Hey there, friendly Tea Partiers:

Apparently many of you think that the press and the pollsters are misrepresenting who you really are. You’re getting all this attention but no one seems to get you. Bummer. It’s like you’re actually really awesome people with legitimate grievances and great ideas on how to make America better – but all that’s getting lost under a cloud of insinuation and heavily edited sound bites.

Are you getting a bum rap?  Sounds like you need a makeover! Luckily, you have the power to change your public image so that it better reflects who you think you are.

Allow me to offer you a few friendly public relations tips:

Problem: Apparently a lot of people think you’re a racist mob.

Solution: Ouch. Even Fox News knows that doesn’t play well on TV. But we can fix that! If you don’t want to be seen as being racist, try this little trick:

Continue Reading Free PR Tips for Tea Partiers! »

We’re less than five months out from the 2010 mid-term elections, in the midst of an anti-incumbent populist wave. Sitting lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are quaking in their boots, but it is true that as the party in charge, House and Senate Democrats are prepared to take the worst of it, should dire electorate predictions come to fruition. I am looking at you Harry Reid.

There is much discussion as to how we got here. A large part of America was swept away in idealist visions of hope and change as 2008 came to a close, even after a staggering blow dealt in the form of a collapsing economy. Conventional wisdom had it that outgoing President George W. Bush brought us to the brink: fiscally, socially and while carrying a big stick of an ineffective foreign policy. But no matter, Barack Obama was going to change all of that. He had the charisma, the intellect and the look needed to show the world that America had broken with the backward stagnation of the last eight years.

But a funny thing happened between November 2008 and the moment I sit at my computer with cursor to screen.

Continue Reading When Cool is Counterproductive »

The boy said to Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, “Ain’t that whitewashing history?”

Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know is, it suits Tom Horne.”

(With apologies to Mark Twain for my “fractured fairy tale” reading of Tom Sawyer, Chapter Two, 1876)

*****

Yessir! It sho’ does suit Massa Horne, who’s running for Arizona State Attorney General. Seems like he’s running his campaign from the front porch of some kind of antebellum mansion though, sippin’ on mint juleps as “overseer” – uh, I mean Superintendent of Public Instruction – for the state some of us are beginning to call the “Mississippi of the Southwest.”

Continue Reading Just Like The Old South »

The rogues gallery of official and unofficial Peak Oil Cassandras includes:

• the 2010 U.K. Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security sponsored by no less than six well-heeled blue chip corporations including the luminous Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group
• the 2010 U.S. Department of Defense Joint Forces Command report
• a 2010 interview with Glen Sweetnam, a senior DOE official, in Le Monde
• a 2010 report in Business Day reporting on a warning issued by Christophe de Margerie, CEO of Total, the French oil company
• a 2010 report sponsored by Kuwait University and the Kuwait Oil Company
• the 2009 report in The Guardian newspaper on Peak Oil warnings by International Energy Agency insiders
• a 2009 speech by John Hess of Amarada Hess, the oil company
• a 2009 admission by Jose Sergio Gabrielli, CEO of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company
• a 2008 Welsh National Assembly Report
• a 2007 U.S. GAO (Government Accountability Office) report urging action
• a 2007 admission by Sadad Al-Huseini, a Saudi Aramco executive
• the 2006 baseline review by the Government of Ireland assessing vulnerability
• a 2005 U.S. Department of Energy sponsored report: “Peaking of World Oil Production”
• a 2005 study by the Government of Sweden
• Jeffrey Rubin, former Chief Economist and Chief Strategist for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, writing and speaking for a decade
• Matthew Simmons, an energy industry investment banker and adviser to Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, writing and speaking for a decade

  Continue Reading Peak Oil, Peak People – The Pique of Human Folly »