Tom D'Antoni: Candidates In Pissing Contest as Washington Burns

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This week the U.S. Senate Democrats caved in again....twice. Once on re-authorizing illegal domestic spying by giving immunity to the Telcos' past criminal offenses. Next on the spare change hand-out which patronizes most of America.

That was bad enough. Bad enough to make one lose further faith in the Congressional Democrats who voted with Bush. It another example of the Democrats' litany of "we want to work with the Republicans and stop the partisan bickering," in action. In fact, 99% of the partisan bickering has come from the Republicans.

What's worse is that Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were absent from duty while this was going on, missing both votes and engaging in a juvenile pissing contest while campaigning.

Amidst the pissing, they had a few things to say about what they would do if elected. Back when they were running for Senate, they also told voters what they would do. Unfortunately, they did not promise those who voted to elect them to Congress that they would miss two of the most important votes of the year by talking smack at each other while running for President.

The media, needing no excuses to ignore substantive issues, loves a fight. Therefore, the two votes that Clinton and Obama missed were also missed by most of the media, or buried so far down that they bumped up against the day's Brittney Spears incident.

Since they didn't make the votes, they obviously couldn't talk about the issues, thereby ignoring the issues. Vicious cycle isn't it?

All this is supposed to make us have faith that either one of them can bring us change? For a dollar, maybe.

The Dems know they have us progressives by the balls. We have nowhere else to go. We're not going to allow another Republican to be elected, or to steal another election. There's no alternative. And Mayor Billionberg won't get us.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Who is to say that, even with a Democratic President and Congress, what needs to get done WILL get done? I'll believe it when I see it and all I see is the Republican in the White House having his agenda furthered by a Democratic Congress, in the face of his overwhelming unpopularity in America.

To hope that the candidates will stop pissing on each other and begin to deal with their responsibilities as United States Senators and as the future President, is about the same as hoping you'll win PowerBall. And yet we go back and play again and again. That is our strength and our folly.



(Via The Huffington Post | Raw Feed.)

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

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coskata_ethanol_630px A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

"It's not five years away, it's not 10 years away. It's affordable, and it's now," said Wes Bolsen, the company's vice president of business development.

The discovery underscores the rapid innovation under way in the race to make cellulosic ethanol cheaply. With the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requiring an almost five-fold increase in ethanol production to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022, scientists are working quickly to reach that breakthrough.

"It signals just how hot the competition is right now," said David Friedman, research director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "There are a lot of people diving into this right now, trying to figure out how to crack the nut. This increases my confidence that someone will do it."

Besides cutting production costs to fire sale prices, the process avoids some key drawbacks of making ethanol from corn, company officials said. It wouldn't impact the food supply, and its net energy balance is high because the technique works almost anywhere using almost anything with great efficiency. The end result will be E85 sold at the pump for about a dollar cheaper per gallon than gasoline, according to the company.

Coskata won't have a pilot plant running until this time next year, and it will produce just 40,000 gallons a year. Still, several experts said Coskata shows enough promise to leave them cautiously optimistic.

"The question will come down to 'Can they deliver?'" said Nathanael Greene, a senior energy-policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The approach is interesting and promising in the problems it addresses."

Coskata uses existing gasification technology to convert almost any organic material into synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol. Richard Tobey, Coskata's vice president of engineering, says the process yields 99.7 percent pure ethanol.

Gasification and bacterial conversion are common methods of producing ethanol, but biofuel experts said Coskata is the first to combine them. Doing so, they said, merges the feedstock flexibility of gasification with the relatively low cost of bacterial conversion.

Tobey said Coskata's method generates more ethanol per ton of feedstock than corn-based ethanol and requires far less water, heat and pressure. Those cost savings allow it to turn, say, two bales of hay into five gallons of ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, the company said. Corn-based ethanol costs $1.40 a gallon to produce, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

The company plans to have its first commercial-scale plant producing up to 100,000 gallons of ethanol a year by 2011. Friedman and Greene said the timeline is realistic.

May Wu, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, says Coskata's ethanol produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than fossil fuel even after accounting for the energy needed to produce and transport the feedstock. It also generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it. Corn ethanol typically generates 1.3 times more energy than is used producing it.

Making ethanol is one thing, but there's almost no infrastructure in place for distributing it. But the company's method solves that problem because ethanol could be made locally from whatever feedstock is available, Tobey said.

"You're not bound by location," he said. "If you're in Orange County, you can use municipal waste. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you can use wood waste. Florida has sugar. The Midwest has corn. Each region has been blessed with the ability to grow its own biomass."

Still, consumers will need some way of getting that fuel into their vehicle. Less than 1 percent of the nation's 170,000 gas stations sell E85, said Mike Omotoso, senior manager of the global power train group at J.D. Power & Associates.

"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."

But with production set to ramp up quickly to meet the 36 billion gallon mandate, ethanol advocates believe it won't be long before E85 is widely available.

This article courtesy of Wired.com

FLASHBACK: Economists Predicted That A Prolonged U.S. Presence In Iraq Could Lead To A Recession

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In yesterday’s press briefing, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about the tie between the current U.S. economy and the Iraq war. Perino quickly dismissed the reporter’s question, insisting that the U.S. economy has been “very strong” and adding that the money was necessary to “take the fight to the enemy” after 9/11.

Oil prices are at approximately $88 a barrel, although they have dropped from the record high of $100 earlier this month. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently noted in Vanity Fair, “The soaring price of oil is clearly related to the Iraq war. The issue is not whether to blame the war for this but simply how much to blame it.”

Before the war, economists were predicting that oil prices at just $75 a barrel could potentially send the U.S. economy into a recession. Therefore, the current economic situation should not come as a complete shock to the Bush administration. A look at economists’ pre-war predictions:

“A war against Iraq could cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, play havoc with an already depressed domestic economy and tip the world into recession because of the adverse effect on oil prices, inflation and interest rates, an academic study [by William Nordhaus, Sterling professor of economics at Yale University] has warned.” [Independent, 11/16/02]

“If war with Iraq drags on longer than the few weeks or months most are predicting, corporate revenues will be flat for the coming year and will put the U.S. economy at risk of recession, according to a poll of chief financial officers.” [CBS MarketWatch, 3/20/03]

“If the conflict wears on or, worse, spreads, the economic consequences become very serious. Late last year, George Perry at the Brookings Institution ran some simulations and found that after taking into account a reasonable use of oil reserves, a cut in world oil production of just 6.5 percent a year would send the United States and the world into recession.” [Robert Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, 10/2/02]

“Gerd Häusler, the IMF’s director of international capital markets, said that ‘purely from a financial markets perspective, a serious conflict with Iraq would not be a very healthy development.’ … Häusler said there could be a repeat of what happened in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when there was a sharp rise in oil prices.” [World Bank, 9/02]

MoveOn has a petition here to tell Congress to “quickly pass a stimulus package that helps those who need it the most and will spend it the fastest.”

UPDATE: Martin at Scholars and Rogues has more.

Transcript:

QUESTION: Dana, how can the president give a great financial boost to help the ailing economy when it’s being held down by $9 billion a month to pay for the Iraq war? How is he going to really bring that together?

PERINO: Well, I don’t — you know, we’ve been at war, as you know, since September 11th, the day after September 11th, when the president decided we were going to take the fight to the enemy. And during the past several years, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, during those years that we’ve been at war, this economy has been very strong. We’ve had 52 consecutive months of job growth.

And fighting the war and making sure our troops have what they need is going to be imperative to the safety of this nation. The president does not apologize for spending money on national security.

Going forward, what the president wants to do in this short-term package is to make sure that we get enough money moving in the economy so that we can avoid the potential risks of a downturn.

QUESTION: I’m not saying apologize, but that is a fact that on your books, if you’re saying you have a checkbook, you’re writing out your checks for the $9 billion a month, and then you still have other things. You say you want to give incentives to businesses, financially, I guess, and tax relief to consumers. How do you balance those books, though…

PERINO: I think I would flip it around and say I think that members of Congress might be able to find some of their pet projects and their earmarks that they could eliminate, that could help with this package. We’re talking about, you know, 1 percent of GDP that’s going to be robust enough to be able to have an impact.

But the president is certainly not going to shortchange our troops. One of the most important things he can do is make sure that the economy stays strong, that it supports all Americans and it certainly supports the troops.

And it supports the economies overseas as well, in terms of if you look at places like Iraq, we’ve been able to help them over the past several years, as they’re getting their democracy under way, but their economy is starting to improve as well. And so we can start transferring over to the Iraqis more of that responsibility. And the Iraqis right now, I think today, are talking through their budget for 2009. And they’re moving forward in a way that we would want them to. And they were going to take up a lot more responsibility to pay for their own security and their roads and bridges and their schools, all the things that we pay for here.

The Fed cuts rates ahead of US market open

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NPR.org, January 22, 2008 · The Federal Reserve, confronted with a global stock sell-off fanned by increased fears of an American recession, cut a key interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point on Tuesday, the biggest one-day move by the central bank in recent memory.

The Fed said it was cutting the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other on overnight loans, to 3.5 percent, down by three-fourths of a percentage point from 4.25 percent.

The Fed action was the most dramatic signal it can send that it is concerned about a potential recession in the United States. It marked the biggest one-day move by the central bank in recent memory.

The Fed decision was taken during an emergency telephone conference with Fed officials on Monday night. Those discussions occurred after global financial markets had plunged Monday as investors grew more concerned about the possibility that the United States, the world's largest economy, could be headed into a recession.

In a brief statement, the Fed said it had decided to cut the federal funds rate "in view of a weakening of the economic outlook and increasing downside risks to growth."

Dow Jones industrial futures had been down more than 500 points, or more than 5 percent, before the Fed move. They fluctuated violently an hour before the start of trading, but improved to a level where they were down 380, or 3.14 percent, to 11,726.

From Associated Press reports.

via NPR

Will Wright's Spore to be simultaneously released for Mac & Windows says EA

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spore011607The eagerly awaited game Spore from Will Wright (of Simcity and Sims fame) is coming to the Mac later this year. CNET broke the news earlier in the day, and EA confirmed it in a press release later. Like the releases promised (but not delivered) last year, the Mac version of Spore will rely on TransGaming's Cider technology and is set to be released simultaneously with the PC version. Nonetheless, they're hoping to do better this time and even Wright himself expressed confidence, saying: "We couldn't be happier to bring Spore to the Mac at the same time as the PC version. Spore is a highly creative game and I look forward to seeing what the players come up with to fill the universe they design."
Here's hoping that Wright's right, because Spore has been looking like the hotness itself for quite some time now.

Via TUAW

Apple introduces Time Capsule, a NAS companion to Time Machine

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timecapsulefrontdante

Apple announced a companion to Time Machine today, Time Capsule. Essentially a hard drive and Airport combined -- an NAS from your favorite Cupertino team. The wireless drive will come in 500GB and 1TB configurations, and will feature 802.11n, as well as server grade hard drives. They will clock in at $299 and $499, respectively (Steve says they're aggressively pricing them because they want everyone to backup). You'll be able to backup your notebook or desktop wirelessly from anywhere in your home. Available in February, pre-order now.