Herbert Hoover may be the most fascinating failed President in all American history. (Even more so than Millard Fillmore.) Not only did he dominate the late Progressive era, feeding Europe after World War I, providing private relief after the 1927 Louisiana hurricane (little fat man with a notebook in his hand) but he re-built his party by hand after its 1932 defeat, his Hoover Institution being among the key builders of what became today's Nixon Thesis.
What the Hoover Institution was building, as early as the 1950s, was an ideology meant first to do battle with the Republican Anti-Thesis of that time, exemplified by Thomas E. Dewey, then Dwight Eisenhower, and finally Nelson Rockefeller, a practical politics which assumed the basic truth in what New Deal Democrats were saying but sought to lean against it, as into a strong wind. It was by winning this intra-party war through Barry Goldwater, who was nominated the same year Hoover died, that their triumph began, and that of their party. Today's GOP remains what the Hoover Institution built then.
Call it NixonLand if you like. Bob Dole called the second half of the 20th century the Age of Nixon. But in terms of the Republican Party the whole century was really the Age of Hoover.
Conservatives are already calling Pickens a hero, but I predict this will end in tears, and will be a major setback for wind development.
Let me count the ways this is stupid:
Pickens is going to lose half the power he generates on its way to market. He's using conventional power lines, and that's their efficiency over 200 miles.
I mention this because my income today is wholly dependent on C|Net. I write two blogs for their ZDNet unit, Open Source and Healthcare.
I like the work for two reasons.
One, it's fun, I'm really my own boss.
Second, there's a working business model here. The company knows how to monetize traffic, and I get what I take to be a percentage of what I bring in. That means when I make money C|Net makes money. It gives me a warm feeling.
Bigger than Iraq. Bigger than Abu Ghraib. Bigger than the housing bubble.
It is nothing less than class war, the slow extermination of the uneducated by the educated.
These government statistics, compiled by government researchers, show trends in premature death rates from 8 causes -- everything from diabetes and heart attack to cancer and accidents. That's the rate per 100,000 people in 8 subgroups, college educated on the right, high school educated on the left.
I have already heard the excuses. The poor deserve their fate. They choose to get fat and die young. Most causes of death before 65 are preventable, and if you don't take care of yourself it's your own fault.
Bunk.
Not only are the rates higher for those without education, but those with just high school they rise steadily, for both races and both sexes. Does anyone doubt that those trends have accelerated in this decade? Does anyone think that the less educated are becoming more shiftless with time?
I would love to see a similar regression done for, say, Canada or England. Perhaps the comparison to Europe is unfair, given that college here is an option which can be purchased while there entry into it is won through competition.
But the conclusion is inescapable. We have two main classes of people in the U.S., those with education and those without. For the last 16 years those with are learning to live longer, those without are dieing younger.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The political media is catching up with something I first wrote over a year ago. 
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