Dear Friends,
During the last two years(approx) we have tried to do something that even Americans don't believe: A Black President, A Barack Obama... Toghether, we have experienced that God has given us the power to reach the point: It was amazing....
today is New Year( Norouz) in IRAN ( The Great Persia). A fw hours ago, President Obama had a congratulation speech towards Iranian for their new year.... From today we have clicked the Presidential Campaign fro Mr. MIR HOSSEIN MOUSAVI for next 90 Days... We are going to fight against Terror, Islamisation,etc. of President AHMADINEJAD... It's againg a tough job, but YES,WE CAN.... Youngesters cannot allow Ahmadinejad and His team to lead Iran and show us to the world in stupid and wrong manner.... We are educated like you, We like Democracy and Peace for everyone like You,,,,,,,
Please help us with oyur mail, letters, newspaper awareness and anything you can do towards your goal.... I guess Danger of Ahmadinejad is a global matter as you have seen.
www.nasim88obama.blogfa.com
God bless you.
Harry, Iran
Today is the eve of what will be for many of us one of the greatest moments of our lives. We have made a positive change in our lives which holds the great promise for the betterment of all. Our motivations for this change are as varried as we are - yet our ultimate goal has been the same - to make the world a better place for all of humanity us to live in.
We have done what we did for reasions both selfish and selfless, and given our support in both time, money, sweat, and even blood - but it will have been worth it all if just one child lives because he now recieves health care instead of none - or one less grandmother freezes to death in the winter because she can afford to heat her house, recieve needed medication and eat at the same time.
Small victories indeed, but small victories like these are what life is all about, fulfilling these hopes and dreams are the winning of the small battles in the war on ignorance and poverty and intollerance. They are what is importaint, not the man or the movement - but the results of electing the man with the movement.
We will prevail, our victory over ignorance and fear is all but assured, but this victory we brought about isn't for his glory but ours - this will be a victory for humanity as a whole, and not a vain glory for a few or the one.
Today is Monday, today we rejoin the battle with renewed vigor and determination, we will do everything we can to combat the forces of ignorance and hypocracy - and tomorrow we will vote and then we will judge the results of our efforts.
As for Wednesday? Wednesday we will no doubt be tired and "hung over", but the hardest part of the "war" we have been waging will upon us. We must "win the peace" with our former adversaries, we must console them and re-educate them so when January 20th 2009 arives, they too will be cheering for Obama/Biden as loudly as we do.
We have a much larger a harder struggle ahead of us in the weeks and months to come - but for now you may be proud of what we have done - take a breif moment to savor what your efforts have brought to fruit.
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”
The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
Can I brag? She thought up this answer all by herself. Next stop: the Bill O'Reilly show! See the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re8oKYCe7BE
We have a convergence happening.....two converging storms, one might say. One is a general election season that promises to be one of the hardest-fought and maybe ugliest on record. This storm is destructive in its own way, and despite the bristling energy it might provide for some, is no healthy thing for our democracy. The other is named Gustav, heading, with cosmic irony and increasing atmospheric fury, for New Orleans. Not only New Orleans, but New Orleans during the Republican Convention.
Since it was Katrina, less than the war, that helped our population see the incompetence of this administration, this meteorological irony is stunning. The snarky Obama campaign supporter in me, the one angry about the "Ayers" ads and the "empty suit" accusations, reacts thus: serves them--the GOP--right. But the human being in me, the one that is not swept into the campaign storm, feels shame that the campaign storm produces or allows such anger and schadenfreude to enter the psyche or even one's sense of humor. The human me very much does not want another human and physical tragedy of biblical proportions to make a point that is all too clear already about the fierce incompetence of the Bush world, and the strident indifference of Republican policy to needs of ordinary Americans. Republicans are not indifferent, but the economic and foreign policies are, even if unintentionally. But our civil discourse should be where we find that conversation, not in the suffering of cities and embarassment of conventioners if--God forbit--another hurricane ruin parts of New Orleans or the oil rigs of the Gulf Coast.
I hope dearly that the news split screen between Gustav and McCain will be a story of two near misses, to go with the two storms. One near miss as Gustav glances off the coast and leaves only a few broken trees and some minor storm surge; another near miss as government by the GOP loses this close election in this season of history-making events and real human need. Should Gustav retain and increase its fury with a land hit, I hope and know that we will all come together as one regardless of party to help everyone who is affected by damage and loss come back to themselves. And if the election goes against how any of us want it to, I hope the same thing.
Here is a link to the Hawaii Democrat Resolution that proposes a revenue neutral approach to funding plug in hybrids and the alternative energy to power them with an electricity surcharge similar to what an equivalent gallon of gasoline costs to go the same distance.
If the calculations are correct, then this could be done at the national level, resulting in an accelerated transition to plug in hybrids.
The proposal has citations to Dept of Energy and government testing of hybrids to back up the case.
http://policy.wikia.com/wiki/Resolution:_Self_paying_vehicle_loans.
Please see Tom Friedman's column in the NYTimes, "9/11 & 4/11": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/opinion/20friedman.html?em&ex=1216699200&en=6ebf1840d585fce4&ei=5087%0A
Friedman correctly diagnoses the toxic soup our national economy, security, and well-being face in the absence of a sane energy policy. He points out that when you are addicted to oil, the problem is not the price of oil, but the addiction.
Let me add my two cents here.
Here's what Bush said in the now famous State of the Union Address in 2006 in which our addiction to oil was officially diagnosed by our sitting government:
Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources -- and we are on the threshold of incredible advances. So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy. (Applause.) We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. (Applause.) Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. (Applause.) By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past. (Applause.)
Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources -- and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.
So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy. (Applause.)
We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. (Applause.)
Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. (Applause.) By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past. (Applause.)
OK, so first: why are we hearing little to nothing about concrete facts on the ground about the "Advanced Energy Initiative"? I've been perusing some of the documents concerning one of its components, the "Solar America Initiative" (see http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/solar_america/), and also discovering much about some vibrant (albeit cost-limited) projects under its auspices. And yet, in the face of the current gas price "crisis", rather than embracing such new and potent projects, President Bush offers us more oil. Given that all the (false) promise of more oil can do is push down the price of gas, and given that the high price of gas has finally moved the population to embrace the real and urgent need for alternative energy, we can only conclude that the real point of pushing for more drilling is indeed psychological: but it's about the psychology of VOTING, not investment. It is pandering in an election year, to give the republicans something attractive looking in a year when they are repulsive. And I suspect it is an attempt to bring in campaign donations by oil interests.
Second, this thought process is either insanity or obscenity:
So we can only conclude that those who are thinking and talking this way--the repubs, mainly, and business interests--are trying to keep us addicted to oil, and to eventually retard all the processes in our country that require a breaking of this addiction.
Third, is it not, reading Bush's words, tremendously disappointing that he has squandered the past two years (half a term) in which he could have been rallying the country behind the very initiatives he spent our money on and got applause for? Is it not tremendously disappointing that the encore of that State of the Union is a shoulder-shrugging, "Aw, heck--let's just drill like mad! The crack we're addicted to is just too damned expensive to keep us hooked!"
I realize there is nothing new or particularly interesting about what I've said here, that others have not already said--but if it encourages folks to read Friedman and keep up the fight, then it's worth posting about!
OK, to end on a positive note: Please lead us differently, Barack, when you are elected. It will be nice to have a President who understands the difference between LEADING and just 'announcing'. It will be nice to have a President who can be a healer rather than a dealer.
Bobby Kennedy Jr. is on CNN's Larry King, showing John Stossel how little he (John) knows about the conditions of our alternative energy potentials. John Stossel? When did he get credentialled to be a spokesperson for energy issues? Just because he can attack something progressive in a quizzical tone of outrage doesn't mean he is qualified to go up against Bobby Jr. on energy and the environment. Unless of course simply devoting oneself at the altar of the "Invisible Hand" via the Competitive Enterprise Institute thus qualifies someone. He is paid hansomely to fight regulation and government initiative in order to maintain unfettered business activity, particularly in the energy sector. Affiliated with monied interests to gather other monied interests to drive public opinion away from acceptance of climate change data and the regulations required to deal with it, Stossel represents much of what is wrong with our public discourse. I stopped watching ABC as a network when they gave 20/20 to him.
Go Bobby!
So, Donald Trump sold his 60,000 square foot mansion in Palm Beach for upwards of $100 million bucks. In doing so, he released the following statement:
"In an age of so many people getting hurt in real estate, it shows that you can still do well in real estate," Mr Trump said.
If that doesn't illustrate the reality gap between the richest rich and the rest of us, nothing does. Trump can optimistically tout our ability to "still do well in real estate" even in a difficult real estate climate, JUST BECAUSE he operates in a different economic domain than most other people. This is not slamming him per se, just pointing out how his comment demonstrates the TREMENDOUS gap between HAVE-A-LOTS (him and his buyer, for example, Russian fertilizer magnate) and HAVE-LITTLES (most of us). Even when Mr. Trump was "going bankrupt" years ago before he turned it around, he was still spending many thousands of dollars a week on lifestyle-related purchases. That shows that there are two economic realities afoot--a wealthy one, where even in a bad economic climate the wealthy get wealthier and the bankrupt still have thousands to spend on unnecessary things, and an average one, where things just get worse or threaten to do so.
I encourage Mr. Trump to invest some of the profit from that sale in renewable energy development so that it benefits everyone. I'm sure he wouldn't want to get scooped by Pickens.
Let me preface this reposting of an article from the home page of "Catholics United" by saying that I have been following the career of Deal Hudson since being his colleague at Fordham University before his resignation, and even prior to that when he taught a friend of mine in Georgia. What bothers me most about the true stories regarding Mr. Hudson (aside from the original sexual misconduct itself) is that the republican party--including now John McCain--INSIST on keeping him in their inner circle of faith advisers. His role in the Rove administration was bad enough, and now John McCain signals his tacit acceptance of the Rove model by adopting Hudson as one of his advisers. This history of Mr. Hudson is easily found in a simple web search. Even though Mr. McCain has admitted he cannot do web searches, certainly his campaign can. We must assume they are competent enough to have done so, especially after the Wright controversy. Hence, we may conclude that Hudson has been on their advisory committee for Catholics in full knowledge and with the campaign's blessings, despite his history. This tells us a lot about the republican campaign this year--more of the same.
Zero tolerance for sexual abusers in any campaign, period.
Pasted article:
Catholics United Calls on Senator John McCain to Remove Deal Hudson from Catholic Advisory Position
In 2004, Deal Hudson resigned from his position as a Catholic advisor to George W. Bush’s re-election campaign over allegations that Hudson had solicited an improper sexual encounter with an 18-year old Fordham University freshman. According to the National Catholic Reporter, which broke the story in August 2004, the incident happened in Hudson's campus office after a night of heavy drinking and resulted in a legal settlement and Hudson's loss of his tenured professorship.
Unlike the Bush campaign in 2004, Senator John McCain seems to believe that Hudson’s political value outweighs any of his past indiscretions and has brought him into the “Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee.”
In addition to questions about his personal conduct, Hudson has a long standing history of using Catholic teaching to advance a partisan agenda. In 1999, Hudson’s magazine Crisis authored an influential study explaining how the Republican Party could achieve greater success at the ballot box by making specific appeals to Catholic swing voters, a move that prompted Bush strategist Karl Rove to invite Hudson into high-level campaign conversations. In 2002, Hudson established a White House Catholic Working Group, which deliberately excluded the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from policy discussions. More recently, Hudson publicly ridiculed a Vatican climate change initiative that didn’t fit his political worldview.
Help us send a strong message to Senator John McCain that we believe divisive figures like Deal Hudson have no place in his campaign by signing this petition.
For more information:
This election year overlaps with the planning process for the second annual "Focus the Nation" national teach-in on climate change and sustainability. Those of you associated with colleges and universities may already be familiar with the event, which in 2008 occurred at 1900 institutions simultaneously on Jan 31 (see their website at www.focusthenation.org). Founded by economist Eban Goodstein, the event/movement seeks to mobilize human initiative in the direction of sane energy, economic, environmental and other policies that might stave off the worst of the effects of climate change in our global future. But overall it is a campaign of awareness, information, and hope. See Goodstein's book, Fighting For Love in the Century of Extinction.
As an organizer of fairly large event at Fordham University this past year (see a recent write-up: http://www.fordham.edu/images/whats_new/magazine/spring08/goinggreen.pdf), I am excited to be beginning plans for the next FTN. Our event incorporated representatives of many of the groups that populate the Obama landscape, including urban thinkers, native americans, energy activists, business people, students, economists, religious persons, political activists, and more. What is most thrilling about planning FTN II is that it's as if a sea-change of awareness has happened since FTN I, given the explosive rise in gas prices that has finally put energy and climate policy on the American front page. This is a time of opportunity to be seized, before the oil/carbon addiction redoubles its hold on our national health.
Since Obama has invited platform recommendations and a cooperative approach to governance, my suggestion is to funnel some of our energies of campaigning for energy policy into organizing cross-over projects, that forward the campaign but also continue those efforts into the post-inaugural Focus the Nation II. Planning suggestions exist at the FTN website, but I'd be happy to offer any advice I can too. FTN is a youth-mobilization initiative, at its core, since the youth of today will have to live with and solve the problems we have made for them. So it seems like the core of the Obama campaign and vision overlaps nicely with the core objectives of FTN. Encouraging FTN events should be part of our "campaign and beyond" planning.
Thanks for any suggestions you may have!
jude
Just like everyone else on MSNBC today, Chris Matthews just allowed a Republican senator from Louisiana to claim, falsely, that no oil was spilled during Katrina and Rita thanks to updated technology on offshore rigs.
Sounded like Barbara Boxer wanted to dispute the point, but Chris interrupted her and substituted his thanks to her for the renaming of a highway in honor of Tim Russert.
Now, I liked Tim Russert as much as anyone, but someone has to finally let SOMEONE tell the truth about offshore rigs spilling during the recent hurricanes.
Here's what was printed in The Guardian about oil spills during Katrina:
The Guardian,# Friday September 16 2005The oil pollution in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could be among the worst recorded in North America, officials trying to coordinate the clean-up say. The US coastguard, which is responsible for the marine environment, said yesterday more than 6.5 million gallons of crude oil had been spilt in at least seven major incidents. The previous worst spill in US waters was the 11m gallons in Alaskan waters from the Exxon Valdez in 1989."This is a major event," said Lieutenant Colonel Glynn Smith of the coastguard in New Orleans. "Things are going well, but three-quarters of the oil from the spills has not yet been recovered."The figure does not include petrol and oil spilt from up to 250,000 cars which have been submerged, or that spilt from hundreds of petrol stations. The coastguard says it has received almost 400 reports of spills, the vast majority of which have not been assessed.
Read the whole article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/sep/16/usnews.hurricanekatrina___
And here are photos of the spills at on-shore storage and other facilities, the stuff DOWNSTREAM in causal effects from the rigs offshore that pump the oil initially: http://www.katrinadestruction.com/images/v/damaged+energy+facilities/
So, our drug-dealer-style republican government and its surrogates continually seek to rewrite history to dupe the American public into taking one more big "solve all our problems" hit off the oil needle.
When will someone in the MSM call them on this? Instead of thanking people for a new road name, for god's sake.....
Chris Matthews, we need more from you.
I suggest that the Environmentalists for Obama, together with any others among the many dozen environmental list-serv interest groups on the Obama site, host a short series of computer-mediated teleconferences or other form of online "meet-up" to develop a common platform with respect to steps to minimize climate change, do serious energy conservation, and develop sufficient energy and its grid infrastructure for the coming decades that does not exacerbate climate change. (The shift to electric cars and other vehicles over the next 5-10 years will enormously shift the form that energy requirements take, and provide choices of how to power an electric grid with much more demand on it, by the way, while gasoline use correspondingly shrinks.) There isn't time to work though concensus within the many groups and localities and then arrive at a concensus - we'd have to do it at the overall level from the start. A unified set of recommendations from the grass roots for the party platform would carry some clout, be noticed by Democrats including but also beyond the Obama campaign.
Does anyone have the tehnical savvy to organize such a series of online meetings, perhaps over the course of a week or two, an hour max per session? Is anyone willing and capable of setting an agenda of points to be advocated about? Would anyone moderate in the sense of discouraging chatterboxes and/or irrelevant issues? Is anyone capable of deducing a concensus from a session transcipt and proposing it back to the next session of an online meet-up for, say, voting?
These aren't small tasks. But it seems important that we not only discuss, but also represent and be a singificant voice of advocacy in shaping the platform.
I'd like to be able to say I could volunteer in any of these capacities, but I can only see the concept, and the importance of weighing in together. I'm not senior enough in the climate field to organize any part of doing it.
If intersted in being active in setting up such an online confeence series, response (volunteering and/or practical "how to" proposals) on the Environmentalists for Obama list is suggested, since it is one of the most active and visible climate interest groups.
Tempus fugit. (Time flies).
Brevity is easiest the readers.
In my Massachusetts town, I spend most of my time working at the nexus of fighting against global warming, helping people reduce their use of traditional (fossil fuel) based energy in ways that save them money, and linking with the projects and ideas of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN) groups based in other towns.
How to get Americans to wake up and stop trashing the home planet, myself included of course, is a huge challenge. It scares me, the consequences of willful blindness to actual climate changes we are beginning to see as disruptive and harmful. They are "the tip of the iceberg".
I am grateful for the Obama-McCain debate on climate and energy, because it needs to be a visible big priority, not a nice tack-on. I'd like to see if the environmentalists in the Obama 08 community could raise the profile of the issue within the campaign, so that it isn't drowned out by more "immediate" concerns, of which there are several vitally important ones.
But - if the planet won't continue to sustain our lives the way we're living them, that's priority #1 to fix. We've got to change, or the planet will change in hugely tragic ways, as is already happening. So how do we come together as a species, homo sapiens, to stop fouling our nest?
Anyone have any ideas about how to raise the profile of climate change in the campaign? How to make sure the very best plans are in place for President Obama to take up on his first day in office? How the President can convince literally half the American people that climate change is real and we all need to do more than change our type of light bulbs and recycle better?
We Americans on average use twice as much energy per person as Western Europeans do. We need different goals, social values, lifestyles and yes, religious understanding more than we need new technologies that would let those who can afford them (solar, wind, hybrid cars, etc.) keep squandering energy without guilt.
I'm a newbie as a participating voice here, so seeking advice - RSVP.
Thank you. I thank you in advance for electing Obama President. Thanks to this miracle, I can cease to be what I was, and become what I really am. I am what I become, which will be nothing.
If you read backwards this blog, you'll understand why I'm leaving your insane society and moving into a tent in the mountains.
You claim to value truth, but I climbed your hill of truth, and found out what lying is.
You claim to value life, but since you are what you eat, you're empty inside, philosophically speaking.
You claim to represent God, what more can I say about that?
Again, it is God who is your enemy. This is what you need your armies for, fighting God, not fighting supposedly for God, which is what pissed him off so much of course.
Be it volcano, earthquake, flood and famine, you guys are in for it for what Bush did.
I know it's not yours, the individual American's fault, but deserves got nothing to do with it, as Clint Eastwood said.
Obama will at least try to help every one he can before the power structure crumbles like your imploding Towers, but God will win.
Then, we'll come down from the mountians.
Adios!
If I read the media correctly, you have not abandoned Obama despite the media's attempt to demonize his pastor, a man of God, for speaking the truth about 'White Society' and 'Amerika'.
This means you HAVE changed! Your belief in Obama has brought an end to the right-wing's ability to terrify you.
Keep it up!
Bravo!
Of course, Mandela still remains among the best examples of humanity.
The Tiger Woods of Revolution and the Obama of Unity afterwards.
Yes, I am talking about Obama's race, Tiger and Nelson's race.
Not that race matters, any human could have been the One, but I believe that a Black man and an Indian, Ghandi, share the cup for Champion Human of the World.
If you begin from the point of view that all humans possess inherent equal worth, it's easy to celebrate the way that Black people in particular have overcome the Biblical odds of slavery, colonialism and CIA/FBI terror.
That is the real stuff, that is the story of the Bible. J. Edgar Hoover's Herodian vision, to prevent the rise of a Black Messiah, was actually carried out in my lifetime. I have met many of the survivors of this purge and I believe they are true American heroes. I wasn't killed because my skin is white, not to mention that I am not anyone's excuse for a Messiah.
And we complain about Obama's Pastor, an actual man of God, for pointing out why God would have good reason to damn Amerika.
Face down the hollow complaints and nationalistic pseudo-pride with the truth.
Hammer home the truth.
Don't stop pointing out the evil that continues to creep back into American society, racism and White Supremacy.
Remember, White people do have a God complex and it has to stop, we need to divorce ourselves from this puffery.
Obama as President will bring reconciliation, but it is our job to let the truth clear his path to the White House. The fossil fool theory would be an easy target for a first skirmish.
Otherwise we'll be paving his way with another faked vision of America the Beautiful, another Diebold Democracy, and another Dog to Wag.
