Red-Crested cardinal, taken by Haole in Hawaii. As I commented on his post, I don't know which I envy more--his birds, or his camera. But I was being polite. It's his camera. I do love this bird, though, partly because I miss cardinals up/out here in way northern CA. Not that we don't have plenty of photogenic birds, including a few he captured in the photos on this post. So it's definitely the camera. And probably the patience.

Guru for the Green Deal

Back in December, the Captain alerted you to the point of view of a singular activist on green economy and Climate Crisis issues, named Van Jones. Based in Oakland, CA, Jones has been active and eloquent on the need to involve poor communities in green energy and environmental sustainability efforts. Not only would such efforts inevitably fail if they remain limited to rich whites enviros in certain urban areas, but green energy efforts have a vast potential to bring jobs to poor and blue collar communities, and lift people out of poverty while doing the actual work of accomplishing environmental sustainability.

Well, this week the Obama administration appointed Van Jones as a special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation. It's tremendous news. Jones is not only good on policy, he is a dynamic speaker and organizer. The blue (collar)-green (jobs) alliance is in many ways the keystone of what is emerging as the Obama plan for simultaneously reviving the economy now, building a new and sustainable economy for the future, ending dependence on foreign energy, increasing health and saving the planet.

Van Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy (linked to Amazon over there in the slide show column). This New Yorker profile tells a lot more about him.

The Other Red Meat

For some people, pork isn't white meat--it's the red meat of politics. List some funny sounding programs, use the fatty metaphors of pork, and you get yourself some political attention.

Look at the omnibus spending bill and all those pork projects. Sure, in a better world they would go through a sensible process of evaluation. But Congress isn't very often about sensible processes. Many of the programs inserted in this bill were for relatively small projects of particular local significance. They are often if not mostly public sector projects, like bike trails, which not only improve health (cutting down healthcare costs) but aid local redevelopment.

Or they are scientific research projects. They may sound funny, like volcano research, honeybee research, termite research--some of those mentioned in the usual list for this bill, for instance in this column. But look at the first comments: there are good reasons for this research, even if it isn't immediately obvious. Sure, some are bad--the ones that give money to already rich businesses. But many perform a public good. And despite what the bloviators say, they employ people. Even if those people are young scientists with huge student loans.

And according to yet another article, here are some of the other awful pork this bill pays for:

Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2 million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision. There's also dozens of projects awarding state and local governments money for police equipment and to combat methamphetamine."

How terrible! Larding it up with boarding school for at-risk Native kids! Glasses for kids with poor vision! How can we let Congress get away with this?

Some of the hypocrites crying over this pork made sure to insert some of their own. Others don't bat an eye at hundreds of billions for useless weapons systems, or no-bid contracts to the Halliburtons and Blackwaters that amount to grand theft on an immense scale, sustained year after year. The biggest pork barrels on the planet have been called Iraq and Homeland Security. But as long as it involves explosives and not honeybees, then it's vital to the national interest.

Meanwhile, this horrible bill spends money on:

Agriculture _ $20.5 billion, including a 14 percent boost over 2008 for the popular WIC program that feeds infants and poor women.
Education _ $66.5 billion, a 7 percent increase over 2008 levels.
Energy _ $27 billion, including a $765 million, 54 percent hike for advanced energy research.
Health and Human Services _ $66.3 billion, including $30.3 billion for health research.
Housing and Urban Development _ $41.5 billion, including $24.5 billion for low-income and American Indian housing.
Labor _ $15.3 billion, including a 5 percent increase for employment and training programs."

Health research when the cost of healthcare is zooming into the stratosphere? Low income housing when millions are unemployed and losing their homes? Feeding infants and poor women? Oink Oink!

If the Republicans truly believed in cutting spending, they had eight years to prove it--and all they did was turn a Clinton surplus into a massive Bush debt. They have no credibility and no shame. In a time of national economic emergency, they play petty politics. Even Tom Friedman has noticed: "Economically, this is the big one. This is August 1914. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is 9/12. Yet, in too many ways, we seem to be playing politics as usual." And Washington media continues to cooperate with this selfish short-sightedness.

President Obama has provided a sensible program for controlling earmarks. But let's not pretend this is actually about pork. It's about getting people upset enough to write checks to your campaign. It's about red meat. And it's about betraying your country in its time of peril.

Nice Ride

I don't want to become a fetishist about things presidential, but having a President is still something I want to revel in a little longer. Anyway, this is such a cool shot of Air Force One, from the New York Times.

The Big Bank Mystery

Update: NYT:"Wall Street soared on Tuesday in its biggest rally of the year after investors found a glimmer of optimism in the financial sector.
The faint signs of hope came in several forms: a memorandum from Citigroup saying that the bank had been profitable in the first two months of the year; calls for regulatory reforms from the Federal Reserve chairman, and the possibility that the government would reinstate rules governing short sales of stocks."


Monday is a day worth celebrating for the return of science and sanity, with President Obama's lifting of bans on stem cell research made by Bush some 8 years ago as a sop to the hard right that put him close enough to the White House to steal it. The President did so with yet another strong statement on the commitment to science, even when it tells us "inconvenient" truths. Nice reference (or additional dig.)

But the economy remains the crucial and uneasy topic. Of the steps President Obama has outlined and taken to revive the economy and the economic future, I have high confidence in all but what his administration is doing to deal directly with the financial sector: the banks, Wall Street, AIG, etc. It's also the area I know least about, but judging from the misgivings of more expert people I find credible, it seems I'm not alone.

For instance, Paul Krugman's persistent criticism that the amount of federal stimulus is too small doesn't bother me, because if true, it can be remedied later, plus money can only be spent so fast, plus the political realities, all of which I somewhat understand. But when he notes that in his interview with the NY Times, President Obama didn't seem worried about the success of the current approach with the financial sector--that does worry me.

So why not some bolder, clearer action? Could be that it's the wrong thing. Or there may well be other considerations, like this one--a claim that Citibank, for one, maybe can't be legally taken over--or put in receivership-- by the federal government, because of their multinational ownership.

Some believe the economic team is too "centrist," too tied to the practices that screwed the economy in the first place (and Keith had a devastating narrative about that on Monday, which I will link to as soon as there's a transcript posted.) But Ross Douthat has a different take, which supports my feeling about this--or maybe my wishful thinking:

But there's a third answer as well--which is that the smart center-left, embodied by Larry Summers as much as anyone, has moved steadily leftward over the last ten years, as part of a broader Bush-era rapprochement between the Democratic Party's moderate and liberal factions. On health care, the environment, income inequality and other fronts, figures like Summers are closer to their erstwhile lefty antagonists than they used to be, sharing common ground even when they don't have identical policy preferences. "

Well, I hope so. And I hope it translates into some righteous anger against their Wall Street pals who screwed things up. But as this piece by Michael Scherer indicates, the perception that current efforts aren't clear and working--that Geithner may not be up to the job, etc.--are potentially damaging, whether they're accurate or not, because of the crucial role of confidence. Scherer begins by quoting Mark Zandi: "The difference between a recession, a very severe recession and a depression is a lack of confidence," he said. Scherer concludes: "If Obama has a single task before him, as the most celebrated communicator of his generation tasked with leading the economic recovery, it is to temper this rising contagion. Good speeches will not be enough. He will, over time, have to find a way to calm the markets, address the concerns of his responsible critics, and then use these successes to assure consumers everywhere that better days do, in fact, lie ahead, a claim that virtually every economist would endorse, though many disagree on the timing. Obama may be just the man for the job. (I can't really think of anyone else up to the task.) That is the hope, at least."

Again, I don't think this is a problem with spending initiatives and programs--stimulus, infrastructure, energy, health care. I think the American people are with Obama on these, and know that these will take time to work. But I think a lot of people are uneasy about the financial sector, particularly when there are so many stories about so much theft on such a huge scale.

Voter confidence on this may turn out to be crucial to ensure support for initiatives, particularly health care. That's going to be daunting enough without doubts left over from other matters. Opening up the debate while trying to find a common solution means that a lot of truth is going to be told, and that truth isn't very centrist. A good indication is this Joe Conason piece in Salon which references a new international study:

Documenting the gross "discrepancy" between the enormous amounts that Americans spend on healthcare and the value received for that expenditure, the study found that the United States ranks poorly among OECD countries on measures of life expectancy, infant mortality and reductions in "amenable mortality," meaning deaths "from certain causes that should not occur in the presence of timely and effective healthcare."

But perhaps any discussion of healthcare in the developed world ought to begin with a plain fact noted early in this study: Among the OECD's 30 members -- which include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom -- there are only three lacking universal health coverage. The other two happen to be Mexico and Turkey, which have the excuse of being poorer than the rest (and until the onset of the world economic crisis, Mexico was on the way to providing healthcare to all of its citizens). The third, of course, is us."

The U.S. is way behind in health care and in health. We're falling behind in education. We're behind in confronting the Climate Crisis, and maybe even in new energy technologies. But we still lead the western world in the number of prisoners we hold, and the number we kill. We've always been a country of mixed messages, but we're tipping the wrong way dangerously, and I doubt that our fall in the direction of transferring the national wealth to a few rich people is a coincidence. All this bears on the debate as well, like it or not.

Arcata Sunset Sky

"Certitude is not the test of certainty."--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Progress Report

President Obama's weekly five minutes, bringing us up to date on the week's efforts to meet the housing market challenge and get the Recovery and Reinvestment Act implemented. Despite the irresponsible comments of Republicans complaining that Obama's efforts have "failed," even though they know there hasn't been time for anything to take effect, Americans are keeping faith with the President, as evidenced by the latest Newsweek poll, which gives him a 72% favorability rating.

Welcome

Michelle Obama helping out at a homeless shelter in Washington on Thursday. Part of what makes this photo so moving to me is that she could be any of the thousands, the millions of (mostly) women who serve food, and do so with a real sense of service, whether it's in a homeless shelter, a cafeteria, a diner. Getting the food on the plate with a smile and a kind word, over and over again. They all have lives, their own thoughts and experiences, but they are there to serve. All in their way are First Ladies.

Health Care Forum: So Let's Get to Work

President Obama opened the health care discussion at the White House on Thursday with these words (excerpted):

"In the last eight years, premiums have grown four times faster than wages. An additional 9 million Americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured. The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds. By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes. Even for folks who are weathering this economic storm, and have health care right now, all it takes is one stroke of bad luck -- an accident or an illness, a divorce, a lost job -- to become one of the nearly 46 million uninsured or the millions who have health care, but really can't afford what they've got.

We didn't get here by accident. The problems we face today are a direct consequence of actions that we failed to take yesterday..."

"The same soaring costs that are straining families' budgets are sinking our businesses and eating up our government's budget, too. Too many small businesses can't insure their employees. Major American corporations are struggling to compete with their foreign counterparts. And companies of all sizes are shipping their jobs overseas or shutting their doors for good."

At the fiscal summit that we held here last week, the one thing on which everyone agreed was that the greatest threat to America's fiscal health is not Social Security, though that's a significant challenge; it's not the investments that we've made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation's balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It's not even close.

That's why we cannot delay this discussion any longer. That's why today's forum is so important -- because health care reform is no longer just a moral imperative, it's a fiscal imperative. If we want to create jobs and rebuild our economy and get our federal budget under control, then we have to address the crushing cost of health care this year, in this administration. Making investments in reform now, investments that will dramatically lower costs, won't add to our budget deficits in the long term -- rather, it is one of the best ways -- in fact maybe the only way -- to reduce those long-term costs."

"But I am here today and I believe you are here today because this time is different. This time, the call for reform is coming from the bottom up and from all across the spectrum -- from doctors, from nurses, from patients; from unions, from businesses; from hospitals, health care providers, community groups. It's coming from mayors and governors and legislatures, Democrats, Republicans -- all who are racing ahead of Washington to pass bold health care initiatives on their own. This time, there is no debate about whether all Americans should have quality, affordable health care -- the only question is, how?"

And the purpose of this forum is to start answering that question -- to determine how we lower costs for everyone, improve quality for everyone, and expand coverage to all Americans. And our goal will be to enact comprehensive health care reform by the end of this year. That is our commitment. That is our goal."

But there are a lot of people out there who are desperate. There's a lot of desperation out there. Today I want them, and people like them across this country, to know that I have not forgotten them. We have not forgotten them."

So let's get to work."

The President indicated his openness to ideas that work. He said that about the stimulus and got nothing but grief and obstruction. What makes health care different? He talked about some of the differences--the fact that the failure of the system that pretty much came into existence after the last debate on health care legislation in 1994 has convinced almost everybody--businesses, doctors and even some insurers included--that the system is fatally broken.

But what about Republicans? The first signs--the participation of many in the forum today and some of the language they used--indicates there's reason for some hope. Not necessarily from the hard right heart of the party, but from some important moderates, particularly talking about universal coverage.

It's a difficult issue to have any optimism about. The Clinton initiative was so popular at first that President Clinton could actually wave a pen at his State of the Union and threaten to veto it if it didn't meet his standards. But in the course of a few weeks it was dead, killed mostly by lobbyists and a well financed disinformation campaign.

It's particularly tempting for me to be cynical about it, because I've been uninsured for years and I've known for years that my most likely cause of death is being refused treatment, or simply being unable to pay for it, and unwilling to burden others because of the outrageous costs. So I will believe this when I see it. But it does seem that the time is right for something to happen to improve what has been the most tragic result of a system that refuses all responsibility as long as the rich keep getting richer.

Frances Perkins Revisited

The portrait on the left is of Frances Perkins, who 76 years ago today was nominated to be the first woman in the U.S. Cabinet--FDR nominated her to be Secretary of Labor, and she was confirmed. Here's what we owe to her leadership: "the first minimum wage, massive programs to put people back to work and enhance our infrastructure, standardized hours for workers, and the expanded right to organize a union." And something called Social Security. Frances Perkins was a mainstay of the FDR government for 12 years, long enough to become a legend in her own time, as evidenced by the panel above right--it's a detail of a mural by Edward Millman of Outstanding American Women, painted as part of the Public Arts Work Project of the 1930s--this is called the Frances Perkins panel, and can still be seen at Flowers Vocational High School in Chicago. There are many murals like this in public buildings all over the country, a lasting legacy to this FDR program--and to Frances Perkins. Her example is one to remember, especially right now.

Sign for Better Times

This is the logo unveiled in Washington on Tuesday that will appear for projects funded by the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It's also the logo for the web site, Recovery.gov, where information on programs and projects funded by the Act will appear, including state level projects. More on recovery in the post below.

Hope is On the Way

As markets wobble down, Americans are keeping faith with President Obama. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows "that 41% of Americans say the country is headed in the right direction, up dramatically from 26% in mid-January, before Mr. Obama took office, and up from 12% before the election." The jump since Obama's Inauguration is the strongest ever recorded except for right after 9-11.

"Part of the explanation for the numbers is that few blame Mr. Obama for the bad economy, with the vast majority of Americans saying he inherited the situation. About half the people will give Mr. Obama at least two years before assigning him responsibility."

"Overall, two-thirds of all Americans say they feel "hopeful" about Mr. Obama's leadership."

Hope is just starting to become tangible as the first projects funded by the Recovery and Reinvestment Act get started. Money is starting to flow to the states to support hard-pressed programs, the boost in unemployment payments is beginning (and that spending will likely enter the economy quickly) and HUD is starting on some $10 billion in projects. Eventually this act alone could stimulate 3.5 million jobs, with almost 400,000 here in California. More initiatives in the budget bill will mean more jobs and economic activity, geared to present needs and future strength.

More work needs to be done in Washington. Though efforts to help the housing market and hard-pressed homeowners are ramping up , efforts to stabilize the financial sector don't seem to be having results, and more drastic action might be necessary.

But as Englands Prime Minister is in the U.S. to discuss global regulations of banking, it's very notable that while European attempts to deal with the crisis seem to be floundering, Obama's leadership has the U.S. on a firmer footing.

"With uncertain leadership and few powerful collective institutions, the European Union is struggling with the strains this crisis has inevitably produced among 27 countries with uneven levels of development," according to the New York Times. "Europe’s difficulties are in sharp contrast to the American response. President Obama has just announced a budget that will send the United States more deeply into debt but that also makes an effort to redistribute income and overhaul health care, improve education and combat environmental problems."

Arcata Evening Sky

Our largely rainless winter continues, scary but beautiful.

When the Newspaper Dies

On Sunday I posted a diary at Daily Kos about the rapid end of newspapers and the threats to magazines. I called it Gloating Over Dying Newspapers? Think Again because I noticed a certain glee in blog posts (at Daily Kos and elsewhere) over the death or threats to the existence of newspapers. Some comments that followed denied anyone was gloating, followed by a number of other comments that, well, gloated. I tried to keep the post direct, uncluttered with a lot of links, to make a simple point. Judging by some comments, I'm not sure I got through. I noticed later that Paul Starr at the New Republic made similar points--though with excellent historical background and analysis--and got similar responses.

That post follows with one quote and link added, and after that a few additional links and quotes.


Some in the blogosphere seem to take great pleasure in the demise, threatened and actual, of U.S. newspapers. Focusing on greedy corporations, some with a political agenda, as well as infuriating big name columnists and political reporters, and glorying in the success of the Internet and the blogosphere, they gleefully greet this rapid series of newspaper deaths--or at least fatal illnesses--as the triumph of the new media over the old.

Be careful what you wish for. While all those objections and characterizations may be valid, they aren't the whole story. The death of major city newspapers and threatened national magazines will deal the blogosphere a mortal blow, as well as leaving major gaps of information that eventually may threaten the civil order. This is a very big deal.

Paul Starr writes, "More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt."

There is one transcendent reason why this becomes a serious problem for the gathering and communication of news: newspapers pay thousands of reporters a living wage that enables them to report. By and large, the Internet does not.

This is the case of an information medium dying off before its replacement is ready.

What percentage of the content on blogs like [Daily Kos] originates in newspapers? I'd be surprised if it was under 90%, in terms of actual information, actual reporting.

Even when blogs break a story--as Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo did recently in exposing Bobby Jindal's false account of being where he wasn't during Katrina--the information that the stories put together and compare come largely from wire service and local newspaper stories.

Most of what appears in the blogosphere is opinion, comment, synthesis and reporting on reporting. There have been cases where citizen reporters have been marshaled to analyze documents, etc. but those are special instances. There's a limit to how much reporting can be done without reporters paid a living wage to report.

Without newspapers, without magazines, we're left with a small number of reporters for U.S. radio (mostly NPR) and reporters for television news--and all of them depend to a large extent on newspaper reporting.

I'm writing this as people in Colorado are in shock over the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. Despite its right wing advocacy, it did significant reporting, and became integral to a regional identity.

Now here in northern California we learn that the San Francisco Chronicle is weeks away from possibly closing. This will leave a major city, and a major center of future-oriented activity, without a daily newspaper. The Philadelphia Inquirer and News are in bankruptcy. Even the New York Times and Washington Post are on shaky ground.

The reasons for all this are beyond the scope of this diary, except to say if you look carefully, many of these businesses are in trouble not because the newspaper specifically is failing. It's not all about a preference for the Internet as a news source.

What I do want to focus on are the reporters. Newspapers function because they pay people a living wage--most often a union wage. (It seems to me that some of the statements by publishers and corporate types complaining that newspapers have failed to "adapt" is yet more code for getting rid of unions, which usually means the Newspaper Guild.)

A few of the larger blog sites employ reporters and editors. But not many--and I doubt many of these are union wage jobs. I would be very surprised to learn that the total number of paid reporters on the Internet surpasses the number of paid reporters on one daily newspaper in a mid-size American city.

This is not lost on some folks in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Though Josh Marshall is optimistic about the Internet's future, he also admits: "If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn't come close to doing the job," he said.

From that same Washington Post article: "If you don't have people out working as full-time reporters, there's this category of information that's not going to appear magically out of nowhere," said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's School of Journalism.

There are a number of proposed solutions out there, and frankly none of them seem very good to me.(I am specifically not endorsing charging for information online.) But the first step is to recognize what is at stake here, and this is my first diary in that regard. It's a time to be alarmed. It's not a time to gloat. --30--

Here's an additional quote from an excellent article on the ramifications for local and political news coverage by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post:

Many bloggers say that far from being able to replace professional reporters, they actually suffer from the diminished flow of state news. "What I can't offer on my blogs is the relationships, the institutional memory, the why, the history that reporters who know the capital can bring to their stories," says Waldo Jaquith, who blogs on Virginia politics and runs a site, RichmondSunlight.com, that tracks every bill. "Newspapers can describe the candidates for governor in a more balanced, deeper way because you don't have a dog in the race. We bloggers do."


Here are some additional relevant passages from Starr's article:

Should we care? Some observers, confident of the blessings of technology, refuse to shed any tears for the traditional giants of journalism, on the grounds that their troubles are of their own making and of little consequence to the general welfare. In this view, regardless of whether newspapers successfully adapt to the Internet, new and better sources of news will continue developing online, and they will fill whatever void newspapers leave. Others are so angry at the mainstream media--the reviled "MSM"--that they see the economic misery of the press as a deserved comeuppance. Let the bastards suffer.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and--particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels--the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country.

Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.

No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict. The reality is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them. The financial crisis of the press may thereby compound the media's crisis of legitimacy.

Already under ferocious attack from both left and right for a multitude of sins, real and imagined, the press is going to find its job even more difficult to do under economic duress. And as it retrenches in the face of financial pressures, Rosenstiel says, "More of American life will occur in shadows. We won't know what we won't know."

Change We Voted For

"I know [the special interests, insurance, banks, oil company lobbyists] are gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: So am I." President Obama describes his budget, his priorities and the fight ahead, in five minutes.

Change You Can Barely Keep Up With

It's getting nearly impossible to summarize a day in the life of President Obama, let alone a week. But what a week this was! His address to Congress, stating the case for the agenda he mapped out, was a huge hit. More than 52 million Americans watched it on TV, and immediately afterwards, his poll numbers shot up into the stratosphere. His support for change is now broad as well as deep.

A few days later he announced a budget that further propelled his agenda for change, with a special emphasis on health care. It dropped accounting tricks that masked the true spending, and it looked forward as far as a decade down the road. "None of this will be easy or certain, " Newsday concluded. "But by rejecting stealth spending and honestly confronting costly choices about the nation's problems, Obama has challenged us all to do the same."

It was a speech and a budget that defined the Obama presidency--of conviction and long-range strategy, and of--surprisingly surprising to some--doing what he said he would do in his campaign.

If that wasn't enough, there were new initiatives and information on coping with crisis in the financial sector, announcement of the plan to end the war in Iraq, new policies on a range of issues, and one new cabinet appointment with another expected tomorrow. If this seems like a lot of change, it is: in sheer activity, the Obama administration has topped every previous one, by more than double.

Lonely on the Planet

This is an endangered animal that doesn't get so much publicity, possibly because it is already so rare and rarely photographed. This particular species of endangered cheetah starred into a fixed unmanned camera, giving us a glimpse of what may soon vanish from the Earth. They are the fastest animals on the planet, and disappearing fast, too.

Rallying the Troops

Click photo to enlarge. They don't get much publicity, but Michelle Obama has been making a series of visits to federal departments. The above photos are from the Interior Department visit (evidently she was given a Native American shawl at the event). Today she was at the Environmental Protection Agency. These visits are as important as anything the President does, because these are the people who need to be inspired to do their best for the country. Today she told them, "This is what it is all about: the future... And in many ways, it starts with all of you. You ensure that the water we drink is safe, that the air we breathe is clean, and that the polluted fields and abandoned factories in our neighborhoods all over this nation are cleaned up and restored."

"Your work will not only save our planet and clean up our environment; it's going to transform our economy and create millions of well-paying jobs. You know this better than anyone in the country," Obama said. "So there is a lot riding on your shoulders.... I know that you are up to the challenge. I can feel it in this room." There is no way to overestimate a visit by the First Lady (making them feel part of the glamor of the presidency, as well as her own) who can say these things with the credibility of her professional experience to back them up. These people need to be honored and inspired. Feeling part of this larger mission can motivate them and focus them on the work ahead, which is every bit as important as Michelle Obama said.

Command Performance

"We are not quitters":Presidential scholars and journalists compared President Obama's speech before a joint session of Congress to FDR's fireside chats, calling it a command performance and the boldest and best speech of its kind in a long time. The President explained his policies and the reasons for them clearly and Americans understood--support for the Obama economic plan shot up to 80% in one snap poll, and the President's approval rating increased in all polls and focus groups. This speech will be talked about for a long time, including here. For now, some of the poll results are here, here and here. The video and text of the speech are here.

Special Comet

Comet Lulin, a stranger to this part of the solar system, is zooming through the sky and comes closest to the Earth today. It's visible with small telescope, maybe binoculars, and in very isolated areas, maybe the naked eye. It's an unusual comet on an unusual path, so it may look pretty strange--maybe with a tail in front as well as behind, and it may look like it's shifting position quickly. Here's some info on where to look for it.

Hope is On the Way

President Obama outlines how the Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus will help you, and previews this coming busy week: a fiscal summit on Monday, an address to Congress and the nation on the state of the economy and what we need to do. The President is looking at this complex and scary situation comprehensively: "We can't address any of our problems without addressing them all." That includes oversight, and a news report Sunday says that tomorrow, he will appoint an investigator to oversee stimulus spending--a former Secret Service agent who exposed corruption at the Interior Department in the Bush administration.

Trinidad Head, CA. February 7, 2009.

One Month and Counting

It's a month today since President Obama was inaugurated. His achievements for that tiny amount of time are remarkable, and the forward momentum remains considerable.

In terms of the past, he has reversed the slide into official disgrace represented by Guantanamo and torture, and his administration is busy reversing other destructive acts and trends of the Bushite years--though it's important to note that institutionally this will all take time, especially as Bushites are still burrowed deep in the bureaucracy and the judiciary.

For the future, the Recovery and Reinvestment Act gives muscle to the pronouncements and change in tone and trajectory, with promise of more to come. As the Sierra Club's Carl Pope writes, "There's never been a month -- not at least since the heady days of the early 1970s -- when environmental policy has moved so dramatically towards a sustainable future. The challenge now is to keep up the pace."

There are big problems and big programs in the next months, but I hope that the President can soon mobilize the spirit of service that he inspired in the campaign.

Yes We CANada!

A shout-out to our friends in Canada on the day President Obama came to call, on his first official state visit, to Ottawa. Click image to enlarge.

Jump-Starting the Future

President Obama and Vice President Biden examine solar panels atop the Denver Museum of Nature and Science where he signed the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with the young entrepreneur whose solar business will benefit. And so will the future. See more in the post below.

Captain Science

He's been adding that little bit of emphasis everywhere he can: in the Inaugural Address, in his Lincoln's birthday speech when he mentioned Darwin's birthday, and substantively, in the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

But in choosing to sign the Act at the Museum of Nature and Science in Denver, President Obama made it crystal clear that he's going to be Captain Science, and President of the Future.

He was introduced by a young entrepreneur who is going to be helped by the stimulus spending in the Act, but check out his business: solar energy. Together he and the President examined some of his solar panels on the roof of the Museum.

It's clear as well in the President's words at the ceremony. After talking about investing in America's future by the Act's spending on infrastructure, education and health care, he said:

"Because we know we can't power America's future on energy that's controlled by foreign dictators, we are taking a big step down the road to energy independence, and laying the groundwork for a new, green energy economy that can create countless well-paying jobs. It's an investment that will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years, and provide tax credits and loan guarantees to companies like Namaste Solar, a company that will be expanding, instead of laying people off, as a result of the plan I am signing.

In the process, we will transform the way we use energy. Today, the electricity we use is carried along a grid of lines and wires that dates back to Thomas Edison – a grid that can't support the demands of clean energy. This means we're using 19th and 20th century technologies to battle 21st century problems like climate change and energy security. It also means that places like North Dakota can produce a lot of wind energy, but can't deliver it to communities that want it, leading to a gap between how much clean energy we are using and how much we could be using.

The investment we are making today will create a newer, smarter electric grid that will allow for the broader use of alternative energy. We will build on the work that's being done in places like Boulder, Colorado – a community that is on pace to be the world's first Smart Grid city. This investment will place Smart Meters in homes to make our energy bills lower, make outages less likely, and make it easier to use clean energy. It's an investment that will save taxpayers over one billion dollars by slashing energy costs in our federal buildings by 25% and save working families hundreds of dollars a year on their energy bills by weatherizing over one million homes. And it's an investment that takes the important first step towards a nationwide transmission superhighway that will connect our cities to the windy plains of the Dakotas and the sunny deserts of the Southwest.

Even beyond energy, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Science Foundation, this recovery act represents the biggest increase in basic research funding in the long history of America's noble endeavor to better understand our world. Just as President Kennedy sparked an explosion of innovation when he set America's sights on the moon, I hope this investment will ignite our imagination once more, spurring new discoveries and breakthroughs that will make our economy stronger, our nation more secure, and our planet safer for our children."

Far Out

From the Hubble telescope. I've lost the link to what it is exactly, but it's far out, right? Especially when you click photo to enlarge.

Paying Attention

It's daunting to look at the little video below--to see those changes happening so quickly and on so large a scale--and to see them in the light of the ongoing global economic crisis, which some are seeing as causing major shifts in the U.S. (as well as being potentially dangerous to the U.S.). There are even some who feel that this--especially as it may dovetail with accelerating effects from the Climate Crisis--signals the end of our civilization's forward momentum (if that's what it is), with decades of serious retrenchment to come.

I don't know what to make of this, especially since I pretty much got out of the parade as the digital age (computers, Internet, blogs) became the network age (Iphones, MySpace), and I'm up here in an isolation zone on the North Coast. But I do know a few things about the future, and I do have some specific worries.

One of those worries is that things are moving too fast and are getting too big for our ability to respond thoughtfully as a polity and a global society. Think of all the changes that got us into this economic mess, and they were mostly the result of decisions by a relatively few people in a few isolated networks, with no rules applied for the larger good, and no sense of responsibility to the larger society. The more we're learning about it, the more it seems it was built on networked delusions and individual's lies.

We're also seeing that even with this lightning-fast passage of the recovery package, we're seriously hampered by fossilized thinking and stubborn and selfish political and economic interests. This is even clearer in California, where the state is seriously imperiled by delusional but stubborn politicans whose power is multiplied because of the complexity and interconnections of things. Even people who think destroying government is the solution may contribute to redressing balances, but things are happening too fast on too big a scale for that now. We may not be able to afford those people holding power, just as we really can't afford Climate Crisis Deniers with influence, yet there goes George Will, repeating falsehoods that have been proven false over and over again. There really isn't a solution, except for the media and the public to wise up faster, so it's a worry.

As for the ship of state, we're finding that it takes awhile to turn it around. Meanwhile, things are changing fast, and big.

The other worry is related. Things are happening faster and bigger, and the network age is selecting for massive social contact, with the danger of intense groupthink and conformity, as well as much less stepping back and evaluating what's going on. My specific worry is too much dependence and not enough redundancy. We're unbelievably dependent on cell phones and microwave technology, on satellites and the Internet. Those are all vulnerable systems, and nobody seems to be thinking about that.

People--as well as entire economies--are becoming dependent on new technologies much faster than ever before. For some, there are no replacements or redundancies if something goes wrong. For others, the new technologies are destroying the old much faster than ever before. Sometimes that's got aesthetic consequences mostly--like imperfect digital photography destroying film, a better quality medium for still photography. But the consequences could be greater and worse--look at all the people who don't have a landline phone, or who are ready to give up the infrastructure of newspapers etc. for the still pretty hinky Internet.

The economy and other changes are also likely to demonstrate vulnerabilities we aren't ready for. Some folks online are positively gloating that newspapers and magazines are endangered. But it has to be something like 80 or 90% of the news and political information on the Internet that originates from newspapers and magazines. The Internet just isn't paying very many people to gather and report news, or to do much else. That isn't a system that's ready to replace newspapers. It couldn't even replace television news, which is really frightening.

If this meltdown gets bad enough, everything we depend on is endangered--everything from Google searches and Wikipedia to fresh fruit and fish in the grocery. In some ways, we are more protected that folks in the 1930s, but in other ways we're probably even more vulnerable, because we're so dependent on stuff from a distance.

That said, there's also strength in size and speed, so there's a decent chance we'll get out of this if we don't lose our heads, and don't withdraw too much from participating in the economy, especially the local one. But the dependence and lack of redundancy bothers me, especially because I don't see anyone else worrying about it.

Changing Times

A five minute perspective that's just a little mind-blowing...

What's Next?

The news has President Obama today looking at how to deal with the auto industry, with the recovery act signing Tuesday, and Wednesday the next announcements on the financial system. But Ron Brownstein recorded what the President said just in answer to a question on Air Force One about his priorities for the rest of the year. His answer is forthright, with sensible support for why these priorities need to be first. I've added my emphases:

THE PRESIDENT: My priorities for the rest of the year. Number one is to get the right structure for the successor to TARP; spending the $300-some billion that has already been authorised as wisely as possible, and injecting transparency and trust into the financial system.

Having a housing program that provides relief to people who are at risk of losing their homes. Financial regulations that ensure that the crisis doesn't happen again.

A innovative and aggressive push for health care reform that focuses not just on access but also on costs, and trying to just provide relief to working families.

And a push for an energy policy that puts us on a path to sustainability.

You asked given what we inherited, are we going to be able to get all this done. Some of these reforms don't cost money. They will still be heavy political lifts because there are philosophical arguments about how to approach it. Some of these problems are very complicated. Health care is a classic situation where it may cost money on the front end and save enormous money on the back end and what we're going to have to figure out is what can we do now to start getting that ball rolling, because the longer we put that off, the worse off we are financially.

Medicare and Medicaid on their current trajectory cannot be sustained. And the only way I think we're going to fix it is if we see those two problems in the broader contest of bending the curve down on health care inflation....

I should add one more thing and that is a budget process that starts bending the deficit curve down.

I think that all these goals are complementary. I also think that the American people understand we won't get everything done overnight. The U.S. government and the U.S. economy are enormous ocean liners, they're not speedboats. So what we will do this year is to try to get them on the right trajectory and hopefully that means at the end of my term you'll look back and you'll say we're at a different place than we would have been had we not made these changes."