Kudos To T-Bonehead? No! A Shower Of Brickbats Instead!

I was mindin' my own business and what came on the cable channel I was watchin' (while slaving over a hot keyboard) yesterday? T-Bonehead Pickens! The ol' crook has a new scam: we're supposed to go for wind to produce electricity without disclosing that he — T-Bonehead — is building the world's biggest windfarm in Gray County, Texas. Who will benefit from wind-powered electrical power generation? Duh! On top of that, T-Bonehad wants the diversion of natural gas from electrical power generation, thanks to wind turbines, to substitute for gasoline and diesel fuel. Duh, redux! Guess who owns the biggest natural gas field in the lower 48 states? If you answered, "T-Bonehead Pickens" you would be correctomundo. So, T-Bonehead would win with wind power and he would win with natural gas. What a guy! All heart! A (real) patriot! If you believe that bull guano, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn that I'll sell you at a bargain price. An environmental site, Climate Progress, drank ½ of T-Bonehead's Kool-Aid. If this is (fair & balanced) debunking, so be it.

[x ClimateProgress.org]
Memo To T. Boone Pickens: Your Energy Plan Is Half-Brilliant, Half-Dumb
By Joseph Romm

The Phone Call — based on a true story

Major cable network: What do you think of T. Boone Pickens’ latest energy plan ?

Climate Progress: Half of it is great, the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20% of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal….

Major cable network: I was hoping you liked the whole plan. That way we could use you on the show…. You don’t have any ideas of who might like the whole thing?

Climate Progress [Long pause, crickets chirp, the wind sighs, sea levels rise a few meters]: No. The people who will like the renewables part probably won’t be thrilled about the fossil fuel part, and vice versa.

Major cable network: Thanks. I’m sure we will find some reason to use you soon.

I am thinking about working that into a screenplay about a mild-mannered blogger for a great metropolitan progressive think tank who sacrifices his chance to be on television because he refuses to endorse an inane idea. I was looking at Matt Damon to play me, especially now that he has put on a little weight.

Seriously, though, it’s great that gazillionaire TBP is talking up peak oil and joining the wind power bandwagon (see “Wind Power — A core climate solution“). And it’s great he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars pushing this idea and delivering the mesage that $15 billion dollars for the wind production tax credit is peanuts compared to the $700 billion this country is going to spend on foreign oil this year.

But if you want to displace oil, the obvious thing to do is use of the wind power to charge plug-in hybrids (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core climate solution“), multiple models of which will be introduced into the US car market in two years. Indeed, with electric utilities controlling the charging of the plug-ins, they can make optimum use of variable windpower, which is mostly available at night time. That would be win-win-win.

The Pickens Plan, however, is based on the utterly impractical idea that “Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel.”

Uhh, never gonna happen, T. Boone. Never. The most obvious reason is the gross inefficiency of the entire plan.

Right now, “We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity.” Most of that electricity comes from gas burned in combined cycle gas turbines at an overall efficiency of up to 60%. Why in the world would the federal government — or anyone else — spend billions and billion of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles in order to burn the gas with an efficiency of 15% to 20%? Natural gas is simply too useful and expensive to squander in such a fashion.

And then there’s global warming.

It now seems clear this country will have a major effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a price for carbon dioxide within a few years. That means all federal and private sector energy-related investments will increasingly be driven by the need to achieve reductions in carbon dioxide emissions at the lowest price.

Running cars on natural gas does NOT significantly reduce GHG emissions (esp. if there is even the tiniest leak in the whole gas delivery process). Running a car on electricity from the U.S. electric grid does reduce GHG emissions. And running a car on electricity from combined cycle gas turbines would have a far lower GHG emissions than running the car directly on natural gas — internal combustion engines are simply too damn inefficient. Of course, running a car on the wind power would eliminate vehicle admissions completely. Or using the wind power to displace coal plants would eliminate the emissions from those plants entirely.

So again, neither the federal government nor anyone else is going to spend billions and billions of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles.

A 2002 analysis of why natural gas vehicles (NGVs) didn’t catch on was published in Energy Policy, “Commercializing an Alternate Vehicle Fuel: Lessons Learned From Natural Gas For Vehicles,” (subs. req’d). The study concluded, the environmental benefits of NGVs were oversold, as were the early cost estimates for both the vehicles and the refueling stations: “Early promoters often believe that ‘prices just have to drop’ and cited what turned out to be unachievable price levels.” The study concluded, “Exaggerated claims have damaged the credibility of alternate transportation fuels, and have retarded acceptance, especially by large commercial purchasers.”

So a large-scale switch to NGVs by consumers is not going to happen no matter what T. Boone does. But he could help accelerate windpower into the marketplace and for that alone he deserves some kudos.

[Joseph Romm is the site editor of "Climate Progress." Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton Administration. He earned a Bachelor of Science (physics) degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. (physics) in 1987 at MIT.]

Copyright © 2008 Center for American Progress Action Fund

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Preview Of The Dubster's Presidential "Library"

The Dubster is the dumbest sumbitch ever to sit in the Oval Office. He should have the smallest presidential library, ever. One shelf in the janitor's closet is all that is needed. If this is (fair & balanced) library science, so be it.

[x Berkeley (Alternative) Fishwrap]
George W. Bush Presidential Library
By Justin DeFreitas



[Justin DeFreitas is the staff editorial cartoonist and film critic for the Berkeley Daily Planet, the West Marin Citizen, and several other Northern California publications. His work also appears regularly in more than a dozen other newspapers and magazines and has been reprinted in the Los Angeles Times.]

Copyright © 2008 Justin DeFreitas

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Test Of Patriotism: Adversaries Or Advocates?

Calling The Hopester! The Geezer's dirty little secret is that he is opposed to benefits for veterans. On top of all of his other votes against veterans, The Geezer voted against the new GI Bill that was Senator James Webb's (D-VA) great accomplishment of this session of Congress. The Dubster lied (Surprise, surprise!) when the new GI BIll was stuffed down his throat and proclaimed that he (and The Geezer) had supported the new GI Bill. The Hopester can demonstrate his patriotism by reforming the VA into the Veteran's Advocacy agency of the U.S. government. Under The Dubster and all of his predecessors, VA has stood for Veteran's Adversaries. Enough phony patriotism! Do the right thing, America! If this is (fair & balanced) patriotism, so be it.

[x Seattle Fishwrap]
VA Or Veteran's Advocacy?
By Martin Schram

When it comes to war and peace, we indeed are two Americas. One fights our nation's wars. The other pays those who go to war so the rest of us, our children and our grandchildren, won't have to.

At least, that is the way it is supposed to work. But a new book, written by this columnist, details scores of shameful ways in which our nation is failing the men and women who volunteer to fight our wars in distant lands — and especially when they return home and discover they must battle anew, this time with their own government, just to get treatment and benefits earned long ago.

Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles (Thomas Dunne Books) chronicles more than a half century of tragic tales of veterans who have been wronged, stacks of dust-gathering studies of delays and denials, official studies followed by official inaction, as problems festered and veterans suffered.

There is the sad story of Gulf War Army veteran Bill Florey, who developed a rare cancer after being exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons that the U.S. Army mistakenly detonated at Khamisiyah, Iraq. A series of horrendous failures and treatment delays left him horribly disfigured and cancer-ridden.

Then the VA coldly rejected his modest request for service-related disability compensation — without even checking its own data that would have proven the merits of his request. The VA case adjudicator simply asserted in adversarial language that it was "less likely than not" that Florey's chemical exposure caused his cancer. Florey died of his brain cancer on New Year's Day, 2005. Six months later, a government study discovered that actually it was twice as likely as not that Florey's chemical weapons contamination caused the cancer that killed him.

There is the tale of Eric Adams, a military policeman from Tampa, Fla., who served in both the Gulf War and the Iraq War. His job in Iraq included leading truck convoys through dangerous territory. A roadside bomb exploded in front of his convoy and when he braked, a truck smashed into the rear of his rented van, which had no seat belts. Back home, a VA adjudicator initially felt there was inadequate proof that his service even constituted combat conditions!

Then the adjudicator challenged the claim for treatment of Adams' posttraumatic stress disorder — even after presidential commission recommendations and presidential directives that stressed the need to provide proper treatment and compensation to suffering veterans. When Adams, who'd seen friends killed in war, showed the VA adjudicator that he had been diagnosed by two VA doctors as suffering from PTSD, the VA changed its ruling: The new ruling was that, yes, Adams did indeed have PTSD as his VA doctors had diagnosed. But the VA again rejected his claim — on mind-numbing grounds that this former military policeman could not cite the specific wartime incident that cold be verified as the "stressor" that caused his PTSD.

There was the case of national guardsman Garrett Anderson, of Champaign, Ill., a truck driver who was interviewed on CNN, after an explosive device cost him his right arm, broke his jaw and left him with a body riddled with shrapnel. Anderson didn't get to collect service-related benefits payments for the shrapnel wounds because the VA adjudicator actually wrote the following decision: "Shrapnel wounds all over body not service connected."

Not service connected? How else did the VA think he got riddled with shrapnel? Taken together, the tales, statistics and studies make clear one conclusion: The Department of Veterans Affairs has become infused with a mindset in which senior officials, mid-level bureaucrats and low level adjudicators have too often acted as veterans' adversaries, rather than veterans' advocates.

The VA adjudicators often function as if veterans are assumed to be attempting to bilk the government. Veterans are often left to find lawyers to fight their battles against the VA. This mindset within certain segments of the VA was not addressed by the recent presidential commission's recommendations for veterans' affairs. But no other solutions can succeed until it is recognized and addressed.

One solution: To banish the mindset of a VA adversarial role, the VA should help veterans gather all information and build their best case for benefits claims. And to foster a new mindset and instantly re-badge the bureaucracy, the VA should be renamed as the Department of Veterans' Advocacy.

[Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. Schram earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Florida in 1964, majoring in political science. He began his news career in 1963 as a reporter for The Miami News. He is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and appears frequently as a commentator on various television networks.]

Copyright © 2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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The Krait Makes Sense: The Hopester Is Anti-Stupid

The other deadly viper on the the NY Fishwrap Op-Ed page is The Cobra (Mo Dowd). Today, The Krait hisses at the Lefties who don't like The Hopester's drift to the center. The Krait makes a great point: The Hopester hates stupidity. (Are you listening, Rat?) The Dubster is stupid. The Geezer is stupid. The Dickster is stupid. Turd Blossom is stupid. Stupid is as stupid does. If the Lefties sit it out in November or — even more stupidly cast their vote for The Geezer — they will reap a bumper crop of stupidity. If this is a (fair & balanced) lack of intelligence, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Audacity Of Listening
By Gail Collins

We have to have a talk about Barack Obama.

I know, I know. You’re upset. You think the guy you fell in love with last spring is spending the summer flip-flopping his way to the right. Drifting to the center. Going all moderate on you. So you’re withholding the love. Also possibly the money.

I feel your pain. I just don’t know what candidate you’re talking about.

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Here’s a helpful story: Once upon a time, there was a woman searching for a guy who was ready to commit. One day, she met an attractive young man.

“My name is Chuck,” he said, grinning an infectious grin. “I’m planning to devote my entire life to saving endangered wildlife in the Antarctic. In five weeks I leave for the South Pole, where I will live alone in a tent, trying to convince the penguins that I am part of their flock. In the meantime, would you like to go out?”

“I have just met the man I’m going to marry,” she told her friends. She had been betrayed by poor listening skills, which skipped right over the South Pole and the tent. Of course, after five weeks of heavy dating, Chuck flew away and was never heard from again.

A year and a half of campaigning and we still haven’t heard Obama’s penguins, either. It’s not his fault that we missed the message — although to be fair, he did make it sound as if getting rid of the “old politics” involved driving out the oil and pharmaceutical lobbyists rather than splitting the difference on federal wiretapping legislation. But if you look at the political fights he’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in 2002 in his big speech against the invasion of Iraq. He did not, you will notice, say he was against unilateral military action or pre-emptive attacks or nation-building. He was antidumb.

Most of the things Obama’s taken heat for saying this summer fall into these two familiar patterns — attempts to find a rational common ground on controversial issues and dumb-avoidance.

On the common-ground front, he’s called for giving more federal money to religious groups that run social programs, but only if the services they offer are secular. People can have guns for hunting and protection, but we should crack down on unscrupulous gun sellers. Putting some restrictions on the government’s ability to wiretap is better than nothing, even though he would rather have gone further.

Dumb-avoidance would include his opposing the gas-tax holiday, backtracking on the anti-Nafta pandering he did during the primary and acknowledging that if one is planning to go all the way to Iraq to talk to the generals, one should actually pay attention to what the generals say.

Touching both bases are Obama’s positions that 1) if people are going to ask him every day why he’s not wearing a flag pin, it’s easier to just wear the pin, for heaven’s sake, and 2) there’s nothing to be gained by getting into a fight over whether the death penalty can be imposed on child rapists.

His decision to ditch public campaign financing, on the other hand, was nothing but a complete, total, purebred flip-flop. If you are a person who feels campaign finance reform is the most important issue facing America right now, you should either vote for John McCain or go home and put a pillow over your head. However, I believe I have met every single person in the country for whom campaign finance reform is the tiptop priority, and their numbers are not legion.

Meanwhile, Obama has made it clear what issues he thinks all this cleverness and compromising are supposed to serve: national health care, a smart energy policy and getting American troops out of Iraq. He has tons of other concerns, but those seem to be the top three. There’s definitely a penguin in there somewhere.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Dubster Can Trump The Trickster By Pardoning... Himself!

Will The Dubster issue himself a war-crimes pardon? Even The Trickster lacked the cojones to issue himself a pardon after Watergate. It has been the fondest fantasy (among many) in this blog to see The Dubster on trial for crimes against humanity and then see The Dubster dance at the end of a rope (like Saddam Hussein). Let the smirking sumbitch utter one last, frat-boy, smartass remark: "I guess I'll be hangin' around for a little while longer." Ha Ha. If this is a (fair & balanced) phantasm, so be it.

[x Salon]
Beware Bush's Preemptive Strike On Torture
By James Ross

(Summary: The president might issue a blanket pardon to block prosecution of top U.S. officials behind brutal interrogations — including himself.)

New revelations of the U.S. government's systematic use of torture in the "global war on terror," including communist Chinese "brainwashing" methods from the 1950s, have brought renewed calls from lawmakers and human rights advocates for the prosecution of senior Bush administration officials. While the legal and political obstacles to such prosecutions are steep, those implicated will not want to leave the enjoyment of their retirement years to the mercy of the federal judiciary.

So don't be surprised if some time before Inauguration Day 2009, President George W. Bush issues a blanket presidential pardon to ensure that those who organized and implemented brutal interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding" (a terrifying simulated drowning) are never hauled before the courts. A pardon would prevent future administrations from ever prosecuting those responsible for torture and other mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay and secret CIA detention facilities elsewhere overseas.

The president may well want to protect loyalists who designed or oversaw his most secretive tactics in the war on terror, and behind closed doors he may be under some pressure to do so. If in the end Bush pardons the stewards of his interrogation policies it would be a final act of injustice by a president whose legacy includes running roughshod over fundamental freedoms and undermining America's ability to promote human rights abroad.

The Constitution provides the president virtually unlimited power "to grant reprieves and pardons" for federal crimes; only impeachment is excluded. A president need not give reasons for pardons and Congress has no power to reject or otherwise block them.

Historically, the pardon power has been used for a variety of reasons. Presidents have issued pardons to individuals to undo unjust or overlong sentences, or as an expression of mercy. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that "the benign prerogative of pardoning" was necessary, otherwise "justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel." Until recent decades, it was the norm for presidents to issue hundreds of individual commutations and pardons each year.

But the president can also grant a pardon before charges are even filed for a crime, not just after a conviction. This has occurred most frequently after insurrections or wars fought to, in Hamilton's words, "restore the tranquility of the commonwealth." Andrew Johnson pardoned the soldiers of the Confederacy and Jimmy Carter issued a broad amnesty for Vietnam War-era draft dodgers. These amnesties permitted large numbers to return to the national fold.

Such "preemptive pardons" have less justification in individual cases. The criminal justice system is deprived of its responsibility to investigate criminal wrongdoing. The victims are denied the sense of closure that only criminal prosecutions can bring. And the general public loses the opportunity to examine the evidence before it.

Presidential pardons have frequently been controversial. Carter's Vietnam pardon, issued on his first day in the White House, reopened old wounds while it healed others. Ronald Reagan pardoned two FBI agents convicted for conducting illegal break-ins in the investigation of the radical Weather Underground. Most famously, Gerald Ford probably lost the 1976 presidential election because of his preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon two years earlier.

As a result, presidents have taken to waiting until the very end of their administration before handing down controversial pardons. George H.W. Bush pardoned six defendants in the Iran-Contra scandal, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, with less than a month to go in his presidency. Bill Clinton issued 140 of his 395 pardons on his final day in office, including that of financier Marc Rich, who had fled the United States on tax evasion charges. While last-minute pardons may dampen the political damage, they tend to live on long in the historical record.

Since 9/11, President Bush has pushed the limits of presidential power in numerous ways — although he has barely used the pardon power, among the most explicit executive prerogatives. At a press conference in February 2001, Bush responded to questions about Clinton's Rich pardon, saying, "Should I decide to grant pardons, I will do so in a fair way. I'll have the highest of high standards." By mid-2007 he had commuted the sentences of just three minor drug offenders serving long prison terms and issued 113 post-sentence pardons.

But after a federal appeals judge last year upheld the 30-month sentence of vice-presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby for his role in the Valerie Plame spy scandal, Bush called the penalty "excessive," extolled Libby's "years of public service" and commuted fully his prison time. It was a clear demonstration of his willingness to protect top officials involved in his wartime policies.

So what of those responsible for torturing detainees? There is the distinct possibility that in his administration's waning days Bush will issue a preemptive pardon for all those who have or may have committed federal crimes relating to detainee interrogations. He might even invoke his father's Orwellian praise of the Iran-Contra defendants, who were pardoned because of their "patriotism" and "long and distinguished record of service to the country," and who the elder Bush believed had been caught up in "the criminalization of policy differences."

Such a pardon might seek to protect low-level government personnel who relied on legally dubious Justice Department memos on interrogations. But it would also provide blanket immunity to senior administration officials who bear criminal responsibility for their role in drafting, orchestrating and implementing a U.S. government torture program.

Constitutionally, neither Congress nor the courts can prevent President Bush from signing such a pardon. It would, however, be the first preemptive pardon in U.S. history for war crimes. And because of his own possible criminal role in approving the torture program, Bush effectively would be granting a self-pardon — something Nixon seriously considered but no president has ever done. As he ponders his historical legacy, Bush might just decide that this is a pardon better left unsigned.

[James Ross is Legal and Policy Director at Human Rights Watch. Previously, he worked on human rights and humanitarian law issues with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Holland, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia, the International Human Rights Law Group in Cambodia, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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