I'm an engineer at Oregon State University.

I'd like to point out a few crucial facts that will give John McCain a better hand come the general election, unless Barack Obama reverses current energy policies.

I recommend that Barack have my blessing for flip-flopping on these issues.

I am and continue to be an advocate for renewable energy implementation.

More below.

Only 2 days left to submit new planks to the Netroots platform!!!! Come on by and add your $.02 to the process:

www.NetrootsPlatform.org

You can find the current top planks below.  These were developed by the Netroots community - democratically, collaboratively, transparently, and entirely online.

Most of the planks are really strong, but everything (even the good stuff) can still be improved. There's still time for YOU to add your voice before we submit this to the Obama Campaign and the DNC!

(For more info, see here, here, here, here and here.)

Click on to see the current platform:

Saturday morning at an Obama rally in Titusville, Florida, I asked the Senator:

"American education policy is being shaped by educational amateurs in Congress, the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the publishing industry.  If you become President, will you devise a workable system to give professional educators a voice?"

It was obvious from crowd reaction that the question was considered both appropriate and important.  He answered at length, affirming his intention to do so.

To my surprise, I was approached afterward by Fox News asking if they could come to my home.  I agreed, they set up in my dining room, and interviewed me at considerable length on this and other education-related subjects.  

The Tax Policy Center revised their earlier analysis on the two campigns tax and revenue policies to address the criticism that what the candidates say on the stump differs from what the campaign staffs had provided, An Updated Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidate's Tax Plans. So how much of a difference in cost?

The difference from what McCain saysd on his speeches versus what his campaign staff claims is his economic policy is a whopping $2.9 trillion more over 10 years, and that is from reducing revenues by $7 trillion versus $4.2 trillion.  That is a whopping 65% increase in revenue shortfall.

Obama, on the other hand actually increases revenues by $400 billion from the relatively (relatively being key here) modest $2.8 trillion.  The Obama plan, as described in speeches, raises reduces tax revenues by just $2.4 trillion over the 1009-2018 period.

I wasn't going to read Elizabeth Kolbert's "New Yorker" piece on the Danish island of Samsø because I'd covered it already and because I heard her talk on the radio;  but a friend sent me a copy and I found that the second half of the article was all about the 2,000-Watt Society, a very interesting idea and a concept I'd been looking for.

2,000 Watts per person per year (or 17,520 kWh) is what we produce now.  It is a baseline for sustainability, at least, this is what the scientists of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology believe.  This 2,000 Watts includes all activities - working, eating, traveling, and investment in common infrastructure.  Currently, Switzerland is a 5,000 Watt society and most other Western European countries are 6,000 Watt societies.  The USA and Canada consume 12,000 Watts per person per year.

"At first glance, the objective of a 2,000-watt society appears unrealistic, but the necessary technology already exists,"  says Moritz Leuenberger, head of the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications.

As the McCain campaign shows more and more why they will be completely unable to win this fall, it seems to the Dog that we should try to get our heads around what we might be able to accomplish in the first year of the Obama Administration (gods, I love typing that!) . The Dog knows that most of us have a laundry list of items that we hope a new Democratic congress and President will enact, but sadly we have to throw some cold water on those hopes.

The Republicans are having a temper tantrum over the rejection of McCain's Op-Ed for the New York Times, who said there wasn't enough new.

So, once again, we're treated to the Republican's typical complaint:  The Media is biased against them.

It's not like McCain's made a million gaffes, and had few of them covered.  Or is given donuts by the leader of the newswire service upon whom the economizing media relies for more and more material nowadays.  Shall we define why the Republicans need the excuse of bias?

I'm back in Paris, and trying belatedly to organise my thoughts after the last 5 days in Austin. Beyond the obvious pleasure for me to see friends I can meet only once a year, I've been trying to get an general impression of what happened at Netroots Nation. I was much impressed by Hunter's wistful and rather pessimistic musings on Thursday, but came reassured by what transpired throughout, and which, in my view, was eloquently summarised by Van Jones in his keynote speech on Sunday morning (it can be viewed here).

I remember 3 core points from what was a truly inspirational moment:

1. they had their chance, they messed up, "it's our turn (to clean up)"

2. consequently, the netroots need to move from a (successful) force of opposition to a force of proposition

3. energy and climate policy is at the heart of the clean up

Space policy made a pretty decent splash at Netroots Nation.  We had an excellent panel on space policy, and an excellent platform meeting.  For those of you who don't remember, we had Andrew Hoppin moderating, and Chris Bowers, Lori Garver, Patricia Grace Smith, and George Whitesides all speaking.  You can about the panelists here.

Join me over the fold to read, and see it

So it started with the gas tax holiday...

He said the average consumer would save a "quarter and a nickel" a day, and only $28 in three months.

McCain told a town-hall audience in Denver: "I want to give the American consumer a little bit of relief just for the summer. Maybe they'll be able to buy an additional textbook for their children when they go back to school this fall."

link

$28? For a textbook? Would that my life were so easy.

The Dog has been a proponent of gun control for most of his life. It is not that this was a family position that he sucked up with his mother’s milk, no that would have been a hell of a lot easier. No the Dog’s father, a dyed in the wool liberal, was a big advocate for gun ownership, just as his mother, was staunchly against. But as the Dog grew up he learned to shoot and hunt, learned the high level of damage that mishandled weapons caused and made up his own mind on the issue. Then 9/11, the "War on Terror" and real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq came along. The Dog is nothing if not a pragmatic political policy guy; it was very clear that talking any kind of gun regulation in those circumstances was a total loser politically.

Things have changed now. The recent decision by the Supreme Court affirming that the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms is one devolves to the individual citizen give us an opportunity to make changes in our gun laws that not only heal the breach in the Democratic party on this issue, but will remake the gun ownership issue one that is a winner for Dems. How do we achieve this miraculous feat, follow the Dog below the fold and he will tell you.

**Contrary to the comments, the blog -theseeing.wordpress.com, is run by me. Thank You.

As the 2008 Presidential Election heats up, I think it is time to analyze both candidates, thoughtfully. As most people have already seen John McCain (as an aggressive, hawkish, not-in-sync with the public candidate), which is quite true, I think we should also spend some time analyzing Obama. While everyone regards McCain's foreign policy as hawkish and following the steps of the Bush administration, we should also take a look at Obama's stance on foreign policy.

I recently told an Obama supporter that Obama's foreign policy seemed a little 'weird.' She told me to refer to Samantha Power, a foreign policy adviser to Obama.
*Some of you might remember Power as the lady who humorously referred to Hillary Clinton as a "monster."
Thus, I analyzed Samantha Power, and this is what I found:

Today’s impossible prices for oil have finally forced America to ask the essential question: "Where’s the Plan?"

We’re in a situation where every business, every homeowner, every retiree, every local and state government, and every U.S. citizen is being forced to live under ‘crisis planning’ – which is a recipe for failure.

On a national level, stumbling from crisis to crisis — from Iraq to Katrina to the current energy crisis - is not a plan to govern.

To become an energy independent nation, the first step we must take is to develop a plan.  We must develop this plan together, out in the open – not behind closed doors.

Americans United for Change has launched a campaign to Free Our Oil! While an interesting response to the Republican focus on lying to support drilling, I challenged this campaign, stating that this effort supports a quite dangerous framing of the problems and solutions.

If we make this just about gas prices, we are caught into a very dangerous framing. "Lowering" gas prices gets people thinking back to cheaper energy unit costs days. We need people, the nation thinking about enery as a system, as a "cost to own" rather than "cost to buy". We (the nation) should foster upfront investment (help it) that will lower total "cost to own" by reducing wasteful use of polluting energy. While difficult in a robocall, every single message (I would argue) should avoid getting captured in messaging that fosters thinking that we can go back to days of cheaper gasoline. Over the long term (and likely short term), it isn't going to happen.

In response, I was asked a very good question for which I had a very ? answer.  Follow after the fold for that conversation.

In all of this confusion and rhetoric about the economy, Iraq, and everything else, it is easy to get mixed up about what is actually going on.  One side is saying something and the other side is saying something completely different.  Both are saying they are right, but who knows?  Whenever I come to a difficult and confusing situation like this, I know I can always fall back on mathematics.  In Mathematics, you find a true constant and you can work your way to the answer based on the relationships between your variables and that constant.  Applying this principle, I have discovered two laws that will help you figure out our political situation.

This morning's Morning Edition on NPR had a rather interesting bit on offshore drilling, when it was announced (in the middle of an unrelated story) that Mr. Bush would be ending the executive ban on new offshore drilling projects.

The focus of the commentary about that was mostly on people's complaints about the view from the Eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico, how it would be ruined by the sight of the drilling platforms, their stacks, the boats going to and fro. Not that I want to minimize this concern... well, actually, I do. I think we're going to have to have some kind of thing off shore, the question is merely what it will be. And I, personally, don't much care whether the horizon has ships or islands on it or merely open sea. Now, that said: guys, you entirely missed the point!

Senator and Democratic nominee for the U.S. Office of the President Barack Obama has announced that it will be the policy of the United States to seek the death penalty for Osama Bin Laden if he is captured alive.

"I am not a cheerleader for the death penalty," Obama said.

"I think it has to be reserved for only the most heinous crimes, but I certainly think plotting and engineering the death of 3,000 Americans justifies such an approach."

"I think this is a big hypothetical, though -- let's catch him first," he said.

Source: http://afp.google.com/...

Some conservatives have been smart enough to embrace Wall-E as their own and some have not.  Similarly its easy from the Pickens plan preamble to have the idea that its a step in the right direction even though its a step here.  What Wall-E, which is garden of Eden for dyslexics, and Pickens plan have in common is a great statement of the issues and then an unwillingness to address the core problem.  This is conservative sustainability - intense anger at where we are but but little realistic thought to how we got there or how we can get out.