is more like it.

The problem is that the bills he signed amount to a subsidy for Xcel Energy with no requirement of fundamental change. The idea of the first bill is that Xcel will tap more wind and geothermal energy, maybe build some big solar projects, and pump that electricity  into its existing systems. The second bill subsidizes Xcel's replacement of high power lines, allowing them to be written off quickly.

This is an enormous win for Xcel. But is it sound policy in the War Against Oil?

I'm not certain it is.

Olbermann's Ooops

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) may note I'm a fan of Keith Olbermann. He's a good writer. I like me some good writing.

But everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes people all up-and-down a chain of command make mistakes. This happened tonight, with Olbermann at the wheel, and his producers at his side.

It was part of his "first story on the countdown," supposedly the #5 story of the day but actually the most important for this is the conceit of the show. Olbermann went on-and-on about how significant it was that Republicans did not filibuster a vote on the Iraq war today, how they let the vote go forward, and how a proposal to end it "won" by a count of 50-48.

This had more errors in it than an early Mets game.

The most important error is that no filibuster was possible on the proposal in question. It was a Republican proposal, an amendment offered by Sen. Thad Cochran, a Republican from Mississippi, to the emergency Iraq spending bill. The Cochran amendment was that withdrawal timelines written into the bill be taken out.

You don't filibuster your own amendment. And you can't force a 60-vote majority on a spending bill you need in order to carry out your own policy. To do so would be both silly and counter-productive.

Since Democrats were given control of the chamber at the start of the year (control which would not now pass to Republicans if, say, Joe Lieberman joined them, because the rules of the Congress have already passed and there was no provision in those rules to give power back and an attempt to change the rules could be filibustered) Democrats controlled the bill. Their committee wrote it. Their majority leader put it forward. And that bill contained the withdrawal language, written after a great deal of negotiation with (no, not Lieberman) Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska.

Nelson got the withdrawal language written in such a way that Bush can vitiate it. It's binding in that it's there. It's not-binding in that it can be ignored at the President's whim.

Anyway, the Cochran proposal to get rid of that language, weak though it was, failed 48-50. This was significant. It was significant not just because Nelson voted "nay," supporting the original language, but because Nebraska's Republican Senator, Chuck Hagel, also voted "nay," opposing his party. (Another Republican, Gordon Smith of Oregon, voted with Democrats in both instances.)

The defections of Hagel and Nelson reversed the count of a previous vote, a few weeks ago, on a non-binding resolution proposed by the Democrats, one that (since it was a resolution, non-binding, and contained no money) could be filibustered. To be precise, cloture could be invoked on the non-binding resolution, requiring 60 votes to move toward a real vote. The cloture motion failed 48-50.

So 48-50 a few weeks ago, 50-48 this time. That's the story. Nebraska changed its mind. (Go Cornhuskers.)

Can you explain that simply? Yes you can.

A Democratic funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan survived an attempt to gut it today, with Nebraska's two Senators changing their mind.

Selling the Future

Good news and bad news today in The War Against Oil.

The good news is that a U.S. renewable energy outfit, Horizon Wind Energy, was sold for $2.2 billion today, further proof that there's gold in them thar' zephyrs.

The bad news? Horizon was sold to a Portugeese company, EDP. Nothing here against the Portuguese. And the owner of Horizon had been Goldman Sachs, which was looking to flip it ever since it purchased the company two years ago for $1 billion.

It's more like the feeling you get when your strong local bank gets bought by the big national bank. The jobs may stay here, but the decisions won't. There may be some charitable contributions but, over time, you know they're going to be giving the big bucks to people near their headquarters.

The Right Wing Bias Mystery

Conservatives spent so much time, effort and money on the 2+2=5 idea of a "liberal media conspiracy" that this post is bound to go right over their heads.

But why is the media still so in the tank for conservatives in 2007? C'mon, folks. Katie Couric, who husband died of cancer, telling Elizabeth Edwards "some people" think her husband should quit his career over her sad diagnosis? ABC doing the same thing, only in spades and doubled? MSNBC telling Democrats to "back away" from investigations 70% of the people support? So-called "liberal" commentators spewing venom at war opponents?

Conventional answers miss the point. Conservative investment, as in Fox News. The reflexive corporatism of corporate-owned media. Let's face it, Bush could be getting a hummer from Alberto Gonzalez in the Oval Office this very moment and all you'd get out of Chris Matthews is "isn't Al Gore fat?"

Nope, this is a simple question of business models.

The Dead-Enders

One of the great mysteries of American political history has to be Herbert Hoover's renomination for President, in 1932.

By that summer it was obvious Hoover, and Progressivism, were doomed. His speech accepting his nomination was an exercise in denial.  He claimed to have already set in motion policies to turn things around. He claimed the U.S. had done better than other countries.

Of course, conservatives claim Hoover got his revenge. The Hoover Institution at Stanford, which he founded in 1959, became a major incubator for conservative thought. By the time of his death in 1964, the roots of neo-conservatism had already been planted.

This is the kind of revenge George W. Bush is plotting. His plan for a $500 million institute is based on the idea that money, over time, can overcome any reality.

Not always.

The Dog That Did Not Bark

Everyone knows the key clue of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles is the dog that did not bark. (Notice how Basil Rathbone doesn't get star billing in this poster for the original film, from Art.Com. Now that's a mystery worth chewing on. But I digress.)

Journalists often miss this key Clue. The danger that does not become reality doesn't seem to be a story. But sometimes it is. Sometimes it's the more important story.

Take all those stories you've read about the Internet running out of bandwidth. Usually video or peer-to-peer technologies are blamed for the demand. In fact, it's crime that's to blame. Spammers, scammers, and pirates are sucking up huge amounts of Internet bandwidth and not paying for it.

Yet the Internet remains fairly stable. Prices remain steady. The fact is, they should be going down, fast. They're being held up by Bush Administration support for landline duopoly and cellular oligopoly, which is another way of saying you don't have many choices and thus "competitors" don't have to compete.

The reason for all this is Moore's Law works. It continues to work. Not just Moore's Law as Gordon Moore envisioned it, the number of circuit lines drawn on silicon doubling every 18 months. I'm talking here of Moore's Law as I conceived is several years ago, exponential improvements continuing across a range of technologies, faster and faster going faster and faster.