When Chemists Attack

We often hear that businesses prefer the government to step out of the way and let them run things.  Regulations, policy, and so forth merely get in the way of business.  So this quote from Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris is interesting:

“For years, Washington has failed to address the issue of rising energy costs, and as a result, the country now faces a true energy crisis, one that is causing serious harm to America’s manufacturing sector and all consumers of energy”

What makes the CEO of Dow say such a thing?  They’ve had to raise prices across the board because of skyrocketing energy costs.  And that’s bad news for all of us.

Occasionally, the current administration releases some potentially useful information … when forced.

The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, has released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impact of human-caused global warming in the United States.

So, why wouldn’t Bush release this report earlier?  I suppose he didn’t like the conclusions.  The summary, which you can grab here, describes what’s likely to be in store for us in the future:  We can expect more heat – more than the global average – with more and longer heat waves and excessively hot days.  We’ll see more intense summer droughts.  We will experience more intense “extreme weather” – hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like.  We can expect more illness and death from heat-loving pathogens, and so on.  It’s not a very pleasant forecast.

I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about John Kerry’s presidential campaign a few years ago, but he’s exactly right:

“The three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement. “In these lost years, we could have slowed global warming and advanced clean energy solutions, but instead America’s climate change strategy has been at best rhetorical, not real.”

This explains a lot about the last few years.  This administration’s response to any crisis has been to simply deny that a crisis exists.  And that’s never a good long-term strategy.

There’s some discussion on the net about whether Barack Obama’s defeat in Kenturcky really means a whole lot.  Clinton supporters, obviously, think it means something.  But Clinton’s Kentucky win was so lopsided because of one issue:  race.

Obama’s problem was with these white voters overall. His greatest losses among whites, by 40 points or more, all have been in Southern states – Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia. Reflecting their discomfort with Obama, nearly half of Kentucky Democrats said they would not support him in a November election against John McCain, again similar to the result in West Virginia.

Look at Kentucky.  This is a state whose Democrats won’t back their own party’s candidate because he’s a black man.  So Obama will lose big in Kentucky in a matchup against John McCain.  But Hillary Clinton won’t win there either.  Why not?  Racism and sexism are often traveling companions.

Naked women and the Confederate flag.  Yee haw!  This kind of voter will just as easily turn out against Clinton as against Obama when the opponent is a white guy.