From the “Do Your Homework” Department:

1.  The other day, President Obama went to Dover Air Force Base to meet with the families of fallen U.S. soldiers and to pay respect to the soldiers’ coffins as they were unloaded from a military transport.  An iconic photo was printed in several newspapers featuring President Obama saluting the coffins.  Rather predictably, Republicans pounced.  Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, took issue with the photo op, explaining that her father and Pres. Bush did that kind of thing in private.

Only…ummm… they never did that kind of thing at all.  Never.  To be fair: they visited military hospitals and met with families.  But neither one of them went to Dover to meet military planes.  Not once in seven years.  This might be because there was a ban on photographing military coffins during their administration.  Bad press, I guess.

Meanwhile: President Obama?  Classy move.

2.  The conservative press was all atwitter (literally — many used Twitter to spread this “news”) when the White House released its visitors’ log.  It seems that Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright (remember them from the campaign?) have both visited the White House since President Obama took office.

Only…umm, again… Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright are not entirely uncommon names in America.  It turns out that two regular ol’ citizens named Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright traipsed through the White House… on tours… over the past nine months.  Their two infamous namesakes have not been to the White House at all.

Homework, people.  Homework.

5000 Year Leap — of Logic

I’ve been hearing so much about Cleon Skousen’s “The 5000-Year Leap” — from Glenn Beck, obviously, and also from friends of mine — that I decided to read it.  There are reasons that I should be inclined in the direction of Skousen’s arguments: I am, like Skousen and Beck, a Mormon; and I do in fact believe that America is a special place.  Not without its flaws, mind you, and I don’t believe in American exceptionalism.  But I think that America has a destiny.  I do.

So I read the book.  And it’s a crock, overall.  He makes some decent points, and some of the things he says in the book are in fact true.  But overall: almost unthinkably poor scholarship, conclusions drawn from thin air, support for points carefully selected while ignoring equally compelling opposing views, etc.  As a former high-school English teacher: I give it a C-.

I should give here a little background on Cleon Skousen.  I remember, from the time I was a kid, hearing about Cleon Skousen.  He was one of those Mormons who had gained a measure of “fame” among their fellow worshippers, without actually holding a position of authority in the church — and he had also developed a following outside the church.  Perhaps the analogous personality in today’s Mormon church might be Steven R. Covey (although I don’t equate the two in any other way than their fame — I really admire Dr. Covey’s work).  It was easy to confuse Cleon Skousen back then with a church authority — I think, in fact, that my young mind muddled the two.  I just sort of assumed he was somebody I was supposed to pay attention to.

But Skousen was actually a long way from church authority, though I didn’t know it up in northern Idaho.  He was a bit of a nutjob, truth be told — a former FBI man who made claims about his connections in the agency that simply weren’t true, a guy who preferred to be called “Dr. Skousen” when his degree was a law degree, a Salt Lake police chief whose methods were said to resemble “a gestapo,” and a writer and speaker on topics as fanciful as the Red Scare and the notion that the Rockefellers had aided the election of Jimmy Carter to foster a “world government.”  You know… a good ol’ tinfoil-hat guy.  Eventually the Mormon church issued a communique distancing itself from Skousen and his organization, the Freemen Institute.  That ought to tell you how far to the right Skousen is.

On to the book everyone’s so gaga about: a major portion of the book is intent on convincing us that the Founding Fathers intended to build an explicitly Christian nation.  Let’s talk about that.

To be clear: I firmly believe three things: (a) that the Founding Fathers certainly intended for Christianity (in all its forms) to thrive in the American nation.  I also believe, because I’m sane and I know my history, that they also intended for Jews and Muslims and yes, even atheists, to find place here.  (b) I believe that the separation of church and state which was so passionately a part of our founding documents was designed primarily (but not exclusively) to protect the church from the influence of the state.  Think of where these people came from: their experience was not with an oppressive church wielding power over the state — it was the opposite.  I don’t take that to mean that the Founding Fathers were unaware of the possibility of tyranny arising from a powerful church (hey, wait a minute… were they thinking about us?); but I think that their sensibilities were more in line with protecting people’s rights to worship.  (c) While I believe that the current “anti-Christian” sentiment has been brought on mostly by Christians overreaching and wielding too much influence in government, I nevertheless think that this sentiment is a bad thing.  While this is demonstrably not a Christian theocracy, it is still true that most Americans are Christian, or at least have Christian sympathies.  As usual, the middle ground is best: Christianity is neither a thing to be rooted out of our government, nor is it the driving force behind our government.  It is simply what feeds the sensibilities of most Americans, and should thus be honored and respected — but not revered.

Skousen, as you might expect, picks and chooses quotes in an attempt to show that America was designed to be Christian.  (He uses “Natural Law” and other designations, but it’s clear that he’s talking about Christianity — he would not be pleased to discover that America was a highly pious Muslim nation.)  For completeness, I should also note that Skousen is a free-market guy, a states’-rights guy and a small-government guy, and I think he may have excellent points on some of those (particularly states’ rights).  (Republican friends: don’t pick at that statement.  Please be humble enough to remember that your guys oversaw the largest expansion of our federal government in the history of the nation, and that… well, they were:  Not.  Right.  About.  ANYTHING.)

For example: Skousen selects this quote from Benjamin Franklin to show that, instead of being what he was (a noted Deist), Franklin had Christian notions — and then he suggests that these notions were shared by all the framers of the Constitution:

Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion…

The first problem here, of course, is that even if we stipulated that this was an accurate description of Franklin’s “Christian” sentiments, it doesn’t show a thing about the rest of the Founding Fathers (who fought and debated on everything, and among whom were other deists, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington).

The second and more damning problem is that it’s only part of the quote (a common theme in The 5000-Year Leap).  The rest of the quote makes one wonder how often this kind of misstatement of positions happens in the book:

As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure.

Look, I’m not trying to say that we should all be Deists, nor am I saying that Christianity has no place in our lives (obviously).  I’m just saying: this is a book frought with inaccuracies and misstatements, it is written by an incredible extremist and something of a charlatan, and too many people are reading it as though it were the new Bible.  Put it down.

What is equally disconcerting, of course, is the other side: folks who hold the notion that the Constitution is completely Godless.  While there is scant evidence to support a strongly Christian Constitution, there is even less to support the idea that the Founding Fathers were trying to create a nation not under God, but beyond God.  This is nonsense in the extreme, and attempts at this conclusion torture the facts beyond recognition.

The fact is, the framers of the constitution were a large and diverse group of men, many of whom were Christian, some of whom were devoutly so.  Many others, though, and particularly key players, simply weren’t.  They fought and argued and bickered and… well, they produced something wonderful.  We don’t need to go back to John Locke or de Toqueville to divine the intent of the Founding Fathers: it’s there on the page, for all of us to see, and it is the most enduring and wonderful political document this world has ever seen.

Short Version of Why I Support a Public Option

…because as long as your healthcare and mine are controlled by companies whose fundamental motive is to limit our access to healthcare, then no amount of fiddling around on the edges will make things any better and costs will continue to rise twice as fast as inflation.

My wife, who runs HR at a tech company here, was thrilled to discover that her company’s insurance costs only rose 15% this year, so long as she cuts some benefits.  Isn’t there something wrong with being happy about that result?

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

A few observations:

• What, precisely, is President Obama’s accomplishment? Simple: the re-establishment of American moral authority in the world, and re-instituting America as the world’s best hope for peace.
• Is that an accomplishment worthy of the Nobel Prize? Well, umm…I probably wouldn’t have done it.  But of course it doesn’t matter what we think.  The fact is, the Nobel Prize Committee thought so.
• Who makes the decision? A committee of five people chosen by the Norwegian Parliament.  They are almost always former Norwegian politicians.

Importantly, here is what the Nobel Peace Prize is not:

• Partisan.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with Republican/Democrat/conservative/liberal agendas.  It’s five guys chosen by the Parliament of Norway.  Period.
• Affected by the U.S. press and its presumed “liberal bias.” These guys aren’t listening to MSNBC.  Or Fox, for that matter.

Look, no matter what you think of President Obama, this is a proud moment for the U.S.  At its essence it is an acknowledgment of how important America is on the world stage.  That’s a good thing, right?

A final note that I just cannot help but say: Rush Limbaugh threw a fit, in which he called Obama a “worldwide joke” and a “laughingstock.”  After the president had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  I’m sure that even someone with Limbaugh’s limited education can see that the data set simply does not fit the hypothesis there.

Because I’ve Been Paying Attention…

…I’m not listening to Republicans who have the frickin’ gall to suggest that they have a clue how to prosecute the war in Afghanistan.  That they are trying to call out the President on his decision-making in Afghanistan is insulting to our intelligence.

They apparently believe that you and I are such irredeemable simpletons that we’ve forgotten that these are the exact people who suggested, only a few years ago, that we divert our attention away from Afghanistan and towards an Iraq that (a) had not threatened us; (b) had not harbored Al-Qaeda; and (c) did not have weapons of mass destruction.  And all of this was completely knowable before the fact.  When they did that, Afghanistan became by degrees worse and worse, and more and more of the hornet’s nest it is now.

Now they want to act like they’re the experts in national security.

Matt’s Big Healthcare Post

Herewith, my thoughts on healthcare:

1.  Healthcare is a fundamental right.

This is important, I think: I believe that healthcare is a fundamental right.  Now, I know that lots of people will say, “You commie liberal, you think everything is a fundamental right.”  I don’t, though.  I really don’t.

But I can think of few things more fundamental than healthcare.  What we’re talking about, ultimately, is this: the right not to die an untimely death.    The right not to die because you’re too poor.  The right not to die because you had a pre-existing condition.  It’s life and death.

This is, I think, enshrined in our country’s Declaration of Independence.  In that document, not a lot of rights are listed.  Three, and only three, are referred to as “inalienable” (meaning: incapable of being alienated or surrendered): Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Life.  That is what healthcare is: the inalienable right to life, no matter how much money you have (or don’t have).  It is simply not right that I can walk into a hospital and get excellent care from good doctors, and another taxpaying American can be refused the same treatment.  We’re talking about the right to live.  It’s…nonsensical.  Criminal.  Horrifying.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  We’ve all heard that phrase.  It’s in the marrow of our national bones.  How, then, do we reconcile this with the over 40,000 Americans who die each year (according to a peer-reviewed Harvard study) because they don’t have insurance?  Not to mention those (like 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan) who were ostensibly covered, only to find that their insurance company would not cover a critical procedure (in her case, a liver transplant)?

If it is a fundamental right, then it is the very job of our government to ensure that it works for us.  We think it’s important the they provide us with the opportunity for decent education.  We think it’s important that they provide good roads.  The government provides flood insurance, for crying out loud — how do we argue against health insurance?

This is simply true: whether through a public option, through some kind of nationalized medicine, through oversight, whatever — it is the job of the United States government to ensure that affordable quality healthcare is provided to all Americans.  End of story.

2.  The U.S. System is badly broken

Let’s get this straight: the concept of choice in medical care is nonsense in the U.S.  I simply don’t understand it when people argue that there would be some curb on our freedoms if we were to involve the government in medical care.  If you have ever had an illness or injury more serious than the common flu, you know that this is true.  Do you get to decide what tests are run or not run?  Not unless you have money to burn, you don’t.  Do you get to decide on your doctor?  Only with certain plans, and then only if they accept your specific insurance.  The whole idea is the biggest crock of the debate.

So, within this limited-choice system: how are we doing?  Well, let’s be fair: if you have untold money to put to the task, the U.S. can provide you with top-quality medical care.  But overall the picture is less rosy.  The World Health Organization slots the U.S. as follows in their various rankings:

• • In health-related expenditures per capita: #1.  We spend more on healthcare per person than anyone else in the world does.
  • In health-related expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product: #2, behind only the Marshall Islands.  The message again: this is super-expensive.
  • In preventable deaths: #14, out of nineteen countries surveyed.  Yikes, right?
  • In healthy life expectancy: #24, just ahead of Cyprus and Dominica.  Not very impressive.  (One really awful statistic that’s unrelated to this conversation: there are fifty countries on this earth where a person’s healthy life expectancy is less than 50 years old, thirty countries where it’s less than 40, and three where it’s less than 30.)
  • The overall rank of the U.S.’ healthcare system: #37.

Moreover, unless we adopt a total indifference to the poor in this country, it’s hard to argue that the system is anything close to fair-minded.  Put simply: if you’re poor in this country, your chances of dying early are massively higher than if you have money.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, indeed.  One of the arguments I’ve heard proffered as an explanation for the above, in fact, is that the U.S. ranking is sinking because we have more poor people and more unemployed people than before.  I sometimes wonder if people who say things like that listen to themselves: this is an argument against reforming our system?  Seriously?

3.  Our current system has a severe perverse incentive.  Let’s review how this all works: if you get sick or hurt in any severity, you visit a doctor.  Because visiting a doctor is simply too expensive for most people (even, probably, you and me — to say nothing of the truly poor), it is unlikely that you do that unless you have insurance (or at least, if you are uninsured there is a very serious debate going on in your mind).  The insurer approves of your doctor, and often in advance of your doctor visit.  They approve or disapprove of medications, tests, and procedures.  You and I are unlikely, again given the cost, to obtain medication, tests or procedures that are not approved by the insurer.  Let’s not mistake this: your insurance company controls your access to healthcare.

Now, let’s not go crazy about insurance companies and paint them as devils or as awful people who want you and I to die.  I doubt that happens much, if at all.  I’ll bet that they think of themselves as pretty darn good people, and they’re probably mostly right.  But let us admit this much: not as individuals but as companies, their incentive is as follows: extract as much from us as they can in premiums, and pay back as little as they can get away with.  Insurance companies get revenue from our premiums, and payment of claims are an expense category in their accounting.  There’s not much room for debate about that.

I’m not saying that the people who work there think of it that way.  But at the corporate level that is really the incentive, isn’t it?  Let’s now do the conjunction of the two conclusions to reach an absolute truth: Your access to healthcare is controlled by entities whose fundamental incentive is to deny you that access.  This is, umm, a pretty bad thing.

4.  Lobbyists are killing our chance to get something that Americans want.  Let’s not cast aspersions here.  Let’s just lay down a few facts:

1. 1. For every member of Congress currently in office, there are six full-time healthcare lobbyists.
   2. The bill currently sits with the Senate Finance Committee.  Over the past twenty years, the current members of the Senate Finance Committee have received over $50 million in campaign contributions from the healthcare industry.
   3. The chairman of that committee, Max Baucus, has received $1.5 million from the healthcare industry just in the last few months.
   4. In total, Congress has received about $380 million from the healthcare lobby in the past few months alone.  There are 100 senators and 435 congressmen, so that adds up to a little over $710,000 per potential vote.  Since you can bet that they didn’t waste money on people who clearly don’t support their agenda, it’s easy to conclude that the healthcare lobby put somewhere around $1 million in the coffers of every amenable senator or congressman.
   5. Ergo, shocker alert: Sen. Baucus’ bill will massively increase the number of customers for insurance companies (through insurance requirements, a la car insurance), and does so without introducing any new nonprofit competition (i.e., the “public option”).  In short, it’s an awesome deal for insurers.

Perhaps I should illustrate the above with a picture:

Anyone super-surprised that the bills coming out of Congress right now (and most egregiously, Sen. Baucus’ version) are almost unbelievably favorable to insurance companies?  The New York Times refers to the groups of people influencing our healthcare reform bill as “organized interests.”  They are too kind: what they mean by “organized interests” is “healthcare lobby.”  And, just to be clear: you and I, no matter whether you agree with me on what we should do or not, are not an “organized interest.”

5.  The cost side of the healthcare equation is a little nuts.  I’m a turnaround CEO.  My job is to come into companies that are maybe performing at a level that is less than what their board and investors were hoping, and try to make it better (grow revenues and make the company more profitable).  This problem is similar: we have to ask, where is this cost coming from?  What areas are contributing value to the system, and what areas are more costly than they’re worth?  What adds value, and what is value-subtracting?

Overall, the cost side of this equation is stunning.  My mother was alarmed whan she learned that pills prescribed for her (post-cancer treatment) that ran nearly $100 per dose, could be had for $4 from a Canadian pharmacy.  A tube of cream to treat toenail fungus runs $264 here, but can be had wholesale for $5.  It’s the healthcare equivalent of those $1,000 hammers and toilet seats we all made such a fuss about years ago.

It’s a travesty, and it is a thread that runs all through our healthcare system: we recently had an emergency room bill that included charges for unnecessary services, and it included a shot that cost $1000 for the medication.  My wife had an i.v. in her arm throughout the visit.  I am not joking when I say that I could insert a syringe into the i.v. and deliver medication, and in any case the job takes maybe thirty seconds to perform.  We were charged $175 each time someone did this.  Not for the medication — just for the service of inserting the needle into an i.v.  This works out to a rate of $21,000 per hour.  Get paid like that for a week, and you’ve made almost a million bucks.  Pretty good work, if you can get it.

Now: let’s get clear about whom we should have an issue with.  It’s not doctors and nurses — they are highly trained, well-educated specialists and they should be paid handsomely for their work.  Moreover, they are not the reason I was paying $175 for someone to push a needle into a tube.  The doctors and nurses receive a fraction of that hospital bill.

It’s a little bit drug companies.  To be fair to them, they employ PhD’s and expensive researchers, and their work is really important and really expensive.  But, in the same way that Halliburton should not be able to unnaturally profit from the performance of a public service, drug company profits should not be able to rise too high.  I know, I know… this seems socialist.  But really: let’s say that polio makes a reappearance in the world.  Should it even be possible for drug companies to charge whatever they want — let’s say, for the sake of argument, $10,000 per shot — for providing the vaccine?  Of course not.  That’s not okay.  At some level, when you’re providing a public service, you inherit some public responsibility.

Who is it, then?  Two groups:

It is partly lawyers.  Tort reform, particularly with respect to medical torts, is badly needed.  Doctors perform under extreme duress, and some allowance must be made for the difficulty of their position.  If you and I were held to the same standard of performance that doctors are held to every day, our stress levels would triple immediately.  Because they can be sued at every turn, for the slightest mistake, they pay massive premiums for malpractice insurance.  That cost is passed along to you and me.

Allow a little rant: I don’t understand how Democrats can take this off the table, when they want everything else on it.  Folks in Washington: if we’re going to address healthcare, then let’s address healthcare.  Everything’s on the table.  If it injects significant cost to the system with little beneficial result to care, then it gets the ax.  Right?

The second group we’ve already discussed: insurers.  These folks aren’t like doctors: this is not a “best and brightest” specialty.  They don’t improve our health.  They don’t…add…value. They simply aren’t worth, in terms of their value to the system, what they’re paid.  They’ve been making huge profits, and they don’t deserve it.

The excessive cost in this system comes from two groups that contribute little to the improvement of our health: lawyers and insurance companies.

6.  Service denial due to “pre-existing conditions” is a crock.  I get the theory.  If the subscriber set were small, it would be difficult for an insurance system to handle expensive care for someone who has a known condition when they enter the system.  But if the subscriber set is small, it is because insurers attempt to game the system by denying insurance for anyone who isn’t healthy.  This is a healthcare version of Vegas’ house rules: If you get to provide great coverage only for people who aren’t sick and aren’t likely to get sick, then it’s not rocket science to make a lot of money.

The mockery of justice goes even further: note that when you are denied coverage for a pre-existing condition, you are not denied coverage for only those issues that arise from the known condition — you’re typically denied coverage entirely.  My ex-wife has bipolar disorder, and when her current COBRA coverage runs out, she will simply not be insured (unless serious reform happens in the meantime).  The illogic goes this far, then: she could be denied coverage for a broken arm… because she is bipolar?  Huh?

I think all of this should lead us to a few conclusions: (a) that serious reform of the system is necessary; (b) that everything should be on the table, including both serious reform to our insurance system and to our tort system; (c) that any decent reform should provide affordable healthcare to every American; but (d) there’s a lot of unsavory momentum that works against any of that happening.  Hence, we need to get really vocal about it, if we want anything halfway helpful to happen to our healthcare system.

Watch It

1. I used to watch Keith Olbermann, but he just wore on me.  He is too often so over-the-top, and he too often plays gotcha journalism.  But this… this is just too good to pass up.
2. It’s long.  All five videos will take you 45 minutes or so.  But still.  Watch this:  Keith Olbermann special comment on healthcare.

Because the Government Wants to Control Your Puking!!

Glenn Beck is now doing a show on whether or not you should get the flu vaccine.  “You won’t hear these honest questions asked anywhere else!” he cries.

Well, yeah.  The government could curtail your freedom to stick your tongue in a light socket, too.  And you wouldn’t want that, would you?  These totalitarian socialist Nazis…

Global Warming Thoughts

One of the things that puzzles me in America is the politicization of global warming.  Ultimately, this isn’t about politics; it’s about science, and the interpretation of data.  I guess that’s what’s so interesting to me: how the way we interpret data, for crying out loud, is suddenly along party lines.

I think there are some things we should all agree on, though:

1. We are in a state of warming around the globe.  The extent of that warming is somewhere between “cause for concern” and “alarming.”  I don’t think it matters which point on that axis you choose.  It’s pretty amazing, really: click here for an animation of the last hundred years or so from NASA.  Blue means a cooler-than normal stage, yellow means hotter, and red means much hotter.  See what I mean?  Note that I’m not saying that today is hotter than normal where you live: that’s not the frickin’ point.  I heard Glenn Beck (my current punching bag, I admit) pooh-poohing global warming by telling his listeners that it was freezing in New York in August.  See, this is why I wish Mr. Beck had attended college: then he might have taken a stats class or something, and he’d know that to select a specific day on one point on the map, or even a season or a year in a region, means nothing in a discussion about global warming.  Sheesh.  Anyway: without for the time being examining why, can we just all agree that the data suggests that we’re in a fairly severe warming stage for the earth?
2. We don’t know exactly why the earth has been warming, but greenhouse gas emissions are a pretty darn good bet.  Another decent bet might be that the earth is just in a cycle.  But we should agree to this as strategy: if we’re in a cycle and we cut emissions of greenhouse gases unnecessarily, we’ll have done some short-term economic harm (although, at least for America, probably long-term economic good — as we’d reduce dependence on the unstable middle east); but if the cause is human-controlled emissions and we ignore it, there are potentially disastrous long-term consequences.  So, just as a matter of strategy, it makes a lot of sense to try to cut greenhouse gases.  Think of it this way: your name is America, and a reputable doctor tells you, “You have high blood pressure.  Obviously, there’s a chance that if we do nothing about it, you’ll still live a long and happy life.  But there’s an increased chance that you won’t if you do nothing about it, and it’s probably due to the fact that you’re way overweight.”  You ask, “Are you certain that it’s because I’m overweight?”  And the doctor says, “Well, no.  But there’s an excellent chance that it is.  And in any case, let me list for you all of the other health benefits that would come from you losing a few pounds.”  And then he lists them.  Would you: (a) say, “You know, I might as well lose some weight,” or (b) go seek a second and third and fourth opinion, until you could finally get someone to tell you it didn’t have anything to do with your weight?  If you answered (b), then you can know with a great degree of certainty that you are a weirdo.
3. Long-term, using less oil is really good strategy for America anyway, even if you don’t take ecology into account.  Picture a future America where we use, let’s say, 30% of the oil we use today (through a combination of fuel efficiency, hybrids, batteries, more efficient ships and trucks, wind power, solar power, etc.  All of it.).  Our dependence on the nutjob Middle East is reduced to near-zero.  We can essentially ignore all of their nonsense, since instability in that region has no economic consequence for us anymore.  (Israel, of course, is still an important question.  But otherwise we don’t have to care.)  We’ve created jobs in an energy economy that is controlled within our borders, and that economy is sustainable.  As an important aside, our air is cleaner — whether or not that cleanliness is a factor in global warming.  How is this anything but good long-term strategy for America?

I think #3 above is why I had such a problem with the whole “drill, baby, drill” chant during the GOP convention: I was thinking to myself, “In what world is that good strategy for America, independent of any particular party affiliation?  How is that smart?”

It’s not, I think.  And I don’t see how our party affiliations should keep us from agreeing on that.  None of the above (aside from the Beck commentary) requires a liberal worldview to agree with it…right?