One of the sad legacies of Ronald Reagan that Obama should reset with a new, smarter approach are so-called “tough on crime” policies that brought us mandatory sentencing, three-strikes, and a complete abandonment of rehabilitation. Now, America leads the world as the number one incarcerator of human beings. Most of those incarcerated are black and Latino men, and most of the crimes are for non-violent offenses such as drug possession, petty theft and burglaries associated with substance abuse and addiction.
Despite these lengthier sentences, most of these offenders are eventually released, and they are released without any effort to address the root causes that motivated them to commit the crimes for which they were incarcerated. After release, these ex-offenders become victims of employment discrimination and are unable to find work (70-90%) because of prejudice against them. Only five states currently have laws on the books that prohibit employment discrimination against ex-offenders- Hawaii, Kansas, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. As a consequence, over 70% recommit crimes within three years of being released from prison. In stark contrast to this result, in most European countries, over 70% of ex-offenders “never” commit another crime in their lifetime.
This must change!
If America really is concerned about “victims’ rights”, how can we encourage a result where ex-offenders are compelled to commit crimes to feed, clothe, and house themselves? For every new crime committed, there is a new victim, and there doesn’t appear to be much thought at all about lessoning the prospect of these new victims of crime.
Vengeance for vengeance sake, has no place in an advanced democratic country. Such vengeance merely creates a cycle of more, and more crime in which no one benefits. It costs us $37,000 a year to incarcerate each inmate, and most of this money is at the expense of other priorities like K-12 education. At 2.3 million inmates currently incarcerated in the US, that is $85 billion dollars “a year” for incarceration.
All major religions seem to understand the lunacy of this through spiritual principles of forgiveness and human redemption. Jesus was fond of helping outcasts such as lepers, prostitutes, and robbers on the cross. This social gospel of Jesus seems to have been lost in much of modern day Christianity that has been redefined by “judgment” as though we have evolved and become someone elses God.
Obama must reset this “tough on crime” legacy of Reagan with a new “smart on crime” policy. This smart on crime approach must not abandon punishment - as there should be some punishment for lawbreaking - but this punishment MUST be limited to the term of the sentence, and not be “punishment for life” as some sort of perpetual vengeance against those who commit crimes. A smarter approach must include state-of-the-art rehabilitation efforts while one is still in prison. This rehabilitation must continue upon release with supportive services for substance abuse and anger management.
It is also simply smarter to involve employers in rehabilitation efforts by providing a mix of carrots and sticks to hire ex-offenders. The carrots could be tax incentives for hiring “and” retaining ex-offenders. The sticks could be laws similar to the ones in the five states that currently prohibit employment discrimination against ex-offenders. These anti-discrimination efforts force employers to relate hiring decisions to the actual work performed, so if the crime is not rationally related to such work, discrimination is forbidden. Additional measures such as prohibiting criminal history questions on employment applications until a later stage in the hiring process where an applicant is deemed “otherwise qualified” would discourage screening out ex-offenders.
Without this smarter approach, we are simply encouraging more crime, more victims, and more extraordinary fiscal irresponsibility in paying for the incarceration of those who could be tax-paying productive members of American society. As we attempt to pay for healthcare, education and other priorities, the time is now for “smart on crime” policies.
Why won't someone in this admin take some time to understand the only logical pathway to energy independence is the stepped approach, natural gas is it for now!! Pickens understands, Cramer understands, Geithner probably understands but takes some time to share his beliefs, where is Obama? The obstinence of our current administration to review the obvious is just arrogant and I am thoroughly disgusted by this behavior.
Someone like Jim Cramer (and I am far from his advocate since his stock 'picks' are still only ~50% correct from the ones I've tracked) should be one of your advisors on this topic; he understands both the opportunities and challenges since he has open access to more independent thinking than your administration (at least it appears this way). It is all about jobs, ability to drive our own future without dealing with the threats of other countries and trying to get our country to a point where my children do not need to go to China or India to make a decent living.
Clean coal is vaporware and doesn't address the need for new job creation . As Cramer pointed out the other day, if we succeed in creating a powerful car battery to run our cars, guess what it needs to plug into to get juiced up each night... electrical outlets which are largely run by coal and unless you solve that 'clean coal' problem immediately, we are just back in the old pollution conundrum exponentially.
The weapon design and arms control communities agree that it is not the capability to design a nuclear device that determines the pace of a country’s acquisition of a first weapon, but, rather, the availability of nuclear weapons materials that can be turned to weapons purposes. For a nation-state, the material for weapons can come from uranium enrichment plants (highly enriched uranium), or reactors and nuclear fuel reprocessing plants (plutonium), or both.
Regardless of its isotopic composition, the minimum amount of plutonium required to make a pure fission nuclear explosive, with a yield equivalent to one to 25 kilotons of chemical high explosives, is quite small, on the order of 1 to 3 kilograms (kg), with the exact amount depending on the level of design expertise and the desired nuclear explosive yield. The minimum amount of highly enriched uranium required is a few times larger—5 to 10kg.
While far from ideal for military applications, the isotopic composition of the plutonium typically produced in civil power reactors does not pose a serious obstacle to fabricating efficient and powerful weapons, as well as crude terrorist devices.
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/power/power.pdf
The proliferation of nuclear weapons is inextricably linked to nuclear power by a shared need for enriched uranium, and through the generation of plutonium as a by-product of spent nuclear fuel. The two industries have been linked since the very beginning and a nuclear weapons free world requires a non-nuclear energy policy. http://www.cnduk.org/index.php/information/info-sheets/briefings.html#nuclearpower
HOPE AND HYPE VS. REALITY IN NUCLEAR REACTOR COST
THE ECONOMICS OF NUCLEAR REACTORS:http://www.vermontlaw.edu/Documents/Cooper%20Report%20on%20Nuclear%20Economics%20FINAL%5B1%5D.pdf
I think I can call you Joe. You're an infinitely more affable fellow that your predecessor. You don't even wanna know what I called him. Anyway, Joe, RE: Solicitation for ideas to ensure recovery/bailout funds spent wisely, I have some suggestions.1. put the Cash Cow on the extinct species list & leave it there. Cash Cow benefit a very few while exploiting a great many. Hardly democratic.2. If a project is growth inducing or speculative in nature . . . it's a cash cow. Taxpayers don't need it. If a few speculators or casino operators put a pile of money into something betting on the come, too bad. If a project requires plan amendments, significant & irreversible cumulative impacts, taxpayers don't need it. If a project requires multiple plan & zoning amendments, it's speculative. Taxpayers don't need it. That money can be better spent elsewhere. If a project requires expansion of existing infrastructure, stretching development further into wildlife habitat & over burdening existing urban services, it's growth inducing, speculative. There is plenty of in-fill land for growth & development. There is a standing stock of commercial structures in which to house new or expanding businesses. Heaven knows, there are plenty of vacant residences in all manner of condition. We are overbuilt. It's speculative, growth inducing & there are better ways to spend tax payers dollars.3. If a project contributes to the sustainability of existing urban areas, fine & dandy. If a project relieves traffic congestion, makes roads safer & smarter, ensures the existing standard of living will continue, dandy. Bring it on. If a project contributes to viability of urban areas & reduces further encroachment into wildlife habitat. ducky. If a project sustains existing agricultural land or perhaps even reverts to ag land, fine & dandy. We need to start growing & producing our own food again. In fact, we need to return to the self-reliance & ingenuity that sustained us in the past.
We need some standard for comparison to figure out how well we are doing. We should have drawn urban limit lines around all urban areas 6 months ago. It's not too late to get started. Urban Limit Lines around the perimeter of all urban areas would provide a geographic area in which to assess resources & assets, raw materials & laborl. We've got nowhere to go but up from here.
Sincerely OpalK9 OTJ
Come on, Californians. Are we the Land of the Fruit & the Nuts or what? Are we gonna stand around swooning while Lawmakers & Politicians bicker & squabble, tinker & Twitter & hi-jack the Golden State back to the Stone Age?
Take a look @ this site: www.commonsense4ca.org. Tell them what you think. At least resolve to solve the budget crisis in a fair & sensible manner. Vote early & often.I, 4 1, am kinda tired of CA Apologists Inside the Beltway. CA is not just Hollywood Royalty & 90210, sun & silicone. We gotta lotta assets, resources & infrastructure to work with . . . if decision-makers could get beyond their own personal agenda & parochial bias.
I know what a mess bio-fuel manufacture made in other states. Saw that on my roadtrip last summer. CA's got an abundance of rooftops & sunshine. Put 'em together & whadda ya' got? A statewide solar array ready-made to take 1 state off the grid. No additional encroachment into wildlife habitat. No huge new infrastructure investment. Wind & solar farms are a redundancy we can't afford. Plus manufacture & sale of solar panels = Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. My. That was easy.
CA's gotta lotta car & a lotta outta work auto sales personnel. What with dealerships closing & all. They could be employed mining DMV databases, searching for the oldest cars in the fleet which are eons old & powered by old, old school technology. CA has car crush programs. Charities are begging for dontated cars. Those Old Smokers & Gross Polluters can be replaced with newer used cars or new cars from an inventory that must be given away anyway. Gear up fleet turnover. Create green jobs. Presently common wisdom is jobs, jobs, jobs, not location, location & location. If we can force the turnover of the TV fleet from analog to digital, we can facilitate the turnover of the truck & auto fleet.
USC (go Trojans) is developing a bionic eye to make the blind see again. Do you think the bionic eye will give lawmakers & decision makers new insight? Whatever. Maybe research could focus on battery operated residences. They said rock n rock was a fad. They said the PC was for geeks & gearheads. They said Who wants a Tweet from a Twitter? & yet Twitter is facilitating revolution in Iran. Stranger things than battery operated homes have happened if we just focus & concentrate.
Heretofore, I had taken as an article of faith that CA Curbside Recycling is indeed removing reuseable resources & materials from the wastestream. Given the many, many betrayals of public trust lately revealed, perhaps I shouldn't assume . . . If our junk is merely being shipped off to China or some 3rd World Banana Republic, we better reform recycling cause idea is fine. CA better work out reciprocal arrangements with industries in other states that do the heavy lifting in the recycling arena. Then all our resources, plastic & paper, metal & glass can be accounted for & we aren't wasting anything. Not rocket science.
CA has an emissions trading program developed to comply with federal clean air standards. Presently the program only address smog forming emissions. Wouldn't take much to tweak that model into a national Carbon Cap & Trade Program. CA's budget shortfall & crisis of credit are not derivative of environmental sensibilities. Global Climate Change is real. It's now. & it's expensive to fix. CA's got the model. It's not brain surgery.
I know . . . I'm just a dog. Oughta shut up & mind my own bidness. Oughta quit digging in Mymi's garden too. As long as there's a squirrel or a cat out there, that ain't gonna happen. Besides what's good for humans is good for dogs & other critters. What's good for GM is good for CA is good for the USA. OpalK9 OTJ
Our Govenator may have failed to mention yesterday, upon the occasion of the Presidential visit, that CA has an Air Resources Board, CA Energy Commission, CalEPA, local planning agencies, special districts & coordinating councils & other agencies responsible for cleaning up CA's environment & managing natural resources. Probably because during the 80's when a lot of these agencies came into being he was busy being Hollywood Glitterati & Legend of the Silver Screen.
Be that as it may during the 80's a lot of time & angst was spent attempting to prepare for this New Age of alternative energy sources by requiring residential developments to orient lots so that at least 80% had adequate roofline orientation on which to place solar panels to take advantage of CA's almost limitless sunlight.
Now would be a good time to use the Budgetary Scalpel to forge a new public/private partnership to retrofit existing residences with solar panels. That's a shovel ready project.
Wind & solar farms are fine & dandy & will help reduce our dependence on foreign oil & reduce our carbon footprint. But it is very expensive infrastructure & ignores a resource we already have available - residential rooftops. Wind & solar farms are also centralized power grid structures. People could have more control over their energy needs & resources if their home became an energy generator instead of energy absorbers.
Centralized power grids are also very vulnerable to terrorist tactics & being held hostage by the Enrons & Ken Lays of the world as happened to Californians when CA deregulated the energy industry (mostly at the pleasure of a Republican Governor much in the image of Ronald Reagan).
This is a win/win because: 1. Energy purveyors could reduce the amout of investment required to upgrade infrastructure; 2. People could be employed to manufacture, sell & install solar panels on existing residences (probably a career for a generation); 3. The average home would reduce energy costs per year in orders of magnitude; 4. the resource already exists so there would be little if any additional impact to the environment & other natural resources like wildlife & water resources; 5. we might possibly Zero Sum our carbon footprint in our lifetime; & 6. the CA Model is not applicable only to Sunny CA. But it's a good place to start. OpalK9 OTJ
President Obama has done a lot in his first few terms. He has outlawed torture, pledged to close Gitmo and give a real trial to each persons there. He has announced sunshine laws for all gov't activity, and he is not ducking the committments to unions and to gay and lesbian people. He is struggling against a terrible legacy, and he has my sympathy for all the people trying to go backward instead of forward with green energy and green jobs, stop giving away money to groups that do not care about the country or the people who live in it. He is trying to stimulate the economy, and we all know that tax cuts for businesses are no stimulus. So many unemployed, so many homeless, we need to focus on basics like healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and hunger/poverty.
I support Obama and I wish him peace and love from his family as he goes through this terrible time. May we all have hope as we go into a future we did not make, but we now have to deal with.
I usually don’t take Republican makeovers very seriously, as most have simply tried to re-hash some version of trickle-down, small government, Reaganomics. But the other night I was watching an infomercial by Mike Huckabee on Winning Back the Middle Class that seemed to focus on changing Washington politics as usual.
Isn’t that supposed to be Obama’s line?
Well, with two cabinet picks who have admitted to failing to pay taxes and only admitting to their tax liability “after” the nomination process had begun, and another withdrawing due to pay-to-play type accusations resulting in an indictment, ethics and undue influence in Washington may actually be an opening for the Republicans, particularly if Obama does not get REAL campaign finance done in his first term.
So what exactly is REAL campaign finance reform…the kind that doesn’t create additional loopholes for influence peddlers?
Publicly funded elections for all federal elections, and “reasonable” Supreme-Court-proof limits on the free speech of so-called independent groups like 527s so that they cannot run campaign ads for or against a candidate within 90 days of a primary or general election would be REAL campaign finance reform.
If Obama does not get this done in his first term, much of his change agenda could be thwarted by the handful of special interest groups that have dominated the agenda in Washington for quite some time. And as stated above, he could create an opening for the Republicans to portray him as a “change is only a slogan to drum up votes” type of candidate while Washington continues business as usual.
Such an appeal to ignore empty change rhetoric will resonate with the very swing voter that put Obama over the top in previously red states like CO, NV, NM, IN, OH, VA, FL, and NC. This is therefore a critical issue for Obama to pay close attention to if he wants to hang on to these voters.
With an 80% approval rating, NOW is the time for Obama to push for this kind of reform, as there are enough Democratic and Republican votes, especially if one vote meant they did not have to face reprisals from these same special interest groups in subsequent elections. Obama’s popularity will not always be this high, and if he waits until his popularity slips, it may be too late to get this done.
Let’s take money completely out of politics now!
-Metteyya Brahmana
This multimedia production celebrates the landmark political win of Barack Obama in 2008. Illustrated by quotes from the media and supporters from all walks of life, this production helps us remember some of the most momentous times of the Democratic campaign.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFAgZs1uqv4
by Marcel F. WilliamsFossil fuels are predominantly responsible for putting excess carbon dioxide and methane intothe Earth's atmosphere, greenhouse gases that are melting our polar ice caps, raising global sea levels, and causing more extreme climate conditions around the world. The coal and natural gas power industry has looked looked towards future technologies for the on site capture of flu gas in order to recover and sequester carbon dioxide. However, there is no cost effective technology for capturing the CO2 from the mobile producers of carbon dioxide: automobiles, trucks, aircraft, and sea craft.But there are new technologies that are rapidly being developed that may eventually divorce carbon dioxide polluting sources of energy from the need for on site capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide. These devices are sometimes referred to as mechanical trees. But what they do is to simply extract and recover carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And these future technologies appear to be far more efficient at extracting CO2 from the air than the plant life on our planet.Some argue that these carbon dioxide from air extracting technologies could be the saviors of the fossil fuel industry. Ironically, such future technologies could also eventually lead to the complete extinction of fossil use on this planet if the CO2 taken from the atmosphere is used in combination with hydrogen from water to produce hydrocarbon fuels such as: gasoline, methanol, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and dimethyl ether.HydrogenBecause the combustion of hydrogen produces only energy and water, hydrogen via the electrolysis of water through hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar has often been proposed as a replacement for hydrocarbon transportation fuels. Liquid hydrogen fuel has been used in US space craft since the days of the Apollo Moon program. And liquid hydrogen has also been frequently proposed for future generation subsonic and hypersonic airliners and aircraft. Hydrogen fueled buses now transport commuters in many urban areas in the US. And hydrogen automobiles have been demonstrated by many automobile companies around the world .However, hydrogen automobiles have a substantially shorter range than hydrocarbon fueled vehicles and are a lot less efficient than electric vehicles. Refueling hydrogen vehicles also takes much longer than refueling with gasoline, ethanol, or methanol. Because of the hydrogen embrittlement of metals like steel, hydrogen pipelines are more expensive to maintain than natural gas and oil pipelines. Aircraft, seacraft and ground vehicles, and the infrastructure associated with these vehicles, would also have to be completely replaced if we completely replaced our fuel economy with hydrogen.Hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 and hydrogenAlternatively, there are several demonstrated methods for synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels by utilizing carbon dioxide in combination with hydrogen which could allow a country to avoid any major overhaul in its transportation energy infrastructure.Chemist have known how to produce methanol from hydrogen and carbon dioxide for more than 80 years:CO2 + 3H2 → CH3OH (methanol) + H2OMethanol is mostly used as a feedstock for making other chemicals. But methanol can be converted into dimethyl ether (DME), a fuel that can be effectively used in diesel engines equipped with new fuel injection systems. The fact that dimethyl ether produces no black smoke, soot, or sulfur dioxide is an clean advantage it has over diesel fuel.Methanol can also be converted into high octane gasoline via the Mobil Oil methanol to gasoline (MTG) process. Back in the 1980's, the New Zealand government produced 600,000 tonnes of gasoline a year from methanol derived from natural gas using the MTG process.Methane gas can also be synthesized from hydrogen and carbon dioxide:CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 (methane) + 2H2OAnd methane can also be converted into diesel and jet fuels via Fischer-Tropsch and hydrocracking processes.Mechanical extraction of atmospheric CO2Plants capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while utilizing sunlight to convert the CO2 into starch. During photosynthesis, trees, for instance, convert carbon dioxide and water into starche molecules and oxygen through a series of oxidation and reduction reactions:6 CO2 + 6 H2O + sunlight ---> C6H12O6 + 6 O2Some farm crops and trees can produce up to 20 metric tons per acre (4047 square meters) of biomass a year. One tonne of dried tree consist of 0.45 tonnes of carbon which would translate into the extraction of 1.65 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually extracted from the atmosphere. That's 33 tonnes of CO2 per acre extracted on an annual basis.Even though the concentration of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is a meager 0.04 per cent, companies like GRT (Global Research Technologies) in Arizona and Canadian researchers at the University of Calgary have already built machines that can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere far more efficiently than any tree or any other source of biomass. GRT claims that its carbon dioxide air extraction system is a thousand times more efficient than a tree of equal size.
GRT CO2 absorbent material The University of Calgary team has shown that they could capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere with less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. Their carbon dioxide from air extraction tower was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on just one single square meter of air scrubbing material. Astonishingly, this suggest that even the most conservative estimates would allow these CO2 extracting machines to produce more than 80 thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide per acre annually.
University of Calgary carbon dioxide extraction machine Because of the need for cheap electricity for hydrogen production, only nuclear and hydroelectric facilities would be currently viable for hydrocarbon fuel production utilizing carbon dioxide from air extraction technologies. Hydroelectric facilities currently produce electricity at 0 .85 cents per kwh while electricity from nuclear facilities currently cost 1.68 cents per kwh. Wind and solar thermal electricity, however, is much more expensive and ranges from over 4 cents per kwh to over 6 cents per kwh.At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, F. Jeffrey Martin and Williams L. Kubic, Jr. have developed the Green Freedom concept for using the cooling towers of nuclear reactors to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for the production of gasoline and methanol.
They argue that a 1 GWe power plant using their Green Freedom method could produce 18,000-bbl/day of gasoline or 5000 tonnes a day of methanol.Carbon neutral hydrocarbon synfuel production at nuclear and hydroelectric facilities would not only allow such power facilities to produce transportation fuels and industrial chemicals, they would also allow them to pump methanol and oxygen up to 80 kilometers away to high efficiency power plants for the production of peak-load and back-up-load electricity and commercial waste heat. Nuclear power plants could therefore not only produce base-load electricity but could also supply methanol fuel to replace greenhouse polluting natural gas power plants which are used for daytime peak-load energy and back-up energy for wind and solar power plants.In 2006, the US consumed nearly 21 million bbl/day of petroleum for transportation fuel and industrial chemical use. If we assumed that nuclear power plants replaced all of the petroleum used in the US in 2006, that would roughly require more than a thousand new 1Gwe nuclear reactors, over 1000 GWe of electrical capacity. Existing nuclear sites that already have nuclear reactors could probably on add an additional 200 to 300 Gwe of capacity. However, if one large centralized nuplex (nuclear park) with about 30GWe of average electrical capacity were set up in every state in the union, then that could add an additional 1500 GWe of electrical capacity, more than enough to replace all of our petroleum needs today and probably our needs 30 years from now.If the new Obama administration is going to invest substantial R&D money into new energy technologies, I would strongly suggest investing in the fast tracking of these carbon dioxide extraction from air technologies that could revolution synfuel production by helping to achieve US independence from the petroleum fuel economy while protecting the global environment from the dangers of global warming and climate change.Links and References1. Green Freedom: A concept for producing carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and chemicals, Los Alamos Labs, November 2007 F.J. Martin and WL Kubic, 2. GRT (Global Research Technologies, LLC)3. Giant Carbon dioxide Vacuums4. Snatching Carbon dioxide from the Atmosphere5. CO2 capture from air6. First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved:7. First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved by Columbia University Scientist and Private Company, (2007) Earth Institute News Archive, 04/24/078. Carbon capture and storage:9. Researchers Scramble to Create CO2-Busting Technologies:10. CO2 capture from ambient air: a feasibility assessment:11. Carbon Capture and Storage A False Solution12. The Case for Carbon Dioxide Extraction from Air13. Klaus S. Lackner, Patrick Grimes, Hans-J. Ziock, Capturing Carbon Dioxide From Air14. K. Schultz, L. Bogart, G. Besenbruch, L. Brown, R. Buckingham, M. Campbell, B. Russ, and B. Wong HYDROGEN AND SYNTHETIC HYDROCARBON FUELS – A NATURAL SYNERGY General Atomics Poster15. G. Olah, A. Goeppert, and G. Prakash, (2006) Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, Wiley-VCH Verlang, Weinheim, Germany
