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How About Some (brilliant) actual Progressives for Obama's Economic Advisers ? Oh, now that it's out that Lawrence Summers blitzed Harvard for a billion bucks with derivatives (not to mention a huge whack to its gender equality image), ... doesn't our Prez now have the perfect excuse to put some, you know, real Democrats into the financial cat bird seats? I recommend Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman , and Texas University's James Galbraith ( Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government . ) If you haven't seen these guys on TV, on the Net, in print or somewhere, you are just not paying attention. They are SMART (and I happen to think, right on economic issues). At the very minimum they look more alert than Summers.

The Flat Ten Years of Climate Temperature Never mind the stolen climatologists' e-mails (aka Climate-gate), the biggie among climate change deniers is the fact that worldwide temperatures have been more or less flat for the last ten years or so. "SEE!?" they say, "NO WARMING!" Well, three things: (1.) The flat temperature where the thermometer is stuck is still warm enough to be melting the North Polar Cap and glaciers all over the world, i.e. "stuck on warm." (2.) A likely reason for the pause in warming is that the sun is in " the deepest solar minimum in almost 100 years " cutting its radiation to the Earth - a situation not likely to last very long. (3.) In the context of even a brief period of time - one century - this flat spot is just a normal wiggle in the temperature graph. See the flattening there? (top chart, right side) When the sun "wakes up," you can bet the line will start up again. Trends aren't smooth line...

Running Out of Water, Land and Trees Gotta love this: Now THAT's a farm! Check it out . And this baby produces food 24/7/365, using a tiny percentage of the water the same production would use in flat farming. (Still Sci-Fi, btw.) On a smaller scale there is Valcent . (Full disclosure: I bought some penny shares in Valcent.) And further pumping up my Sci-Fi sense, when we master farming vertically, we will be ready to grow greens on the moon and Mars. Gotta have your greens, SpaceBusters. Look ahead; behind is a mess.

Create These Jobs, Oh Government o'Mine I hear from the right (a lot), "The government create jobs? Riiight." Like that is impossible . Well how about fixing some pure government stuff, like this: As Sewers Fill, Waste Poisons Waterways Yuck! This N.Y. Times headline spun me around a few times. Let's face it, sewer systems are mosdef government thangs. So fix them! Expand them! Hire a bunch of people ("create jobs"), buy lots of concrete and steel (American, of course, creating jobs), buy mucho equipment (from American manufacturers, creating jobs), and get underway right away, PLEASE. How many jobs would be created? I'm guessing tens of thousands, but I am but a blogger, bud, so I really don't know. However, this paragraph from the Times article makes it sound reasonable: "In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dump...

How to Respond to Reeely Rotten Politics Wow, the hard Right is pee-ing all over President B. H. Obama. The Moonies' Washington Times revisited the whole Birther thing in a sideways slap at the Prez as "not one of us enough to know how wrong he is." (Heard about it on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC.) So if the right is going to get (stay) irrational, untruthful and just nasty, maybe the rest of us shouldn't be so hard on Obama if he's not moving as fast as we'd like on some issues. I mean, he's had almost a year , for heaven's sake! We snipe a lot, apparently expecting him to be FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln all rolled into one right away. Now. Today. Ooops, too late. So let's keep our support for the issues and principles we believe in, and our backing for the best guy likely to come along for a while for getting them done. I'm just saying...