Day: July 21, 2008

Of T. Boone Pickens, Al Franken, and Hope for the Planet

Trish

T. Boone Pickens has done the impossible. The billionaire Texas oil man changed my father, a man who listens to entirely too much talk radio, from saying that oil alternatives are so much flooey and we should get real and drill in Alaska, to saying we must look beyond oil for our energy future. This commercial did it.

Al Franken was right when he said the Bush Administration is to global warming what Herbert Hoover was to the Great Depression

Pickens is one of many people who believe in the concept of “peak oil.” They state that at some very recent point, like 2005, we reached the top of the bell curve of potential oil reserves on the planet, and it’s downhill from here. They believe we have already used, therefore, more than half of the earth’s oil, and the finite resource will grow only rarer in the years ahead. I — like you probably — think they’re right. And even if we haven’t peaked yet, it’s only a question of when.

T. Boone’s “Pickens Plan” proposes using wind energy to power homes and businesses, and calls the Great Plains, “the Saudi Arabia of wind power.”

A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over — even if only 20% of wind power could be captured.

Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.

That’s a lot of money, but it’s a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it’s a bargain.

True that. He also calls for cleaner burning and more efficient natural gas to fuel our cars. Bush’s beloved corn-based ethanol? Puh-lease!

The funny thing is that Pickens isn’t even trying to get through to George W. Bush. He knows a lost cause when he sees it.

[…]

Obama’s New Plane: The Real Straight Talk Express

Trish

The Obama Campaign Plane (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

Pretty sharp.

The repainted plane is likely to become a familiar backdrop for the remainder of the campaign. Previously, the campaign plane did not have a distinctive paint scheme.

The front cabin, where Obama travels, has been fitted out with luxury recliner seating. Obama 08 is embroidered on one seat, presumably to be normally occupied by the candidate.

The press cabin is still the normal 3-seats-to-a-row economy class seating.

Oh boo-hoo, you members of the press assigned to the Obama campaign. I suppose you’d rather be with John McCain, eating barbecue, attending meaningless closed “town hall” pep rallies, and taking weekends off. Wait, don’t answer that.

Predictably, Obama is already getting flack over the paint job, which uses his logo and no American flag. It’s like not wearing a lapel pin, critics say.

Except that if he did paint an American flag on his plane, these same idiots would accuse him of undermining the Current Occupant, something he’s quite rightly refused to do in meeting with foreign leaders.

“I think it is very important to recognize that I’m going over there as a U.S. senator. We have one president at a time…” Obama said.

No doubt Obama will remind us of that when he’s in the Oval Office.

Monuments for W: Every American City Should Follow San Francisco’s Lead And Name a Sewage Plant After George Bush

Jon Ponder

On Election Day this November, voters in San Francisco will vote on a local initiative to rename one of the city’s largest waste treatment plants in honor of George W. Bush.
A national George W. Bush Legacy Project to rename American sewage plants after Bush over the next decade could provide a perfect foil to the surely coming efforts by Bush dead-enders like Karl Rove to rewrite the failed history of the Bush era into a series of triumphs for their Dear Leader.
If the initiative passes — and since the number of Republicans in the city is statistically zero, it very well might — the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant will be forever known as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. It is as fitting a monument to the eight years of the Bush presidency as we can think of, with the possible exception of a naming a garbage dump after him.

The San Francisco effort is the work-product of local activists who came up with the idea in the most grassroots of all settings: over beers. Subsequently, the group set up the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, which handled promotion for the petition drive. On Thursday, the city’s Department of Elections certified that the 7,168 signatures the commission submitted were valid and approved the initiative for the November ballot.

Although the organizers in San Francisco are clear that their effort is satire, this is a cause that grassroots organizers in other cities should consider seriously. This nationwide effort could be similar to, but hopefully more successful than, the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which was the brainchild of the anti-government lobbyist Grover Norquist, who is best known for his close associations with corrupt Bush cronies like (now-imprisoned) Jack Abramoff and (perhaps incarcerated one day) Karl Rove.

[…]

Florida’s Charlie Crist “Prepared to Accept” Being Gov. if McCain Doesn’t Pick Him for VP

Trish

Poor Charlie Crist. The governor of Florida is whining (somebody call Phil Gramm!) to the foreign press about his station in life. At the end of an interview with the Financial Times of London, where Charlie and his girlfriend were celebrating their recent engagement, uh, undertaking a trade mission, he threw in this:

Charlie has shown he’d rather take credit for looking like he cares than actually doing anything meaningful, which makes him the perfect running mate for John McCain

Mr Crist would not be drawn on whether he would accept a White House job. Asked if he had been vetted for the vice-presidency, he said: “No. I can’t talk about it. Since [the post] has not been offered I’m prepared to accept being governor of Florida.”

Hear that? Charlie is manning up and preparing to accept the bitter disappointment of only being governor of the fourth largest state — due to overtake New York in third place by 2010 — if he must.

This guy is showing the GOP stuff of which he is made more and more lately. Earlier in the same interview, Crist said that even though the drilling he welcomes off the Florida coasts would be out in federal waters, only Florida should decide whether to allow it. Because Floridians are, you know, hurting.

“[The current price of gas] is a significant crunch on Florida families,” he said. “And I think the difficult decision that I have to make, as somebody who cares about the environment, is to realise that my fellow Floridians are hurting financially right now.”

And we’ll still be hurting if we drill, we’ll just be hurting and cleaning up oil spills.

The big lie in all this drilling discussion is that it will do anything but benefit oil companies. Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and all the rest will be selling that Florida oil in the world market, most likely to China and India.

But hey, Charlie has shown he’d rather take credit for looking like he cares than actually doing anything meaningful, which makes him the perfect running mate for John McCain. The two of them can enjoy fleecing their contributors right up to November…when Barack Obama wins.