A Real Hero: Norman Borlaug

I had seen stories over the weekend about the death of Norman Borlaug and hadn’t paid them much attention.  Last night, however, I had occasion to watch watch a profile of his life and work in a segment on the Lehrer News Hour.  So later in the night when I found myself browsing the New York Times on my iPhone, the consequence of finding myself awake in the middle night with lingering effects of a cold/flue over the weekend, I decided to read his obituary.  Impressive as it was, the full impact of his life didn’t really hit me, however, until I read a paragraph toward the end of the obit.  It is contained in the September 13, 2009, New York Times obituary entitled Norman Borlaug, Plant Scientist Who Fought Famine, Dies at 95:

By Mr. Toenniessen’s calculation, about half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues of the Green Revolution.

Wow, talk about a life having an impact on the world.  This is clearly a man who’s life made a difference.  This is a true hero.  I hope there’s a lesson here that our lives can matter in the world;  that we can all make a difference.  We must but care enough to try.

A Little Help from Technology

As readers of this blog are well aware, I have been on sabbatical these last months.  I think one of the reasons I quit was that I could no longer cope with trying to blog using old technology — four year old PCs.  It took ages to download anything off of the web and even switching from one page to another on the screen was agonizingly slow.  I also risked with every attempt to post something that my entire system would crash.  Yesterday I purchased a new Apple laptop.  It appears I can actually now do things quickly.  Where it used to take me 20 minutes to finish even the smallest blog posting, I can now do it in 5 minutes.  I think that will mean I’ll be more inclined to give this a shot again.  It may also be a different blog.  I suspect it will be somewhat less political and more eclectic.  We’ll have to see.

The Importance of Locally Grown Food

Over the summer I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of supporting locally grown food.  Almost all of the vegetables, and even meat, that I have purchased this summer have come from local farms.  I am convinced that it is healthier and it’s clearly more energy efficient.  (Why should I be eating broccoli from California in the summer on the east coast?)  As concerns the meats I purchase, I am also convinced that the animals are much better cared for and lead much better lives (no feedlots or cramped living conditions).  There is a story today in the New York Times on local farming in New York State.  The article is entitled A Party for Local Farming and Locally Grown Food.

Going Within

I heartily recommend a New York Times blog post I came across this morning thanks to a friends post on Facebook.  It is by Pico Iyer and is entitled The Doctor is Within.  It’s an excellent piece talking about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism.  It made me think about why I stopped writing on this blog several months ago.  Perhaps I was trying to change the world and was realizing the futility of such an effort.  Perhaps it was a cognizance that I needed to readjust my thinking before I commenced writing again.  And, perhaps it is appropriate that I began again with different expectations.  Perhaps.

Why Health Care Must Be Rationed

There was a superb piece by Peter Singer in the New York Times on July 15 entitled Why We Must Ration Health Care.  For one thing, we already do it; we just don’t do it equitably.  A public plan with the ability to purchase supplemental insurance or to purchase private insurance would be preferable to what we have an not as onerous as a single payer system.  But we can’t lose sight, the author points out, that even in countries with single payer systems, people are far happier with their system than Americans are presently with what they have.  It is time to move forward on health care reform.  This article helps point us in the right direction and dispense with the argument that we can’t ration health care.  I strongly recommend it.

Obama’s Latest Plan to Raise Taxes

Maybe this is why I’m a Republican.  I have a healthy distrust of government when it comes to finding new ways of taxing its citizenry so that the government can allocate (spend) those resources instead.  While I think Republicans have gone significantly overboard in their opposition to tax increases and support for most tax decreases, Republican distrust of government distrust of public spending at the expense of private spending is fundamentally healthy.

While I reserve judgment on President Obama’s newest plan to raise taxes–his plan to raise $210 billion from “curbing offshore tax havens and corporate tax breaks”–I have suspicions that it but the move of dedicated big spender seeking new sources of revenue to fund his expansive federal social agenda.  The story can be found in the New York Times’ Obama Asks Curb on Use of Havens to Reduce Taxes.  It is the source of the quotation above. 

I’m not going to say much more.  I don’t know enough about the details, but I am suspicious.  This proposal needs thorough vetting on Capital Hill and elsewhere.  There is much we all need to learn about the pros and the cons of the proposal before we make it law.    

Why Obama’s Energy Policy Will Not Work, Part II

There is a must-read opinion column in the Washington Post this morning by Robert J. Samuelson.  It’s entitled The Bias Against Oil and Gas.  It is spot-on.

Energy is critical to the healthy functioning of the U.S. economy.  It is, therefore, a crucially important issue for President Obama to get right–to address in a rational manner.  The point here is that Obama’s “bias” against oil and natural gas will have consequences.  These consequences include failure of his ”energy policy” and quite possibly failure of his economic policy upon which so much, even rhetorically, rides on the over-estimated potential of renewable energy.  Worse yet, it means that Republicans may be handed an issue, when oil prices once again soar (and oil prices will again soar, trust me), that gets them re-elected before they deserve to be.  The loser will be the country.

The point here, and I am certain the prime motivation behind Mr. Samuelson penning the piece he did, is that there is time to correct course.  There is still time to get it right.

There are a couple of reasons in particular why someone as brilliant as Mr. Obama has gotten this issue so terribly wrong.   One, and at the top of my list, is that our president doesn’t really understand energy policy.  This is understandable.  Although Illinois is an oil and natural gas producing state, it is not Texas.  While once a significant producer, Illinois’ production has declined and oil’s economic significance to the state is limited.  Additionally, spending a career in Chicago and so little time as a Senator representing the entire state, President Obama has had little opportunity to be educated.  Thus he, like most Americans, has learned about energy not by first hand experience but by what he’s been informed about energy, and particularly about oil and natural gas, by popular culture.  Popular culture tells us that oil is dirty and is bad for people and the planet and the way to move ahead is to not drill any more dirty oil wells.  It tells us that solar and wind are clean and abundant and we must only try harder and that will be our future.  As nice as this sounds, however, it is myth.

Another reason Obama has this wrong is alluded to in Mr. Samuelson’s column.  It is the power of the environmental groups and the fact, quoting Mr. Samuelson that “[t]o many environmentalists, expanding fossil fuel production is a cardinal sin.”  Given that environmental groups are an important contituency of the Democratic Party, Democrats are loathe to challenge its orthodoxy.  Yet a rational energy and economic policy demands a overt challenge.  Unless challenged it will lead the country down a path that does not lead to energy self-sufficiency.  It will lead to even more oil imports in the years ahead.

Expanding domestic oil production is not inconsistent with our country’s, and the world’s need, to limit the burning of fossil fuels in the years ahead.  That need is properly addressed through legislation that will begin to put a cost on the burning of fossil fuels so as to discourage its use.  In the meantime, the goal of this country needs to be moving as much production as it feasibly can back to this country.  We must never lose sight that every barrel not produced at home will otherwise have to be imported.  And every barrel of oil imported amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs going overseas.

Energy and economic policy will only work if built on a rational foundation.  It is time to re-lay the footings and begin to construct an energy policy that has architectural grounding.   

 

The Republican Party’s Identity Crisis

In a follow-on to yesterday’s posting, there are two additional pieces today, both in the New York Times, that address the Republican Party’s identity crisis.  The first is a front page article, above the fold, by Adam Nagourney and David M. Herszenhorn entitled G.O.P. Debate: A Broader Party or a Purer One?  The other is on Op-ed by former Governor (and EPA Administrator) Christine Todd Whitman entitled It’s Still My Party. 

I am convinced the Republican Party’s only path forward is to become a party that can not only tolerate a variety of perspectives, but can accommodate those perspectives in its platform and in the way it governs.  Frankly, I don’t see this happening for a while.

My history as a Republican goes back 37 years.  Although I’d always identified as a child as a Democrat, I was a Scoop Jackson or moderate Democrat, at least on defense issues.  When the party rejected Scoop Jackson for the presidential nomination in 1972 and nominated George McGovern, my path forward was clear.  I was able to comfortably remain a Republican up through the George W. Bush’s first term, although the Reagan ascendancy was a mighty challenge.  When the conservatives began to exert control of the party in 1976 when Reagan challenged President Ford for the Republican nomination, I first witnessed the ‘purist’ wing of the party in action.  At my local ward meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I saw the purists in action for the first time as they showed up in droves and defeated the Ford slate.  At the state party convention the purists would later deny slots on the state’s delegation to the national convention to New Mexico’s sitting Republican Congressmen and Senator, who had all supported Gerald Ford.  Four years later I held my nose and voted for Reagan and, to my surprise, I did come to regret that decision.  I even served as an Reagan alternate delegate from New Mexico to the 1984 GOP convention.  What was notable was that although I was viewed then within the delegation as a “moderate”, that was still apparently OK.  It isn’t today in most places.

In her Op-ed Christine Todd Whitman argues that it’s important that “moderates to stay [in the party] and work from within. One thing we can be sure of is that we will have no impact on the party’s direction if we leave.”  She goes on to observe that “[t]o the extent we lose more members of the Republican Party, we lose what ability we have left to affect policy, and that is going to be devastating to our nation. Our democracy desperately needs two vibrant parties.”

Although I may not change my party registration, I am functionally an Independent these days, for the party has left me and the things it once stood for.  It has become something else with which I rarely identify.  At this juncture I am also tired of doing battle with the purists.  I am of the mind that the only way the purists are going to learn their lesson is the hard way in a succession of devastating losses.  Either that, or, the purist Republican Party needs to be isolated with the formation of a new political party in the center.  I agree with Christine Todd Whitman that it will be devastating for the country to have one-party rule.  But that doesn’t mean that second party needs to be the Republican Party.  Let’s get a third party in the mix that can draw moderate Democrats and Republicans and challenge both the left and the right of the political spectrum.  Let the Republican Party stay pure and let’s give the Democratic Party to Nancy Pelosi and her friends on the left.  Let the rest of us join and belong to a brand new party.

That would be my choice, although it’s been pretty clear to me since I started this ‘centrist’ blog, that there been no groundswell of people who agree with me.  Certainly moderate Democrats are not disaffected at present with a capable President who’s steering a relatively moderate course.  And Independents seem to like the middle ground and the ability to move back and forth as they see fit.  

So for now I must just watch the show from the sidelines, the show being the Republican Party’s process of trying to make itself relevant again.  What I know is that I have no intention of being part of the process.  I’m tired of tilting at windmills.   

The Understandable Defection of Arlen Specter

My first reaction when I read that Senator Specter was to become a Democrat was shock.  I hadn’t thought he’d take such a radical step.  Make no mistake, in America changing one’s party is a radical action.  I had thought that perhaps he’d become an Independent – a far easier step along the continuum of politics.  No, he had decided to make the full leap.

As I’ve had a day to think about it and to read the numerous stories and commentary in the Washington Post and the New York Times, it’s made more sense to me.  For readers who aren’t regular readers of this blog, I, like Senator Specter, sit in a place on the political spectrum that is hard to categorize–liberal on this issue, conservative on that, and, often, very centrist.  Yet I would have a lot of trouble becoming a Democrat.  I would have trouble for the same reasons I have trouble any longer calling myself a Republican.  Each party has wings and viewpoints with which I am in vehement disagreement.  For me, it is merely trading one set of issues with which I agree/disagree for another.  For Senator Specter, however, it would appear that in his calculation it was what will be necessary for political survival.

While I’d have preferred he become an Independent and run as an Independent in Pennsylvania in 2010, he obviously calculated that such a move would unlike result in his re-election.  Instead of one one party opposing him, he’d have two.  And since it seems our system is such that unless you’re either a Republican or a Democrat you don’t have much chance of being elected in America, one must chose one party or the other if one hopes to be elected to public office.

For the time being I don’t have that dilemma.  I can be an Independent.  Still, I would very much like to create a middle-of-the-spectrum party that would have a chance of seriously playing in the political game with the big two.  It would reform the big two like nothing else I can think of.

In a Washington Post editorial this morning entitled Aisle Crosser, there is a quote of Senator Lieberman, a rare elected Independent.  Here’s what he’s quoted as saying:  “You know, it’s good for the Democratic Party, bad for the Republican Party that Arlen Specter left them and joined the Democratic caucus.  But you know what? Overall, it’s not great for American politics, because both parties should have moderate or centrist wings in them that . . . [create] more opportunity for common ground and less partisanship.” 

I couldn’t agree more.  In an ideal world Arlen Specter could have remained a Republican and still been renominated by his party.  This isn’t an ideal world.  He would have been beaten by a conservative ideologue in the Republican primary.  Personally, I would like to remain a Republican and fight for a more moderate party.  However, I don’t see that happening in the next decade.  So Specter is going to seek his home as a Democrat and I will seek mine as an Independent.

My hope is, as unideal as this situation is, that Senator Specter can and will remain a voice of moderation and principal in his new party.  My hope is that he can try to pull Democrats to the right more successfully than he was able to pull Republicans left.  I actually think he’ll have better luck.  Smart Democrats realize that the secret of winning elections is drawing in the center.  Republicans are, as I indicated above, a decade of losing elections (hopefully) away from learning this lesson.  In the meantime we have to hope the Democrats don’t head full-tilt left and contribute to a Republican win before they’ve learned their lessons.  Then we’re all in real trouble.

In closing let me recommend another two pieces on this topic, this first from the New York Times.  It is by Senator Olympia Snowe and it’s entitled We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter.  Also well worth reading is this New York Times blog by David Brooks and Gail Collins entitled Specter, At Least for Now.

    

Why Obama’s Energy Policy Will Not Work

I have very few complaints about our President and the job he’s been doing.  To date, Mr. Obama, while perhaps overreaching at times, has managed to hit the political sweet spot more often than not.  He is, by and large, managing to do the right thing.  His high polling numbers reflect this.  Where he has completely missed the boat, however, is energy policy.  What he is proposing for the country will simply not work.  What the Obama administration has proposed is fantasy, dangerous fantasy.  My critique here is not to declare opposition but to advocate in favor of a course correction.  What’s been proposed is good, indeed, admirable, but it is not sufficient to accomplish the administration’s stated goals.

A couple of recent Op-eds are useful in helping to explain why what Obama is proposing will not work as represented.  The first appeared last week in the Washington Post.  Authored by James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch, it is entitled Getting Real on Wind and Solar.  The second was in this morning’s Washington Post.  It is Robert J. Samuelson’s Selling The Green Economy. 

As I’ve said many times before on this blog, what the country needs to do, in addition to that which has been advocated by Mr. Obama in incentivizing and encouraging the development of new and clean energy technologies, is to recognize the inevitability of fossil fuels in our economy for the next two decades.  This is cold, hard reality.  Given this reality, the focus needs to be producing more oil and particularly cleaner burning natural gas, here on the North American continent.  For U.S. energy policy to finally succeed the country must face down the twin enemies of overseas imports of oil (this because our transportation sector is so heavily dependent on oil – 96%) and carbon emissions.  Increasing domestic production of both oil and natural gas, while not meeting the second goal–decreasing carbon emissions–, is our only viable alternative if we are to succeed with goal number one — decreasing foreign imports.  It will be through our climate change policy that we reduce emissions either through implementation of a cap and trade system or a carbon tax.  This will be what reduces our use of fossil fuels.  In the meantime, moving more energy production onshore in North America not only increases domestic energy security, it gives our economy a gigantic boost in the form of dollars circulating in America instead of being shipped abroad.  We can no longer afford the money drain.

Environmental groups and their followers need to lose the certainty that supporting domestic production, offshore and onshore, is yielding to the enemy.  It isn’t.  It is facing the fact that the country can no longer afford foreign imports, which is and has been for years the default when domestic production is stymied.  Instead, we need to bring the production home and focus on reducing carbon emissions through enactment of workable climate change legislation.  It can work.  We simply need to make it national policy.