November 9th, 2008
We saw the first light of dawn on Wednesday morning, a glimmer of hope on the horizon as we woke up from the last eight years of our national nightmare.
We move forward into an uncertain future, the rotten legacy of a Presidential administration more concerned with realizing a radical conservative policy agenda than actually governing.
The 56th anniversary of Irish Coffee’s invention provides me little solace this afternoon, because so many of the decisions made by Mr. Bush and his advisors, decisions based on thoughtless ideology, reactionary fear, and short-sighted greed, are now institutional facts.
We’re facing ongoing warrantless surveillance of Americans, prisoners of war languishing in detention camps, both public and secret, a broken military, a broken military procurement system, the largest national debt in our nation’s history, a broken economy, and a pandemic of scientific and political illiteracy.
As a nation we’re watched, muzzled, bruised, ignorant, and in debt.
Solving one of those would be enough to make Senator Obama a history-making President, but he’ll have to do better. If this country is going to remain as the planet’s cultural, political, scientific, and economic pivot, he’ll need to be a lot more than merely a good President.
After eight years of Bush and company, we need Senator Obama to be a great President; one of the great Presidents.
He needs to be the kind of man who deserves his own monument on the national mall. He faces challenges equal to those of great presidents before him, but it remains to be seen if he’s up to the task.
The country needs a radical change in direction, most importantly in the industries that make up our economic base. It was discouraging, then to hear the words of incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel before the Sunday political talk shows this morning.
Emanuel joined with the Congressional leadership, saying that the U.S. auto industry needs financial support, possibly from a portion of the $700 billion bailout package passed last month.
I’ll say this just once: The U.S. auto industry needs to die. Ford, GM, and Chrysler need to die.
The Big Three U.S. auto makers are among the last vestiges of post-war American economic dominance, not post-Gulf War, or post-Vietnam, but post-World War II. Little has changed at the corporate level since that time.
They grew to dominance in an era when there was no external competition from other countries. They grew fat and lazy as they divided the U.S. market between each other, only innovating under pressure from government legislation, or consumer protest.
Now they’re facing billions of dollars in losses, and tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.
Why? There isn’t much mystery to it: They make crappy cars, unreliable, inefficient, and expensive. The sad thing is that the foreign competition isn’t that much better. The American consumer has become so used to incremental change that we have no expectations of something revolutionary.
Well, if the U.S. auto industry isn’t going to revolutionize themselves, it’s time to make revolutionary change a requirement for staying in business. Adapt, or die.
The Obama economic recovery plan should make room for a bailout of the auto industry, but with serious conditions. If you want the taxpayers to bail out your industry, then we need to see some returns that aren’t limited to padding your next quarterly report.
There needs to be a fleet-wide increase in fuel efficiency by a minimum of 50% in the next four years. There needs to be a commitment to replace the existing fleet with zero-emmission vehicles in no more than ten years. And finally, there needs to be a commitment to build these vehicles, and their sub-assemblies, right here in the U.S.
Will this be the same auto industry that we’ve known? Not at all. It will be leaner, automated, and flexible. It will not employ hundreds of thousands of people. Sorry, Detroit, but there will be no revitalization of your industrial core based upon automobile production.
The industry simply can’t compete if it continues to make the same cars, in the same way, with the same people.
Adapt, or die.
• Reid, Pelosi call for bailout of auto industry
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We like to consider ourselves adaptive around here. There isn’t any election hysteria to talk about anymore. We have to adapt to this new climate, which means news. This, the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 9th of November, Ought-Eight.
Well, we don’t have to adapt too quickly, because there’s still the election fallout to discuss.
Someone else will have to adapt in the coming weeks, according to reports from Talking Points Memo. Joe “Droopy” Lieberman is reaping the fallout from his aggressive campaigning in support of Senator McCain’s failed bid for the Presidency.
Joe’s colleagues in the Democratic caucus, of which he’s a voting member, have been understandably upset by his vocal support of the Republican candidate in this election season.
Lieberman’s participation in the caucus was a convenient fiction that allowed Senate Democrats to claim a one-vote majority, and therefore a nominal control over the Senate.
But Lieberman himself hasn’t been a Democrat since his loss to Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic primary. Following that defeat Lieberman created a new party for himself, Connecticut for Lieberman, and ran as an independent candidate. He ran against his former party, backed in part by conservative activists who hoped to divide the Democratic vote.
In November of 2006 it was uncertain if he’d return to Congress voting as a Democrat in the aftermath of his self-serving defection from that party. Both sides aggressively courted his support, but he chose to side with the Democrats in order to regain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Now that chairman’s seat is on the verge of being taken away.
Lieberman was the lame kid who got invited to the parties because he had a fake I.D.; but we’re all grown up now, and he’s still lame.
With three races yet to be decided, the Democratic leadership in the Senate gained six seats with Tuesday’s victory. Unless all three undecided races end up going to the Democratic challenger, Senate Democrats won’t need Senator Lieberman’s vote.
Sorry Joe, but we don’t have to play with you anymore. If you want to hang out, that’s cool, but we’re not going to call.
It’ll be no great loss for the Governmental Affairs committee. For all the hay that Senator Lieberman has made about his homeland security experience, he has yet to hold a single investigative hearing. The Governmental Affairs committee is supposed to be the oversight committee within the Senate.
The House Oversight Committee under Henry Waxman has ordered dozens of investigations, held hundreds of hearings, and issued subpoenas to nearly every current and former member of the Bush Administration.
In startling contrast Senator Lieberman has failed to call a single investigative hearing into the rather glaring faults of the Bush White House in the two years since he became Committee chairman.
Now, so long as one of those three Senate seats still up in the air remains in Republican hands, Lieberman will be sent to sit in the corner by himself.
Things change, however, if all three seats go Democratic. That would result in Democrats holding fifty-eight seats, with two independents who currently vote with the Democratic caucus. Keeping those two independents, one of whom is Lieberman, then becomes critical to taking a dominating 60-seat, filibuster-proof hold on the Senate.
While nice for the Democratic party agenda, I almost hope that it doesn’t happen, because then we have to keep inviting Joe to all the parties.
• Lieberman’s seat up for a vote, via Talking Points Memo
• Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, hearing schedule
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So we did just go through this election, all 22 months of this election, with the typical media election, election, election, and did we mention that there’s an election happening, coverage.
Somehow voters in Alaska didn’t get the message.
Nationwide a little over sixty percent of registered voters turned up at the polls, a number well within historical expectations.
But in Alaska, with the State’s governor running for the office of Vice President, turnout was surprisingly, improbably low.
Only 25% of registered voters turned out in District 18, the suburban region to the south-east of Anchorage. District 10, just within the boundaries of Anchorage itself only saw 28% of registered voters submit a ballot.
Across the state turnout varied between the high 30s and mid 40-percent range. A few places like Fairbanks saw higher turnout, slightly over 50%. The Alaskan state average was only 45%.
Compare that to turnout in our own state. Over 85% of registered voters in Alpine county made it to the polls. The lowest turnout was in Riverside county, and they still managed to see just barely over half, 50.1% of registered voters cast a ballot. Upwards of 68% of own Santa Cruz county voters made it out.
California’s turnout was 4% better than that of the nation, with 64% participation.
So then where were 20% of Alaska’s registered voters on Tuesday? It appears as if a few of them are missing. The state’s turnout in 2004, when their governor wasn’t running for national office, was 66%. Even considering the 63,000 absentee ballots and early votes that are still waiting to be reviewed, there were nearly 27,000 fewer votes cast in Alaska this year than in 2004.
Alaska has been a Republican-dominated state since its oil industry gained influence in the late 1960s. Yes, the national Republican base was disillusioned, but Alaska had one of their own in the race. In a year when there were expectations of record national turnout, it seems like at least a few more Alaskans would turn up to vote this year.
What, too, about the indictments and convictions? Both of the state’s senior representatives at the national level, Senator Ted Stevens, and Representative Don Young, were seeking re-election under clouds of scandal and corruption. Supporters and opponents of those two men should have turned out in greater numbers.
Somehow both of them appear, for now, to have won re-election in spite of widespread voter dissatisfaction with the Republican party, a conviction of Stevens, an FBI investigation into Young, and a massive national voter registration drive by the Democratic party and grass-roots liberal organizations.
It doesn’t make much sense, and for now nobody’s talking about it, but then that’s why you listen to this show.
• Alaska Division of Elections
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The Hubble space telescope is slowly coming back to life after the failure of its main computer system, along with the backup, took its cameras offline on the 17th of October.
Hubble has been showing its age in recent years. A mission originally scheduled for launch in the coming weeks, but now postponed until 2009, will install two new science instruments, repair two older instruments, replace all six of the gyroscopes, all six of the batteries, the main guidance sensors, the insulation blankets, and a docking body for future missions to the telescope.
It was planned as an overhaul of the entire unit, but it nearly didn’t happen. NASA, post-Columbia fireball, was working with an increasingly risk-adverse culture as well as the arbitrary time limit for the end of shuttle operations.
As advanced as we like to think the shuttles are, they’re essentially 1970s technology. The space shuttle doesn’t have enough on-board fuel to reach both the Hubble space telescope and the International Space Station on the same mission. If something were to happen in orbit while the Shuttle was headed to Hubble, the crew would be unable to use the Space Station as an emergency refuge.
This nearly killed the long-planned Hubble repair mission. The solution was to have a second shuttle waiting nearby, ready to be fueled and launched in case of an accident.
Everything was set for an early October launch when Hubble’s main computer began to fail. A spare unit, constructed at the same time and stored at the Goddard Space Flight Center, showed similar flaws. This lead to the shuttle launch first being pushed back to mid-October to allow for repairs, and then postponed until early 2009.
The restart of all but one instrument earlier this week means that the repair mission will go forward almost as originally planned. The telescope is using its on-board backup computer, but NASA engineers are hesitant to trust a piece of hardware that’s already half-failed.
Its replacement, along with the camera upgrades and new instruments, will usher in a new era of science for Hubble. Astronomers expect the reinvigorated Hubble to provide the first direct evidence of dark matter, using gaps in the light from distant stars to illuminate for the first time the cold dark matter that makes up 80% of the universe, but has never before been seen.
The servicing mission planned for January is likely to be the last visit of humans to the Hubble. Current plans call for a robotic tug to dock with Hubble in 2014 and drag the aging telescope into a fiery grave in the our planet’s upper atmosphere.
Its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled for launch in 2013.
• NASA, Hubble Servicing Mission 4
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There’s no replacement for what comes next, excellence.
It’s little known, but a little over one in a hundred Europeans are naturally immune to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Concentrated largely in Northern Europe, this group of people have a mutation on their cells, a defect that prevents strands of HIV from entering their cells.
That’s fine for them, but what about the other 99% of the human race?
According to the Wall Street Journal there may be an answer to that question coming from the Charité Medical University in Berlin.
Dr. Gero Hütter, a hematologist working at the University, has functionally cured a middle-aged American AIDS patient. The patient, unidentified for his privacy, no longer has any detectable HIV in his bloodstream, despite being taken off anti-retorviral drug therapy nearly two years ago.
The treatment itself was radical, and not practical for the millions of other AIDS patients around the world. Dr. Hütter performed a bone marrow transplant on his patient, first killing off the man’s own bone marrow with chemotherapy and radiation before transplanting the bone marrow from a donor carrying two copies of the HIV-resistant mutation in their cells.
The new marrow cells reproduced, creating an immune system based upon HIV-resistant cells. The virus was no longer able to replicate in his body. He has effectively been made immune to AIDS.
The procedure carries its own risks, a 30% mortality rate. It requires top-rate medical support unavailable in areas where most of the planet’s AIDS patients live.
But what it does is prove the ability of that rare mutation to transfer effective immunity, a vaccination against AIDS powerful enough to kill the living virus in a patient.
The goal in the coming years will be to find other ways of blocking those receptor sites, through drugs, or gene therapy, without creating new problems.
It’s a huge challenge, but thanks to Dr. Gero Hütter, researchers around the world have an opportunity to face it, and for that he is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
• WSJ, A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS
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And that’s the News for this new day in America, on the 9th of November, Ought Eight.