kindler Posts

As US democracy faces its deepest crisis since the Civil War, it isn’t easy to keep track of all the moving parts. As Donald and his enablers move on multiple fronts to degrade our democratic norms, traditions, and institutions into cheap tools for a white nationalist mob led by a would-be strongman, we need a scorecard to keep track of where we stand – and to avoid the kind of disorientation or dismay that their daily “shock and awe” psychological warfare campaign is meant to achieve.

The latest fashion among right-wing trolls? Attempt to halt all criticism of the Koch Brothers by bringing up the name of environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer. We have our billionaire political donors, you have yours — what's the difference? Ah, false equivalency, the last refuge of the simple mind. Well, in case you need some troll repellent, here are four fun facts demonstrating the enormous differences between Steyer and the Kochs.

Barbara Comstock, who wants to be Virginia's 10th District chief lawmaker, has a fatal attraction to lawbreakers. She has literally made a career of defending Republicans guilty of crimes, corruption, even treason.

It's easy to get caught up in the absurdity of climate change deniers and ignore the possible solutions for what the scientific community nearly universally agrees is happening to this planet — which is exactly what the Koch Brothers, Exxon Mobile and the other fossil fuel titans want. It's time to move the discussion forward (and not in nauseating circles). Here are three options to help curb humanity's escalating impact here on Earth.

The Los Angeles Times took a little-noticed step that could have a profound impact on your children's and grandchildren's future: it banned climate change deniers from its pages. If this step catches on and spreads to other media outlets, it could finally lead us away from the distraction of the phony, manufactured "debate" over the existence and causes of the global climate disruption and actually get down to the real work of confronting this challenge.

NBC 4 in Washington reported yesterday that Terry McAuliffe has now come out in support of President Obama's proposed climate change rules. This is a courageous move, and a big deal that ought to make more of those who care about these issues get off their butts and hit the streets to help Terry beat world-class climate denial conspiracy theorist Ken Cuccinelli.

The Republican Swift boat campaign against Virginia gubenatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has now begun in earnest.

Watergate started with a third-rate burglary at the Democratic headquarters that got little attention at the time.  The recent arrest of a young Republican operative dumping voter registration forms in the trash has received no more coverage than that.  Maybe it is just an "isolated incident" as the State Board of Elections claims.  Bu...

It wasn't that long ago that the environment was a bipartisan issue.  Just 4 years ago, Republicans nominated John McCain, a Congressional leader on climate change, for president.  The first President Bush appointed an activist EPA administrator, Bill Reilly, supported the Earth Summit in Rio and passed important Clean Air Act amendments.  In  past decades, the GOP included genuine environmental leaders like John Chafee and Sherwood Boehlert.  
But...

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

20 years ago, The Atlantic Magazine asked of the first President Bush: "Can George Bush Think?"  The same question deserves to be asked of Mitt Romney.  While both men have shown competence in key areas, both have been handicapped by a lack of vision and vast blind spots that come across as inexplicable, if not downright bizarre.  

Perhaps the roughest part of the 1992 article for Bush I was when the author, Richard Brookhiser, quoted one of the president's own staffers as saying:

"Can he think in an organized, linear way about problems? Can he pose thesis and antithesis, and draw a synthesis? No. He is the least contemplative man I've ever met."

The author's main point was that, rather than having a consistent ideology -- what Bush dismissively called "the vision thing" -- his style was "dealing with what he finds on his desk every day when he gets in" -- what another Atlantic writer, Richard Schneider termed "The In-Box President".

It is hard to think of another major party presidential nominee worse at grasping the big picture than Mitt Romney.  I'm not sure it's sufficient to consider his record of flip-flopping merely sneaky and dishonest.  It is so blatant, such a huge elephant in the room, that it borders on the pathological.  
We -- especially the media -- have to ask of the man who's just a few percentage points shy of seizing the White House: Does he have any vision whatsoever?  Or is he somehow incapable of thinking beyond the immediate moment when he is pandering to an audience, forgetting that he previously held the opposite viewpoint -- and not conceiving or caring that he may need to take a different position in the future?  

Everyone else, across the political spectrum, can tell when he's flip-flopping.  Can he somehow not see it?  Could he possibly see what he says and does yesterday, today and tomorrow as completely different and unrelated realities, like the victim of some sort of dissociative disorder?

The other day, Newt Gingrich, in full marketing mode, told the Washington Post that Romney "is a manager who sticks with his strategies and implements them relentlessly."  But Newt, the unthinking man's "intellectual", here demonstrates only his own shallowness.  To the contrary, most of the time, Mitt is all tactics and no strategy.  

Facing an audience of pro-Israel donors?  Insult the Palestinians (and throw in Chile, Ecuador and Mexico for good measure) -- you'll never need them in the future.  Want to attack Obama on a wedge issue?  Go after him for granting states some flexibility on welfare, ignoring that these changes were mostly requested by Republican governors and that Romney himself asked for similar exemptions when he was Massachusetts governor. (And please forget the core conservative, Reaganesque value of federalism, i.e., devolving federal powers to the states). Want a running mate who makes the base happy?  Choose Paul Ryan for his ultraconservative budget, even though you recently opposed it and you'll have to make distinctions between "his" budget and "yours."

You don't need a college degree to see that all of these waffles don't add up to a full breakfast.  But you may be tempted to ask: How could Romney have become filthy rich in venture capital if he's so incapable of strategic thinking?

My answer is that I fear Mitt suffers from the same cognitive disability afflicting all those Wall Street traders and corporate shysters whose alleged brilliance and foresight brought us the Great Recession.  Sure they can and do focus like lasers on building their own piles of money.  But do they do it from long-term vision and strategy, or from a sort of opportunistic instinct, a ruthless willingness and ability to grab money wherever they can based on short term tactical moves?

It's precisely their contempt for the long-term that is both noteworthy and disturbing.  If an Enron or a Lehman Brothers -- or the world economy -- collapses, no biggie, as long as you've built your own nest egg and escaped from the collapsing building in time.  It's the triumph of the greedy individual over all the rest of society and posterity.  

How would someone with this perspective govern as president?  With self-preservation and enrichment his only compass, Mitt would, as always, go where he sees the greatest political rewards of the moment.  He would continue to follow every knee jerk of his ultraconservative base, on whom he depends for his political survival, until it led to some major blow ups, causing a reaction in the other direction -- and repeat.  Expect a lot of muddling through and zig-zagging, but with President Romney following the lead of the tea party whenever he can get away with it.  

Such is the dead end to which today's GOP has marched, and to which they will take the rest of us if we let it happen.  The Republican hatred of government, indebtedness to corporate America, enforcement of ideological rigidity and general War on Brains have all led to a presidential nominee with no vision whatsoever beyond giving multinational corporations and millionaires everything they want.  

I don't know to what extent Mitt can think, but the rest of us better snap out of it and go door-knocking before we are all stuck with the Zombie Administration.

It's truly remarkable how little time Ken Cuccinelli spends actually doing his job as Virginia Attorney General.  There are too many fun political games to play instead -- harassing climate scientists, suing the President over health care, suing the EPA over pretty much everything.

And now the latest -- Cuccinelli intervening in a Maryland gun control case with no implications whatsoever for Virginia.  As if terrorizing our state weren't enough, he has to interfere with our neighbors too.

Basically, our Ayatollah General used his time -- funded by your Virginia tax dollars -- to file a "friend of the court" brief in support of a Federal District Court ruling striking down an MD law that limits handgun permits to those who can prove a "good and substantial reason" to have one, i.e., an unusual threat to their personal safety.
Never mind the timing of this move, after not one but two horrific mass shootings conducted by crazed gunmen who purchased their firearms legally.  And let's just say for now that Cuccy is entitled to his opinions on the matter.  Just ask this -- what does it have to do with Virginia?  The odds of such a law being passed in our state are slimmer than Misty May-Treanor.  There is simply no reason for the state AG to intervene in this matter.

But Cuccy as usual is operating, not as state AG but as aspiring King of the Tea Party -- determined to be, on every issue, More Right-Wing Than Thou.  But why stop with legal briefs?  Why not be a real red-meat, manly conservative and send the VA National Guard across the borders to overrun DC and MD and forcibly arm their citizens?  After all, you can never be conservative enough when there's the historical example of folks like Genghis Khan to live up to.  

Just think, some day we can aspire to once again have an AG who spends his or her time protecting Virginia's consumers and citizens, challenging big corporations and others who pose real threats to our lives and livelihoods.  But in the meantime, if we're dumb enough to let this guy become governor, you can bet his mischief and meddling will get many, many times worse.  

No, that headline is not a typo, and no, Blue Virginia has not been bought by Rupert Murdoch.

Yes, I am still against the vast majority of what Republicans stand for.  But I sure miss a certain category of Republican, the type who acknowledges the reality of our society's problems and actively works with people on all sides of the political spectrum to seek solutions.  Yes, this now-endangered species used to be fairly common.

In today's GOP, sadly, such leaders are being wiped out by the Tea Party Mob, who consider the likes of, say, Richard Lugar unacceptable because of such transgressions as working with former Senator Obama on nuclear non-proliferation.  Another casualty of the last election was Rep. Bob Inglis, who -- although highly conservative on almost every issue -- was defeated for a few "transgressions", including acknowledging the reality of climate change and the need to deal with it and our energy challenges in a mature and thoughtful manner.

Inglis has now been named to head a new Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University.  And that's good news for all of us.  
The goal of this "nationwide public engagement campaign" is to "explore and promote conservative solutions to America's energy and climate challenges."  Granted, "conservative solutions" has become an oxymoron thanks to morons like Palin, Paul and Romney, who have zero solutions other than slashing government, cutting taxes, reducing voter turnout and regulating women's bodies. But it is indeed for that reason that we need conservatives to turn away from conspiracy theories and shock-and-awe political carpet-bombing campaigns towards sitting down to conceive and negotiate reality-based solutions -- especially to our twin climate and energy challenges, about which the US continues to do disturbingly little.  

As he outlines in this EE News interview, Inglis seeks "free market solutions" to climate change.  While I don't think this is the whole answer to the problem, it is an important part of it.  I don't agree with him, for example, that renewable energy doesn't need any subsidies, because it otherwise will be too difficult to quickly overcome the fossil fuel industries' century-plus head start.

But I strongly agree with him that the Federal government should immediately stop subsidizing oil, gas and coal.  I agree even more strongly with his goal of encouraging energy efficiency and renewable energy development through price signals:

[L]et's attach all costs to all fuels. So let's make coal, for example, fully accountable for all of its health costs. If you do that, it really changes the economics of what wind and solar look like and what nuclear looks like.

The strongest price signal would be through a carbon tax, which Inglis advocates: "basically, stop taxing something that you want more of, which is income, labor, industry, and start taxing something you want less of, which is pollution."  (A solution that environmentalists like Paul Hawken and Al Gore have been advocating for years, and also the approach being taken by a very interesting grassroots group, the Citizens Climate Lobby.)

While I remain deeply skeptical that he can sell any kind of tax to his Republican colleagues, it's important for him to try and see if it can lead to any productive avenues.  While I would love to defeat all the wacko Republicans at the polls this November, the reality is that a blowout which gives Democrats a bulletproof majority in Congress is highly unlikely.  That means that we will need partners on the other side of the aisle in order to get anything done.  For that we need conservatives who see climate change as something other than a vast conspiracy of evil scientists.  America needs a conservative movement that is not completely divorced from reality if we are to get anything done at all.  

And our climate change and energy crisis cannot wait any longer.  So I welcome Rep. Inglis to George Mason and Virginia.  I encourage him to follow in the tradition of one of my favorite old-time Republicans, Jack Kemp, who sought and implemented real, market-based solutions that helped people's lives, like Enterprise Zones.  We certainly won't agree with you much of the time, Rep. Inglis, but please engage us, even challenge us.  In a year when half the country has suffered severe drought, and states like Colorado and Texas have been devastated by record heat and wildfires, it should be obvious that the time for shouting and denial needs to end and the time to come together and find solutions must finally begin.

Cross posted at Daily Kos

Ever since the Reagan era, Republicans have had a simple, clear, persuasive message: GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.  For whatever reason, Democrats have not had a comparably clear and simple message defending the essential role that government plays in today's world.  

Now would be a very good time to fix that.  Depending which ways the winds shift by November, we could be just a few percentage points away from a Tea Party takeover of the White House and Congress.  The consequences of such a coup would be profound and long-lasting, as today's Republicans have not hidden their intent to slash everything from Medicare to the EPA.  They are on the verge of doing so because we have not sufficiently made the case for the value that government adds to our everyday lives.  

I would summarize that case as: GOVERNMENT PROVIDES THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDATIONS FOR MODERN LIFE.  Civilized day-to-day life as we know it would simply not be possible without strong and effective government.  Perhaps the most effective way to prove this case is to ask people to walk step by step through their day and recognize all the ways that government programs and policies allow them to take the high quality of their lives for granted.  (For a useful example of such an exercise, see Government is Good: A Day in Your Life, by a Poli Sci professor.)
Our safety, security, health and freedoms are protected by virtue of our status as citizens of a democracy with one of the most effective governments in the world.   Our economic system, transportation network, public health and civil liberties all rest on governmental foundations.  We either choose to pay the dues for these systems or allow them to fall apart.

Next time you hear the term "free market", challenge it.  Since when has capitalism ever worked "freely" without government backing it up?  Try running a business with no legal system to protect the sanctity of your contracts or copyrights, no police to catch people stealing your goods, no government regulating and maintaining roads, air travel, railroads and waterways for your products, employees and customers to travel through, no education system for your workforce, no standards to set a level playing field among you and your competitors, no regulatory system to protect the reputation of your industry by catching the shysters who will otherwise operate in shady ways and sell unsafe products.  Business leaders who think they can thrive if they just cripple the government are seriously deluding themselves.  Government in countless ways sets the stage for business (which is why the whole trumped-up "debate" over Obama's comment about business owners not creating all they have with their own hands is so ridiculous).

Next time you hear a libertarian touting all the ways s/he is proudly independent and considers government some sort of parasite on hard working citizens, ask a few questions, like:

- Ever use the bathroom? Did you know where your poop goes once you flush the toilet? To sewage systems and treatment plants paid for with your tax dollars.  You can do without that and handle your waste by yourself, right?  And you don't mind drinking or swimming in water with untreated sewage in it, by the way?

-  Do you ever drive on roads or walk on sidewalks?  Are those free?  If businesses built only their own roads for their own benefit, would we have the type of interconnecting, open and mostly functional system we have today?

- Do you or your parents or grandparents rely on Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid? How would they live if we dismantled or starved these systems?

- Do you eat food from restaurants or supermarkets?  How do you know it's safe?  Might your tax dollars paying for USDA meat inspectors, FDA food regulations, and local public health inspections be worth the investment?

- Ever check the weather?  Do you know that all the services you use depend on the National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)?

-  Do you use computers?  Did you know that NASA dramatically spurred development of the computer through the space program and that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created the Internet?  If you hate government, could you please refrain from using these devices?

We could, of course, go on and on, and it is a worthwhile exercise seeing how far you can go in finding the ways in which government touches our lives.  What is extremely difficult to imagine is what modern life would look like without all the investments that have been made through government at all levels.  Could you imagine going through your day without roads, public education, police, sewer systems, safe food, air, water and products, computers and the Internet, etc.?  Our lives would surely be set back in history, perhaps 100 years.

Libertarians will surely argue that businesses and citizens together can and would have filled all these gaps without "big government", but it is an unpersuasive case.  To be sure, there are positive examples of businesses coming together to form independent organizations, such as standard setting organizations, without having to rely on government for these services.  But even in these instances, government (i.e., the National Institute of Standards) plays a critical role as the ultimate referee of which standards to use, based on the public good rather than any industry's particular vested interest.  

Of course it is true that not all government is good -- not by a long shot!  Indeed, it is essential to regularly review what we're getting from government and where we can pare laws and programs that either are not needed or have negative consequences.  For example, it is fair to ask, in the age of the Internet, whether we need as many post offices as we have.  Unfortunately, the current debate -- focused on indiscriminately slashing domestic programs (while of course increasing defense and cutting taxes) -- is an impediment rather than a path to such a mature and thoughtful discussion.  

Who we elect and what policies they put into place matters a great deal, with ripples through every current of everyday life.  Our government desperately needs leaders who seriously understand the value of the institutions they are charged with directing.   But to get to that point, we need to educate the public about why government matters.  

If Democrats don't figure out soon how to make that case clearly and forcefully, we may begin to lose the foundations of civilized life that we've paid so much and fought so hard to build.  And we will all suffer from the loss -- including the goombas who are so blinded by their misdirected hatred of government that they can't see all that it provides them in exchange for their taxes -- the price of admission to civilized society.  

How can we get Virginia Democrats even more psyched to support Tim Kaine?  Here's an idea: have Ayatollah General Cuccinelli abuse his office to make a cheap political attack on him.

Well, what do you know?  Wish for something hard enough and it happens.

Apparently George Allen and his cohorts have decided that they are not going to win the Senate race on current, relevant issues and so they have to resort to Willy Horton tactics.  Horton, for those too young to remember, was the killer George H.W. Bush blamed Mike Dukakis for releasing from prison in Bush's slimy 1988 campaign.  

It's an appropriate reference, since Cuccinelli is dredging up documents and issues nearly as old.  In a NUTshell, they're trying to blame Kaine for trying to send a German murderer convicted in 1990, Jens Soering, to complete his prison term in Germany rather than Virginia.  Bob McDonnell more recently reversed this extradition agreement so that Virginia taxpayers can keep paying for this guy's incarceration.  (Lowell summarized the case in a bit more detail here
The document that Cuccy is waving around like a flag right now is an affidavit Kaine wrote for another case, working as a civil rights lawyer in 1988.  Apparently, Soering's lawyers recycled Kaine's affidavit -- which discusses some esoteric details of capital murder cases in general -- without Kaine's knowledge or approval.  (If you want to read the affidavit for yourself, knock yourself out -- but you are advised to put a pillow on your keyboard to avoid knocking yourself out for real.)

From that, Cuccinelli has manufactured the lie that Kaine "was a witness on behalf of a double-murderer."

Huh?

As Kaine spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine responded:

We'll leave it to the Allen campaign and the attorney general to use state government resources to play politics in the Virginia Senate election...Governor Kaine is focused on working together with Virginians to strengthen our economy and create jobs.

Meanwhile, Virginians continue to wait for the day that our Attorney General will spend some time actually doing his job rather than just playing right wing gutter politics.

Not since the Chicago Cubs has anyone assembled as impressive a losing streak as Ken Cuccinelli.  With his reverse Midas Touch, every major case that Virginia's chief legal officer champions just ends up swirling down the judicial toilet.  The latest flush came today, as the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit rejected his baseless challenge of the US EPA's scientific finding that greenhouse gases represent a threat to human health.  

If the man were capable of embarrassment, now would be a good time to show it.

This, of course, is not the first time he's been thrown out of court on a climate change case. No, actually it's the THIRD time.  First, Albemarle County Circuit Court Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled in August 2010 that Cuccy didn't have any "objective basis" for his witch hunt against former U-VA climate scientist Michael Mann.  Bravely, our Ayatollah General then took his case to the Virginia Supreme Court -- which in March of this year ruled that he had read the law wrong and didn't even have jurisdiction to challenge U-VA in the case.

This of course is on top of the smackdowns that Cuccinelli received from the courts in his challenge to President Obama's health care law.  After somehow winning his first round on the issue, he lost his next two. In September 2011, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously found that he lacked standing to even bring the suit, derisively commenting that allowing standing in such cases would "convert the federal judiciary into a forum for the vindication of a state's generalized grievances about the conduct of government."
The next month, the Supreme Court left Cuccinelli's health care appeal off its docket, even as it took on other state attorneys general's cases on the matter.  

One of the striking things about Cuccy's loss record is how often his position is struck down on basic, threshold issues that you would expect a wet-behind-the-ears legal intern to get right.  Basic issues of who has standing to sue, what sorts of entities are subject to the laws in question, etc. are matters that you'd think a man with a position as important as his might spend a few minutes on Wikipedia to double-check.

You may say that none of this matters to Cuccinelli or his rabid supporters -- it's not about winning, it's about going down fighting!  Well, fine and dandy, but a habitual loser is generally not what Americans admire.  The man has lost so many times because he takes positions that make no sense legally, logically or morally -- and then fights them, unbending, to the death.  

Perhaps that's the rebel spirit of the Confederacy, but what does it get you? Just another reason to be pissed off and blame the commie socialist pinkos who nefariously run the world, I guess.  (Never mind that many of the judges who've laughed Cuccinelli out of court have been Republican appointees.)

Meanwhile, the hero of the tea party courageously continues his quixotic quest, proclaiming, like the Black Knight of Monty Python fame: "It's just a flesh wound!"

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." -- George Orwell, 1984

You know a political movement is desperate to maintain control of the debate when it starts banning language itself.  And so my jaw dropped when I saw the following in the Virginian-Pilot:

State Del. Chris Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, who insisted on changing the "sea level rise" study in the General Assembly to one on "recurrent flooding," said he wants to get political speech out of the mix altogether.

He said "sea level rise" is a "left-wing term" that conjures up animosities on the right. So why bring it into the equation?

"What people care about is the floodwater coming through their door," Stolle said. "Let's focus on that. Let's study that. So that's what I wanted us to call it."

Wow.  Just wow.  Since when did "sea level rise" become a "left-wing term"?

As far as I can tell, sea level rise is an observable phenomenon, meaning that you either measure and observe it or you don't.  It's like gravity or rain or sunrise -- you can prove and demonstrate the effect happening by resorting to basic scientific methods.  Ideology, religion, and political party have nothing to do with it -- it's about the truth, plain and simple.

In fact, sea level rise has been measured worldwide and yes, it has been correlated with melting ice caps and expanding oceans due to global warming.  And this has been shown to be a very real threat to Norfolk, as documented in a recent episode of PBS's Need to Know.  This fact was also confirmed in a recent Hampton Roads forum by Kathryn Sullivan, an assistant secretary of commerce and deputy administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

What you do about that truth is a political choice -- but on that basis, the Republicans and Democrats in Virginia were in agreement at least on studying the serious threat of increased flooding in the Hampton Roads area.

So why condemn a generic, accurate, measurable term like "sea level rise" as "left-wing"?  The only reason could be to stifle debate, to make sure that opinions that some powerful interests don't want to hear are fully suppressed.  (Powerful interests like the oil-rich Koch Brothers perhaps? -- i.e., the primary funders of the Tea Party groups agitating against rational action on climate change.)

As Orwell showed so brilliantly, the destruction of language and of democracy go hand in hand.  So let's not let the right get away with banning perfectly accurate terms from the debate, or trying to make scientific results disappear with a wave of the magic wand.  They are entitled to their opinions about how to proceed politically, but they are not entitled to force our political system into the straitjacket of an alternate reality.  

A picture tells a thousand words, and economist Michael Norman's graphs here tell the whole story of Obama's economic record, and why he should run strongly and proudly on it -- and why we should not concede an inch to Republicans and their distortions on the matter.  

In these graphs, the frightening free fall of the economy in 2008 and early 2009 is shown -- with the clear trend of the economy surging back up following passage of the president's Recovery Act in February 2009.  The data are honestly displayed, showing where recovery has been painfully slow (e.g., housing and employment), but demonstrating quite dramatically how most of the fundamentals of the economy (like GDP, personal income, industrial production, etc.) rebounded from rock bottom and have stayed positive since then.  

Plain and simple, the stimulus WORKED.  Unfortunately, the Republicans who took over Congress in 2010 have blocked further efforts to bolster our economy, leading to significant stagnation, particularly on public sector employment, as the president noted the other day.  

Oh, and by the way, don't believe all the hype about these dollars being unaccountably squandered on boondoggles.  If you want to know where the money went and how its being used, to what ends, this information is documented to an unprecedented level of detail at Recovery.gov -- and the site even invites software developers to develop apps to allow for more transparency and analysis.

Obama quite simply rescued us from the brink of economic disaster to which Republican policies had carried us -- and to which they will again if we let them.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

Two events this week, thousands of miles apart, demonstrated vastly different visions for America and the world.  While the Heartland Institute's climate change denial conference disintegrated into an embarrassing, stinking mess, SpaceX partnered with the Obama administration to strike new ground for the human race -- the first commercial space flight in history.  

Don't let anyone tell you there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats -- the gulf between Heartland and SpaceX perfectly illustrates the two visions between which we must choose.  One side seeks to guide us smoothly into the 21st century.  The other seeks to pull us back into the Middle Ages.  

America itself was launched by major figures of the Enlightenment, leaders like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson who not only believed in science but practiced it.  It is no coincidence that the US has won nearly half of all science and economics Nobel Prizes, or that our nation has a long history of innovations and inventions from the cotton gin to the Internet.  It is part of America's DNA -- to be American is to believe in science and the power of human ingenuity to help us tackle our greatest challenges.  Of course we have many other aspects to our history and character, both good and bad -- but our scientific achievements are America at her best.  
Yet every time that humanity has tried to take small steps or giant leaps forward, someone somewhere has fought that progress and tried to hold us back.  The same country that created the Declaration of Independence also produced the Salem Witch Trials.  The USA of Martin Luther King was also the USA of Joe McCarthy.  The "land of the free and home of the brave" is also the land of the ignorant and home of the reactionary.   Progress is never a straight path forward -- it is a zig zag as we fight the forces of the status quo protecting every plantation and oil refinery, every misbegotten privilege and civil wrong, in the name of conservatism and tradition.

And so today we have the choice between those who would harness science and reason for the public good -- and those who would defund and deny science at the most basic level.  At the forefront of today's Republican party are science deniers -- hence, even as self-respecting corporations were pulling their funding from the Heartland Institute, its conference was being addressed by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who regaled them with such brilliant insights as:

CO2 is a natural gas. Does this mean that all of us need to put catalytic converters on all our noses? The fact that people think CO2 is a pollutant ... basically goes into propaganda.

That the Republican Vice Chair of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology won't even bother to spend 10 minutes on Google to find out under what conditions carbon dioxide is harmful or helpful tells you how close we are coming to an era of Lysenkoism if we let the Republicans take full control in November.  

But we have a clear alternative -- and it is most definitely not "socialism." To the contrary, the Obama administration just demonstrated one of the most visionary and thoughtful examples of the government turning over to the private sector a project that the market may indeed be able to do better: space flight.  The government has an essential role in planting seeds through early research, development and support for advances toward which industry cannot or will not venture by itself.  But once the government has proven the potential and built the infrastructure for a new field, in many cases it makes sense for government to then step back and encourage others to take the lead -- with appropriate regulation and monitoring, of course.  Industry probably never would've gotten to outer space without NASA's leadership.  Yet now, once again, government has moved us forward, and the marketplace is free to gain the ample benefits of following.  

What an elegant vision -- government not as some evil, alien force scooping up our tax dollars and squandering them with no benefit to the citizens, but as an innovator, partner and yes, regulator for progress.

We take for granted the incredible scientific and technological feats that allow a rocket to launch into space -- and permit the satellites that guide our GPS systems, give us up to the minute weather forecasts and beam stupid, meaningless TV shows to us.  But none of this is coincidental, easy or guaranteed.  It depends on having leaders who believe in and support science -- and not just with lip service, but with funding and solid, consistent support.

It's been a while since we've seen such a remarkable event as the SpaceX launch and docking at the International Space Station to make us feel good about our scientific and technical capabilities. It's a fine reminder about what it means, and should continue to mean, to be an American.  But it's our choice whether we create a future that looks like this -- or we allow Republicans to turn our country into a backwards laughing stock, a forgotten nation like Belarus, where government supports not science and progress, but security and tradition.  The choice between the paths of Heartland and SpaceX is a stark one -- to boldly go where no man has gone before, or to go back where we've sadly been stuck so many times in history.  But if we don't fight for the right choice, here and now, the wrong one will unquestionably be forced upon us.