Tony Snow died this morning, he was a good man and a true patriot. He was a news anchor at fox and left to take the post at the white house, that is a serious pay cut. Whatever you think of President Bush it should not apply to Tony. Tony was a great communicator and a brilliant man. My thoughts and prayers are with his family.

The last time I saw him on TV he was on RTwBM show on HBO, I was taken back on how smart he was on the show and how well he communicated. Bill was on one of his rants that do not have much fact behind them and Tony handled himself fantastically, I remember thinking Tony seems a lot smarter and believable then Bill. He was just that good at communicating.

He was respected by all and will be missed

Everyone is so hyped up about the election this year, like if Obama does not agree with everything you want the world will come to the end. The real problem is that it will take more then the president to solve our problems, we all need to change our behavior.

Start looking at your electrical bill and make sure you do not run your AC too often, by new appliances, sell your hummer or large SUV. Take the train, car pool. For clothes and other things look at tags try to buy things built in America. Do not buy fruit out of season

If you are not willing to make these changes and many others like it, this is all talk and nothing will change

First of all, a viable third party in this country is not a bad idea. Second it will have nothing to do with this presidential election, anyone who is saying otherwise is just angry and ignorant. If there was going to be a third party before it had a chance of the White House or for the party to have any real power at all, it would have to start with Congress and State Politics. The president only signs bills into Law, Congress controls the purse strings and drafts bills, then votes on them before they can go to the President to be signed into law. A third party candidate in the white house would be absolutely useless since the party would have no base any where else. So anyone is serious about a third party, will talk about its platform and starting to get local and state candidates on ballets. I think that would probably be a good thing. Anyone who talks about million person marches and taking the white house are just angry and lack a clear understanding of politics. Do some research on the UK, its Parliament but you can draw some good conclusions from that model for a third party.

If you are one of these angry people crying for revolution, I suggest you chill and put on a Beatles album.

The other week McCain gave a speech on his Environmental policy. I saw the whole thing and then the talking heads analyze it. It looks to be very green, in some areas even greener then the democratic platform. I need some double checking on my bull shit filter here to make sure I am not missing something.


The policies look similar, differences are as follows:

both want to start a CO2 credit program, but McCain wants to give the credits away for free to get it started.
McCain wants to drill off shore

McCain has this 300 million dollar research prize, which does not sound like a bad idea.


What am I missing here, did McCain just get Greener then us?

OK, months ago there was lots of arguing on this site, in the public and on the news. The Democratic primaries were full of passion. The arguing got to be a bit much at times, but it was for real reasons, there was a real debate going on. That is all over!!!

So now when I log on to this site and see people arguing over things like PUMA, something that has zero news coverage and is so small and silly I do not get it. I see almost all of the old school folks, some I used to have some serious debates with and the Obama supporters say who cares, for good reason, WHO CARES!?!? yet I continue to see people argue of this and other silly little points. Why?


There are real questions to be asked and real issues to discuss, why is everyone commenting on these silly posts?


I do not get it,

The clintons and Obama's seem to be getting along pretty well, we are up in every poll! The congressional races look good for us as well, so we are arguing why?

lets take a look at the different agencies over the last 7 years to see how they have been doing under bush.


CIA: Did not see Sept 11 coming, and the terrible job with Iraq intell.

FBI: Was never able to find out how anthrax was sent through our mail system. Spying by China is at a all time high

Fema: katrina, need I say more?
Army Core of Engineers: katrina need I say more?

FDA: The current deal with contaminated food

CDC: Contaminated Flu shots a few years ago

NASA: Tragic loss of Columbia

department of Justice: How many were fired for no reason?

Department of Energy: Where do I start?

The White House: VP leaked information about a CIA agent.

EPA: does this even still exist?

SEC: The bank crisis

DOT: Has anyone flown recently? Not to mention the 8 lane bridge that collapsed 2 years ago.

I am trying to think of an agency that has done a good job with the current leadership, can not think of one. I have other examples of screw ups but I think I made my point. During the same time the EU and China have become world leaders with strong economies and with the case of the EU very good diplomatic policies.

The EU is in the middle of working out a deal with Iran, where are we on the sideline.

Besides listing some of the things that are issues, the real point is its going to take a long time for us to dig ourselves ourselves out of this whole, maybe 10-15 years. Damage from bad policies is like gaining weight, its adds up or goes on real easy, but it is a pain to undo it.

Here are the most likely realities of our future.

The next 4 years our influence in the world will continue to fall to pre WWI levels
We are probably looking at a decent size depression until we break the oil dependency, this will take at least 4 years and will come at a great cost.
We will pull out from Iraq but the middle east will continue to be a major problem for us and the world, we will be forced to take a back seat and hope the EU can work it out for us.


Now consider what happens if we do not get good leadership?


Sad fact is if we get a leader that looks for the quick fix we will see this pain again in the near future or worse. The best thing we can do now is chin up and take our medicine and get through this.

So I could be off my rocker but I think I have the answer to all of the energy problems in our country. I am curious to see how far off my rocker I am. The key to our energy problems is hydrogen. It can be stored as a liquid or gas, can be burned or used in fuel cells to create electricity. So here is the deal, people have been saying for years that there are areas of this country that has tons of wind potential and solar potential, geo thermal, the list goes on. The problem is these areas are not near where we need the energy and having new very long very high voltage power lines running across the country is just not very attractive. So what I am proposing is build these power plants in the middle of no where and build gas plants right next to them to produce hydrogen. This hydrogen can then be shipped via pipeline or train or truck to other locations. We can have power plants that burn hydrogen instead of oil and coal to produce electricity. I do realize using hydrogen in cars is still a little far off, but it can be used in trains and other large equipment. Then to be used in cars in the years to come. The premise of argument is as follows:   Read More »

They are increasing the output of oil, by a pretty good margin. Realizing we were beginning to see how addicted we really are it is time to flood us with more oil to get us back in our energy policy coma. This oil topic is kind of a pet peeve of mine.

What really kills me is Bush and McCain saying drilling in more off shore locations and in the arctic is the answer. The core of this argument is that we have no where to drill. So they are saying we have a fleet of oil drilling rigs sitting idle because they have no where to go. This is not the case, they are all very busy right now. They have been for a long time. If you ask anyone in the oil industry, they will tell you that it will take 7-10 years to get these new wells on line. Of course you have to realize our existing wells would decline in production, that's what they do. If we do nothing, the world demand will continue to increase, so basically we are screwed. In the oil market there really is no such thing as our oil, its a free market so there is only supply and demand. the last two years production was down and demand is up. The booming economies in China and India are a large contributors to this. The only real answer is to move off oil for our portable energy supply.

I do not get it, why does she get so much flack. I am not sure I have ever seen a spouse get so much flack. Except maybe Hillary but that's a different story, Hillary was and is obviously more politically active

I am watching all the news about the floods in the midwest, a very sad story. One of the reports talked, in depth, about the floods in 93, which I remember. I also remember government saying they learned their lesson and would stop building dikes along the Miss river and let the flood plains flood and not build there. The report talked about that, and said in the late 90's the land they did not rebuild on, moving the town, they started building malls, and started building dikes again.

We keep cutting corners thinking the worst will not happen then it does, and its a national tragedy. To some degree it is the same thing with NO. It kills me when politicians and investors make bad decisions and then what the were betting would not happen happens. We need to stop developing flood plains

All,

If you look lower in the blog you will see that I like many of you have been feeling the pinch of high oil and the other down stream economic effects of high oil prices. It sucks, however, we have been here before, remember the late 70's? So we have known of this day for 30 years, yet since the price of oil was low we did nothing. So the question is this, even though the high prices suck, is this what we need to get our asses in motion? If the price of oil drops again will we forget about this pain again? I hope you realize that if it drops again and we lose our political momentum on this issue nothing will happen. If that happens when the day comes when we do really run out of oil, which will be MUCH sooner then you think we really will be up the creek.


So do we take the pain and get off our addiction to oil now or are our withdrawal pains to severe and risking our lives?

The latest polls have Obama pulling away from McCain, this has to be some of the Hillary supporters coming over to Obama. To make things even better for the party, Hillary hits the campaign trail again to support Obama. This is great for the party. I do not think she will be VP, I think she will be a power house in the Senate, maybe the next Ted Kennedy. Which is really good for the party, people tend to forget that having the White House does not mean much when you do not have very strong politicians in the Congress. I see Hillary writing a lot of good Bills that Obama will be signing into law.

I have been away for a few weeks and see lots of people posting now that were not here before 3 weeks ago. Most of them posting nastiness, think that's part of being new. Where did the rest of the folks go, and where did all these newbies come from?

I make a good living but I am really starting to find myself in a bunker mentality, that is just keep my head above water now and survive what feels like an attack on my household. I am loosing money in the stock market like crazy, with my portfolio down because the market has been getting killed, ehich means it would be a problem to sell it off in case of emergency. My day to day budget surplus is now gone, increased gas prices and food prices have now begun to really start hurting. My house has lost lots of value so a lot of the money I invested in my home is now for not. This has not bothered me till now because I expect small hits to the economy. We had a pretty good one in January, and I thought we were on our way out, then BOOM another major hit.
The job market is shrinking so I have to make sure nothing goes wrong at work.


Here is the deal, I can see a lot of this has to do with oil, I also study the world economies and I know what the real demand is, its very very very high. There is no real solution in the short term for this problem, and the politicians are killing me. George Bush is killing me with his recommendation, if we were to start drilling now, and drilling like crazy you are looking at about 7-15 years before it is commercially available. during that same time existing wells will continue to drop in their production, so no real help.   Read More »

I do not see lots of posters I used to, the fighting is mostly gone, which I like. But not many comments on posts either. I am guilty of this too, but I have been real busy latly. Is everyone just burnt out after the primary? Or does everyone know McCain does not stand a chance? If so we need to be careful we do not get lazy. I did not like the fighing but a healthy debate here or there would be nice

So over the weekend the Saudi's increased oil production, to what many say is their absolute max output, to the point that not all the oil is light sweet. It did not really make a dent in the prices of oil today. Oil was actually up for a while. Was working from the hotel room today so watched all the talking heads on oil. There is a lot of talk of this being supply and demand. With China and India increasing their demand and the fact that total oil production delclined last year I believe them. I have been paying attention to this issue for some time.

The Republicans want us to start drilling here. Even the oil experts say if they could start drilling tomorrow it would be about 8-10 years before it would produce commercial oil. If we are not in a much different place regarding our use of oil in that time we are in real trouble. We need to demand signifigant changes from our auto makers very soon.

Believe it or not, finding an alternate power sources for our cars is easy compared to using something else for our fertilizer and chemical industries. the Petro Chemical industry is very important to world food supplies.

One of the best quotes I heard was what one person imagined he would hear from his grand kids "you just burned it all?"

Hello,

Been traveling a lot so have not been on here but wanted to log on and wish everyone happy fathers day. I also wanted to say how sorry I was about the death of Tim R.


I did get a chance to watch some news today and saw that our good friends (satire) in Saudi Arabia have decided to increase production by 500,000 barrels a day to lower the price of oil. Sounds like the drug dealers do not want us to break our addiction. The lower prices will be nice but the fact is if we do not feel the pain we will not change.


Again Happy Fathers Day

The board had been fighting way too much as of late. Mr. Bill had a great post last night asking the Hillary supporters to keep a civil tonge. I checked back to his blog today to see that Obama supporters were baiting and Hillary supporters were attacking, of course only to be attacked back. We all watch the news and know the stats, delegate count and so on, and we can all check cnn.com. Posting them here are rubbing peoples faces in them with an antaginizing tone does not help anyone. It is not just what you say it is how you say it. You can make your point, even a very strong pro Obama point without pissing everyone off if you just think a little before you type. There are some people on here, in both camps, that will over react to everything and spew hate. They are transparent and we know who they are so ignore them. We lost some good people off this board, today we a really bad day for the board. We can not wait for Dean or anyone else to make this better for us, if we want it to be better then WE have to make it better. Some simple rules make this easy, I will post them as comments so they are clear. Being civil is to all of our advantage.

I saw the post earlier, and followed the link, but it only had a . and not Jackie's name. I also tried to go back and find the comment that started all this. This would really suck if its true! If someone has the post that someone posted the nasty comments on I would appreciate it. I want to know who would say things like that. Also please tell me he is still on the board.

I got home a little early today and had some time to watch the news, do not have a lot of time to do that during the week. Saw some stories on Hillary, some on Obama, McCaff read some blog comments. Things looked and sounded pretty good for our party, when you heard what people of saying things are looking up. I read some of the CNN blog, a lot of anti McCain stuff on there. Other stories about how the media has to admit they over estimated the divide in the party and that we will have unity soon. Like I said not bad. The only thing they said which I found a little strange is they are worried we will have trouble (with both canidates) because the War in Iraq is going better, or so they say. Only 19 KIA in May. Still too many. I thought April was a terrible month for us, checking on that so I think this might be the next BS story for media hype we shall see.