Xark!

An energy plan we can believe in

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Well. There's a simple, visionary plan from a guy whose life has earned him the credibility and stature to propose it: Reverse the trend in carbon emissions, end our dependency on foreign oil (thereby changing our relationship to the Middle East) and kick start our economy with new industries, new products, new services, new public works projects.

We rallied around Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon in 10 years and to do other grand things, "because they are hard." Well, we've got a better reason to do this: Because it's going to save our sorry asses.

Sure, we'll have the usual people telling us this is just more stupid libtard stuff. And to put it bluntly, screw 'em. They've had their time, and they blew it.

Anyway, I've just started a group at MyBarackObama.com to encourage the explicit adoption of this challenge. I'll post the URL as soon as it gets processed.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

A remarkable paragraph

The concluding paragraph from a post written yesterday by Jon Taplin:

We live in an age of forgetting. The monstrous information flow that washes over us on a hourly basis, pushes out recent events and their lessons and fills our minds with new obsessions: Spitzer, Ferraro, Spears, Market Meltdown. The fact that men and women are dying and being maimed in their loyal service to a fatally flawed policy is soon pushed off our TV screens and the front pages of our newspapers. Communications scholars have long understood the power of governments to persuade by obfuscation and fear. If the coming election is to serve the purpose of renewing our commitment to Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people”, then we must not forget our brothers and sisters dying on the plains of Iraq. We are in the role of British Redcoats and Hessians on the commons of Concord, Massachusetts 232 years ago. We must take our soldiers out Iraq and let the Iraqi people decide their own fate.

I certainly agree with the first sentence. I also agree with the last. It's the penultimate one that will bug me all day -- because though I understand the thought, I think the analogy is misleading. Yes, we've cast ourselves in the role of occupying army, but to think of Iraqis as the militia at Lexington and Concord on that fateful day misses some important points.

The British colonists who survived the running skirmishes of April 19, 1775, later helped form a wildly diverse young nation via often painful compromise with fellow countrymen of different beliefs, backgrounds and interests. I think it would be a mistake to presume that the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq have anything in common with the Minutemen of 1775 beyond mere gun ownership.

Our debt to them isn't merely rhetorical. I think modern citizenship now requires that we struggle daily against our own forgetting. It's the beginning step in all that we must do.

(And no, there were no Hessians at Lexington or Concord. But let's not quibble.)

Fox News Porn

Cheney on Iraq, 1994

Mellowing back to sanity

Cal Thomas and I disagree on some fairly important stuff (Thomas believes that the Bible is reason enough to uphold laws banning gay sex; I believe gay couples should have the same civil rights as straight couples), but it turns out there's some pretty important stuff on which we agree entirely:

As with religion, some people on the right have used patriotism, which should be a unifying theme, to divide Americans. My liberal friends love America as much as I do. They might disagree on some, or all, of my political and religious beliefs, but that does not make them less in love with America, much less un-American.

I don't want to put too much weight on this column (which I appreciated on several levels) or on some kind of conversion by Thomas, who has actually cautioned the right against some of its whacko excesses, like that overblown "War on Christmas" Fox gave us back in 2005. But I do think that it's a good sign that we're hearing this now. Not so much the words, even, but the tone of those words.

Dick Cheney: Not part of Executive Branch

(Cartoonist note: I didn't really get to complete this one before I went to work this morning, so this updated, final version has some differences from the one I put up earlier today-- dc)

Hersh: J'accuse

Have you heard about Seymour Hersh's interview with Major General Antonio Taguba yet? I heard about it today... but not from reading a newspaper.

"There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff (the explicit images) was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

That's the two-star general who was tasked with investigating the program of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, the same man who was forced into retirement this year. Hersh hit the talking-head circuit last night to promote it. On what planet is this not front-page news? Everywhere?

The "Korea model"

Preview: Dubya's long, hot summer

As the Buddhists say, karma is a bitch...

Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right.

"It's just gotten steadily worse," he said. "There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit" -- Gingrich was referring to Carter's suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the "attack" on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a "killer rabbit" during a fishing trip -- "that there was a morning where the average American went, 'You know, this really worries me.'" He added, "You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don't have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can't avoid thinking about."

-- Jeffrey Goldberg interviews former House Speaker (and current presidential hopeful)  Newt Gingrinch in his "Letter From Washington: PARTY UNFAITHFUL, The Republican implosion," from the June 4th issue of The New Yorker.

[S]ome big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK…etc., etc. This is called a “bunker mentality” and it’s not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

-- From the April 30th issue of the subscription-only Nelson Report, a Washington insider newsletter, quoted by Think Progress and the Huffington Post...

Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security.  Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy (your administration even went to the Supreme Court and argued correctly that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).

What's a conservative to do?

-- Mark Levin, the National Review Online, May 31, addresses the President.

The other thing that's interesting to me is the degree to which the Right isn't even rational about this anymore. It doesn't even make arguments anymore about this or that part of the bill, it's just "We don't want any kind of immigration reform because it's going to legitimize 12 million people who are here and, oh by the way, aren't leaving. So let's just build a fence, and that's it." That seems to be the essence now of the conservative majority's immigration policy.

-- Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal's famously conservative editorial board, addressing the board on May 22.

We hereby challenge the Journal’s editors to debate the immigration bill in a neutral venue with a moderator of their choosing ...  It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week.

-- The editors of the National Review call out their Wall Street brethren for an East Coast Establishment conservative smack-down, May 31...

Longtime readers of this blog know that the Wall Street Journal is notorious for refusing to acknowledge its factual errors in editorials about immigration policy and for tarring its opponents as anti-immigrant racists. Will they rise to NR's challenge or continue to smear amnesty opponents from the safety of their Manhattan offices?

-- Michelle Malkin, treating the WSJ with a tone of scorn usually reserved for The New York Times. According to a poll on the post, 95 percent of her readers think the National Review editors would win.

Laura Ingraham "takes the gloves off." Doesn't she want to "do what's right for America"? Finally, conservatives get mad at this president - for all the conservative reasons we're now familiar with. It only took six years of betrayal to get there, but, hey guys, welcome aboard. I find myself echoing Glenn Reynolds:

Heck, I'm basically pro-immigration and I find the Administration's arguments for the bill sufficiently unpersuasive and insulting that I'm leaning against it on that basis alone.

It's the arrogance and condescension that finally makes your blood boil.

-- Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan, blogging for The Atlantic, May 31

Message To The Left:  I'm not saying you should impeach him, I'm just sayin', you know, go with your hearts.

-- Conservative blogger Ace of Spades sums up his feelings about the president, May 31.

This is his legacy. Even his own supporters now despise him, even his own samurai are deserting him, even the people who could aid him are pushed aside. And we've got 19 months to go before January 2009.