Harold Ford sent out an email today to his senatorial campaign supporters to let them know that he’s accepted an offer to be Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. This is clearly not a guy who is ready to go make a ton of money in the private sector. I wonder if this means we’ll see him running for Governor of Tennessee or for the U.S. Senate again next. I imagine this will eventually mean a role in Hillary’s campaign, too.

It was a big week. Hillary and Obama are in. China’s blowing satellites out of space by missile and perhaps threatening an arms race. I couldn’t be here to cover any of it. I was at my work team’s annual meeting/retreat thing in Atlanta. Our days were mostly scripted from 8:00am to 10:30pm or later with workshops, seminars, meetings, group lunches and dinners, and enforced fun and socializing. Combine that with the jet lag feeling of waking up at 3:00am every day on my body’s time and one night of too much drinking and, well, you get the picture. Here’s my quick take on what I think were the three biggest news stories of the last week.

Clinton: She’s the presumptive front-runner for a reason. She’ll be hard to beat, but she can be beat. I think of myself as a pretty die hard liberal, but Hillary represents some of the worst of what I think about liberals. Hillary is the kind of liberal who thinks she knows best for all of us on damn near everything and is willing to legislate it if she can. I’m the kind of liberal who wants individuals to be free to live their lives how they see fit and believes in using government power to regulate industry, taxes, public spaces, and public spending to do enable them to do so. I won’t vote for her in the primaries, period. If she gets the nomination, I’ll vote for her, but I doubt I’ll work for her. In order to win both the nomination and the general election, she’ll have to run a radically different campaign than anything we’ve seen before. I have no doubt she can do that and see some signs already that she is doing it. The money environment just shifted dramatically for the other candidates, too. That was expected, but now it’s here.
Barack Obama is an empty slate for most people. Don’t take that to mean I’m saying he’s an empty suit. I think he’s a smart guy with a lot of charisma. He actually reminds me more of Bill Clinton than any other politician in the Democratic Party. But I think the man-on-the-street exclamations about Obama aren’t backed by any realistic experience with the guy. I think a lot of people are projecting what they want him to be. His brilliant use of rhetoric in public speeches and appearances lends itself to that. I’d also bet there’s a certain level of fake enthusiasm for a black guy by folks who would never actually vote for one.

China can blow satellites out of the sky. The satellites that we use to surveil them, the satellites we’d need to get the pictures of troop and equipment deployment, etc, fly right at the altitude that China has proven itself capable of hitting. We’re not in a new arms race. We’ve been in an arms race with China for years. We were just so far ahead that we weren’t hyping it here. If you look at US policy moves on space during the Bush administration (and possibly further back), you see the clear arrogance of hegemony by our government. I believe that some sort of major showdown between the US and China is inevitable in my lifetime. I don’t know if it’ll be military or economic. I wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome, but I’d put slight odds on the Chinese winning it unless the US foreign policy establishment develops a multi-decade strategy for dealing with China that is as clear and comprehensive as how we managed the cold war. Preferably we do that without as much stumbling and stupidity as we displayed along the way in that one.

According to an AP article it’s now looking more like a matter of when for Barack Obama to announce his candidacy than an if. He’s hiring staff on top of all the other steps he’s taken in recent months. Announcements by Obama, Clinton, and Richardson are due in the next month. Former DNC chair and current U.S. Senator Chris Dodd announced this past Thursday that he’s running. That brings us to up to four declared major candidates, one who has already dropped out, and possibly three more in the near future on the Democratic side.

For the last few years, we’ve had to listen to self-righteous right wing assholes try to tell us that the war in Iraq isn’t about oil. No more.  Bush must be just about ready to wash his hands of Iraq if it’s finally time to push this law through. If the collaborationist government in Baghdad had any support left among the population, it’ll be gone after this. There’s little chance that this law will be upheld by whatever government(s) emerge from the Iraqi civil war. I doubt that Iraq will be in the same position to muscle their way out of it that Russia has been. There’s no doubt that the oil companies will be able to extort something pretty damn valuable from Iraq in the process.

I meant to comment a couple of days ago on a Truthout.org column about the top green tech ideas of 2006. I was reminded of that today while reading an article on the upcoming Motor City Auto Show. I’m just going to go ahead and post the most interesting section below:

Plug-In Hybrids and the V2G At the end of 2006, General Motors announced it would commit to manufacturing a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid adds a larger battery pack and a plug to charge the batteries with grid power, allowing the car to rely more on the electric drive and less on the fuel supply. A new study for the Department of Energy has found that we already have enough electrical generating capacity to power 84 percent of our 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrids. That’s because our capacity is designed to meet peak power needs for air conditioning on hot afternoons, and when peak power is not needed there is plenty of spare capacity to charge electric car batteries.

This would be a bad trade-off where grid power is provided by coal. But ask not what grid can do for your car; rather, ask what your car can do for the grid.

The real promise of plug-in hybrids is using their batteries to stabilize a power grid that is supplied by renewable but variable wind and solar power. Dubbed “vehicle to grid,” or V2G for short, the idea is to use the combined storage power of 220 million mobile battery packs to buffer the grid whenever the vehicles are not in use. Vehicles would absorb excess power at night or on sunny or windy days. The vehicle battery packs could then be tapped to help out during peak demand periods and a computerized “smart grid” would regulate it all. The potential is huge. Terry Penney, a technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab said, “if millions of these [plug-in hybrids] were produced, it would enable some of the renewable technologies to really take off.”