Midday Open Thread

• Al Gore delivered a "moonshot" speech on energy today, a speech many people had hoped would come from Barack Obama's lips on January 20, 2009. Every kilowatt of U.S. electricity, Gore said, should come from solar, wind and other eco-friendly sources in a decade. Not 25 or 50 years, but 10.

  A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here’s what’s changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power – coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal – have radically changed the economics of energy.

  Andy Revkin at The New York Times's Dot Earth has an annotated version of the speech.

Video moved below the fold for our friends running Macs. -ct

• In a new paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Marina Ottaway and Mohammed Herzallah write that even Arab countries usually aligned with Washington are undertaking diplomatic initiatives that contradict U.S. policy, "because they no longer trust the U.S. capacity to contend with escalating regional crises" whether that relates to Iran, Lebanon or Hamas.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced objections  to the Cheney-Bush administration's efforts to redefine as abortion contraception that 40% of Americans use. A new Department of Health and Human Services proposal would prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer use of these contraceptives under the Weldon and Church amendments. Said Pelosi:

  “The majority of Americans oppose this out of touch position that redefines contraception as abortion and represents a sustained pattern of the Bush Administration to reject medical and sound science in favor of a misguided ideology that has no place in our government.

• Ben Smith over at Politico wonders if John McCain's often raw humor, which in the past has included a rape joke, will be seen as a "McCain being McCain" authenticity or backfire.
• The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee is holding hearings today on how foreign banks facilitate "tax evasion by U.S. clients, hide client and bank misconduct behind the cloak of bank secrecy laws, and add to the offshore abuses that cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $100 billion each year."
• President Bush gets credit for pushing the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, but on Wednesday 16 Senate Republicans voted against the bill that will triple spending to treat and protect millions in Africa and elsewhere from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Previously, as DemFromCT explained here, several conservative Republicans put a hold on the bill because it eliminates the requirement that recipients provide "abstinence" education. The current program expires in September. Known as PEPFAR, it has helped bring lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to some 1.7 million people and has supported care for nearly 7 million. Up to $48 billion will be spent over the next five years "for the most ambitious foreign public-health program ever launched by the United States."