Thumbs up on these initiatives, as described in the Grist story:

The package would allocate $500 million for weatherization programs to reduce energy usage. It also would approve a $300 million investment in advanced battery research, $1 billion for the advanced battery manufacturing loan guarantees, $500 million for local governments to improve energy efficiency, another $500 million for additional energy efficiency and renewable energy R&D; and $140 million for electricity transmission improvements. Another $2.5 billion is set aside for mass transit funding, with $400 million marked for Amtrak in particular.

This part, I’m not so sure of:

The package includes additional assistance for the auto industry, putting $25 billion of the $700 billion bailout toward loans. The lawmakers say that their loan package “requires a long-term financial plan from the companies and has robust provisions for oversight, taxpayer protection, and executive compensation.” It also calls for tax deductions for interest payments on car loans and state taxes for new cars purchased between November 12, 2008 and December 31, 2009.

Goodie. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m no opponent to government investing money that will help save our planet. I might even go so far as to call that a worthwhile investment. But do we really have to piggy-back that with huge payments to U.S. automakers so that they don’t have to compete on the global market? It seems like one of the conditions attached to that auto money should involve fuel efficiency standards, not just a financial plan. Paying auto-makers to keep up the status quo seems a bad idea. At least that was Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s take.

Why not do something useful with that money that also helps the Big Three get more competitive in the world market? A financial incentive to produce plug-in hybrids, hybrids and more fuel-efficient cars sounds about right. The U.S. automakers couldn’t figure out that commuters wouldn’t want to drive a Tahoe or Yukon to work when gas is $4 per gallon. Why reward incompetence? Instead, let’s drag Detroit kicking and screaming into the reality of today’s world, and the world of the future. That has to be better than blindly forking over $25 billion without a commitment to change anything, right?

There’s an excitement about the approaching Obama Presidency that has nothing to do with his race. Obama understands the importance of caring for our environment and the real and growing danger of climate change. He gets it, where so many in the past have obfuscated, attacked the science, or simply talked about the importance of reversing climate change while doing absolutely nothing about it. Although he did mention “clean coal” technology, I was particularly stoked that it was last among the solutions he listed and that he used the phrase “develop clean coal technologies.” During the campaign, I was afraid that Obama believed clean coal technology actually existed. I should have known better.

Clean coal does not exist. It’s dirty to mine, dirty when it burns and dirty when converted to liquid fuel. The sooner we can get away from all fossil fuels for electricity the better. And if we take the lead and improve the technology for solar and wind energy, we might just get China and India to stop burning coal as well.

CNN is reporting McCain will not go back to Capitol Hill today, as some of his colleagues work to finalize an agreement. Maybe debating Obama to a draw took too much out of him, or maybe he realized it was easier to manage this thing if somebody just summed it up for him in terms he could understand. He was described as “fairly quiet” during his all-important meetings late last week.

Perhaps he decided to pass because his understanding of the economy isn’t stellar, or perhaps because the de-regulation he fought for so hard for 26 years caused this mess. Maybe Congressional leaders who are actually working this thing out told him he didn’t need to be in D.C. to not talk about the plan. He’s perfectly capable of not talking about the bailout from anywhere.

Be that as it may, focusing on McCain’s lack of economic knowledge is missing the point. I think it is possible for a person to be a good president without being an economist. But for that to happen, he must have good judgment, good advisors, and make rational decisions. McCain has demonstrated none of these traits so far in the campaign.

The real story is that McCain is just going from one lousy stunt to another. The Palin pick was a gamble that could be disastrous for the country if it actually worked. The suspension of his campaign (which never really got very suspended) was a joke, and threatening to skip the debate was clearly a cheap ploy to either hype the foreign policy debate (a topic McCain thought he would win) or to reschedule for next week, and, by some odd coincidence, delay the vice-presidential debate until a more convenient time for the McCain campaign. My guess would be somewhere around Nov. 6.

It’s a presidential race, and McCain is acting anything but presidential. He’s acting out like a petulent child. Here’s some free advice, John. If you do get elected president, you have to occasionally look someone in the eye, even if you disagree with that person. If there’s a financial crisis, you can’t shut down the government until it gets worked out.

I just hope that once this election is over we see more of the old John McCain. This new one frightens me.

The solution to our economic and environmental problems?

Here are a few of them:

1. The economy has too much money leveraged against itself. Read Jim Manzi’s post in The American Scene for the best non-partison, layman’s-terms explanation I’ve found for why we’re in such a mess.
2. The federal government has to do something to avoid a financial meltdown.
3. It’s going to be really, really expensive.

Happily for me, and anyone else who cares about the future of our planet as much as their 401k, government money spent on improving infrastructure will put money back in the pockets of working Americans. The first domino fell in this crisis when an increasing number of people could not afford to pay their mortgages. Foreclosures went up, housing values tanked and the backbone of too much of our economy (home equity) began to evaporate. Part of this is because banks were irresponsible in granting loans, true. But part of this is also because people have to spend $4 per gallon of gas to get to work. It is because electricity, natural gas and heating oil prices are all rising faster than the paychecks of most Americans.

A solar thermal energy farm in California's Mojave Desert.

There is a solution to high energy prices, and it is not off-shore drilling. We need to make mass transit an option for people who don’t work in Washington, D.C. or New York. We need to revamp the power grid to make it more efficient and eliminate transmission loss of electrical power. We need to construct the infrastructure to get energy from wind farms in the Midwest and solar thermal fields in the desert to mainstream America.

The Senate took a positive first step today, when it passed an extension and expansion of the renewable energy tax credit, but we need more of a push in this direction. There are real-life solutions to our energy crisis rather than turning everything nuclear (McCain’s basic energy plan, coupled with pointless offshore drilling), or wasting time and money on clean coal (a pipe-dream that Obama keeps bringing up to gain favor in the rust belt).

Improved mass transit and efficient power lines are not technical impossibilities, like carbon sequestration. So far, all devised methods of carbon capture and storage would be so energy-intensive that there would be no net decrease in the environmental footprint of burning coal for electricity, not to mention that burying liquid carbon in an empty oil well is no guarantee it would stay there.

Have you ever wondered why it’s easier to take a high-speed passenger train from Paris to Athens than from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.? Ever tried to get to work in a mid-size city without a car? Have you ever loaded the family onto a train for your summer beach trip?

No, you haven’t, but you could. Yes, it’s expensive, but good Lord, what are we spending our money on now? Trillions to Iraq. Potentially $700 billion for a bailout, with no guarantee that there won’t be more bailouts over the horizon.

A conservative’s conservative, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., points out there are a lot of problematic aspects of the bailout.

1. It would reward the greed and irresponsible lending practices that caused the problem in the first place.
2. It would bail out foreign entities that invested in the U.S.
3. Either the national government makes massive loans to these corporations or actually takes a stake in them, a nightmare for any politician who’s advocated “smaller government.”

So, conservatives, tell me why this bailout is acceptable and yet the government spending money to improve our infrastructure, grow the economy by providing jobs and lowering energy costs for everyone is socialism.

The worst part of it is, the Republican Party of today isn’t really conservative anymore, at least not fiscally. We have a $9 trillion debt, thanks to the current administration and neither McCain nor Obama is going to cut back on government spending after this election.

The difference is simply where the money comes from, and for what purpose it is used. Obama wants to close tax loopholes for the wealthy and major corporations and invest money in renewables.

McCain wants to cut taxes even further for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, claiming that will boost the economy from the top down. In essence, he wants to be even more George W. Bush than George W. Bush was. Does he really think it will work this time? Oil companies have never had it so good as they did under the Bush administration. Their profit margins have been shattering records year-after-year. Has any of that money trickled down to the rest of us? Of course not. Gas prices are also at record highs, and as a result of our government’s lack of investment into clean technology and renewable energy, we are more dependent on oil than ever.

The crisis has forced McCain to re-write his economic policy on the fly. For more than 20 years in the Senate, he’s fought hard for the de-regulation of Wall Street. Now, it’s becoming clear that a staggering lack of regulation allowed this crisis to fester and grow. So now he rails against the greed and corruption of Wall Street CEOs, but just a month ago, Carly Fiorina was his chief economic advisor. Fiorina, you may remember, was forced out as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but got a $45 million going-away present as 20,000 employees were laid off because of her bad business decisions.

These are the exact “golden parachutes” McCain has decried so forcefully in the past week. He claimed on The Today Show, that he didn’t “know the details” of Fiorina’s severance package, and extols her virtues.

Either McCain is lying about not knowing the details of Fiorina’s severance, or he and his team were incredibly irresponsible in doing background checks on a very high-level adviser. Based on his track record in this campaign, I’d say it’s probably both. Yesterday, he praised her as a “role model” in the same breath that he used to demand Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac CEOs give back their severance packages.

Obama, meanwhile, is preaching more regulation, also lambasting golden parachutes, and focusing on how the government will be repaid for the deal.

Neither candidate has explicitly endorsed or rejected the Bush bailout plan, and they are both focusing more on who is to blame for the problem than what to do next. Therefore we have to look at their history and tendencies to try to determine what they will do if elected.

McCain has always been a hands-off, help industry by cutting taxes on the wealthy politician. That may help stock prices recover, but it won’t help middle and lower class families pay their mortgage or their energy bills.

Obama’s energy plan has always included investing money in renewables to provide jobs, reducing consumption of oil rather than trying to drill for more of it, and adapting our country for a clean future rather than clinging to the dirty ways of the past.

I shared these thoughts with a more conservative friend of mine a few months ago, well before we realized how serious the mortgage crisis was. I even used the phrase “New Deal” as a description of what I’d like to see happen. He responded that the New Deal was a failure and that only World War II brought us out of the Depression.

PWA workers install Chicago's first subway system, circa. 1940.

He’s right, and he’s wrong. If you see FDR’s program as simply an economic instrument meant to end the Depression, then it did technically fail. The Depression did not end because of the New Deal. The New Deal helped, but not enough.

But looking beyond, the effects of the New Deal are still being felt today. For example, only 10 percent of rural homes had electricity in the early 1930s. It was not profitable for utilities to run power lines out to the countryside, so they didn’t, until the New Deal’s TVA and Rural Electrific Administration.

It was the Public Works Administration that first brought a subway system to Chicago, so why not continue in that vein now that people can’t afford to drive their cars to work. If the government can pick up the tab to bring electricity to the rural farms, why not bring efficient wind power to the large cities? Why not expand tax incentives to make people want to put solar panels on their roofs, and spring up solar panel manufacture and installation businesses across the country?

The fact is that since The New Deal and the completion of the Eisenhower Interstate highway system, our nation’s infrastructure has taken a backseat to sexier ways to spend money. Bridges are collapsing, our power grid could use an upgrade, our highway transportation fund is in danger,  and mass transit needs a big infusion to give people an alternative to automobiles.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Bill Clinton said government investment in green technologies could have on The Daily Show last night. Dennis Markatos, a blogger for publicradio.org, sees the crisis as an opportunity to rally behind the policies we should have enacted years ago.

So, as our government debates and throws out astronomical cost figures to solve this economic crisis, let’s not forget to expand our green economy. It makes sense economically and environmentally, and for once, Americans would not have to choose which was more important.

There is no truth.

Let’s look at this election. You’ve got John McCain, who started out as an experienced war hero, a veteran of Washington, but with a reputation as a maverick who speaks his mind. On his side he had experience out the wazoo, distinguished military service, and he could make some credible argument that he would be less bad than George W. Bush.

He promised to run a clean and “honorable” campaign (as opposed to the Rove-style attacks that got George W into office twice). He even rode around in a campaign bus called the “Straight Talk Express,” and people did not yet deem it ironic.

Back then, Barack Obama was too inexperienced to run for President. Then, when that strategy wasn’t having the impact in polls, suddenly Obama was too famous to be president. Seriously? Isn’t that, umm, part of the gig? Quick, name one non-famous president. The guy knows how to draw a crowd and that puts him on a level with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? Yeah, I’m sure 80,000 people would roll into Mile-High Stadium to hear Paris’ thoughts on the election and why banking regulations are, like, so totally hot.

So McCain’s credibility is starting to fray heading into the Republican National Convention, not to mention he made a few (repeated) gaffes on geography and he turned 72 years old. I’m sure he’s in fine mental and physical health, but it’s a consideration. Remember how hard it was to get Grandpa to give up his car keys, even after it was pretty clear he was a danger to himself and anyone else on the road? What happens when Grandpa has Secret Service protection and nuclear launch codes?

But I shouldn’t say that. It’s age-ist, which I suppose is better than being sexist, mostly because Carly Fiorina hasn’t stuck her big foot in her mouth about age-ism… yet. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. I still have a few more points to cover before I get to Fiorina.

Actually, just one point, and its name is Sarah Palin. I can’t say “her” name is Sarah Palin, because that would be sexist. After saying for months that Obama was too inexperienced or too big a celebrity to be president, McCain chooses someone with less credible experience than Obama and goes about trying to make her into just as much of a celebrity. It’s a classic example of one-upmanship… in Bizarro World.

Palin did have several comparative disadvantages to Obama though. The biggest such disadvantage is the fact that Obama knows about things that go on in the world around him, and isn’t having to learn about foreign policy while rigorously campaigning and refusing nearly all non-scripted contact with the press. It’s exhausting denying all those interview requests. I don’t think her journalism classes at the University of Idaho prepared her for that.

Nothing against people who took five years to get a journalism degree. I’m one of those people. Then again, I’m not one of the four human beings on the planet with a realistic chance of becoming president in the next four years.

For my part, I can’t decide if McCain’s choice was insanely dumb or just insane. After all, Palin did ignite a conservative base that wasn’t all that jazzed about McCain. His convention bounce is fading fast, but he enjoyed a lead in the polls for the first time in this campaign. On the other hand, people were bound to catch on to the fact that the moose-hunting momma was woefully unprepared to even do a serious foreign policy interview with a reporter. At some point, you have to believe the American people will want to vote for someone who can at least pretend to know what they’re doing.

McCain was apparently hoping no one would notice how unqualified Palin was. He set out to achieve this goal by hiding her from the press, and attacking any media or Democrat who questioned her credibility.

For this task, he mostly relied on Ms. Fiorina, a spokesperson and advisor for the McCain campaign who has given her boss nothing but acid reflux disease. Almost as soon as the Palin pick was announced, Fiorina was pouncing on anyone with the audacity to say “who?” as being a sexist bigot Nazi sympathizer. Apparently, when a female candidate runs for vice-president we are all supposed to surrender our votes unquestioningly. Any rumblings that being mayor of a town of 9,000 and then governor of Alaska for 20 months does not qualify one to be vice-president and Fiorina, or one of McCain’s other attack dogs, will shoot you down like a moose.

(I’m sorry to keep bringing up the moose hunt. I don’t actually have a problem with moose hunters, I just find it amusing. I’ve never tried it, but I imagine shooting a moose is like shooting a deer that doesn’t move as fast and makes a bigger target.)

In the meantime, McCain goes on The View, and gets absolutely toasted on the Palin pick and the attack ads he’s been running about Barack Obama. Apparently teaching kids to avoid sexual predators is the same as putting condoms in their hands in kindergarten. Good to know. All of this, mind you, comes from a man who ditched his disfigured wife for a beer heiress 18 years his junior, whom he married just a month after his divorce was final. Sure she waited five years for him to come back from the Hanoi Hilton, but that’s no reason he shouldn’t play the field.

Cindy McCain (the aforementioned heiress, whose previous role in the campaign was to stand around and be rich) complains about the vicious media who “picked our bones clean.” Apparently, McCain thought he would have praise lavished upon him by the estrogen brigade for choosing a female running mate and was perhaps not quite prepared to be spit-roasted by women of substance. As far as McCain is concerned, women only exist to provide him more children, millions of dollars, punchlines and votes from disaffected and delusional Hillary supporters.

Anyway, back to Fiorina and Palin. So Palin did this interview with Charlie Gibson, and she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was and contradicted a lot of the things she said before she was running for vice-president, and The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan nearly blogged himself into a coma pointing out all the times that she’s lied, contradicted previous statements or done things that are just downright nutty. His series on “The Odd Lies of Sarah Palin” highlights a number of inane things that the vice-presidential hopeful has lied about. The series is at 11 parts and counting.

Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live realized that Tina Fey looks a lot like Sarah Palin, saw the ABC interview and decided to make the funniest sketch of the last 10 years.

Fiorina said it was sexist. The nation quasi-revolted, because Saturday Night Live is an American institution while the national economy and Bill of Rights are just things that egg-heads talk about in libraries at college while the rest of us attended our fourth kegger of the month.

Then, Fiorina committed her final act of political hara-kiri by saying that Palin was not qualified to run a large corporation, possibly ignoring the fact that she herself was obviously not qualified to run a large corporation either. Fiorina did go on to say that she also didn’t believe McCain, Obama or Joe Biden were qualified to run a large corporation. But look on the bright side, America, there’s no way running the country can be as difficult as running a Fortune 500 company, right?

Nobody is qualified to run a major corporation! Especially not me!

While a broken clock is right twice a day, and a blind squirrel may eventually find an acorn, Fiorina still leaves us wondering when she will stumble upon her first morsel of truth, as she tries to say Palin’s galling lack of knowledge about foreign policy is ok, because she has “executive experience.”

Riiiiight. Being commissioner of my fantasy football league is executive experience too, that doesn’t make me qualified to do anything more than organize a yearly draft.

The fact is, Palin’s executive experience as governor is less than two years in length. Not quite half a term. Basically, all she’s done is request a Bridge to Nowhere, decry the term Bridge to Nowhere as offensive to Alaskans, spend millions of dollars in Nowhere building roads that would connect to said bridge, decide that maybe the bridge wasn’t such a good idea after all, spend the federal money allocated for the bridge elsewhere and then claim she told Congress “Thanks but no thanks” on the no-longer-offensively-named Bridge to Nowhere. Sure, it would have been more fiscally responsible to oppose the process from the beginning, but why let facts get in the way of a good campaign slogan?

She also got huge checks from the oil companies in return for allowing them to drill anywhere that wasn’t federally protected, which she gave back to Alaska’s taxpayers while requesting significantly more ear-marked federal dollars per person than any other state. So her platform of being a reformer who objects to the concept of ear-marked, pork spending is, well, dubious at best. It’s like she’s some poetry-reading European who picks up girls on the rebound, saying things like “it’s disgusting what your jerk boyfriend did to a beautiful woman like you. I would never do that to you.” Except that while he’s saying these things, he’s writing down the numbers of her hot friends from her cell phone.

Before being elected governor, Palin was mayor of Wasilla, a town of fewer than 9,000 residents. Her primary accomplishment as mayor of that town was to build a sports complex, which as the Wall Street Journal reports:

The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin’s legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

There is actually more to executive experience than firing everyone who disagrees with you and starting projects you can’t finish. Then again, look who’s been in the White House for seven years. Perhaps I was wrong.

At any rate, this is the experience Fiorina and other Republicans are saying is more important to being President than Obama’s time in the Senate. They say his work in the Illinois state legislature is meaningless. They are flat out dismissive of the work done by community organizers. Obama’s Ivy League education is somehow a negative as well, proof that he is out of touch with average Americans who could not get into said institutions or become the first black president of Harvard Law Review.

Call me a classic example of a left-wing nut job (if you haven’t already), but I’m ok with having a President who’s smarter than the idiots I drink beer with on a Friday night. I never want to hear a President say “Hey, check this out,” and then have to rush him to the emergency room five minutes later.

For those keeping track, we have officially reached the era in which:

1. Saying one female political candidate has more substance than another is sexist.
2. It’s easier to run the United States of America than a Fortune 500 company
3. “Straight Talk” means blatant lies and fear-mongering
4. Building a hockey rink in a small town is more important when running for president than being a United States Senator.
5. The press is so hated that nobody really minds if vice-presidential candidates won’t take questions from them

Thanks, Carly. Thanks for everything. At least we don’t have to pay you $45 million to go away, like Hewlett Packard did.

McCain apparently told someone in his campaign that Fiorina would now “disappear.” I can no longer give McCain the benefit of the doubt to tell the truth, but for the benefit of my sanity, I hope he keeps his word on this one.

It was really just as well for McCain that Fiorina disappear, although I’m sure he would have preferred she not explode like the Death Star first. After all, now McCain is all fired up about re-regulating the financial industry and large corporations that he worked so long and hard to de-regulate while in the Senate.

“We will stop multimillion dollar payouts to CEO’s who have broken the public trust. We will put an end to running Wall Street like a casino. We will make businesses work for the benefit of their shareholders and employees. And we will make sure that your savings, IRA, 401k and pension accounts are protected,” McCain said.

“I also pledge to you that I will do everything in my power to undo everything I did over the past 26 years in Washington, and to drastically realign my position on everything, so long as you vote for me,” McCain didn’t say, but he may as well have.

Fix the economy? That's my job?

When he says things like that, it’s probably best that he stay away from his “chief financial advisor” who took home such a great severence package after running Hewlett-Packard into the ground, forcing massive job cuts and slashing the HP stock price in half.

Now, we remain somewhere in the midst of a giant economic crisis. Two financial giants are being swallowed up and the government is bailing out AIG to the tune of an $85 billion loan because the results of an AIG bankruptsy would stretch far and wide, a true financial disaster of proportions difficult to imagine. Tuesday, McCain opposed the buyout, kindof, mostly repeating his talking points about reform without any specifics on what exactly he was planning to reform, or how economic catastrophe can be averted. Tonight, less than 48 hours later, he is now in favor of the buyout.

He’s admitted that:

“The issue of economics is something that I’ve really never understood as well as I should. I understand the basics, the fundamentals, the vision, all that kind of stuff,” McCain said. “But I would like to have someone I’m close to that really is a good strong economist. As long as Alan Greenspan is around I would certainly use him for advice and counsel.”

McCain said his staff hates it when he discusses his shortcomings on economics, even though he has read widely and studied the subject.

“I’ve never been involved in Wall Street, I’ve never been involved in the financial stuff, the financial workings of the country, so I’d like to have somebody intimately familiar with it,” he said of a potential vice president.

Hmm, he wanted to pick a running mate with a thorough knowledge of the national economy to shore up one of his admitted weaknesses. How’d that turn out again? Oh, right, Palin. Great decision.

As if all of the above weren’t enough to make your cerebral cortex short-circuit like Clark Griswold’s Christmas lights, the past month has also given us:

• Sean Combs (Diddy, Puffy, Puff Daddy Dadd, or whatever you’re supposed to call him now) riding on a Segway and wondering if there are any black people in Alaska
• Ralph Nader paying who knows how much money to air this commercial, in which he talks to a bird about why nobody is paying any attention to him in this election. He still manages to come across as the second most-credible candidate running.
• Karl Rove saying McCain’s ads went too far and didn’t pass the 100% truth test, which would be kind of like Adolf Hitler saying that Joseph Mengele really wasn’t a nice guy. Yes, it’s true, but why in the world are you the person saying it?
• John McCain is apparently unaware of who the Prime Minister of Spain is. Best case scenario, McCain misheard the question and rather than asking for clarification, assumed he was being asked about one of those pesky South American drug lords. Worst case, Spain is being added to our top-secret enemies list and we’ll dispatch them as soon as we finish with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakiston, North Korea, Ivy League colleges and the liberal media (i.e. not Fox News or talk radio).
• Sarah Palin’s second actual interview with the press is a two-parter from the ever-impartial Sean Hannity of Fox News, who (probably) asked her such tough questions as “Gee Governor, what’s it like, having so much more executive experience than Barack Obama?” and “Wasn’t it brave of you to go through with your pregnancy after all?” They may as well have let McCain himself ask the questions.

It was all just a dream, right?

So, finally, after all of the lies, the lack of information, exploding spokes people, idiotic choices, ridiculous statements, economic catastrophies, conversations with birds and both conventions, where do we stand? What’s the end result?

We’re right back where we started. The race is a virtual dead heat with a slight lead for Obama. It’s as if somebody clicked the ruby slippers together and poof, we’re back in Kansas again, and the whole Oz we’ve been subjected to for the past month was all a dream.

I don’t know if I can take any more of this. I mean, the House of Representatives just passed an energy bill and I can’t even find time to write about it because McCain and Palin are making my head explode.

Maybe that was the plan all along. If you can’t win on the issues, just make all the Democrats’ heads blow up. That makes just as much sense as anything else I can come up with to explain the McCain campaign’s lies, changing positions on the issues, confusion over basic facts and complete reversal in tone.

You’re a wily one, John McCain, but you won’t fool me. I’ll keep my brains inside my skull long enough to cast my vote for Obama in a solid red state. And even though all the electoral votes from my stupid, stupid state will go to you, I’ll give a grin of satsfaction when your margin of victory here isn’t high as you once thought it would be and I’ll thank God when Obama wins the election. Because four years of this kind of nonsense would be about three years and 11 months more than I could take.

“Drill, baby, drill is not an energy policy”

“We can’t bear Palin”

“Real leaders don’t have to cram for the interviews”

“Blink before going to war”

“Bush in a skirt”

Most of all, though, it’s the pitbull sign that got me. Probably because “diplomat” isn’t a word you hear tossed around very much in this campaign, from either side.

You don’t hear it from the McCain campaign because McCain would just as soon go to war as negotiate with growing threats like Iran or North Korea and Palin seems ready to invade Russia because that’s what her handlers have told her to say.

You don’t hear Obama saying it because… well, I don’t really know why. After all, Obama’s actual ideas on foreign affairs have been right on, and two steps ahead of Bush or McCain since his first day in the Senate. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan sums it up better than I could:

On one of the most critical decisions of the war, Obama staked out a position a while back that the Bush camp and neocons assailed as naive, disastrous, and revealing of his unfitness to be president. But like almost everything else Obama has said about the war, he was right and Bush was wrong. Obama was ahead of Bush in proposing to shift troops to Afghanistan, ahead of Bush in suggesting a timetable for Iraq withdrawal (subsequently embraced by Maliki), ahead of Bush in arguing we should talk directly to Iran, and, of course, right about not fighting the war in the first place.

Good judgment trumps experience yet again. And yet McCain, who aspires to be the oldest elected first term president, trots out as his running mate who has neither experience in foreign policy nor much of an interest in it until three weeks ago. We can’t know for sure what kind of judgment she has because she is still woefully unprepared for even serious foreign policy interviews, let alone meetings with foreign leaders (of which she has had none in her life).

That should be perfectly fine, if you’re nearing the halfway mark of your first term as governor of Alaska. Unfortunately, McCain dragged Palin out of her comfort zone for a cheap boost to a flailing campaign, desperately needing to create the campaign narrative instead of simply reacting to Obama.

I don’t mean to beat a dead horse (or shoot it from a helicopter) but it’s easy to be outraged when such blatant manipulation and deceit as the McCain campaign has foisted upon the American public is rewarded with such a boost in the polls. If McCain wins this election, it will prove for years to come that shrewd judgment, focus on the issues, and solid plans for America’s future can’t trump vicious, lying attack ads (which even Karl effing Rove says are over the line), a personable folksy charm, and millions of lobbyists’ dollars.

A vote for McCain is a vote for not just George W. Bush’s policies (although McCain seems to grow more infatuated with them by the week), but also the stubborn, deceitful way in which the current administration has gotten exactly what it wanted for the past seven years. WMDs in Iraq? Sure, if it’s convenient. The Bill of Rights? We’ll pass something called the Patriot Act that makes it obsolete. People will have to vote for it. After all, who could oppose something called the Patriot Act post-9-11? Nobody, case closed.

McCain promised to run an “honorable” campaign and yet now he’s slinging mud faster than a 6-year-old at summer camp. He’s trying to rebuild his image as a maverick through his spunky running mate, who won’t talk to the press because she doesn’t know enough to answer their questions. He’s getting caught completely off guard on shows like The View, because increasingly, he’s making himself less available to the traditional media. It’s easier that way. That way you don’t have to defend the content of your ads, which pundits from all sides of the political spectrum are calling deceitful, dispicable and worse.

It’s easy to fall into a cynical trap there and resort to personal attacks rather than focusing on why Obama and his policies would be better for America (unless you happen to run an oil company). My archives will show I’ve fallen into McCain and Palin-bashing a time or two. I need to re-frame my thought process and look more objectively at issues and policies at stake in this election. The great part (for Democrats) is Obama comes out ahead in that light.

Obama has shown far more insightful judgment and has proved he can grasp the complexities of dealing with other world leaders without threatening to go to war with them. Obama has the better (though far from perfect) energy policy. Obama wants to give tax cuts to 95 percent of Americans and force corporations and the top 0.01 percent of the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. McCain wants to give tax cuts to the wealthy, hoping that money will trickle down to everyone else, but not all that concerned if it doesn’t. He also wants to take in less revenue but promises to continue spending at the same reckless pace that the Bush administration established. Once upon a time conservatism meant balanced budgets and responsible spending. Now it stands for dirty politics and a complete disconnect between income and expenditure, passing whatever debt results down to future generations.

These are the facts. McCain has spent a lot of time and money trying to distract us from these facts, first by grabbing the mantle of more off-shore drilling (which sounds great in stump speeches, but won’t actually bring the price of gasoline down, and therefore won’t actually help anyone but the oil companies who land the drilling leases). Now that that fervor has died down, he’s settled into attack mode. No need to talk issues, just lie, lie, lie about the other guy and hope something sticks.

These are the issues that matter from now to November. We need to keep our eyes on the prize, ignore the actions that infuriate us, but don’t seem to matter to undecided swing voters. We should make the case that Obama will improve things in this country, not focusing on the fact that McCain is running a dishonorable campaign of offensive lies.

And we should also watch SNL again, because this was hilarious.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/palin-hillary-open/656281/

No wonder the McCain campaign is trying so hard to keep her away from the media. She may be the home-grown folk hero you’ve all been looking for, but it’s pretty clear she has no business being anywhere in our national chain of command. I respect her immensely for her pro-life stance, and truly believe she did the right thing carrying a Down Syndrome child, when many are aborted. She is undoubtedly tough, resolute and lives out her convictions. She should rightly be seen as an inspiration to working mothers and proof that a woman does not have to sacrifice having a family to have a career. She should not be vice-president.

If McCain hadn’t been so impulsive in choosing her, perhaps she could have learned more about foreign affairs or the national economy before she was thrust into the VP spotlight. She’s dangerously unqualified to do anything but spout catch phrases and run the state of Alaska, but that’s not even the issue here.

The issue is that John McCain chose a cheap bump in the polls over what’s best for America (choosing a running mate who would be ready to lead should anything happen to him). He is doing a dis-service to his country and even to Palin herself by choosing her as the VP candidate in this election. She’s clearly not ready, and I’m tired of government that doesn’t blink, doesn’t think, doesn’t admit that they might be wrong.

Since the announcement, John McCain has picked up his old “Maverick” persona, which he ditched after the primaries in favor of the “Obama is too inexperienced” or “too much of a celebrity” mantra. Now that he has his own inexperienced celebrity, he’s back to claiming to be a maverick (even if his voting record says otherwise).

That issue is already well-documented, but here’s another. One trait that McCain, Palin and George W. Bush have in common; they have all proven to be dangerously reckless, unconscionably impulsive, and never wavering in their course of action no matter what the facts. This recklessness cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq. It’s why we allowed torture to go on and why the President was allowed to rework some of those pesky Constitutional freedoms he didn’t like via the Patriot Act.

But why take it from me? Here’s someone you might want to listen to (and no, it’s not Matt Damon):

No, I haven’t forgotten that this is a conservation blog, and I know I haven’t mentioned a single environmental issue yet. Well, as if her galling lack of knowledge about foreign policy isn’t enough, Palin is also denying that global warming is man-made. McCain’s choosing her as a running mate represents another slap in the face to conservationists, whom he used to talk nice to, even while voting right in step with the disastrous environmental indifference of George Bush.

But for once, I’ve found an issue that seems more important than curbing greenhouse gases and developing clean, renewable energy. The irresponsibility that McCain showed when choosing such an inexperienced running mate is chilling. Bush and Karl Rove were pretty good at getting elected. It’s too bad they did such a horrendous job running the country once elected. McCain is now patterning himself in the same mold, and the arrogance and recklessness is truly frightening.

McCain proved by choosing Palin as his running mate that he is unfit to lead our country, that he cannot make the kinds of critical decisions that would put the country in front of his own desires and well-being. God help us all if he were to make such cavalier choices from the Oval Office. That’s not even to address the truly unspeakable: What if Palin actually becomes president?

After two weeks of intense briefing by the McCain campaign, she still had never heard of the Bush Doctrine until asked about it on national television, is unsure of how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work, cannot answer a basic policy question when advisors haven’t written a response for her, has never actually met a foreign world leader, and has no experience and little apparent knowledge beyond the scope of Alaska. She keeps decrying pork barrel spending, but does she even realize that her state is the worst offender among the 50?

Imagining a president who has less clue what is going on than George W. Bush did: that’s enough to keep me up at night, long after nightmares about global warming catastrophes have dissipated.

I saw a film today, oh boy…

After a particularly busy week at work, I decided to kick back and relax by watching Across the Universe (and yes, there is a point to this post besides my ridiculously mundane Friday night). I still hadn’t seen the movie, and being a huge Beatles fan, I was anxious to give it a shot.

The movie was pretty good, but most of all got me thinking about the stark differences between the society of the late 1960s and the one we live in now.

Characters in the movie protested the Vietnam War, mourned the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and generally believed they could change the big, bad world that surrounded them.

Nowadays, the story is something else entirely. If you want to do something about Darfur, you simply join a Facebook group. If you think the war in Iraq is a sham, you start a political blog that nobody reads and vent your thoughts into the wasteland of cyberspace. Obviously, your humble author is not exempt from the times.

I’m not saying people should blow up any oil refineries to protest global warming, but it’s staggering to think what could take place if we had even a shred of the willpower that the previous generation did, and I am forced to ask myself why.

Is it because of a lack of leadership? There is no modern-day equivalent to Martin Luther King, and while I have the highest of hopes for Barack Obama, the comparisons to John or Robert Kennedy (Examples one, two, three) remain unearned in my mind.

It’s also worthwhile to wonder if it’s possible to have a John Kennedy or a Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 21st century. Would JFK’s notorious bad habits have cost him a modern-day election? Could Bobby raise enough cash to get the Democratic nomination in 2008, given his radical stance that corporate executives had a moral responsibility to protect the general public, not just their shareholders? Would the NASA program be attacked as a wasteland of government spending, another example of how the big, bad Democrats want to spend your hard-earned money?

When it comes to that, I wonder if John, Paul, George and Ringo could have grown and evolved like they did under today’s rules and culture, with a modern-day producer, record label and management?

Maybe the problem is that young people simply don’t believe that the worst is possible. We’ve never faced a Vietnam (certain parallels in Iraq notwithstanding). We’ve never faced the possibility of being drafted to fight a war thousands of miles away. The soldiers we do send are volunteers, often from the lower class, those who saw the financial incentives of enlisting and put their lives on the line.

Sure, scientists are up in arms about global warming, but they were fired up about CFCs and the ozone layer a few years ago and that took care of itself with barely any consumer burden at all. Besides, when members of Congress are calling the whole thing a hoax, it’s easy to believe whichever truth you find most convenient.

I do think politicians share part of the blame. In the past 10 years, the Republican political machine has gotten very, very good at launching attack campaigns. They slam people and policies with equal abandon, spending millions to convince the public that any change is a change for the worse. Obama’s plan to invest $150 billion in green technologies: government pork-barrell spending. Nevermind the fact that the total investment costs as much as only 15 weeks of the Iraq War.

If we can spend a trillion dollars to fight insurgents in Iraq, while giving giant tax breaks to oil companies and the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, I find it a sham that anyone can even suggest it’s not worth it to invest in finding a solution to the climate crisis, which contrary to what they would have you believe, is real, is caused by man and is the greatest threat to security we face in this day and age. It’s the kind of thing we shouldn’t even be taking a chance on.

Yet for both candidates, the heart and soul of their energy policies center around things that do not actually exist: cheap nuclear power and clean coal. It’s worthy of a seperate post down the road, but those two things are as far-fetched as flying cars that run on water. Nuclear power is inherently, ridiculously expensive and leaves waste products that will be around for hundreds of thousands of years. Building 45 to 100 new nuclear power plants, as John McCain wants to do is totally irresponsible fiscally and environmentally. He wants to trade one environment crisis (global warming) for another one further down the road (turning Nevada into a nuclear waste land). He’s checking the depth of the nuclear water with both feet, never a sign of a reasoned, thoughtful politician.

Coal is inherently dirty. It can be cleaner, but carbon sequestration simply doesn’t work. All the proposed methods of carbon capture are theoretical and would consume so much energy that the impact on the environment might actually be negative. There is no way to burn coal without contributing to global warming. Period, end of story. And don’t forget the the unconscionable methods in which a lot of our coal is mined. Yet, Obama mentions this non-existent technology in all of his energy speeches as a way to endear himself to the bitter old West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio coal miners, whether or not there’s any scientific backing to even the concept of clean coal (there isn’t).

When you really start to follow politics, it’s easy to see why our generation can be so skeptical and pessimistic. The empowerment and optimism that young people in this country once felt seems to have been bought and discarded by special interests. Nowadays, it’s much easier to affect change with millions of dollars than a sense of what is right.

But the spirit is still alive. As dim as it appears now, people want change and are ready to be called to duty. That’s what Obama’s campaign has been about so far, rekindling the can-do attitude that many people have left for dead. It may just get him into the White House, particularly if McCain keeps showing the voting public how impulsive and reckless he is. That’s why I’m voting for Obama, even if I don’t agree with all of his policies. America is ready for a government that doesn’t (blatantly) cater to the wealthy at every opportunity. To me, Obama is not the lesser of two policy evils. My generation needs someone to believe in, and Obama may be the best chance we have.

Great Scott!

FADE IN:

EXT. THE STEPS OF THE U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING

REP. ROY BLUNT addresses a crowd full of eager REPORTERS who would rather regurgitate what BLUNT is doing than do any actual research or break a story.

REP. ROY BLUNT

We must vote on offshore drilling, we must vote now, we must vote yes and we must vote yesterday. Anyone who does not do these things hates America and laughs all the way back to his terrorist camp as real, average Americans sweat at the pump.

REP. JOHN BOEHNER

I agree with everything this man says, but I’m waiting for someone to be indicted in a sex scandal, as that seems to be the only time I can advance my political career.

HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI

Seriously, offshore drilling? That’s what this is about? Your own people say that offshore drilling won’t have any impact for 10-15 years at the earliest, and that it probably won’t do much then. You can’t wait five weeks for a regular session?

ROY BLUNT

No, we can’t, because people are in favor of drilling now. Five weeks from now, people might figure out that the oil companies are the only ones who stand to benefit from the swill we’re proposing.

NANCY PELOSI

Ha! So you admit that offshore drilling alone won’t affect prices at the pump!

ROY BLUNT

Please, we admitted that months ago. Go look at YouTube for God’s sake.

BARACK OBAMA enters, fresh from his Hawaiian vacation, wearing khaki shorts, sandals and six leis.

BARACK OBAMA

Aloha, guys. I’m back from vacation. What’s happening?

ROY BLUNT

We’re not leaving the Capitol building until Pelosi calls an emergency session so we can vote on offshore drilling!

BARACK OBAMA

Wow, you guys are really hung up on this drilling thing. It’s too bad you couldn’t have used a little of this spirit and fire for something worthwhile, like fixing our record deficit, developing alternative energy sources, passing tax credits to make solar and wind power more financially viable instead of helping Big Oil hold onto their ridiculous profits or encouraging public transportation.

ROY BLUNT

Takes one to know one!

BARACK OBAMA

I don’t even know what that means, but whatever. Look, if you guys are really so gung ho on giving the oil companies more land to not drill on, maybe we can package offshore drilling concessions with some real alternative energy solutions. You know, compromise.

ROY BLUNT, JOHN BOEHNER, JOHN MCCAIN, HOWARD WOLFSON, BILL O’REILLY, RUSH LIMBAUGH, SPENCER BACHUS, FOX NEWS, MITT ROMNEY, JOE LIEBERMAN (in unison)

FLIP-FLOPPERRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BARACK OBAMA

Oh, boy. Here we go again.

NANCY PELOSI

Wait, I’m confused. So he’s a flip-flopper because he’s willing to compromise on an issue, but the fact that you, John McCain and others are flat-out lying about the impact offshore drilling will have is ok?

ROY BLUNT

There you go, Pelosi, over-thinking things as usual. It’s politics now. It’s not about what would really happen, what impact drilling would have. It’s about selling the American people on a slogan you can fit on a bumper sticker. There’s no room for complexity on a bumper sticker. Drill here, drill now is all people want to hear, and by God, we’re going to give it to them.

SPENCER BACHUS

Besides, what else are we going to tell people? Without offshore drilling, our party has nothing to stand on but seven years of George Bush.

JOHN BOEHNER

Shut it, Bachus.

SPENCER BACHUS

Yes sir.

LIGHTNING BOLTS fly through the air, and suddenly a DELORIAN appears and flattens BACHUS before skidding to a stop in the middle of the assembled crowd.

JOHN MCCAIN emerges from the still smoking DELORIAN, wearing ridiculous sunglasses, his white hair disheveled, making him look like a more senile version of Albert Einstein.

JOHN MCCAIN

My friends, I’m back from 1991, where I’ve apparently been living because Czechoslovakia was still a country back then.

JOHN BOEHNER

Dammit, John. You just ran over Spencer Bachus. He was on our side.

JOHN MCCAIN

Uh oh. I hope they don’t take away my driver’s license. Anyway, sorry I’m late. I haven’t been to this place in so long, I forgot where it was. What did I miss?

ROY BLUNT

We’re not leaving the Capitol building until Pelosi calls an emergency session so we can vote on offshore drilling!

JOHN MCCAIN

Offshore drilling? Wait, what year is it? Am I for the environment or against it?

MITT ROMNEY

It’s 2008, sir. You’re running for President.

JOHN MCCAIN

Right… so for or against?

MITT ROMNEY

Jesus, I have to beg this guy to give me a VP spot? (sigh)

It’s not a matter of being for or against the environment. You’re in favor of granting the oil companies more leases to do whatever they want and blaming Democrats for high gas prices while completely ignoring the fact that oil companies can’t be bothered to drill the land we’ve already leased to them.

JOHN MCCAIN

This might be my 1991-brain talking, but isn’t that an environmental issue?

MITT ROMNEY

It used to be, but then the check from Exxon cleared and the poll numbers starting coming in.

JOHN MCCAIN

The check cleared?!! Why didn’t you say so? I could have sworn it was one of those fake novelty checks Ed McMahon hands out, you know with all those things I said about needing to protect the environment from special interests and whatnot.

Ahh, to be young and naive again. How long ago was that, Matt?

MITT ROMNEY

My name is Mitt, sir, and it was 2003. You were 67. Don’t worry, it’s all water under the bridge now, sir.

JOHN MCCAIN

Hot damn. Hey, everybody, listen up! Drill here, drill now!!! I don’t care if it is the U.S. Capitol, if there’s oil under there, we’re gonna find it!

BARACK OBAMA and NANCY PELOSI walk away as MCCAIN continues his rant.

BARACK OBAMA

So, all I have to do to become President is beat that guy?

NANCY PELOSI

That’s right. So what are you going to do now? Put out another counter-attack ad about McCain’s latest attack ad that was a counter to your attack ad that wasn’t technically an “attack ad” but more of a defense against McCain’s first round of attack ads?

BARACK OBAMA

Nah, even I’m sick of all the mud-slinging going on here.

I’m already leading, and I’m going to slaughter that guy in the debates. I think I’ll go back to Hawaii until the convention.

END

The gentleman ahead of me in line seemed to believe, as do a disturbing number of Americans, that there’s a magic oil pill lying in wait just below our shores or just inside that herd of caribou in the wildlife refuge that will make all our energy problems go away. After all, it sounds good, doesn’t it? Gas is expensive, we have more oil. Problem, solution.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, at least not to the House Committee on Natural Resources. Their June 2008 report, titled “The Truth About America’s Energy: Big Oil Stockpiles Supplies and Pockets Profits states pretty clearly:

Since the 1990s, the federal government has consistently encouraged the development of its oil and gas resources and the amount of drilling on federal lands has steadily increased during this time. The number of drilling permits has exploded in recent years, going from 3,802 five years ago to 7,561 in 2007.

Between 1999 and 2007, the number of drilling permits issued for development of public lands increased by more than 361%, yet gasoline prices have also risen dramatically (Figure 1) contradicting the argument that more drilling means lower gasoline prices. There is simply no correlation between the two.

Gee, in George W. Bush’s administration alone, oil companies started getting 361 percent more permits and that number has almost doubled since we re-elected him in 2004? I’m shocked. Well, at least that solved our oil crisis, right? Didn’t it?

No? Maybe that’s because the oil companies don’t have time or equipment to drill the land for which they already have drilling leases. Courtesy of that same pesky report:

Combined, oil and gas companies hold leases to nearly 68 million acres of federal land and waters that they are not producing oil and gas (Figure 4). Oil and gas companies would not buy leases to this land without believing oil and gas can be produced there, yet these same companies are not producing oil or gas from these areas already under their control.

If we extrapolate from today’s production rates on federal land and waters, we can estimate that the 68 million acres of leased but currently inactive federal land and waters could produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.

That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75%.  It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third, and be more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

That’s courtesy of The House of Representatives, not me or The Huffington Post.

Clearly, the reason for high gas prices and large oil exports is not that we don’t have enough drilling leases floating around out there.

The problem is that all Congress can do is lift a moratorium on drilling. Congress doesn’t even grant leases to oil companies, that’s the Bureau of Land Management. Congress can’t force the drillers to put a rush on the job and the leases will doubtless have a long, if not infinite, lifespan. Imagine this, for a second, from the perspective of an oil company:

You’re pulling in record profits, year after year. Demand for your product is sky high and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. You’ve had a beer buddy in the White House for the past seven years, making your life better every step of the way, and you have 68 million acres of land just waiting for you to drill. You need one last reserve, one last score before a potential change of administration in November. After all, why settle for a ridiculous amount of land to exploit when you can have even more?

Say you get the leases. Are you going to rush to invest billions of dollars in new drilling equipment, refineries, hire more engineers and other employees just to rush the first barrels into the marketplace and decrease the price of that black gold you’re pumping out of the ground? Of course not. You’re going to do exactly what the oil companies are doing with those other 68 million acres. Sit on them. Stash that land away for a rainy day, use the drills and resources you already have, but use them when you’re good and ready.

Sure there are plenty of documented reports that the drilling won’t help immediately. John McCain even said so himself. One of the most compelling arguments came from this L.A. Times story, in which Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, had the following to say:

“What he failed to mention was data released recently by his own Department of Energy that shows, unequivocally, that drilling in the arctic refuge will have no effect on today’s high gas prices. At peak production, two decades from now, the amount of oil speculated to be available in the refuge would lower gas prices by less than 4 cents a gallon. Basically, the president wants to destroy one of our last pristine wilderness places to save us a few pennies 20 years from now.”

Ouch.

Regardless, it appears the country is bleeding from its jugular and the Bush-McCain tandem have proposed to build a band-aid factory that will begin producing in 5 to 10 years. And even worse, they’re promoting offshore drilling as the solution to the problems Americans are experiencing now. (Bush also wants to drill in ANWR, while McCain is against the idea, if only because he was so forcefully in favor of protecting the area in his past life.) It’s just another example of big oil dollars being the top concern of our commander-in-chief and the guy who hopes to be the next in line. It’s pretty frightening stuff for all of us who don’t run oil companies.