Dana Blankenhorn

The Real McGovern Wing

Here's more proof of my generational thesis, the idea that we're at the end of the Nixon Era and entering into something new, which I have defined as the Internet Thesis.

At a time where every poll I see shows Republicans in deep, deep trouble, on nearly every single issue, with their candidates trailing in fund-raising for the first time in ages, and their congressional campaign committees having trouble recruiting viable challengers, these same positions have become absolute litmus tests for conservative bloggers.

Meet the McGovern Wing of the Republican Party.

I take as recent evidence the situation in Virginia, which I have been studying closely for Voic.Us. There, Republicans hold narrow majorities in the state legislature. They were able to force a transportation compromise on Gov. Tim Kaine. They should be feeling good about themselves.

Uh, uh.

Some Love for the Roberts Court

I am no big fan of many Supreme Court decisions but today they got two patently right.

And in one case, they handed a big win to Microsoft, whose legal department is also seldom on my good list.

In both Microsoft v. AT&T, 05-1056 and KSR International v. Teleflex Inc., 04-1350, we saw an attempt to expand patent rights in ways which harmed innovation. In the first case, AT&T was trying to force payments on Microsoft's foreign sales, while in the latter case Teleflex was trying to patent the basic idea of a brake pedal.

In both cases, it was the Supremes who applied the brake pedal.

Good Union, Bad Union

The difference between a "good" union and a "bad" union is, in a word growth. Just as this marks the difference between a "good" company to invest in and a "bad" one.

Before proceeding to get union fans mad, let's look at companies briefly. Toyota, good. Ford, bad. When a company stops growing it starts dieing, and dieing companies can do a lot of damage, for a lot of years, to people and the general economy.

The same is true with unions. Good unions, like the SEIU, are constantly seeking growth. They aim to organize new industries, new businesses. Business advocates may hate them, but these unions are doing their job. Anyone who thinks Wal-Mart isn't socially better-off for the work of unions against them probably thinks Wal-Mart's only obligation is to its shareholders. Which is false.

Tesla-ism

The biggest mistake being made in The War Against Oil is Tesla-ism.

Nikola Tesla is the father of our modern electric grid. His work with alternating current proved that Edison was wrong, that you didn't have to build big generators in peoples' houses, and that you could effectively deliver power to them from hundreds of miles away.

There are some forms of renewable energy, especially geothermal energy, that require a lot of capital to tap, and should be tapped centrally.

But there are other forms of renewable energy, specifically solar and wind energy, that do not require a lot of capital to tap, and thus don't need to be tapped centrally.

Unfortunately our current political decision-makers are so accustomed to the Tesla system that they really can't conceive of anything different. So they're backing huge solar energy projects which will lose more than half their power in today's inefficient delivery systems.

When you think like that, and act like that, you're not fighting The War Against Oil effectively. You're wasting money and wasting energy.

The most important work we can do with capital right now is to improve grid efficiency, and to enable two-way transfer of power. The first will cut our requirements for new major energy generation. The second will enable individual homes and businesses to sell their own generated power back to the grid.

This Week's Clue: Values Coming Together

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 18 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of April 23 30.

Enjoy.

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There is a direct link between the values underlying modern software development, modern business practices, modern academic practices, and modern politics.

If you follow the threads you can be current in any of these subjects.

In all these areas it is the values made possible by the Internet which are ascendant.

• In software they call it open source. (That's Richard Stallman at right.) Rather than keeping code secret, and forcing people to license it under terms that don't even require that it work, companies publish the code publicly and sell support. In return communities contribute improvements, the product gets better faster, and the best contract, the GPL, assures the program's creator they benefit from all those improvements.
• In business practice they call it the Economics of Abundance. The agents of the seller are no longer the masters of the market. Now it's the agents of the buyer who are most important. Newspapers fade, Google rises. And those who take this lesson forward will rise to the top of the business heap.
• In academic practice, which until recent decades prided itself on the free sharing of knowledge, there's growing pressure to return to that practice. When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation insisted on the sharing of AIDS knowledge as a condition for grants last year, this was an important turning point. The wholly-proprietary model of university research, which grew many colleges into multiversities over the last decade, is under threat.
• In politics I call this the Internet Thesis. It is the real power behind the Obama candidacy. He doesn't lean against the old Thesis of Conflict, as Hillary Clinton does, and he doesn't face it head-on, as John Edwards does. He simply denies it exists, talks about consensus, and millions of people understand.

All these trends are connected by what Al Gore once called the “Information Superhighway.”

Good In The Crazy

There are days when I consider Republicans to be insane.

Rudy Giuliani's New Hampshire speech was one of those days.

But it's important to note that Republicans don't see things that way. In fact the conservative netroots eat that kind of stuff up. From stunts like their Gathering of Eagles to their fascination with the troglodyte Fred Thompson, it's obvious this kind of stuff is meat-and-drink to them. How else do you explain the continued popularity of Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly? These people, and these attitudes, still have millions of fans.

That's the good news.

My Inner Gravel

Before leaving the Democratic Presidential race for some time (let it marinate, it's really too early people) let me say a few words about Mike Gravel.

I think if most of the people who watched last night's debate were given truth serum, they would be cheering for Gravel, a former Alaska Senator who went all Howard Beale on Bush last night, and by extension on the rest of the Democratic field.

There are many times when all of us say exactly what he's saying. The war was lost when it was started. The next one to die there is a new crime. We've got criminals running this country and we ought to treat 'em like what they are.

But when power starts smelling close -- and it smells awful close for a lot of Democrats these days -- that's not what you say. You get all diplomatic, get a big stick and shove it up your ass, and you smile, smile, smile. Gravel is like a fart at a cocktail party, a big one, and the old guy who did it smiling that big ol' smile of his as if to say, "don't tell me your shit don't stink, I'm old enough to know better. And I can say what I really feel because no one takes me seriously anyway."

The Internet Debate

History will record that tonight's debate among eight Democratic candidate prospects for 2008 was held on MSNBC.

It wasn't.

This scene, for instance, from the cover of MSNBC.Com tonight, did not really take place as portrayed. There was no time where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went mano a womano, where any real contrast was drawn between them, or where they were permitted to dominate the stage. It didn't happen, and in an 8-way "debate" it couldn't.

The event was televised by MSNBC, but it will go down as the first true Internet debate.

For the first time, the "spin" of self-righteous jerks like Chris Matthews won't determine the winners and losers. That will happen online. Clips from this debate are going to appear online, and activists will be debating the debate, parsing the debate, and spinning the debate online for weeks.

It's from that we'll learn who won and who lost. Not from TV. From the Internet. That's because so much of the Democratic base today takes its cues from the online world, rather than from TV. Americans voted for Democrats last year despite the TV coverage, not because of it. We're sick of the TV coverage, with its TV values and phony earnestness, which only includes the few "talking heads" from Washington who have told us what to think for a generation.

Their time is over, and so is their medium's.

The Sound of Eras Ending

Eras are marked by a dominant medium, by myths and values which are assumed to be true, by a Thesis which tells you how things work and an AntiThesis which leans against those assumptions and attempts to moderate it.

The current era is ending, and there is no better evidence than the recent work of David Broder.

Broder is one of the giants of our current era. A Korean War veteran, Broder rose within the Washington establishment. He saw Watergate and, more important, he saw what came after it. He saw that the bad guys, in the end, won. As an "impartial" observer of "the truth," which is political reality, he gradually internalized those lessons and, in so doing, literally ran off the rails in our time, becoming a parody of himself.

Falling Behind in The War Against Oil

The War Against Oil is the first war in history that everyone can win. (Picture from Treehugger.com.)

But you can't win if you don't play. Absent U.S. policies that encourage hydrogen energy, and discourage hydrocarbons, we will continue to fall behind the usual suspects.

Chief among these suspects is China, where Shi Zhengrong runs Suntech Power Holdings Ltd., now a New York Stock Exchange listed company. His own share is estimated to be worth $1.4 billion.