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Grant Washburn of the United States rode a wave during a practice session of the Red Bull Big Wave Africa event in Cape Town, South Africa. The surfing contest begins Saturday, and 24 surfers from five nations will compete to ride the biggest waves using conventional surfboards. The waves are in the 4 to 5 meter range, the minimum size requirement for the contest to run. (NY Times)
Yesterday the Washington Post refuted
the McCain campaign ad asserting Barack Obama chose to skip visiting
wounded U.S. troops in Germany when the Pentagon refused to allow media
photographers to record the event.
Later in the day, the McCain campaign admitted the ad was incorrect and, in the straignt talking way the Senator is so famous, blamed the press for the error.
Today, Business Week reports the McCain campaign was poised to produce a negative ad whether Obama had visited the troops or not.
What
the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP
strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script
ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama
was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no
matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to
launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is
the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their
opponents—a lie.
Welcome to the new McCain cum Schmidt cum Rove campaign.
Pretty desperate. Pretty slimy.
I wrote last month of a California start up doing genetic modification to single cell organisms which, once modified, would produce a petroleum oil like chemical that could be refined into fuels for automobiles. The researches claim the resultant fuel is carbon neutral, could be manufactured for a fraction of crude oil pricing and is interchangeable with petroleum based fuels (eliminating transition costs). The Guardian UK has a followup article and identifies the start up doing the research:
Sapphire
Energy has raised a total of $50m (£25m) in venture capital in recent
weeks, the highest amount ever for an algae biotech company, including
a significant investment from the UK's Wellcome Trust.
Algae are seen by many experts as promising a source of green fuel in
the future: ranging from single-celled organisms to large seaweeds,
they are the world's most abundant form of plant life and, via
photosynthesis, are extremely efficient at using sunlight and carbon
dioxide from the air to make organic material such as sugars, proteins
and, under the right conditions, oils.
The
money for Sapphire came flooding in after the company recently reached
its most significant milestone yet, refining high-octane gasoline from
their green crude. "The resulting gasoline is completely compatible
with current infrastructure, meaning absolutely no change to consumer's
cars," said a Sapphire spokesperson.
An
added advantage is that their gasoline does not have contaminants such
as sulphur, nitrogen and benzene that are contained in standard crude
oil and the company believes the cost of their fuels will be comparable
to standard fossil fuels on the market.
Sapphire
said it expects to be at a stage of commercial production of green
crude within three to five years. Geoffrey Love, head of venture
capital at the Wellcome Trust, said the investment was made with this
in mind. "There was already in place a very strong scientific and
management team.
"They'd already made milestone-based progress to proving they could
make not just biodiesel, which plenty of other companies out there can
do, but proper crude oil."
Necessity is the mother of invention and there's some very, very, very valuable intellectual property to be gained here. There is, no doubt, a lot of very smart, very motivated people working on alternative solutions to the gasoline crisis. Best of luck to them all.
We've seen the John McCain ads. Consistently negative attack ads against Barack Obama. Given that McCain continues to hang close to Obama in the polls, the McCain camp clearly believes there's something to be gained by attacking Obama, even with easily disproven charges. One can assume the McCain campaign will continue to use the attack ad strategy up to the general election.
We've also seen the Obama ads. Kinda fuzzy and intended to make us proud and partriotic, full of Obama policy details and short on McCain attacks.
In a LA Times opinion piece, Jonathan Chait suggests Obama needs to forget about that McCain pledge he would keep the campaign respectful and honorable and, while not stooping to the McCain level, start throwing some punches.
...negative
ads work better than positive ads. In focus groups, voters insist they
hate negative ads, because that sounds virtuous. Yet studies show the
negative advertisements are the ones they remember.
To go on the attack, Obama doesn't need to engage in character
assassination and baseless charges, as his opponent has done. All he
needs to do is stop letting McCain paint a wildly distorted
self-portrait. The Arizona senator wants voters to see him as a
maverick who never changes positions for political reasons. One ad
touts the way he bucked Bush on the environment. It doesn't mention
that McCain has abandoned the climate-change bill he co-sponsored,
demanded wider drilling and a gas-tax holiday that would undermine the
goal of burning less fossil fuel, and started raking in huge sums from
oil companies.
McCain has de-emphasized or reversed nearly every position that set him
apart from Bush, most notably the tax cuts for the rich that are the
heart of Bush's economic program. To prove his partisan bona fides
during the primary, he boasted that "I did everything I could to get
[Bush] elected and reelected." And when an interviewer suggested that
McCain was different from Bush, the senator replied, "No. No. I -- the
fact is that I'm different, but the fact is that I have agreed with
President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent
issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in
agreement and support of President Bush." Why haven't we seen these
words in television ads?
There's plenty of opportunity here. For example, John McCain is vey happy to have voters believe, because of his own personal story, he's a big supporter of veterans rights and benefits. In fact, McCain has a horrible record on these issues. Informing voters of the Senator McCain's real record on veterans issues (and many others) is not an unwarranted attack, it's just stating facts.
Stephen Colbert explains "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "honest belief"
The new ad from the Obama campaign, hitting John McCain for his pattern of sleazy, inaccurate ads.
Iranian presidential elections are slated for mid 2009, and the
re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is anything but a
certainty.
As more than 70% of the Iranian gross domestic product comes from oil, two factors come into play. Iranian GDP is booming along at 6.5% growth (compared to the U.S. GDP growth rate of 1.6%) as a result of worldwide oil sales, but all those Iranian rials are pegged to U.S. dollars and Iranian inflation is forecasted at 28% for 2008.
Add the inflation to Ahmadinejad's economic policies, and you get an angry Iranian populace. Ahmadinejad, flush with petro dollars implemented programs to aid his primary consituency, poor and lower class Iranians. In the process, Ahmadinejad has antagonized middle and upper class Iranians.
Economists
inside and outside Iran say Ahmadinejad's economic policies are the
reason why Iran has the worst inflation record in the Gulf after
war-stricken Iraq. In June 2007, 57 Iranian economists accused the
government of ignoring the basics of economics, and a prominent Iranian
cleric went so far as to say that the president's economic faults had
dealt "a severe blow to the Iranian system."
Boasting defiance of liberal economic principles, Ahmadinejad's government embraced high spending and low interest rates in an attempt to fight the country's 13 percent youth unemployment rate and economic inequality by encouraging small-business entrepreneurship and creating short-term employment (Link)
Also working against Ahmadinejad is the official Iranian position on censorship. The Supreme National Security Council has forbidden the Iranian media from any discussion of the Iranian nuclear issue, but make no such restrictions on discussions of Iranian economics. The result is lots of discussion about Iranian economics and the failures of President Ahmadinejad.
And that provides opportunities for challengers to Ahmadinejad. One, Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, is considered a viable contender. He's a pragmatic authoritarian with hardline credentials. Former president Mohammed Khatami is popular, has demonstrated an ability to manage Iran's economy and relatively pro-Western and being pushed hard by the Iranian reformists.
Ahmadinejad is not popular in Iran and U.S. leaders have, for political purposes, equated Ahmadinejad with Iran.. A change in leadership will change the Iranian tone and offer new opportunities for diplomacy for the U.S. It can't come too soon.
The Justice Department's Inspector General testified before Congress today that the illegal hiring practices employed by the DOJ occured "unchecked, without adequate supervision, without adequate oversight" and "resulted in very serious damage in the Department of Justice".
Glenn Fine said he asked then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales how his subordinates like Monica Goodling could engage in illegal practices without Gonzales' approval:
FINE: He said he wasn’t aware of what was going on. He said he did not know Goodling used poltiical factors when assessing candidates for career positions, did not know the search terms Goodling used, did not know even that Goodling’s portfolio including hiring for IJs [immigration judges], and basically said he didn’t have knowledge of the role the office of the Attorney General played in identifying candidates.
That's not what President Bush said when he announced Gonzales' resignation.
Jordanian brides and grooms took part in a mass wedding ceremony in Amman. A Jordanian Islamic charity organized the mass wedding for 60 young couples who could not afford expensive ceremonies. (NY Times)
Oil analyst Edward Morse was interviewed the other day for Foreign Policy, providing some analysis about where we are and making some predictions about where near term pricing may end up.
Morse says record crude oil pricing is a result of industry underinvestment, driving demand to catch and pass suppy, and a lack of transparency of supply from OPEC producers creating market uncertainty. Morse also notes decreasing demand as a result of high cost and projections China's post Olympics demand will fall off rapidly and projects crude pricing to fall below $100/barrel by years end.
That's good news, but Morse cautions there's a couple factors that could drive prices upward again. The first is a more active than normal hurricane season that may disrupt Gulf of Mexico supply lines and the increasing tensions in the Middle East, particularly the saber rattling going on between Israel and Iran and the U.S. and Iran.
This question and Morse's answer was particularly interesting:
FP:
What effect will lower prices have on renewable and alternative energy?
Is there a tipping point that could doom alternatives like ethanol or
plug-in hybrids?
EM: I see a period of two or three years with relatively lower prices,
in the high $90s. But we don’t know what the response will be on the
conventional side, going out three or four or five years. And certainly
with the power requirements of the world, something really needs to be
done to improve overall efficiency in a dramatic way across all energy
uses, and something needs to be done to encourage, in the marketplace,
the use of as many renewables as possible. One of the dangers of lower
prices is that it will again lull governments and consumers into
thinking that there is no problem at hand, and that would be in my
judgment a false sign of hope.
We're not known for our long attention span and that complacency represents a big risk. MacArthur Fellow and Rocky Mountain Institute Chairman Amory Lovins maintains that had the U.S. fuel conservation efforts from 1975-1985 not been abandoned and continued at the same rate, we would not be importing a drop of OPEC oil into the United States.
Long term problems require long term solutions. Even oil analysts like Edward Morse understand the urgency of finding long term solutions, not relying on patching the problem to just get by.
