I've been away from Kos for a while for a lot of reasons.  What spare writing time I've had has been devoted to a contribution I'm making to a book on sustainability.  My piece looks at the way John Locke's theory of rights (and hence property, and hence government) depends on an infinite planet.  Since Locke's political philosophy was pretty crucial to the structure of our own gov't, when we go looking for the roots of the un-ecological aspects to our system, his writing, especially his writing on property, is a good place to start.  And there are definitely some things that will have to change as we face up to the fact that we live  on a finite planet.  Like, Fifth Amendment Takings law....

You can't overstate the historic importance:  for the first time ever, the US Senate came to the verge of taking up a far-reaching bill (The Boxer substitute to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act) that deals with global climate change. Republicans have been engaging in procedural tricks to try to kill the bill without actually voting on it (see "Shameful Obstructionism Stymies Climate Bill", a Sierra Club press release, for an account), and just a few minutes ago a motion for cloture--to bring the bill to a vote--failed to achieve the 60 necessary votes.  

For the past few weeks environmentalists and progressives have debated whether this was the best bill that could be gotten, whether it could have been improved through amendments, whether a better bill might be gotten out of a different, presumably more Democratic, Senate next year.  In all that discussion there was one point that was overlooked:  

What is the problem?  Well, here's how I frame it:

The whole letter-to-your-descendents thing can get schmaltzy, but when the good people at desmogblog invited me to give it a whirl, I thought why not?  I've been thinking about my own mortality lately, and thinking about the kind of world my kid and her kid(s), if she has any, will grow up in.  And what do I want them to know about me?

This:

Look, I love Bernie Sanders.  I love being able to say that my home state of Vermont is represented by the only avowed Socialist in the US Senate.  (And what is socialism but basic common sense?  To me it means "social control of things that affect society"--like, say, the power of capital to affect communities and landscapes.)  Mostly Sanders' challenge-the-corporations, take-care-of-the-little-guy approach has my full backing.  But he goes a little astray with his latest proposals on gas prices.

"A lie," Mark Twain said, "can get halfway 'round the world before Truth can get its boots on."  

Which, when you think about it, helps explain the ascendancy of neoconservative politics in this country.  

The latest example of this connection:  The Heartland Institute, a division of the right wing think tank the Hudson Institute, has released a list of "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-made Global Warming Scares."  

The problem:  the list is a lie.  Scientists on the list do NOT deny that global climate change is happening.  Nor do they deny that human emissions are causing it. Quite the opposite:  many of the scientists on the list are the scientists whose work established that the climate is changing and that human emissions are the primary cause.  Dozens of them who have been contacted are outraged at having their work misrepresented and are demanding to be taken off the list.  

Those of us interested in saving industrial civilization from cooking itself to death face an uphill slog:  the Republican base doesn't cotton to environmental types.  But there is a way to turn these voters into carbon cappers.  What they need to appreciate is the connection between controlling carbon and the "family values" that was their watchword last presidential election season.

I was visiting my friend Ike again, which always offers a chance to be surprised.  We talked about the upcoming election, and I wondered whether he had an "anybody but McCain" attitude.  He said he'd rather not vote than vote for Hillary Clinton.

"Why?"

"Face it," he said.  "With one or two outstanding exceptions, like Florida in 2000, voting is mostly a symbolic act.  Well, the symbol that I want to register is that the system isn't working.  I'd vote for Obama, but if Hillary gets the nomination, I'd rather send the symbolic message 'none of the above' than give her any kind of support."

And so I had to find out why.  It turns out that Ike feels strongly about pay equity, he makes large judgments on narrow grounds, and he's got a memory.

Over and over you read and hear in the media that "all of the presidential candidates favor a cap-and-trade system to deal with global warming"--as if there were no difference between the two democrats and John McCain on this issue.  

There are differences, big differences, and if the Democrats want to win in November, they'd better emphasize those differences. If they don't the voter who is moderately aware of climate problems is going to hear McCain talk about the issue and feel okay about voting for him, under the mistaken impression that McCain is going to deal with the problem.

Any day now McCain is going to bring out his policy paper on global warming, and then the devil will be in the details.  What details should we look at?  Here are the wedge issues that are likely to separate McCain from the Democrats (and which will separate McCain's Business as Usual model from sound policy that carries us toward solving the problem).

This just in from a story in The Washington Times by Stephen Dinan:

President Bush is poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming, and will lay out principles for what that should include.

Specifics of the policy are still being fiercely debated, but Bush administration officials have told Republicans in Congress that they feel pressure to act now because they fear a coming regulatory nightmare. It would be the first time Mr. Bush has called for statutory authority on the subject.

Has the nation's pre-eminent climate change delayer had a change of heart?  No, not really; seems he's developed a late-term ability to read the handwriting on the wall. And both sides of the aisle have reason to be unhappy.

Did anyone else see parallels between the tape loops of Reverend Wright and the tape loops four years ago of Howard Dean's hoarse-voiced exhortation to his troops?  Both got a lot of air play--over and over and over.  The "Dean Scream" coverage was a big factor in Dean's lost Presidential bid; the tape made him look nuts, though when seen in context his "yee-hah!" was a completely appropriate exhortation to his supporters, the end of a classic stem-winder.  And so, four years later, we get the same character-assassination-by-decontexted-sound-bite, this time directed against this election cycle's progressive, grass-roots building, call-for-change candidate.  

Who is doing this?  

I think we know why it is being done; you don't see endless tape loops of McCain looking ridiculous, and four years ago we didn't see endless tape loops of Bush being stumble-mouthed or stupid, or of Cheney being hypocritical, uninformed, ethically challenged, arrogant.  And I'm sure that this lack was not for want of suitable material.

What can we do about it?

You know that book "The 100 Americans who are Ruining America (and Al Franken is #37)?  Isn't it about time there was an equal time book from a progressive point of view?

(Maybe there is and I don't know about it.  If there is, tell me in the thread below, and don't read any further.)

I've got an agent interested in this idea:  "The 100 Republicans You'll Never See in Heaven."  To be out in time for the election it's got to be done quickly.  That's where you come in....
 

Diarist xrepub has a story today, Meanwhile, not in the news--MASSIVE floods hit USA, expressing wonder at how little media play is being given to the flooding around him in Missouri.  Bush declared some counties a disaster area, but it seems that the story just isn't making it into headlines around the country.  Hmmm...wonder why.  

I posted a comment, but want to expand on the topic a bit here....

This just in (from the Washington Post):

The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and possibly as much as $1 million -- of the organization's funds into his personal accounts, GOP officials said yesterday, describing an alleged scheme that could become one of the largest political frauds in recent history.

The story continues:

Joe Trippi's diary yesterday, Rebooting Democracy, drew a lot of attention.  Quite a few of the comments were on the order of "Hey Joe!  Joe! Read this."  And Joe wasn't to be found.  One thoughtful reply from Sawgrass727 pointed out that Trippi had only ever commented in dKos once, to a diary he posted before, and that by doing a "hit-and-run" diary, however informative, he wasn't exactly participating in the grass-roots community of thinkers that's going on here.  

I confess I succumbed to the idea of having Joe Trippi's ear for a moment, because I think that if we're talking about "Rebooting Democracy," there's a more ambitious (and yet achievable) agenda to be laid in front of the American voter.  In particular I wanted him to think about redistricting as a campaign issue, and I wanted him to know that internet voting is a very, very bad idea.

This just in:  

Human culture on planet earth didn't come to "the end of history" with the end of state socialism in the USSR, as Francis Fukuyama said.

The disappearance of Cold War ideological conflict didn't usher in an era of "The Clash of Civlizations," in which ethnic and religious identity are the main drivers of inter-cultural, international conflict, as Samuel P. Huntington says.

For the past decade and a half, this is the thinking that has defined the range of conversation about foreign policy and international relations.  It's time to open up the conversation and talk in plain terms about what's really going on.

I thought I would expand a bit on my diary from a few days ago, and make more explicit something it contained.  (A friend told me I buried the lede.)

The subprime mess is generally treated as a crisis, a catastrophe, one of those unpredictable pathologies that happen in our economy because the ingenuity of corporate and financial types outpaces regulatory understanding and control.  Sure, it's some of that, but what it isn't is unpredictable or pathological.  

When you understand the thermodynamic roots of economic life, and when you understand how our financial system flouts thermodynamic law, you can see that regular crises like these are a structural requirement of our system.  

If I said to you, "give me a thousand bucks today, and in 45 days I'll give you $1500," you'd think I was stupid or crooked or both.  That kind of interest rate works out to a phenomenal 2466% per year, and it's what Carlo Ponzi offered investors in Boston in 1920.  

If I said to you, "give me a barrel of oil today, and in a month and a half I'll give you a barrel and a half back," I'd be making the same deal--but, thanks to the generous Energy Return on Investment of oil in the 1920s, I could have made good my promise.  I could have used the energy in your barrel of oil to help drill a well, which would have returned to me 100 barrels of oil for every barrel I invested in the effort of extraction. (The EROI of U.S. oil back then was about 100:1.)  

Too bad Ponzi wasn't an oilman.  He went to jail for what he did.  His spirit lives on, though, in economists who assure us that infinite economic growth is possible on a finite planet.  And when you use EROI to think about what Ponzi did, you're led to some other interesting thoughts.  

I just took my dog for a walk and stopped in at the corner coffee shop for a cup and a quick scan of the paper.  But I didn't get to the paper; instead I had a conversation with the barrista, a young woman who finished a B.A. in political science and Spanish, and who is applying for graduate school in Social Work.  And I realized I had a strong opinion about that:  if she goes for an MSW, she's probably headed for a dead-end career.