Dana Blankenhorn

A Democrat Energy Disaster in the Making

UPDATE: Almost ashamed to admit this but the man known to fans of the Austin Lounge Lizards as Gingrich the Newt agrees with me on this.

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The headline is the right-wing spin on an energy bill which passed the House today.

In this case they're right, but for the wrong reasons.

While the centerpiece of the bill feels right -- $16 billion in oil and gas tax increases to fund renewable energy and energy conservation -- the devil is in the details.

The details make this a very weak bill. More important, the whole assumption behind it -- that energy "supply" must be big, delivered from central facilities over long distance power lines -- is false.

The bill does not, as reporters claim, "increase taxes" on "energy producers." It simply recoups tax breaks that were not designed to be given, but were seized by energy company lawyers. At best, it works along the margins. Remember, $16 billion over 10 years is $1.6 billion per year. In the grand scheme of things, it's chickenfeed.

The Panic Room and the Pace of Media Change

One of Atrios' major themes is impatience with the pace of change in journalism.

Years later with polls being what they are I can't believe the media still serves us up this shit sandwich.

is typical of his oeuvre.

Intellectually I appreciate this. I frequently find myself yelling at the TV while watching Wolf Blitzer in The Panic Room (uh, The Situation Room) or Lou Dobbs claiming to be a journalist when he's just a former corporate apologist turned nativist.

Today was fairly typical. A long story about Hillary Clinton wearing a low-cut outfit on the Senate floor, with Carol Costello defending her obsession with this nonsense and no one talking about Iraq, except to pretend things there can't be as bad there as they seem. (They are.)

 

No Free Pass on Vick Case

I really had no plans to address the Michael Vick case again.

The less said about this "man," the better, I thought.

But suddenly, as with everything else in Atlanta, it became a race thing. Today, for instance, the Atlanta NAACP had a "rally" telling us not to pre-judge Michael Vick, and not to withhold him his living before a jury has spoken.

Needless to say they wouldn't be talking this way about a white defendant accused, say, of killing a black man because of his skin color. No, that's a hate crime, and I agree with them on that point. If a white cop is indicted for murdering a black man, he shouldn't be on the street before trial.

Same thing here.  This was a hate crime, maybe not in law but in fact, a hate crime. 

R.L. White (above), a radio preacher in the entrepreneurial Baptist faith, is grabbing a little publicity for himself with this. But he is doing no one any favors, least of all Michael Vick.

Much Adu About Nothing

For a special treat this Sunday here's a sports story which has nothing to do with scandal, or drugs. Or even David Beckham. Although it is about soccer.

It's about Freddy Adu. Four years ago, Freddy Adu was the face of U.S. soccer. He signed with Major League Soccer at just 14, having already completed high school, and was said to be the next big thing.

Sad to say, he may turn out to be U.S. soccer's Mickey Rooney, classically trained, too famous too young, and too short. Rooney had increasing trouble getting good roles as he aged, his cute turning to dumpy, and his un-Andy Hardy lifestyle had him forgotten before TV even arrived. Rooney's story has a happy ending. He's 85 and recently celebrated 25 years of marriage. He seems happy, content, everything any of us could hope to be at that age, a role model once more.

Adu should be so lucky.

Now 18 he flew to Europe this weekend, tail between his legs, hoping to catch on with Benfica, a Portuguese team.  He had tried out with Manchester United, he was hoping to catch on with Celtic in Glasgow, so while Benfica is a big club, for Portugal, it's a real come-down.

The 1967 Game: Who's Timothy Leary Now?

I have a confession to make.

When there is bad news I try to avoid it.

I turn off the TV. I avoid the paper. And I look somewhere else. To sport. To entertainment. To my family. To you.

One hallmark of a Generational Crisis is that this stops working. During a crisis there is no place to hide from the bad news. It may surround you on the street, as in the late 1850s. It may growl in your stomach, or in the sad eyes of your children, as in the early 1930s.

In the late 1960s, it invaded the TV and radio -- the pictures from Vietnam, the hippies, and riots, the rock music -- all had a profound impact on the Greatest Generation. It re-set their assumptions, and it focused the anger of a lifetime on the culture.

Something like that is happening right now. We have built our hideouts on celebrity culture, on sports and entertainment, but there is no place to hide from the horrors:

• Baseball?
• Football?
• Basketball?
• Bicycling?
• Movie stars?

This, of course, in addition to the daily horrors on the TV. This in addition to the war our best are being lost in, the falling knife and overwhelming worry of real estate, the bizarre weather. And our leaders are not just powerless to act, they're piling on.

This Week's Clue: Is Cringely on Crack?

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

Enjoy.

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Robert Cringely is, rightfully, a legend in tech reporting. But there are times when he just makes me cringe.

His latest PBS column may be the dumbest thing he has ever written.

In it he is describing the same situation I described here a few days ago, Google's effort to increase the spectrum commons in the coming re-allocation of TV spectrum.

But his conclusion? Stop. Don't tick off Verizon and AT&T. They will crush you.

Look who Google is up against -- all the largest Internet service providers in the U.S. Google will not win this even if they win the auction, because the telcos and cable companies are far more skilled and cunning when it comes to lobbying and controlling politicians than Google can ever hope to be. The telcos have spent more than a century at this game and Google hasn't even been in it for a decade. And Google's pockets are no deeper than those of the other potential bidders.

Cringely, STFU. There are two key reasons why you are absolutely, totally, 100% wrong on this one:

 

Think Small in The War Against Oil

There was a time when it had to be explained to me that Tony Perkins of the AlwaysOn Network had nothing absolutely to do with Tony Perkins, the right-wing crank. (Thank goodness Tony Perkins the actor used his full name, which was Anthony.)

Well, someone is going to have to explain it to me again, because Perkins' AlwaysOn site is beginning to look awfully right-wing cranky, especially as it relates to The War Against Oil.

Take this piece of nonsense from Ed Ring. He is dissing wind power here, taking a swipe at biofuels along the way. And making absolutely no sense.

The real danger is what I call "big energy," the idea that green energy must come from central sources, out of town, just as oil does. This idea is nonsense. As is the idea that we must restrict our thinking on future green energy projects to 2008 technology.

Ring, who runs an occasionally-sane site called EcoWorld,  also seems to have a second agenda,  which is to support sprawl. He complains about environmentalists supporting higher-density residential development to preserve green space, so he can then swipe them for endorsing "wind farms" far from town.

When environmentalists won't say what they're for, they just become shills for the oil companies, who want all the confusion they can get so they can dominate the future as they did the past.

Return the Spectrum Commons

Some day, when Republicans are truly politically dead, not just wounded as they are now, we need to return to the idea of the Commons. (The picture of Bruce Kushnick to the left is getting a bit old -- send us a new one, Bruce!)

Not Communism, asshole. The Commons. Parks, forests, content, seas, air,  software...and most important, spectrum.

Right now, in Washington, so-called regulators and so-called competitors are doing their little spectrum dance again.

The headline on this Washington Post story is deliberately misleading -- it reads FCC Majority Backs Open-Access Plan for Airwaves. In fact that's just not true at all.

The plan of FCC chair Kevin Martin and two Democratic commissioners is to auction off all the spectrum being abandoned in 2009 by TV stations, and to  require but one-third of it built out so that all devices can use it. Martin resists even the idea of mandated wholesaling, which Google says is a pre-condition for its entry into the bidding.

The Duke of Oil - Chapter 15

The following is a work of fiction. Here is the Table of Contents, which is updated as new chapters are written.

It is the third in a series of sci-fi novels of the type known as alternate history. What's different is that this series takes place in our time, with characters familiar in your real life.

The first book in the series, The Chinese Century, was written late 2004. Its table of contents is here. The second,  The American Diaspora, was written in 2005. The table of contents for that book is here.

The Time of Paranoia

Right on schedule in our generational crisis, we have reached the Time of Paranoia.

The Time of Paranoia is when otherwise-rational people start to see dark forces descending, preparing to destroy their world and everything in it.

In the case of our time, we fear George W. Bush.  Executive orders meant for "just in case" (created by crazy government bureaucrats for loony government leaders) are being spun as evidence of a coup. And not just by liberals, but by once-respected conservatives as well, such as Paul Craig Roberts (right).

I'm sorry, but I have to laugh. Hasn't Iraq taught us anything? It is impossible to occupy a people against their will. And this goes double for Americans.

There's an assumption abroad that what we couldn't do in Iraq we could do here, because Saddam Hussein did it in Iraq for decades and because Robert Mugabe did it in Zimbabwe for years. But Saddam had help -- mainly our help but later (as the Bush people were fond of documenting before we invaded) Russian and German and French help. That help came only because Saddam had something those "friends" thought they could loot -- oil wealth. We're importers. Mugabe, like other African dictators, is just too insignificant to care about -- and Africa won't advance as a continent until they do what we won't, namely hang Mugabe.

Just in case, there is something Americans, left and right, do need to say to George W. Bush right now, something we need to get through his thick skull before he does something really stupid.

I don't think he will, because at the end of the day the one distinguishing character trait of George W. Bush is cowardice. He has always been a coward, and always will be a coward. So let's take advantage of that fact, for the sake of the country.

What follows is addressed to the President.