McCain gives an impressive performance, but must confront Obama on alternative fuels

McCain, aside from the obvious physical impediments placed on his body from 5 1/2 years of captivity at the hands of sadistic communists, came off as the elder statesman, the more presidential of the two candidates yesterday evening. True to form, his opponent retreated to tired, polished responses peppered by his trademark "uhhhhhh" throughout each sentence. The only candidate who offered anything the public hadn't heard before was McCain. At the risk of quoting an overused term, the Republican candidate lived up to his "Straight Talk" persona, managing to speak directly to the questioner and the American people at the same time. On the other hand, his opponent's responses could've come out of any given pep rally or campaign commercial from the past 3 months or so.

Meanwhile, McCain has continually been silent when his detractors mention the dishonest claim that he voted against alternative fuels 25 times in his Senate career. In the third debate, McCain cannot let this pass unchallenged as he and Palin have in their respective debates. The votes his opponent cites do include wind, solar, and geothermal energy, and those are all fine, albeit inefficient forms of alternative energy. However, within those same bills are subsidies for biofuels. Do not make the mistake of confusing these biofuels with those of Brazil, whose sugar cane crop is both efficient and sustainable and the net carbon output actually does make it a true alternative fuel. Instead, these were subsidies for corn ethanol, which is perhaps the least efficient source of ethanol known to man while also being just as hazardous to the environment as the coal and petrol it's supposed to replace.



The reason Obama and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle continue to pretend this is a legitimate alternative has everything to do with the politics as usual and nothing to do with "change" of any sort to the tacit acceptance of corrupt and immoral agribusiness in the United States. For fear of challenging the image of the down-home, small town values, plaid shirt-wearing, pickup truck-driving farmers of America, McCain has failed to come right out and say that corn ethanol is bad for America and corn subsidies are bad for the entire planet. In fact, the mom and pop farmer is as much a victim of agricultural policies perpetuated by Obama as an obese child in the South Bronx who has been fed high-fructose corn syrup from the earliest stages of his life to rural peasants in the developing world who can't keep up with the ballooning price of grain. Quite often it's large expansive corporate farms that buy up increasingly large tracts of land for corn production. The vast majority of that corn (nearly 75%) goes towards ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, and feed for cattle. Ethanol is a viable solution and it could potentially be used to power the entire nations's vehicles-if that ethanol comes from a source other than corn. McCain needs to elaborate this point and drive home the fact that he has a record of bipartisan action on climate change, but that does NOT include further entrenching this nation in dangerous corn subsidies. These subsidies help factory farms drive up food prices, feed us unhealthy cattle, and use their profits for disinformation campaigns for high-fructose corn syrup and lobbying efforts for a brand of ethanol whose carbon output is on par with any traditional fossil fuel.

While the McCain campaign seems resigned to the beating they ritually take from Obama on ties to oil companies, the facts demonstrate that neither candidate is owned by the oil lobby (try here, too). On the other hand, Obama and prominent Democrats are literally in the pocket of the ethanol industry.

Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.

“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”

Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build “energy independence,” he also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not.

Many economists, consumer advocates, environmental experts and tax groups have been critical of corn ethanol programs as a boondoggle that benefits agribusiness conglomerates more than small farmers.

[bold is my emphasis]

For the first time in years, the Republicans have a candidate who is pro-stem cell research, pro-environment, pro-evolution; in a word, pro-science. This is the opening McCain needs to portray Obama as anti-science, anti-progress, and xenophobic. Moreover, it is cynical pandering in its rawest form. The Arizona Senator should propose that we dive head-first into algae-ethanol research (The most efficient ethanol source on Earth), while lifting trade barriers, including those on sugar, as a means to revitalize the economy and open re-open the marketplace of ideas.



Meanwhile, McCain can propose constructing algae-ethanol facilities (which are impervious to the surrounding climate and produce a constant yield) in rust belt cities like Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Detroit, Duluth, and Youngstown. It is imperative that McCain makes these facts known if he wants to seriously perpetuate his status as an independent reformer. That's putting country first and that's the kind of straight talk Obama lacks the courage to confront.

Rod Dreher smacks it out of the park

Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News is consistently insightful, independent, and frank in spite of my personal disagreement with him on our current military engagements. His blueprints for Republican renaissance are detailed in his book Crunchy Cons. This should be required reading for anyone who has found themselves at odds with the theocratic and unshakably laissez-faire wing of the party that has sat firmly at the helm for almost a decade. The predicament that John McCain finds himself in follows a typical narrative of his career. McCain is no stranger to being underfunded, underpolled, and the underdog. Nevertheless, the next two weeks are do or die time, and if he is going to turn around his campaign, it must be done immediately. In his latest editorial, Dreher outlines what could be John McCain's last chance to save his campaign. The speech below is what John McCain must communicate to this country in order to turn the ship around.

My friends, I am neither young nor eloquent, handsome nor smooth. But I have lived a long life, much of it in service to America in war and in peace. And I have always stood for straight talk. There has been no time in our nation's recent history when the American people more needed to hear the plain truth from their leaders. A fundamental reason our country faces economic catastrophe is that we have built our lives around running from truths about the American way of life.

Washington has run from the truth. Wall Street has run from the truth. And if we're honest with ourselves, all of us have, in one way or another, run from the truth.

We have accepted the lie that we can live exactly as we want to live, with no concern for the consequences. We have taken the blessings of liberty and prosperity and turned them into a curse of debt slavery – bondage that will be visited on our children, and our children's children, if we don't change.

Everybody has a theory about how we got into this mess, and it's usually one that absolves them and their party from blame. My friends, I'm here to tell you that this crisis is the Republicans' fault. It's the Democrats' fault. It's the fault of every one of us who believed in the fairy tale of a free lunch.

It's time for all Americans to take responsibility for what we've done. It's time for all Americans to pull together to help our families, our neighbors and our country through hard times.

I will not lie to you and tell you that the road ahead will be easy. I will not insult you by giving you simple villains, simple heroes or simplistic solutions. As the song says, everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die. My fellow Americans, all of us must sacrifice to endure the trials that history sends our way and to rebuild our nation on a solid foundation of honor, truth and plainspoken virtue.

I know something about sacrifice. And I know something about the way life can break your pride. I was a cocky Navy aviator who thought he was invulnerable. Then I was shot out of the sky and spent five years in prison. That experience did not kill me. It made me stronger. It taught me how much I loved my God, my family and my country – and what trials I could endure for the sake of that love.

I am a patriot. I believe we are a nation of patriots, of men and women who are ready and willing to put country first. But over the years, our leaders, Republican and Democratic, have asked us to do little more than to go shopping, to vote for them and to blame other people for what's wrong with America. Anything to keep us from facing the truth and changing our ways.

As your president, I will ask you to do hard things. I, too, will do hard things for the good of this great nation. Serious times call for serious leadership. In his first speech as prime minister, with his free nation facing the might of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill refused to mislead the British people about the gravity of their situation. We remember today his words to them: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

Churchill did not give cheap optimism. He, too, had fought and suffered for his nation, both on the battlefield and in Parliament. He had known the joy of victory and the humiliation of defeat. What Churchill, from his incomparable experience, could offer his people was the gold standard of hope. Hope is the conviction that whatever suffering we must go through, goodness and right shall prevail.

Today, when I survey the gathering storm, I am certain that if we, the people, stand together without fear or favor, victory will be ours. I ask you to give me the privilege of leading this great nation in a time when heroes will be made, and all good men and women must come to the aid of their country.

Thank you, and God bless America.

If McCain can heed the inspiring words of Dreher and use them to fight back, he can chip away at the heavy favorite and beat the odds like he has so many times before.

Feingold seeks limits on laptop searches

No agency of the federal government has better demonstrated the apathy and ineptitude of the present administration than the Transportation Security Administration. Theft, constitutional indifference, wasteful and unnecessary spending, unprofessionalism, and most importantly, less secure airports have defined the federal government's foray into airport security. In a time when nearly all corners of the military are being dangerously privatized, the only ground the federal government actually took from private companies has been a complete and abject failure.

Russ Feingold has put forth the first major challenge to the unbridled authority of the TSA.

Under a 29-page bill Mr. Feingold introduced on Friday, customs agents at airports and borders would need to document a "reasonable suspicion" before inspecting a computer or similar device carried by an American resident and could only hold on to the device for 24 hours before starting the process of seeking a warrant from a judge.

We shouldn't trust them with valuables in our baggage, why should we trust them with our private information, especially when they don't have probable cause. Kudos to Feingold. Let's hope this is the first of many moves to restrict the TSA's intrusive and ineffective methods.

CNN's Overreaction to isolated racism

Obama's supporters have been laying the ground work for several weeks now. If their guy doesn't win, get ready for the race card to be played like Ms. Pac Man at a NARAL convention. The above is a clip of a solitary individual who planted a misspelled sign the size of your average sheet of paper on his lawn. The contents? "OBAMA HALF-BREED MUSLIN". We've seen similar synthetic hysteria over the very racist, but inconsequential "Obama is my slave" t-shirts and the Obama waffles.

But what kind of reporter finds this newsworthy? Almost all network news has devolved to the point where the rap sheet of a celebrity gets equal billing with genocide on another continent. However, this is a special kind of story. It's often said that by reacting to Ann Coulter's latest unapologetically venomous soundbite, the media is giving her even more undeserved attention. Judging by the latest in a long line of false outrage to a remote village idiot's prejudice, the media has learned from its mistakes and is now using its own infrastructure to instill the notion that if McCain wins, it will not be the result of his decades of service to this country or peerless record of reform on a Rooseveltian scale, but because, through no fault of his own, a minority of a minority within his voting bloc falsely believes his opponent is a Muslim.

The truth about clean coal

September 24th was a bad day for Joe Biden. In less than 24 hours, he negated his own campaign's ads, claimed FDR was both president in 1929 and went on (chronologically impossible) television to lead America through it, and presented a schizophrenic position on coal energy. On coal, Biden said,

No coal plants here in America... Build them, if [The Chinese] are going to build them, over there. Make them clean.

[snip]

We’re not supporting clean coal.

Quick to jump on this new weakness, the McCain campaign formed the Coalition to Protect Coal Jobs. According to the campaign, the coalition

will spread the message about the importance of clean coal technology and the advantages of tapping the country's vast coal reserves. The group will also speak out to protect critical coal jobs when they come under attack from the most anti-American energy ticket in history.

Regardless of the impact of coal, this was a completely ridiculous move on Biden's part. Not only is he contradicting both he and Obama's position on clean coal, but this might bury the Dems in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia; states Biden was brought on to deliver for his ticket.

The BBC offers a crash course in the technology.

However, clean coal has detractors who don't have a perpetually surprised look on their faces. Greenpeace is probably the most prominent in the movement against clean coal. They offer a 5-point manifesto against the technology.

1. Clean coal cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change

If time was a factor, then Greenpeace could not, in good conscience, support any of the renewable sources of energy traditionally supported by environmental groups. The inrastructure currently in place for coal extraction coupled with the vast domestic resources make clean coal far more conducive to the urgency of possible climate change.

2. Clean coal wastes energy

This is a legitimate grievance. However, like all new forms of technology, this is constantly being improved. Greenpeace is not concerned with wasted energy and its carbon impact for fuel cells or recycling plants

3. Storing carbon underground is risky

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) can reduce carbon emissions by up to 90%. Meanwhile, the technology of storing CO2 has gotten to a point where the threat of its leakage is virtually nonexistent. When the carbon emissions are almost eliminated and the risk is nearly irrelevant, it should be considered a viable technology and its storage is demonstrably safe.

4. Clean coal is expensive

This is a valid point. Clean coal, like all new sources of energy, is expensive. The same can be said for virtually all the sources of energy that Greenpeace and other more idealistic environmental groups extol. The advantage of clean coal is that significant infrastructure already exists for the extraction and production of coal.

5. Clean coal carries significant liability risks

There's no doubt that coal mining is at times a dangerous activity and there must be protections for the employees who put themselves at risk each time they enter a mine. However, it's biazarre to argue that by eliminating coal as an option is somehow helpful to them.

At the heart of it, Greenpeace's points are not environmentally-driven, they are economically-driven. They know that all of the immediate environmental risks associated with coal have been all but eliminated. Strip mining, for instance, is an ugly practice in which dynamite is used to literally detonate chunks of mountaintops in order to extract coal in the aftermath. But both candidates have voiced their opposition to this and other intrusive coal extraction methods.

WHO reignited the culture war?

I would link a story, but I don't need to. Nearly all major news outlets have made the claim in one segment/article or another: Sarah Palin's nomination revived the culture war. First the major media outlets overplayed select aspects of Palin's record, then staged a tantrum that a "war" was taking shape when her supporters came to her defense. McCain is a moderate who never put much stock in the phony "conflict" that draft-dodging journalists and College Republicans have been propagating ever since Pat Buchanan choked out his last breath of relevance in at the Republican National Convention in 1992. For him, an war with actual elements of danger and death was quite enough. What makes this "culture war" so much fun for those who fight is that the only casualties are the reputations of public figures and no exercise of any kind is required. Unless you count the tired process of your average news cycle, but that's not the type of exercise I mean. Observe:



So, we can all agree that the guys who use the term culture war want to censor those they disagree with and shut them and their families off from dissenting opinions. For them, this is a war that is won by never seeing or hearing from your enemy.

With that unfortunate example of neoconservatives and paleoconservatives embracing out of the way, the question remains: Did Sarah Palin bring it back? I first began supporting Palin for VP in May of this year, and started this blog a week or so before the nomination. What brought me to this conclusion was not her stance on abortion or evolution, but her record as governor of Alaska. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find her religious views expressed anywhere if one searched articles pertaining to her in the Summer of 2008, as I did.

Instead, there were bountiful examples of a brash independent streak that had won her enemies on both sides of the aisle. According to Bloomberg News

Ms. Palin threatened to evict Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest oil company, and partners BP PLC, Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips Co. from a state-owned gas field, winning their promise to increase Alaska's natural gas output 17 per cent.

This and other moves led conservatives to compare her to Hugo Chavez, and her policies to socialism. That was the Sarah Palin I supported and continue to support today. You wouldn't recognize it today, because of all the sensationalism the media has engaged in by pointing out her belief in God or that neither she nor her daughter chose infanticide, a fact she only chose to reveal when the media began suggesting she had faked her pregnancy while Bristol delivered Trig Palin. This is not to suggest that the media is liberally biased. I am wary of such a blanket statement, but it is obvious with every passing day that the media is simplistic and ruthless and is motivated by factoids, not facts, sound bites, not speeches, and profit, not informing. It is no wonder that they would seize upon isolated speech excerpts, trivial meetings and family issues to turn one of the few credible reformers left in this country into an extremist Christian who will lord over McCain the way Cheney was assumed to pull President Bush's strings. Anyone keeping score knows it was the sensationalists, not Palin, who reanimated the rotting corpse of the dishonest culture war.

Obama's taking a beating on all sides

Ever since the Palin nomination, Obama has found himself playing defense in just about every area in which he thought he was on solid ground. His message of Change is finally being put under scrutiny, and the results haven't been pretty. He's losing 8 out of 11 key swing states since the Republican National Convention. Obama's now trying to maintain that the Change message belongs to him alone, while the Palin selection has shored up the base and allowed McCain to be more persistent in his own message of reform. Just when it seemed things couldn't go any worse, he compared the McCain-Palin record to "lipstick on a pig," and all hell broke loose. Now, "lipstick on a pig" is an ancient expression and is familiar to almost all Americans. That's why it's stunning that Obama's defenders point to an 11-month old quote to make Obama appear acceptable. Obama made his comment a little over a week after Sarah Palin said the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull is lipstick. The laughs in Obama's standard exalting audience were laughs of recognition. His supporters made the connection instantly, but Obama would have us believe that his brain trust failed to notice the possible gaffe.

con·text [kon-tekst]
–noun
1. the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect: You have misinterpreted my remark because you took it out of context.
2. the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.

And Barry won't recover until he understands that.