Friday

Friday May 29, 2009

. . . .So, the battle over the Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor continues to heat up. Although it appears that some more rational voices are straining to be heard. Senator John Cornyn repudiated both Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on Thursday. This is meaningful, Conrnyn is Chair of the National Republican Senate Committee. More pointedly, he said "Neither one of these men are elected Republican officials. I just don't think it's appropriate. I certainly don't endorse it. I think it's wrong."

. . . And by the way, how, in the last 72 hours, did empathy become a bad quality for a judge, at least according the Party of No and the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight? Just wondering.

. . . And this of course comes on the heels of the absolute maniac appearance today on CNN by former 6th Congressional District Representative Tom Tancredo, who said that Sotomayor belonged to the "Latin KKK". This of course comes from a man who over the years has threatened to bomb Mecca, called Miami a Third-world city and suggested that the fence actually go around Brownsville, Texas to exclude it from the United States. Tancredo is one of the loudest voices behind the movement to throw all immigrants out of the country. Now, rather than debate that, given that simplistic viewpoint, it would mean the Tancredo would have to leave with the rest of us. Only makes sense, we basically rape the continent, leave, and leave the toxic mess for what's left of the original inhabitants here. And we wonder why bloods call us "stupid White people".

. . .There's still reaction coming in from readers about the letter I posted yesterday, and first batch of responses to it. Jeff sends this in:

For over 50 years of my life I considered myself a "physical Republican" and though I did not agree on many planks of the platform, right for women to make a choice about abortion, rights of gay or lesbian couples to enjoy the same rights as you and I have and be legally married if they choose, most enviromental policies, and the what I consider hijacking of the party by the religious/Chistian right. I frankly have done quite a bit of work and fund raising for the GOP over the years, much, much more then your average Republican. However I became so disenchanted over the last 8-10 years that I would say now that I am much more of a Democrat than Republican

. . .In terms of Limbaugh's effect on the public, Arnold "weighed" in on him as well, and his impact on the Right. Arnold says he (Limbaugh) is most definitely not the 800-lb gorilla in the room. . . .he's down to 650 lbs.

. . . . .Arianna Huffington was on "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann on Thursday night and discussed specifically Rush and his continued references to some kind of Obama "master plan".

. . .Got news for Rush. He's the President. He's supposed to have a master plan. It's called charting the course of the country and national policy over the next 4 years, that would be the role of the Chief Executive under the United States Constitution, maybe Rush should read it.

. . . .Another one of the "must reads" that I came across this week was over in Tina Brown's Daily Beast and was a co-authored piece by Mark McKinnon, a former strategist for both Bush and McCain, and Rob Shepardson, who did the youth marketing for Obama, co-wrote a piece called "A Manifesto for Young Voters". I'm going to run it in whole, because it talks specifically to many of the same points made in this column, and by you all:

Yes, you can change politics. We had a shot and left you a lot of wreckage. But there are a lot of hopeful signs that you, the next generation of voters, are different. You appear to be a generation with a lot fewer selfish chromosomes and a lot more socially responsible DNA.

President Obama wants to change the way Washington works. President Bush came into office intent on doing the same.

Can it happen? We hope so, because the historically complex problems facing our country right now deserve an honest, open debate. Ordinary American voters are not at fault. They want change; they vote for it, repeatedly; they become frustrated when it doesn't happen. Despite our collective will, somehow our discourse winds up back in the gutter.

Our hope is that recent changes in politics, activism and technology might—might—usher in a new era of more enlightened debate.

In 2000 and 2008, calling for a new way of doing politics won votes. Looking ahead, our bet is that those who live by a different standard of political behavior will prevail while those who revert to familiar old-school tactics will find themselves on the losing end.

We've talked to hundreds of younger voters, activists, and students who desperately want to change politics. They are post-judgmental about race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, different upbringings, diseases, or other conditions that once stigmatized people.

What they don’t like, however, is old-fashioned, selfish political gamesmanship. It alienates them. They’ve grown up watching our problems get worse while politicians blame each other through obscure language and nasty behavior that’s offensive. They have a point: Why engage in a system that seems so irrelevant?

And they are brutally frank about whom to blame: their older brothers and sisters, and their moms and dads. "They’ve had their shot," they tell us. “Now they need to get out of the way."

Thankfully, issues motivate young voters. We’ve learned that if they understand the scope of a problem, and they are given a credible way to address it, they act. We’ve seen this in politics and beyond, for organizations such as Bono’s ONE campaign and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

The good news is that their political alienation hasn’t stifled their better angels—as long as it is not furthering the political charade. During last year's campaign, one young woman put it perfectly: "Enough already. Please, stop the political bullshit. Our country is in serious trouble, so let's get on with it."

To add fuel this fire, social media make mobilizing humans unbelievably easy compared to the dark days before YouTube. Today's tools can overthrow dictators, squelch guerrilla groups, and elect the first African-American president. Younger voters share every moment of their lives with hundreds of friends. Older generations may find it bizarre or alienating and, yes, it can turn ugly, but the result of omni-sharing is a radical reduction in disrespect. Young people today, in short, collaborate.

So digital utopia is just around the corner? Well, not quite. Not until this promising next generation of activists, political organizers, and the citizens they mobilize sign onto a code of conduct for the digital era.

Unless Ashton Kutcher has a better idea, here are a few thoughts to start the bidding:

• Respect those with a different point of view. After all, they might be right, and you might be wrong.

• Question policies and positions, but don't question motives. Assume good intentions on the part of your opponents until proven otherwise.

• Don't personalize your differences. Stick to the substance, which is hard enough. Plus, the personal's none of your business, and only schmucks care.

• Tell the truth. Be honest. Don't distort. It's not right, and it's bad politics.

• Compare views, don't go negative. Arm voters with facts. Don't hide from the scrutiny. And (maybe) if you don't want to, your position might be weak.

• Use social media to engage and activate supporters. Spread the truth, not venom or half-truths about your opponents.

• Don’t let the anonymity of social media induce you to say things you wouldn’t otherwise say with your name attached.

• Keep it organic but keep it organized. Meetups and rallies need to be clear what they are about. The power of the collective can be lost without a common goal uniting them. A mob of people who are just angry cannot accomplish real social change.

• Continue to create, build, and reinvent your own model of political debate. Why follow the cynical politics of the past that led us over the cliff in the first place?

• Demand choices: You are not empowered by "speaking out." A vote is not a choice. If the Internet only gives us more of a "voice," then it has failed democracy. It succeeds if it results in more choices. Don't settle for less.

• Reform starts at home: Republicans cannot improve the Republican Party by fighting Democrats. They have to fix their own house first. And now that Democrats have consolidated power, Republicans have little ability to hold them accountable. Republicans and Democrats need to be responsible for disciplining their own side. Things only got to the poisonous stage they're at because we've all failed in our responsibility to clean up our own messes—or, sometimes, to even see them.

Don't get us wrong: This is not a plea for everyone to lock arms, throw partisan labels out the window, and lay down their weapons.

On the contrary; we hope the next generation of activists bash each other's brains out—through substantive, thorough, serious debate about the issues. Does anyone really believe that one party has all the solutions these days?

There are few things more noble than working in politics and government. That's true now more than ever. So while we hope that idealism motivates the next generation to change politics in our country, we hope they do it for pragmatic and self-interested reasons, too.

After all, engaging in a new way to do politics will win elections. It's also the best way we know how to find the solutions that will secure our country's future, both here and abroad.

The old-line cynics will no doubt skewer our hopeful optimism. That's fine. We're used to the arrows. We bear the scars of all the old battles.

But you've got a chance to change the rules of the road going forward. One thing we know for sure from having practiced this game for a few decades: Winning campaigns and movements never look back. They look ahead and reinvent the rules

. . . .Just a short note, according to the latest figures released, 12% of all mortgages are either in foreclosure or now late.

. . . .On this one, I am in full agreement with the White House, the President, General David Petraeus, and in complete disagreement with the Left and it's thirst for "justice" and a "need to know". There is absolutely no reason to release the photos from Gitmo, and a very compelling reason not to. We have thousands of our young men and women in Iraq right now. Inflaming a populace, giving them further photographic evidence of the abuse suffered, will only put the people we have now in country in further danger. There is no good that can come of it.

. . . .Son Cody weighed in tonight with his judgement on two new albums. Eminem's latest effort "Relapse" gets two thumbs up. He's listened to it extensively, and Cody also has a unique perspective, having grown up with two sober and clean parents and around people who have gone through treatment and are in recovery. His opinion - Eminem's just working out the demons and doing some therapy. The first half of the CD will absolutely offend you and piss you off, guaranteed, as he works out some of his own demons. The second half, actually, and I listened to a few tracks as well, is him starting to work the Steps and get on with himself. Combine that with Dr. Dre's production and the beats he brings to the project and it's a winner.
- The other one he weighed in on is one that he picked up on a whim because he saw it. It's the soundtrack from HBO's True Blood and he says it's excellent and has more better tracks than not, and has possibly only one or two that are throwaways.
- On the graphic novel and comics front, he says that with Todd McFarlane back at the helm of Spawn, the series can right itself and take off in some good directions.
- He also recommends the Ultimate X-Men series from Marvel, now being penned by Mark Millar, who was the scribe behind the Wanted graphic novel.
- He's keeping his eye on and collecting another series right now called The Boys and recommends it.

. . . .I'm going to keep beating this drum. Fixing, upgrading, reinventing the national electrical grid has to be one of our top priorities. Electrical distribution efficiency puts money back in our pockets, puts money back in public coffers and is key towards reducing our dependence on foreign oil sources, which is a right now type of thing. I re-ran the NPR 10-part series on the grid earlier (it can be found below and in the archives section). Wired magazine as well did a great series of pieces on that one, and we'll continue on with that:

Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid. A whopping 40 percent of all the energy used in the US—be it oil, gas, wind, or solar—is converted into electrons that travel over these wires. Any attempt at energy reform must begin here.

But this keystone of our 21st-century economy has yet to advance much beyond its 19th-century roots. Considering how wasteful, unresponsive, and just plain dumb the grid is, it isn't surprising that outages—which have been increasing steadily over the past quarter century—cost us $150 billion a year. The real shock is that the damn thing works at all.

Now consider what we will ask the grid to handle in the near future: Demand for electricity is expected to increase by as much as 40 percent in the next two decades—more than twice the population growth rate. To meet that need, we will have to generate an additional 214 gigawatts, a feat that would require the construction of more than 357 large coal plants. We also want to plug in dozens, if not hundreds, of gigawatts of wind and solar power harvested from the most remote corners of the country. And we will want to recharge millions of electric vehicles every night, without fail.

That is why we must fix the grid—reinvent it to be reliable, efficient, responsive, and smart. Washington is already on the case: President Obama has called a new energy agenda "absolutely critical to our economic future," and his stimulus package directs more than $40 billion toward that goal—the largest single infusion of government capital to the energy sector in US history, more than half of which will go to grid-related projects. In the short term, this bonanza aims simply to create jobs. But in the long term, it lays the groundwork for the grid of the future. (About $400 million will go to fund ARPA-E, a sort of Darpa for energy research.) And this is just the beginning: Congress is considering additional legislation in the hope of remaking our energy infrastructure.

Private enterprise is on board as well. Just take a spin through General Electric's Smart Grid Lab in Niskayuna, New York, which will simulate an entire electric system—complete with the kind of state-of-the-art meters, software, and communication tech that will enable a smarter grid. Or check out Google's new PowerMeter, a Web app designed to give consumers instant information about their energy usage.

But technology alone won't solve this mess, because fixing the grid is not a technology problem—it's a system problem on the broadest scale. Political gridlock, broken markets, and shortsighted planning have created a slew of bottlenecks that can't be solved with a bunch of smart meters and fancy routers.

Here, we show how utilities and businesses have begun to tackle those obstacles—from installing new transmission lines to empowering consumers. If we're serious about remaking our energy infrastructure, we'll need to encourage these kinds of fixes and replace our current system of misplaced incentives. Right now, that system encourages everyone involved—customers, utilities, and private industry—to neglect the grid. We have to give those stakeholders new reasons to turn on, engage, and transform.

Go ahead, blame Edison. He's the guy who invented the business model that got us into this mess. Edison Electric Light, founded in 1880, was a vertically integrated monopoly that controlled everything from generation to distribution. (It even owned the bulbs in customers' homes.) As utilities sprouted across the country, they saw no reason to deviate from Edison's successful blueprint.

For its first century, then, the electricity industry was a simple affair. Most states anointed a single utility to provide all the power to its citizens. These utilities owned the plants that generated the electricity, the transmission lines that carried it to substations, and the wires that distributed it to customers. When more power was needed, they simply built another coal-fired plant and spliced it onto the grid. Rates had to be approved by a public-service commission, but otherwise the utilities were autonomous. (They linked their systems to neighboring grids, but mostly for backup.) Electricity was inexpensive and abundant, and the system's reliability was the envy of the world.

What it wasn't? Efficient. Since the utilities had a captive market and seemingly unlimited access to cheap fossil fuels, they had no incentive to upgrade their leaky old plants. No one complained as long as energy was seen as plentiful and harmless. Then came the fuel crisis of the 1970s, along with the rise of environmentalism. In 1978, Congress began chipping away at the utilities' dominance by forcing them to buy electricity from independent generation companies that met efficiency goals. Fourteen years later, the government went much further, ordering the utilities to open their transmission lines to all comers.

The result was utter chaos. Many utilities got out of the generation business and morphed into middlemen, shopping for the cheapest power—often from areas with low labor costs and lax environmental oversight—and transporting it hundreds, even thousands, of miles to their customers. This meant using the links between grids, which hadn't been designed to accommodate such heavy traffic. The grids of distant states thus became closely intertwined, so that an outage in one rural county could affect millions of far-flung customers.

Though power companies were demanding more from the grid, they had no incentive to upgrade it. Every penny a utility spent on grid improvement would potentially benefit plants owned by rivals. And states that exported cheap energy resisted plans for costly new transmission projects, fearing they would lead to higher in-state rates—and angry voters.

As a consequence, the grid has fallen into disrepair, with few major efforts to fix it. Today, utilities allocate just 2 percent of revenue to research. "For God's sake, we contribute less to R&D than the pet food industry does," says Jeffrey Byron of the California Energy Commission. So the grid remains hobbled by unreliable electromechanical switches and analog controllers. During the early minutes of the Northeast blackout of 2003, the Ohio utility whose damaged hardware started the cascade couldn't even monitor its own wires; employees had to phone a regional overseer and beg for updates. By that time, it was too late.

Regulators, meanwhile, have done a terrible job of mandating grid upgrades. Maybe that's because nobody is really in charge. The industry-run North American Electric Reliability Council appoints eight regional agencies to manage grid standards, but they clash with state agencies, which constantly angle for more authority. Adding to the muddle are the quasi-governmental independent system operators and the regional organizations responsible for ensuring open access to transmission lines. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, created in 1977 to supervise regional and national electricity sales, has proven inept at mediating interstate disputes. This thicket of regulation and competing interests strangles any ambitious initiative. As a result, despite ever-increasing electricity demand, fewer than 700 miles of interstate transmission lines have been built since 2000.

To fix the grid, then, we don't need another layer of oversight. We need to tweak the system so that companies are rewarded—not punished—for investing in the grid. Take the case of Duke Energy. Like most utilities, the North Carolina company is not known for its environmentalism. (It has been accused of flouting the Clean Air Act, for instance.) But in 2006, Duke announced its Utility of the Future initiative. This billion-dollar program is designed to smarten up Duke's portion of the grid by deploying customer meters and network-level gizmos that facilitate speedy, two-way communication. It's exactly the sort of upgrade that will help make the grid stable enough to handle wind turbines and plug-in hybrids.

How did the giant utility come around to embracing the smart grid? Probably not out of the goodness of its corporate heart. The costs of building new generation facilities—and the tumbling prices of plug-and-play gadgets—likely made raising the grid's IQ a more efficient way to improve Duke's long-term prospects. Look at the company's recent push toward IP-based open standards for all its grid hardware. Open standards will help operators communicate with one another regardless of utility—turning the grid into an Internet-like ecosystem rather than a scattered network of proprietary islands. But there may be another reason for Duke to become an evangelist of the approach: Open standards would make it easier for the large utility to gobble up and incorporate smaller rivals, since their systems could be integrated with minimal effort.

Duke isn't the only utility to grasp the financial upside of smart-grid projects. Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy is building SmartGridCity, a $100 million effort in Boulder, Colorado, that will allow customers to monitor their electricity consumption via the Web, as well as pump wind and solar energy into the grid. If SmartGridCity is a success, Xcel hopes to persuade public utilities nationwide to invest in similar systems.

This type of investment benefits the grid tremendously and must be encouraged at every turn. According to Roger Anderson at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems, tweaking the grid's communications capabilities can increase transmission efficiency by 50 percent—no additional wires necessary.

Self-interest has a long, noble history of spurring some of America's greatest infrastructure projects. But it must often be nudged along by cleverly crafted government incentives. The transcontinental railroads, for instance, got a crucial boost from a federal land grant program. These grants, often located in barren quarters of the western US, weren't worth much at the time; the railroad companies laid track through the land in hopes of increasing property values. Energy regulators already have some experience creating similarly ingenious carrots. In the early 1980s, states began to realize that utilities wouldn't become more efficient until their revenue was no longer tied directly to the sheer amount of energy produced. So regulators in dozens of states began to implement decoupling, a policy that rewards utilities for coming in below generation targets. Suddenly, companies could profit by promoting efficiency.

With similar policies, we can push energy companies to make the grid better for everyone. For example, utilities have not been eager to incorporate renewable power from customers' rooftop solar panels or backyard wind turbines. They would be more likely to do so if they were allowed to hike rates or were given tax breaks for making the necessary accommodations.

The grid took more than a century to grow into the unwieldy beast it is now. Given the urgency of climate change, energy independence, and economic demands, we have only a fraction of that time to fix it. But the solution won't spring forth fully formed. This, the greatest engineering challenge of our era, must be solved the same way it was created—piece by piece, with utilities and consumers acting in their own interests. For too long, those interests have been misaligned. It's time for a reset.

. . . .Enough for today, outta here. Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they slip through your hands. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how our ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right here, right now. This ain't no dress rehearsal and the curtain goes up every day on the real thing. Change yourself, change your world and it will change the world.

. . . Got your back, somewhere out there in the night

The Desolation Angel
[where: Hell, Michigan 48137]