Nearly forty years ago, I participated in an energy summit. I was young, inexperienced, hadn’t found my voice, and my job was merely to be a journalist at the most base level; to record and catalog what was said. I could have done more, but what I heard intimidated me. It was the first time I realized there are some problems that can’t be solved, so I organized my tapes, turned them in with a comprehensive index, and said nothing.

The summit was held at the beautiful Ventana Inn at Big Sur. Its participants included executives of oil companies, the Sierra Club, public policy institutes and regulators. The concept was we all sit down and have a freewheeling discussion about the problems. What we discovered was we all pretty much agreed on what the problems were; and that there was no politically viable solution. So we all did what I did: nothing.

We could solve this problem tomorrow with something as simple as a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. The primary function of this tax would be to reduce consumption, so revenue would be far from a straight line computed from current consumption. We would still, however, raise a shitpot full of money.

This money could be plowed back into paying the people whose livelihoods were taken away by the spill to clean it up, and to promote new methods of energy production. We’d still hound BP into bankruptcy, but any revenue we’d get from them in fines or damages could be plowed into green energy technology too, or go back into the economy in the form of debt reduction.

But the public outrage over millions of gallons of oil in the gulf would quickly turn to public anger at the imposers of the tax. There would be rumors of corruption; that the money was lining the pockets of the energy companies. The energy companies themselves would scream bloody murder and sue everybody in sight to stop it. Cheap energy long-term alternatives are unwanted competition, artificially inflated short-term prices simply cut into their bottom line.

Most socially responsible liberals would be outraged over the terrible effects on the poor. This solution is a progressive tax run wild because it makes energy inefficient systems worthless and within the reach of the poor, which amplifies the inequity.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a vision of energy independence that has been worn away by the refusal by the right to pass a truly robust recovery package; one that not only bails us out, but helps us build a future. Until we do that, until we do something truly dramatic, we will simply repeat past mistakes.

Withdrawing from an addiction is painful, and until we are willing to walk through the pain, we will keep electing politicians who either promise cheap energy or promise alternatives but who know or learn the American people simply aren’t interested in solving the base problem.

That problem isn’t the oil in the gulf, that’s the symptom. It’s our denial of our cheap-energy addiction that put that damn hole in the sea floor in the first place without any Plan B to plug it.

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When my partner Ray got the pitch from Mitch Stewart of Organizing for America on Monday, he had other things to do with his discretionary money, but the first paragraph got him:

Every single day, special interests spend a staggering $1.4 million lobbying Congress to shut down the President’s agenda for health care reform.

Certainly he could afford the $5 the president was asking for. In fact, he gave $10. But the next morning, he found the account he uses for web purchases overdrawn. The DNC had not only authorized $10 twice, they had authorized $500.00 as well. For three days, despite scores of phone calls, the transaction had neither been reversed nor had anyone at the DNC or Blue State Digital acknowledged the error.

Blue State Digital, founded in 2004 by four former Dean staffers, at first denied any involvement or responsibility. But the emails and the donation page point to them, so they finally resorted to the claim that their involvement was none of our business.

The DNC at first claimed donor error, then flatly denied that no more than one transaction took place. The bank produced documents complete with Terminal IDs, sequence numbers and switch timestamps proving the DNC in fact made four transactions, but refuses to remove the hold unless the DNC advises it in writing to do so.

Its the ultimate Catch-22, with all the trappings of the kind of government bureaucracy the right tries to scare up as a bogeyman to keep health care private.  “Do you trust the government,” they ask, “to provide your medical care?”

Late this afternoon, the DNC did apologize, and tried a new story. It was an address mismatch that caused the transactions to fail. That never stopped Blue State during the campaign, and there were lots of donations with the same exact data.

Nor could they explain how an address issue turned $10 into five hundred but they attempted, without success, to reverse the charges; the charges that yesterday didn’t exist.  Because of their previous denial, Ray’s now canceled the card and faxed a flurry of dispute documents back and forth to the bank.  The DNC is still trying to decide whether or not it requested and received an auth code. Their spokespeople don’t seem to know.

Ray thinks the government needs to guarantee every American health care, and there should at least be a public option. He’s spent a lot of time in verbal gunplay on Facebook with our insurance industry friends, but his powder is no longer dry.

In frustration he finally wrote the White House (the BlueState-served webpages hide out behind a link to www.whitehouse.gov). Its not easy to argue that a group of people can tackle something as difficult as multi-billion dollar health care when they can’t figure out why a $500 charge attempt got made for a $10 donation, and claim its none of your damn business when you inquire about it.

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A debate has been raging among Media Matters, Daily Kos, Gawker.com and Tommy Christopher over at Politics Daily over a Jake Tapper piece about President Obama playing the Hussein card as he speaks to the Muslim world. I have to agree with Christopher and come to Tapper’s defense.

For the past 8 years, we’ve done everything we possibly can to inflame American sentiments against Muslims, and to inflame middle-eastern Muslims against the United States.

I knew if we could get through the campaign without the Hussein part of Barack Hussein Obama completely overwhelming the percentage of the electorate with one word attention spans, this would suddenly become a feature as we explain to the peoples of the mideast that we’re not all oil-grabbing Christian Soldiers: we just had the misfortune to elect some of them to lead us.

Every few months the left wing noise machine forgets that it’s politics we’re playing here, and sometimes the shadows turn out larger and more influential than the characters who cast them. When we forget that, unpredictable results can occur. We got our ass handed to us by Lieberman; we made him a bigger monster than he would have been had we left him alone.

This is a damn good thing Obama’s doing, and its good journalism that points it out. We didn’t like the press cowed by the nationalist jingoism of Bush/Cheney, but we seem hell-bent to repeat it by not tearing up the pre-election talking points now that the Hussein card may turn out to be trump.

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It it starting to appear that, if the Senate can’t first head it off at the pass, President Obama will not allow Congress to vent its anger through the tax code and pick the pockets of the weasels at AIG who accepted huge bonuses from the company they helped destroy.

I don’t know this for sure, its just my take on his 60 Minutes interview aired tonight, coupled with the perception that cooler heads are prevailing, and that in the rear view mirror the last week is looking more like a collective hissy fit than responsible government or intelligent public policy.

In today’s NYT, Thomas Friedman likens our actions to a those of children home alone.  I don’t totally agree with his solutions, but he certainly gets props for bravery. Even the appearance of standing up for the AIG bandits paints a bullseye on your back.

The problem: this is a world crisis of confidence, and we are beholden to a lot of people who made this mess to help us get out of it. We knew or should have known they were greedy pigs when we let them build this house of cards, but nobody in power wanted to stop them because on paper the rich were getting richer.

Now all of a sudden we’re surprised that they’re greedy and we’re angry that they know where all the bodies are buried. Like Bernie Madoff and tens of thousands of other criminals who have information that will solve quandries, they have us beholden to them. At least for the short term.

When our country was attacked, we took great pride in a president who turned that into political capital, standing on the wreckage of our biggest financial edifice and vowing to exact a pound of flesh. But we now realize we  took our anger out on the wrong people, and in the end we only made things worse.

Now a new president is standing on a financial wreckage while politicians around him demagogue the American people into demanding a pound of flesh yet again. This time it appears we have a president smart enough to realize that immediate visceral reactions may feel good today, but in the end they just make things worse.

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Dear Rush Limbaugh:

Thank you for writing your open letter to President Obama, published Friday as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I know things have been tough for your syndicator and owned stations (Premiere/Clear Channel). First, the banks tried to renege on their deal to take your employer private, and you all had to take less. Then the bean-counters came in and you had that mass firing Inauguration day.  Then, the junk bonds keeping your company alive got even junkier.  Standard and Poor downgraded them from B to B-.

With so many things wrong in this country, it made no sense when there was suddenly so much hue and cry from the biggest right wing talk networks and station groups over the fairness doctrine. Mr. Obama’s never liked the fairness doctrine, your party is against it, and you can count those in my party who want it reinstated on your fingers and toes. You may not even need your toes.

Last Friday (the same day Clear Channel’s massive debt got downgraded), you dropped your pants in your WSJ op-ed and it suddenly all made sense. Its not about the fairness doctrine at all, is it?

Its about a handful of companies owning the vast majority of powerful radio stations across this country and putting on nearly every station the same imported schlock with no local staffs, minimal local content, and in some cases not even a living soul stationed at studio or transmitter.

Your precise question to President Obama:

Is it your intention to censor talk radio through a variety of contrivances, such as “local content,” “diversity of ownership,” and “public interest” rules — all of which are designed to appeal to populist sentiments but, as you know, are the death knell of talk radio and the AM band?

Requiring Clear Channel to provide local content in their communities of license is not censorship. Its like requiring an investment company to actually buy some stocks and bonds for their investors and truthfully advise those investors about their holdings. Requiring radio stations to serve their communities–regardless of the political leanings of the ultimate content–is only a death knell to weak and poorly managed companies: companies like yours; companies that you would ordinarily, as a free market conservative, demand be thrown under the bus.

Fact is, Mr. Limbaugh, what has happened in the radio business is the same thing that has happened in the banking, the mortgage, and even the automobile industries. We “let the market decide,” by deregulating everything in sight, and the charlatans took over: people who don’t give a rat’s ass about ethics or values or anything but this month’s profit. Your masters bought up every radio station and station group they could find using expensive debt. The interest payments siphoned off the money for local programming and public service.

The decimation of the radio business by firing legions of talented people at the local stations, replacing them with automatons voiced in sweatshops in “cluster facilities” hundreds of miles away is broadcasting’s version of a Ponzi scheme. Its like selling off the locomotive of a train claiming inertia would keep it moving. Now that its ground to a stop, you’re trying to blame President Obama because you’re afraid he’s going to force you to replace the engine.

Your answer is to do what Rove, Cheney, and Bush did to sell the Iraq war. First you teach that the fairness doctrine is a bad thing. You call it censorship. Then you use those terms in a sentence with all the things you want to sully. Fairness doctrine, public interest, diversity of ownership, local content. There’s no connection, but you hope your listeners aren’t sharp enough to catch it. Saddam Hussein, terrorist, 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, axis of evil, mushroom cloud.

But this time, they might catch on. All those words strung together to get us into war were either bad or unfamiliar and foreign sounding. Local content, local ownership, local people behind local mikes discussing local issues—what we once called full-service radio—are things people understand and many of us even remember. It will not be easy to redefine them as a negative when a lot of people will see them as an old friend, and it would truly be karma to see the “populist sentiment” that you’ve played like a violin for 20 years be the thing that puts your stations back in the hands of people who care about serving their communities, and takes you off the air for good.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if your denouement came the very first time you got caught red-handed at the Shock Doctrine? Rush Limbaugh, Saddam Hussein, Sean Hannity, Clear Channel, Terrorist, 9/11, mushroom cloud.

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I spent some time today starting the cleanup from the election. What to do with the local grassroots web site? How about the email addresses tied to the local url? Do we park them all for four years for the re-election, or just let them evaporate when they expire and start over.

In 2000, and again in 2004, we cleaned up after a disaster. Its been so long, since we’ve won one, I don’t quite remember how its done.

We have such a mess of problems, and no doubt we’ll discover there are many more that the Bush/Cheney administration was able to hide or spin hoping the truth wouldn’t emerge until the transition is over. I’ve never seen such problems, but I’ve never had more faith that the new folks in charge are up to the task.

Congratulations to everyone who helped elect Mr. Obama, and I hope those who didn’t will give him a fair chance to be everybody’s president.

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