Sarah Palin to be President Trump's Secretary of Stupid

Hilarious, isn't it? But ignorance isn't a disqualification to their faith-based supporters. Intelligence, education, knowledge - those are suspect.

Furthermore, they think that anyone can work in government, because government - their own government - is worthless. The Republican Party pushes that idea (and then demonstrates it when they get in power).

If they needed medical care, would they go to an amateur? If they needed legal help, would they go to an amateur? Heck, if they needed a plumber or an electrician - and they were paying for it - they wouldn't want an amateur. (They might do it themselves, or with friends, to save money, but they'd want to hire professionals.)

But they want amateurs in government - running our government, not just in low-level positions. And this degree of ignorance just demonstrates their amateur standing, I guess. (Of course, Sarah Palin was a governor - for one-half of one term - so she shouldn't be this ignorant.)

The Pentagon's liberal green agenda

Marine general (from Republican Party training documents)

In my last post, I showed one way the right-wing is fighting back against reality. Here's another.

From Indecision Forever:

Constantly looking for new ways to destroy all that is well and good with America, hippies have recently taken to disguising themselves as top ranking military brass. Out are Birkenstocks and hemp skirts, in are polished shoes and chestfuls of distinguished service medals.

But have no fear, Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and a few Democratic allies, are wise to these tricks. The conservative magazine Human Events explains…

The Senate markup of the 2013 National Defense Appropriations Act late last month dealt a grave blow to the liberal green agenda that has taken hold of the Defense Department.

Like the version of the bill that passed the Republican-controlled House, the Senate version censures military plans to invest heavily in costly biofuels to power ships and aircraft…The Democratic-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee voted 13-12 in late May to include two amendments sponsored by Inhofe and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would prohibit the military from purchasing alternative fuel in the next fiscal year if it cost more than traditional fuel sources.

It's the military-green energy industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower didn't warn us about!

I guess it's worth offering up the generals' and admirals' side of the story, since they're the "experts" on security policy, so here goes: The military isn't interested in renewable energy because they speak for the trees, they're invested in green technology because it helps them to blow shit up while reducing the risk of their own soldiers getting blown up.

The Army's investment in energy efficient tents and trailers? It has something to do with the reality that oil tankers have a nasty habit of coming under enemy fire as they traverse the scenic byways of Central Asia on their way to forward operating bases in Afghanistan. For those bad at math, fewer tanker trips = less American casualties.

The Marines' interest in solar panels? Has to do with the fact that Marines operate in small units, away from resupply points, and carrying pounds of batteries reduces the amount rations, weapons and ammunition that can brought to bear on the bad guys.

With this is mind, do we think that the Navy is invested in biofuels because a) diesel makes baby Al Gore cry, or b) because the ability to make algal biofuel while underway reduces the need for port visits where U.S. warships are especially vulnerable, a la the U.S.S. Cole?

Wow, we've finally found a way to get the right-wing worried about the military spending money! You just have to tie it to protecting the environment (even when that's not the purpose).

Now if we can just tie all military spending to environmental protection, maybe we can close up the Defense Department and go home.

The danger of wind farms

In The Know: Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit

This is The Onion. I don't have to tell you that it's a parody, right?

But you never know, do you?

Saudi Arabia owns us

(John Darkow)

Are you surprised by the difference between our military actions in Libya and our muted response to the protests in Bahrain?  You shouldn't be. Saudi Arabia owns America.

Come on! That can't be a surprise. Our foreign oil addiction was clearly demonstrated during the Arab Oil Embargo in the 1970s, but as long as our fix kept coming (though at ever-higher prices), we refused to do anything about it.

We've had nearly 40 years to end our addiction to oil, but we couldn't muster the will or the wisdom to fight it. We could have started a new Manhattan Project or Race to the Moon - a dedicated, well-funded attempt to research and develop energy alternatives.

But instead, we took the path of Ronald Reagan and his spiritual (and political) descendants:  Don't worry, be happy. Cut taxes and watch a Rambo movie. Don't bother to create a great America when you can just fantasize about how great we already are, instead. Read your horoscope and pray that Jesus will return before the oil runs out. And ignore those annoying scientists.

After all, work is just too much... work. And it costs money to actually invest in America. Sure, it will pay for itself in the long-term, but why should we care about our children and grandchildren? Besides, I want to spend the money now.

Like every other addict, we've got plenty of excuses. Basically, most of us would prefer to believe what we want to believe, rather than face reality. In other words, we tend to be foolish and short-sighted cowards. But we insist that everyone acknowledge how exceptional we are. Heh, heh. Yeah, I'm real impressed.

OK, I love my country, and we do a lot of things right. Heck, we elected a black man to the presidency. That is progress. And recent polls show that a majority of Americans support gay marriage. That's not just progress, it's progress at lightning speed. I'm astonished - and impressed - at how quickly attitudes are changing when it comes to gay rights.

But we're still embarrassingly ignorant, superstitious, bigoted, apathetic, short-sighted, and yes, cowardly. We need to stand up and face reality, and then work to create the kind of future which will make us proud. Forget the excuses. This is our chance to make a better world. We'll never have another opportunity. This is it. Use it or lose it.

Saudi Arabia owns us. It didn't have to be this way. And it doesn't have to be that way in the future. But it gets harder and harder to change as time goes by,... and we've wasted 40 years already.

A threat to America's supply

(Mike Thompson)

Some of these post-it notes are from the 1970s. Yes, we've known what was going to happen for at least that long. But we haven't been smart enough to actually do anything about it.

And as far as I can tell, we're still not that smart. In fact, we seem to be getting dumber by the day.

Running on empty

(David Horsey)

Chair apparent

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Jebus! What have we done to ourselves???

The war against traditional bulbs

(Jeff Danziger)

Thank God the Republicans have taken back the U.S. House of Representatives, huh?  Rep. Joe Barton (TX), whom I've posted about before, is the ranking Republican in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in line for the chairmanship now that we've thrown the Democrats out.

Of course, Joe is famous for apologizing to BP after Barack Obama made them pay to clean up their oil spill in the gulf. According to Joe, it was a "tragedy of the first proportion" - not the oil spill, which was the biggest ever, but the fact that BP was required to pay for the cleanup.

As I noted before, he's also the guy who thought he'd "baffled" Energy Secretary - and Nobel Prize-winner - Steven Chu by asking him where oil came from. (I'm sure Chu was wondering what they taught in grade school down there in Texas.)  And Barton's solution to global warming is to sit in the shade.

But eager to get started turning our country around, Barton has a new crusade. He plans to defend the "traditional, incandescent light bulb" from the onslaught of those "little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones."

Here's TPM:

War on Obamacare wasn't the only one Barton declared before an audience at the Heritage Foundation today.

The ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and one of the men vying to be the next chair of the powerful panel when Republicans take over the House next year, Barton laid out his plan for, essentially, undoing most of what President Obama and Democrats accomplished in the past two years. He laid out the central fronts: the battle to repeal what he calls Obamacare, the fight against the EPA, backing the growing insurgency opposed to net neutrality regulations, taking on "environmental radicalism" and -- of course -- defending the "traditional, incandescent light bulb" against government regulators who want to replace it with what Barton called "the little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones."

I say thank God for Joe Barton, defending traditional American light bulbs from what are no doubt socialist, Muslim light bulbs. But does he go far enough? After all, our Founding Fathers didn't need light bulbs at all. If candles were good enough for them, what are we doing using electric light? Why isn't Joe standing up for candles? Don't tell me he's a... moderate!!!

Joe Barton would like to apologize to...

... BP, for soaking up all your valuable oil with our worthless pelicans.

Oh, Internet, you're such a kidder! Who comes up with these things? It's great, anyway.

Joe Barton, of course, is the Texas Republican - the ranking Republican on the House Energy Committee, in fact - who thinks that the "tragedy of the first proportion" isn't the current oil spill in the gulf, but rather that President Obama has persuaded BP to pledge $20 billion to clean it up.

Keep in mind that the President didn't - couldn't - order BP to do this. So how was this a "shakedown"? Furthermore, how could Barton think that asking BP to clean up their own mess was somehow wrong? Well, maybe the fact that he's taken more campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry than anyone else in the House of Representatives? Maybe because his biggest single contributor owns 25% of the Macondo Project, the site of this Deepwater Horizon explosion?

And yes, this is the lunatic who'll be chairman of the Energy Committee if the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives this November. In fact, we've seen him in action before. He's the guy who thought he'd "baffled" Energy Secretary - and Nobel Prize-winner - Steven Chu by asking where the oil in Alaska came from. (I think Stu was stunned by this level of ignorance in a member of Congress.) And Barton's "natural response" to global warming is to sit in the shade. Great, huh?

But whenever you're depressed, the Internet inevitably rides to the rescue, this time with a Joe Barton would like to apologize website. Click on the random apology to get a new one.

Among others, Joe Barton would like to apologize to...

Al Capone, for our totally unfair income tax system.

The Confederacy for taking all your slaves away. Totally a shakedown move on our part. Sorry.

Germany, for D-Day. Seems like you guys would have really liked to keep all of Europe. How about if we just give you Texas for your troubles. Fair trade?

Rachel Maddow for President!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Great speech! However, I should also note Jonathan Chait's comments:

Few people follow the arcana of Congressional debate. They attribute all political outcomes to the president, and thus when the outcome is unsatisfactory, the reason must be a failure of presidential willpower. I wrote about this phenomenon, with relation to the BP spill, in a recent TRB column.

Rachel Maddow offered a perfect example of the phenomenon the other night. She delivered her fantasy version of the speech President Obama should have given. It was filled with unequivocal liberal rhetoric. I was struck by this portion, explaining how she would pass an energy bill:

The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year. The Senate version of the bill will not expand offshore drilling. The earlier targets in that bill for energy efficiency and for renewable energy-sources will be doubled or tripled.

If Senators use the filibuster to stop the bill, we will pass it by reconciliation, which still ensures a majority vote. If there are elements of the bill that cannot procedurally be passed by reconciliation, if those elements can be instituted by executive order, I will institute them by executive order.

In reality, you can't pass any of the climate bill by reconciliation. Democrats didn't write reconciliation instructions permitting them to do so, and very little of its could be passed through reconciliation, which only allows budgetary decisions. Maddow's response is to pass the rest by executive order. But you can't change those laws through executive order, either. That's not how our system of government works, nor is it how our system should work.

If Maddow's speech had to hew to the reality of Senate rules and the Constitution, she'd be left where Obama is: ineffectually pleading to get whatever she can get out of a Senate that has nowhere near enough votes to pass even a stripped-down cap and trade bill. It may be nice to imagine that all political difficulties could be swept away by a president who just spoke with enough force and determination. It's a recurrent liberal fantasy —Michael Moore imagined such a speech a few months ago, Michael Douglas delivers such a speech in "The American President." I would love to eliminate the filibuster and create more accountable parties. But even if that happens, there will be a legislative branch that has a strong say in what passes or doesn't pass. And that's good! We wouldn't want to live in a world where a president can remake vast swaths of policy merely be decreeing it.

Speeches are easy. Where's the will?

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It's magic!

Jonathan Chait has a brief, but very good, blog post entitled "Lamar and the Magic Climate Plan" (where I took the above Willy Wonka image) that points out the problem - er, one of the problems - with Republicans these days:

Lamar Alexander takes to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to lay out his clean energy vision. It's a lot like the Republican health care vision: let's do all the popular stuff and none of the unpopular stuff it requires.

Well, of course. That's pretty much what we expect from Republicans these days - nothing serious, just propaganda to fool the uninformed. And it's the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, too - which had some of the looniest editorials in America even before it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch (of Fox "News" infamy).

All of Chait's post is well worth reading (and as I say, it's quite short), but I thought the last two paragraphs were particularly good:

This is not the only problem with Alexander's piece. He outlines goals, like increasing conservation and electrifying half the automobile fleet -- but he has absolutely nothing about how to obtain these goals. His electric car plan is literally what you read above: "Electrify half our cars and trucks." Who would do this? How? He does not say. Cars and trucks run on gasoline because gasoline is the cheapest fuel available. If you wanted half the cars to run on electric power, you'd have to change this so that gasoline was no longer the cheapest fuel available. It could be a tax on carbon emissions, enormous subsidies for electric batteries, regulatory fiat, something. Likewise, if you want people to conserve energy, you need to increase the cost of using energy.

I'm not sure how you have a debate with people like this. It's as if you propose that, in order to get your family out of debt, your 23 year old son living at home gets a job, and the son replies that he likes the part of your idea where he gets paid, but let's leave out the part where he goes to work. This is basically Alexander's case. And he's one of the moderate Republicans! Most of them just deny the science of climate change altogether. The moderate position is that we can fix the problem via magic.

You can't debate people like this, because they're not interested in determining the best policies. Their only goal is political advantage. Everything is presented through the prism of politics. Reality is immaterial. Reason is immaterial. Evidence is immaterial. What's important to them is only how it will fly with voters and campaign contributors. Here's another example:

Just a year and a half after they were tossed out of power, at the end of eight long years of criminal incompetence and unmitigated disaster (12 years in Congress), Republicans are working hard to get back in charge. But according to House Minority Leader John Boehner, they've learned their lesson. So, what's the magic plan that will miraculously fix everything this time? It's tax cuts! Yup, the same old obsession they had during the entire eight years of George W. Bush! Still that old magic...

Here's Talking Points Memo:

"You equate the idea of lowering marginal tax rates with less revenue for the federal government," Boehner cautioned. "We've seen over the last 30 years that lower marginal tax rates have led to a growing economy, more employment, and more people paying taxes. And if you look at the revenue growth over those 30 years, you've got a prime example of what we've been talking about."

This is practically the reverse of the truth. In the years after the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, economic growth and employment were significantly lower than they were after Bill Clinton's 1993 tax increases. According to Michael Ettlinger and John Irons of the Center for American Progress, "Over the seven-year periods after each legislative action, average annual growth was 3.9 percent following [Clinton's 1993 tax increase], 3.5 percent following [Reagan's 1981 tax cut], and 2.5 percent following [Bush's 2001 tax cut]."

But beyond the factual contradiction, Boehner appeared to be in denial about the real impact of the Bush tax cuts. Another reporter followed up: "Are you saying that the Bush tax cuts didn't effect the deficits that we're in now?"

Boehner halted for a moment, then shrugged: "The reductions in '01 and '03 were to respond to an economic problem. '01 was done before 9/11. '03 was done in response to what happened to the economy. But that's not what led to the budget deficit. It's not the marginal tax rates. If you look at the problem that we've got here, it's a spending problem, that has grown over the last five or six years. A real spending problem. "

Bush did use the 2001 recession to argue for tax cuts...but only after running for President on a platform of reducing taxes in response to Clinton's budget surpluses. Tax cuts either way. And as for the latter claim--"that's not what led to the budget deficit"--the numbers tell a much different story.

Take a look at this graph from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Bush tax cuts are in fact the single biggest contributor to the current deficit.

So what, if anything, would Republicans do differently if they got another bite at the apple? The short answer seems to be: very little.

According to Republicans, black is white, up is down, and this time tax cuts really will magically fix everything. Yes, trickle down economics - voodoo economics - really does work, despite all the evidence when we've tried it. You just have to have faith.

And yes, of course, Republicans will drastically cut spending this time. Trust them. Of course, they won't tell us what they'll cut. And when they do propose cutting some specific program, it will have about as much effect on the deficit as spitting at it. But then, their goal isn't to cut the deficit. Their goal is entirely political.

Unless we start getting smarter voters - better informed, more rational, more honest, less gullible, less apathetic, braver - we're going to find ourselves in a world of hurt. Republicans have nothing but the same old ideas that got us into this mess - into all of these messes - in the first place. And they're either cynical as hell or they're crazy enough to rely on magic to fix everything - or both.

BP spills coffee

This is funny, but of course, the problem isn't that BP has been inept in handling the current oil spill. It's a very difficult situation, after all.

No, the real problem has been our "drill, baby, drill" mentality, stupidly (and cowardly) refusing to accept the energy challenge we've been facing for decades, combined with right-wing anti-regulation ideology that basically let oil companies - and banks, too! - regulate themselves.

Thus the stage was set for this disaster. If we were going to let oil companies drill at such depths, we shouldn't have shrugged off the very real dangers involved. And in any case, we should have been using this to buy time while we engaged in a massive research and development effort to wean ourselves from fossil fuels.

Once the explosion occurred, it was too late for smart thinking. I have no doubt that BP is doing the best it can - and, indeed, that we've got every available expert working hard on this problem. But it's not as simple as spilling a cup of coffee. This is very deep in the ocean and very difficult to fix at this point. That's why we should have used our brains before the drilling ever started.

I'm angry at BP, too, which is why I laugh at this video. But I'm angrier at the Bush administration, and I'm even angrier at us, the American people who elected them, and who have let politicians take the easy way out for decades. This video clip is liable to give the wrong impression. But it's a lot easier to blame BP than to look in the mirror and see who really is to blame, isn't it?

It is our fault that we didn't get serious about weaning ourselves from fossil fuels after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, and in all the years since. It is our fault that we bought into right-wing ideology which claimed that corporations needed no regulation, because they'd just naturally do the right thing. It is our fault that we elected George W. Bush - twice! - and let him gut the government programs we still had in place. It is our fault that we left a Minerals Management Service rife with conflicts of interest, even after the 2008 scandals broke.

Now that oil is spilling everywhere, we're looking for a scapegoat. That's typical, isn't it? But if anyone is to blame, it's us. This is what happens when we're dumb. This is what happens when we're greedy. This is what happens when we're horribly short-sighted. And I'm afraid it's only the start. You think this is bad? Just wait. If we don't drastically change our ways, this is only the beginning.

LOST

Here's Ed Stein's commentary on this cartoon:

What’s coming increasingly clear as the Gulf of Mexico turns black, is that the Bush administration’s coziness with the oil industry was worse than incompetent–it was criminal. The Minerals Management Service, already notorious for being in bed  (literally, in some cases) with the industries it supposedly regulates, handed out drilling permits and environmental waivers like candy, in violation of its own rules and environmental law, often against the advice of its own geologists and biologists. Interior Secretary Salazar supposedly drained that swamp, but it turns out that the Obama administration either underestimated or ignored the degree of corruption, and many of their worst practices have continued. The inevitable result of all this hanky-panky is the worst oil spill and quite possibly the worst man-made environmental disaster in history. Funny, I don’t hear anybody chanting “Drill baby drill” anymore.

But you know, he's dreaming if he thinks we won't be hearing "drill, baby, drill" again soon enough, just as soon as this disaster has passed from the public consciousness (given our embarrassingly short memories, I give it a year, tops). And I don't see too many signs that this has given a boost to energy reform legislation - cap-and-trade, alternate energy, conservation - either.

Speaking of the latter, I've heard absolutely no talk about lowering speed limits. And it isn't as though there aren't other benefits to that, in addition to conserving energy. Here's how Eric A. Morris at Freakonomics puts it:

According to a recent paper by Lee S. Friedman, Donald Hedeker, and Elihu D. Richter, the lifting of the federal 55 mph speed limit in 1995 was responsible for 12,545 deaths between 1995 and 2005. That’s about 45 percent more American fatalities than we have suffered in 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan put together. And all those human tragedies are due not to weighty national security imperatives but to the fact that we all want to go just a little bit faster.

I might point out Al Gore's commentary in The New Republic, too:

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life."

The problem is exactly that nothing has changed. Nothing changed after the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973. Nothing changed after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Nothing changed after the 9/11 attacks. We've seen, repeatedly, for decades, that change is desperately needed, but we can't seem to muster the political will to do anything.

This is not just about the political power of big corporations, and in particular the oil and gas industry. It's not just about being greedy and gullible, willing to elect politicians who'll tell us whatever we want to hear and willing to let our descendants pay for our foolishness. It's not just about irrational, short-sighted, ignorant non-thinking. It's about all of these coming together to paralyze America and stop us from changing course before even worse disasters strike.

It might be different if we were destroying our planet to buy time, but we're not. We're doing nothing. We're wasting that time. I guess we're all hoping to die before things get really bad. Our kids? Who cares? What have they ever done for us?

Or are we even that smart? Maybe we're just too dumb to notice - and too apathetic to care if we did.

Limbaugh's alternate universe

On the Doonesbury website, I came across this quote from Rush Limbaugh:

When do we ask the Sierra Club to pick up the tab for this leak? Everybody's focused on BP and Halliburton and Transocean...The greeniacs have been driving our oil producers off the land.

Heh, heh. How loony is that? Of course, Limbaugh deliberately tries to say the most outrageous things possible. That's his schtick, after all. But you have to wonder about the alternate universe inhabited by his dittoheads and teabaggers - and really by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and pretty much all of Fox "News."

I realize that many of my fellow Americans have very short memories, but doesn't anyone remember the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973? Even then, we were importing huge amounts of oil from some of the worst nations in the world because that's where the oil is. Oil is not a renewable resource, and when it's gone, it's gone. That's why big oil companies are trying to drill ever deeper, in ever harsher conditions, even deep in the oceans. And that's why we're sending huge sums of money overseas, to feed our oil addiction.

The Arab Oil Embargo should have been the shock we needed as a nation. The writing was clearly on the wall almost 40 years ago. We should have started a new Manhattan Project - a huge government-funded effort to begin to wean ourselves from an oil-based economy. But OPEC was smart enough to drop oil prices whenever we seemed to be getting serious (never very serious) about alternate energy. And in the "don't worry, be happy" Reagan years, we were quite willing to pretend that all was well. In an ant and grasshopper world, we were - and we remain - the grasshoppers.

Then came 9/11, when we missed another opportunity. Here's Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times:

President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America. I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change. It was the Texas oilman’s Nixon-to-China moment — and Bush blew it.

Had we done that on the morning of 9/12 — when gasoline averaged $1.66 a gallon — the majority of Americans would have signed on. They wanted to do something to strengthen the country they love. Instead, Bush told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping. So today, gasoline costs twice as much at the pump, with most of that increase going to countries hostile to our values, while China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind, solar, electric cars and high-speed rail. Heck of a job.

We had a government of oilmen. Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had made big money in big oil, and for political purposes, there's no way they would have asked Americans to make any sacrifices anyway. Remember, these were the people who actually cut taxes (mostly on the rich) during wartime. Yeah, we ran two wars on a credit card. Real smart, huh?

Of course, we never would have invaded Iraq - which hadn't attacked us, was actually the enemy of the people who had attacked us, and was no threat to America whatsoever - if it hadn't been for their huge reserves of oil. Remember how the war was going to pay for itself? Yeah, in the same way that we were greeted as liberators, huh? (Were Bush and Cheney ever right about anything?)

Meanwhile, there's global warming, a real and very serious threat. I've discussed that before, but let me just repeat two quick points: First, if you accept anything except the consensus of climatologists - the experts in this scientific issue - you're simply sticking your head in the sand and believing what you want to believe. They could always be wrong (none of us is infallible), but no one else is likelier to be right. And second, it's the ultimate of foolishness - and certainly not "conservative" - to keep changing the atmosphere of our only planet unless we know for certain that it won't cause problems.

And while idiot America still rallies around "drill, baby, drill," China is putting billions into alternate energy research. Yes, while America is still basing our economic future on the equivalent of buggy whips, China is moving forcefully and intelligently into the 21st Century. And since they're spending vast sums of money on such things, their economy is still growing strongly, even in this worldwide economic meltdown.

Admittedly, we started out in a hole, due to the spendthrift policies of the GOP - now newly re-branded as the "Party of No." Now, suddenly, they're the deficit police. (How funny is that?) And they're warning of inflation in our distant future, when deflation is the real threat in America, now that they've collapsed our economy. They're denouncing deficits (really, how can they do that with a straight face?) when this is a time when deficits make sense. You don't want deficits in good times, but we learned in the Great Depression of their great value during an economic collapse.

And just as in your personal finances, debt isn't always bad. It all depends on why you're borrowing the money. (Borrowing to pay for a college education is a lot different than borrowing to have a wild vacation in Hawaii.) When Republicans held power, they created record-breaking deficits just to give tax cuts to the rich and to wage war unnecessarily. If, instead, they'd invested that money in education, in scientific research, in alternate energy technology, or even in 21st Century infrastructure, we'd be far, far better off today. Heck, even if they'd used the money to balance the budget, we'd have been far better off!

But in the right-wing alternate universe, God created the Earth and gave it to human beings to despoil as we wish. There's no possible way we could ever destroy what he created, so we're perfectly free to foul our own nest. Besides, all good Christians will be raptured up into the sky any day now, so why worry about long-term impacts?

In the right-wing alternate universe, there's a bottomless bowl of oil under America, easy to reach if those damned (literally) environmentalists would just get out of the way. There is no global warming. There is no problem with pollution. Mountaintops are made to be leveled. And drilling in the oceans is perfectly safe, except when those clever environmentalists fiendishly sabotage drilling rigs. (At which point, the ocean will miraculously take care of the oil spill, anyway, as God intended.)

Environmentalists in this alternate universe are strangely powerful, and multinational corporations strangely impotent. Poor CEO's struggle against mighty tree-huggers. No politician dares to cross the king-makers in the environmental lobby. But, of course, they aren't really worried about pollution and clear-cutting and endangered species. No, not at all. In reality, it's all a giant conspiracy to set up a new world order of socialism, communism, fascism - and probably other "ism's" good Republicans have never even heard of - under a black Antichrist. Oh, and let's not forget the death panels!

In the right-wing alternate universe, quitting means that you're not a quitter. And only true American patriots advocate seceding from the Union. In the right-wing alternate universe, immigrants are always the scum of the Earth - except for our own immigrant ancestors, of course, who came to America from the white right nations.

In the right-wing alternate universe, it's treason to criticize a president during wartime - but only if that president is a Republican. Torture is a traditional American value, but separation of church and state is not. Thomas Jefferson does not deserve to be in history books, and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery (which was never as bad as liberals claimed, anyway).

In the right-wing alternate universe, since the ozone hole is no longer a big worry, that means we must have banned ozone-destroying chemicals for no reason. And the absence of a Silent Spring has nothing to do with our subsequent regulation of pesticides. Since the government cannot, by right-wing definition, do anything worthwhile (except to wage war, of course), those dangers simply must not have been real after all. Certainly, our actions couldn't have made a difference, could they?

In the right-wing alternate universe, you need Republicans to protect Social Security and Medicare from Democrats. In the right-wing alternate universe, a high-profile failure of abstinence-only sex education makes a perfect spokesperson for abstinence-only sex education. In the right-wing alternate universe, President Barack Obama is a socialist!

We laugh at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and all the other crazies, because we think they're so loony that no one could ever believe them. Heck, Democratic leaders eagerly pointed to Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party (and he, always the showman, was eager to don that mantle). After all, the vast majority of Americans couldn't possibly be dumb enough to go along with this stuff, could they? Could they?