Ver y telling NY Times article on Jon Stewart and the Daily Show

There is no question that the Daily Show represents, of all the media outlets, the finest in what you want out of your Fourth Estate. Everyone is fair game and the objective is to create havoc in the echo chamber that is what passes for 21st Century "News" programming. You can also skip the broadcast and just catch it on Comedy Central.

The link is annotated, but Times articles have limited availability, so I'm reprinting it here as well:

Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

IT’S been more than eight years since “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” made its first foray into presidential politics with the presciently named Indecision 2000, and the difference in the show’s approach to its coverage then and now provides a tongue-in-cheek measure of the show’s striking evolution.

In 1999, the “Daily Show” correspondent Steve Carell struggled to talk his way off Senator John McCain’s overflow press bus — “a repository for outcasts, misfits and journalistic bottom-feeders” — and onto the actual Straight Talk Express, while at the 2000 Republican Convention Mr. Stewart self-deprecatingly promised exclusive coverage of “all the day’s events — at least the ones we’re allowed into.” In this year’s promotional spot for “The Daily Show’s” convention coverage, the news newbies have been transformed into a swaggering A Team — “the best campaign team in the universe ever,” working out of “ ‘The Daily Show’ news-scraper: 117 stories, 73 situation rooms, 26 news tickers,” and promising to bring “you all the news stories — first ... before it’s even true.”

Though this spot is the program’s mocking sendup of itself and the news media’s mania for self-promotion, it inadvertently gets at one very real truth: the emergence of “The Daily Show” as a genuine cultural and political force. When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”

While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls “the coolest pit stop on television,” with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the program’s signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by “real” news shows, while Mr. Stewart’s interviews with serious authors like Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. “The Daily Show” resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation “Are you insane?!” seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-“Catch-22” reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Offices for “The Daily Show” occupy a sprawling loftlike space that combines the energy of a newsroom with the laid-back vibe of an Internet start-up: many staff members wear jeans and flip-flops, and two amiable dogs wander the hallways. The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.

What the staff is always looking for, Mr. Stewart said, are “those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in ‘The Green Mile’ ” — the Stephen King story and film in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain — “suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable.”

To make the more alarming subject matter digestible, the writers search for ways to frame the story, using an arsenal of techniques ranging from wordplay (“Mess O’Potamia,” “BAD vertising”) to exercises in pure logic (deconstructing the administration’s talking points on the surge) to demented fantasy sequences (imagining Vice President Dick Cheney sending an army of orcs to attack Iran when he assumed the presidency briefly last year during President Bush’s colonoscopy).

Gitmo, the Elmo puppet from Guantánamo Bay, became a vehicle for expressing the writers’ “most agitated feelings about torture in a way that is — not to be too cute — that is not torture to listen to, and that is not purely strident,” Mr. Stewart said. And the cartoon strip “The Decider,” featuring Mr. Bush as a superhero who makes decisions “without fear of repercussion, consequence or correctness,” became a way to satirize the president’s penchant for making gut calls that sidestep the traditional policy-making process.

As the co-executive producer Rory Albanese noted, juxtapositions of video clips and sound bites are one of the show’s favorite strategies. It might be the juxtaposition of Senator Barack Obama speaking to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin while Mr. McCain campaigns in a Pennsylvania grocery store. Or it could be a juxtaposition of a politician taking two sides of the same argument. One famous segment featured Mr. Stewart as the moderator of a debate between then-Governor Bush of Texas in 2000, who warned that the United States would end up “being viewed as the ugly American” if it went around the world “saying we do it this way — so should you,” and President Bush of 2003, who extolled the importance of exporting democracy to Iraq.

Often a video clip or news event is so absurd that Mr. Stewart says nothing, simply rubs his eyes, does a Carsonesque double take or crinkles his face into an expression of dismay. “When in doubt, I can stare blankly,” he said. “The rubber face. There’s only so many ways you can stare incredulously at the camera and tilt an eyebrow, but that’s your old standby: What would Buster Keaton do?”

Given a daily reality in which “over-the-top parodies come to fruition,” Mr. Stewart said, satire like “Dr. Strangelove” becomes “very difficult to make.” “The absurdity of what you imagine to be the dark heart of conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams far too frequently turns out to be true,” he observed. “You go: I know what I’ll do, I’ll create a character who, when hiring people to rebuild the nation we invaded, says the only question I’ll ask is, ‘What do you think of ‘Roe v. Wade?’ It’ll be hilarious. Then you read that book about the Green Zone in Iraq” — “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran — “and you go, ‘Oh, they did that.’ I mean, how do you take things to the next level?”

Mr. Stewart has said he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration “as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal.” Though he has mocked both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama for lapses from their high-minded promises of postpartisanship, he said he didn’t think their current skirmishes were “being conducted on the scale that Bush conducted things, or even the Clintons; I don’t think it has the same true viciousness and contempt.”

SOON after Mr. Stewart joined “The Daily Show” in 1999, in the waning years of the Clinton administration, he and his staff began to move the program away from the show-business-heavy agenda it had under his predecessor, Craig Kilborn. New technology providing access to more video material gave them growing control over the show’s content; the staff, the co-executive producer Kahane Corn said, also worked to choose targets “who deserved to be targets” instead of random, easy-to-mock subjects.

Following 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the show focused more closely not just on politics, but also on the machinery of policy making and the White House’s efforts to manage the news media. Mr. Stewart’s comedic gifts — his high-frequency radar for hypocrisy, his talent for excavating ur-narratives from mountains of information, his ability, in Ms. Corn’s words, “to name things that don’t seem to have a name” — proved to be perfect tools for explicating and parsing the foibles of an administration known for its secrecy, ideological certainty and impatience with dissenting viewpoints.

Over time, the show’s deconstructions grew increasingly sophisticated. Its fascination with language, for instance, evolved from chuckles over the president’s verbal gaffes (“Is our children learning?” “Subliminable”) to ferocious exposés of the administration’s Orwellian manipulations: from its efforts to redefine the meaning of the word “torture” to its talk about troop withdrawals from Iraq based on “time horizons” (a strategy, Mr. Stewart noted, “named after something that no matter how long you head towards it, you never quite reach it”).

For all its eviscerations of the administration, “The Daily Show” is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology. A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Mr. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire,” parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches. He has characterized Democrats as “at best Ewoks,” mocked Mr. Obama for acting as though he were posing for “a coin” and hailed MoveOn.org sardonically for “10 years of making even people who agree with you cringe.”

TO the former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Mr. Stewart serves as “the citizens’ surrogate,” penetrating “the insiders’ cult of American presidential politics.” He’s the Jersey Boy and ardent Mets fan as Mr. Common Sense, pointing to the disconnect between reality and what politicians and the news media describe as reality, channeling the audience’s id and articulating its bewilderment and indignation. He’s the guy willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to wonder why in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “It’s 3 a.m.” ad no one picks up the phone in the White House before six rings, to ask why a preinvasion meeting in March 2003 between President Bush and his allies took all of an hour — the “time it takes LensCrafters to make you a pair of bifocals” to discuss “a war that could destroy the global order.”

“The Daily Show” boasts a deep bench when it comes to its writing, research and production and has provided a showcase for a host of gifted comedians who have gone on to other careers — most notably, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report,” as well as Mr. Carell, Rob Corddry and Ed Helms. But while the show is a collaborative effort, as one producer noted, it is “ultimately Jon’s vision and voice.”

Mr. Stewart described his anchorman character as “a sort of more adolescent version” of himself, and Ms. Corn noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”

“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.”

Unlike many comics today, Mr. Stewart does not trade in trendy hipsterism or high-decibel narcissism. While he possesses Johnny Carson’s talent for listening and George Carlin’s gift for observation, his comedy remains rooted in his informed reactions to what Tom Wolfe once called “the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life,” the weird happenings in “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque” country.

“Jon’s ability to consume and process information is invaluable,” said Mr. Colbert. He added that Mr. Stewart is “such a clear thinker” that he’s able to take “all these data points of spin and transparent falsehoods dished out in the form of political discourse” and “fish from that what is the true meaning, what are red herrings, false leads,” even as he performs the ambidextrous feat of “making jokes about it” at the same time.

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

Mr. Stewart can be scathing in his dismantling of politicians’ spin — he took apart former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s rationalizations about the Iraq war with Aesopian logic and fury — but there is nothing sensation-seeking or mean-spirited about his exchanges. Nor does he shy away from heartfelt expressions of sadness and pain. The day after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, he spoke somberly of the tragic situation there and asked his guest, Ali Allawi, a former Iraqi minister of defense, how his country handled “that sort of carnage on a daily basis” and if there were “a way to grieve.”

Most memorably, on Sept. 20, 2001, the day the show returned after the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Stewart began the program with a raw, emotional address. Choking up, he apologized for subjecting viewers to “an overwrought speech of a shaken host” but said that he and the show’s staff needed it “for ourselves, so that we can drain whatever abscess there is in our hearts so we can move on to the business of making you laugh.”

He talked about hearing, as a boy of 5, of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He talked about feeling privileged to live where you can “sit in the back of the country and make wisecracks.” And he talked about “why I grieve but why I don’t despair.”

Mr. Stewart now says he does not want to listen to that show again: “The process of the show is to bury those feelings as subtext, and that was a real moment of text. It’s laying bare the type of thing that is there hopefully to inform the show, but the show is usually an exercise in hiding that.”

In fact, Mr. Stewart regards comedy as a kind of catharsis machine, a therapeutic filter for grappling with upsetting issues. “What’s nice to us about the relentlessness of the show,” he said, “is you know you’re going to get that release no matter what, every night, Monday through Thursday. Like pizza, it may not be the best pizza you’ve ever had, but it’s still pizza, man, and you get to have it every night. It’s a wonderful feeling to have this toxin in your body in the morning, that little cup of sadness, and feel by 7 or 7:30 that night, you’ve released it in sweat equity and can move on to the next day.”

If this is true, it could be the beginning of the end for the monopoly of carbon-based energy suppliers

I'm never quite sure what to think when I read an article like this. My level of knowledge about science (like most things) is quite poor, but I do know how to source :) I like this one because it is build around elegent simplicity:

"Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution

Thursday 31 July 2008


by: Anne Trafton, MIT News
Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system.

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity - whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source - runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

"Giant Leap" for Clean Energy

Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the world's energy problems, said Nocera. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet's energy needs for one year.

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

"Just the Beginning"

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today's energy systems. MITEI Director Ernest Moniz, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, noted that "this discovery in the Nocera lab demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier basic science."

The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources - governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

The convergence of history

Frank Rich's article on Obama's European adventure is a good read. Whether you are Republican or Democrat, there is no question that Obama is setting the agenda, and it is an agenda that has caught the imagination of people around the world (as well as the amorphous positions of the party of the sitting president). The truth is that the rest of the world does not want to hate the U.S. and understands how a weak America undermines every one's prospects for peace and security.

How Obama Became Acting President

Sunday 27 July 2008


by: Frank Rich, The New York Times

It almost seems like a gag worthy of "Borat": A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama's magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.

He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even "Access Hollywood" mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was "wrong" about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they're still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American "bloodletting" and "be paid for by the Iraqis."

Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq's $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That's the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The "change" that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality - sometimes through Mr. Obama's instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it's change you happen to believe in or not.

Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate's flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.

On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran "appeasement," would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama's, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page: "Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran."

Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a "general time horizon." In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama's, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation's troops by early 2009.

But it's not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there's an Obama administration.

The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are "making more in 10 minutes" than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against "corporate greed" - much as he also followed Mr. Obama's example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners' bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan ("A Leader You Can Believe In"), it can't be long before he takes up fist bumps. They've become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today.

"We have one president at a time," Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party's candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in "Chicago." The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush's de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip - will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? - few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCain's behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president.

Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to "lose a war" isn't even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.

The week's most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama's Berlin speech with a "Mission Accomplished"-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana's coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately "postponed" but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.

When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy. The McCain camp should be careful what it wishes for. As its relentless goading of Mr. Obama to visit Iraq only ratcheted up anticipation for the Democrat's triumphant trip, so its insistent demand for joint town-hall meetings with Mr. Obama and for more televised chronicling of Mr. McCain's wanderings could be self-inflicted disasters in the making.

Mr. McCain may be most comfortable at town-hall meetings before largely friendly crowds, but his performance under pressure at this year's G.O.P. primary debates was erratic. His sound-bite-deep knowledge of the country's No. 1 issue, the economy, is a Gerald Ford train wreck waiting to happen in any matchup with Mr. Obama that requires focused, time-limited answers rather than rambling.

During Mr. McCain's last two tours of the Middle East - conducted without the invasive scrutiny of network anchors - the only news he generated was his confusion of Sunni with Shia and his embarrassing stroll through a "safe" Baghdad market with helicopter cover. He should thank his stars that few TV viewers saw that he was even less at home when walking through a chaotic Pennsylvania supermarket last week. He inveighed against the price of milk while reading from a note card and felt the pain of a shopper planted by the local Republican Party.

The election remains Mr. Obama's to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we've learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama's post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That's some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation's big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

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India Journal - Day 1

It's been almost two years since my last trip to India. A lot has changed since that last trip, but the surreal travel experience remains. The trip to Bangalore consists of two flights (three if you count the hopper from Eugene to SF) of about 10 hours each, with a 1-2 hour stop-over in Frankfurt (a city I'd like to stop in some day, based on the quality of natives I've sat next to who are returning home). The flights take a parabolic course from SF over the Great Lakes and far enough north to catch a glimpse of Reykjavík, Iceland. The visuals seen this far north are said to be spectacular, and judging from the horizon and sky I saw (the picture does it little justice, but gives you a taste), I think I'd like to spend some time here as well.

The flight crews were excellent and helpful this time and they do a nice job of parsing up the trip into digestible (often literally) chunks. I'll do another entry on the flight to Bangalore later... five of my "seatmates" on that flight were not yet a year old!

Anyway, before leaving on this trip, the family drove to Colorado to visit with my brother's family. 2200 miles of cross-country driving is something I generally dread in anticipation, but it is a great way to see the coutry and I always wish we had more time to stop and "be" on these journeys. I was struck this trip by some of the amazing places we passed through, and the majestic views we had - JP and Erin's choice of places to live is among the most breathtaking places I've ever seen. Upon our return, I had a conversation with my mom - she was intimating that if I were going to move to Canada, it's still a good time (apparently once you hit 45, you're a less attractice candidate). I was surprised by my own reaction, which was much stronger than I would have guessed. My own connection to place is much more a part of my life than I let myself believe and for all it's flaws (felt most prominently in our dysfunctional political system) the United States is my country and I can't imagine ever leaving it to live elsewhere.

But I do love visiting other countries and getting to better know the people I meet. I recently read Vonnegut's "A Man without a Country", and I hold close his plea to take note of times when you are happy and savor them. I've thought of this more and more often recently - I realize the blessed life I have and am learning to stop and appreciate how much of it is due to all those people throughout the years who thought I was worth caring about, knowing well my deepest flaws. The goal now is to be that for those I care about, to help with whatever meager skills I may possess to let them know how much I think of them and to learn to better reveal those things that illuminate my own soul.

Well, what started as a physical travelogue has turned a bit inward. Perhaps there is still hope :)

Priceless...

I don't know where it came from, but this is the BOMB!

Long read but well worth it on the coming water wars

I firmly believe that the wars fought 100 years from now will be over water. Major multinationals are clustering (and have been for the last 10 years) around the fresh water supplies of the world, so they recognize the potential value fresh water represents to the world. This article is a tease, but presents a local fight against one of these MN's that I expect to be played out several times over the next dozen years...

How to Know if Your Water Is Safe to Drink
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on June 4, 2008, Printed on June 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/86690/

When Elizabeth Royte first began following the story of the town of Fryeburg, Maine, battling the giant multinational Nestle, it seemed like an easy David and Goliath story. But it turns out that when it comes to water issues, there is a whole lot of gray. Her new book, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, is about the backlash in a rural Maine town over Nestle's bottled water business. She writes, "Incomplete knowledge drives the town's narrative. No one can say for sure how much water lies beneath Fryeburg or what removing it will do."

The story tackles the environmental costs of sucking spring water, which are still largely unknown and further complicated by each side's geologists for hire. It also deals with the backroom deals, the politicking and the legal maze as citizens get their hands dirty with democracy.

While the main narrative is about Fryeburg, the book is really about the conundrum of what to drink. If bottled water is bad, then what about our tap? Is tap water safe? Why are kids today growing up on bottled water? Why is the federal government cutting funding for public water infrastructure?

Royte addresses these issues in our interview below; you can read more about them in Bottlemania. You can also find an excerpt on our site.

Tara Lohan: The narrative of your book follows the ongoing story in Fryeburg, Maine, where residents are battling the world's largest food and beverage company, Nestle, which produces Poland Spring water. Explain what's going on in Fryeburg.

Elizabeth Royte: Right now the town is being sued by Nestle. The company drilled a well in the town of Denmark, and they have very small dirt roads and then couldn't get the water out of the town so they built a pipeline to Fryeburg, and they wanted to build a tanker station where the trucks would fill up and then they'd haul it to the bottling plant in Hollis or Poland.

First, Nestle was given a permit to operate the tanker station, but the people who live near the tanker station fought the permit, and eventually the town's appeals board denied the permit. So Nestle sued the town, and the judge sent it back to the town to hash out whether it is a permitted business in a rural residential zone. Essentially it was a zoning issue.

The planning board looked at it again and then decided no, the tanker station is not a permitted use. So, Nestle appealed, but the planning board was upheld. That was three decisions in a row that went against Nestle, so Nestle a few months ago took the town back to court again. It is costing the town a great deal of money, and there is a citizens group that has formed to fight the tanker station, and they have spent tens of thousands of dollars. And there are people in the town who aren't talking to each other, and there are lots of hurt feelings.

TL: But that's not the only issue with Nestle in Fryeburg, right?

ER: Yes, there is a well in Fryeburg also that is already pumping 180 million gallons a year of water and delivering it to Hollis and Poland. When you drink Poland Spring and it says it came from Evergreen Spring, it came from Fryeburg. An elderly man who lives on the town's pond believes the pumping is affecting his well and the pond. That is in dispute, and I talk about that in the book.

The people who are fighting the tanker situation are fighting it on the grounds that they don't want the truck traffic in this rural community. It is a zone issue for them. Others see an environmental issue with the pumping.

TL: One of things that is so interesting in the book is that this is not really black and white. It is frustrating to think that it is so hard to figure out whether there is environmental harm or not.

ER: If you've read Robert Glennon's Water Follies, which is about groundwater pumping across the country, you can see it is a really complicated issue. There are different groundwater rules in different states. It is difficult to link cause and effect with groundwater problems. He says just because you don't harm a spring or stream doesn't mean your aren't hurting the broader environment. We see harm from groundwater over-pumping with saltwater intrusion to aquifers and with sinkholes forming and with lower water tables and with wells gone dry. There are people in Michigan who are also fighting Nestle's pumping in their communities because they think that their stream levels are being affected. But no one has been able to prove this direct cause and effect in court.

TL: Why is it so difficult? If you are taking out 180 million gallons a year, as is the case in Fryeburg, there has got to be an effect, right?

ER: Nestle says that this is sustainable, that they've done all these hydrogeologic studies that say they are taking out x amount, and x plus y are replenished. So there is no net loss. They say what they're taking is extra water, and I make the point in the book that there is no such thing as extra water. The 180 million gallons used to go somewhere, and even if it wasn't staying right there around that spring it went to a pond or into the soil -- it was feeding an ecosystem. We may not know exactly what is going to happen when that's gone, but it just doesn't make sense to me that absolutely nothing would happen when you subtract those gallons.

What was really the most frustrating was the inch-by-inch struggle of the town with Nestle, and the legal maneuverings, and the meetings and the town passing various moratoria. They were doing everything right -- they were very new at this, and Maude Barlow has talked about the fight for water and how it is a fight for democracy. And these people are reading their land use planning tables, which none of them has read before, and taking out their dictionaries and trying to see what the proposed ordinances would really mean. They were doing everything right, but they were being stymied at every turn by the company, which has a lot of money and time and experience. I still don't know what will happen. For now, they can continue to pump from that Evergreen spring.

TL: You wrote that what is happening in Fryeburg is what a modern water conflict looks like.

ER: Yeah, you might say, why go to a town that has plenty of water to write about a water war. And you think about water wars in dry parts of Africa or India, and a lot of concern about global water scarcity has focused on the developing world. But here I'm going to Maine, and there is plenty of water there. But I believe, increasingly, this is what a modern water war will look like. You have a corporation, Nestle, coming in and wanting to lay claim on more water, and then looking to more towns throughout Maine (and others states, too, like Michigan and California) to increase their market share.

They know that there is a demand out there, and they are trying to meet that demand. Maine might not be suffering from a drought now and might not be in the future, but the people are worried about what Nestle might be planning to do. They are taking water for bottles now, but someday are they going to want to pull out more of it -- and ship it not just out of state but out of the country? I'm not saying that Nestle has these plans or that it is legal, but as water becomes scarce in other places, whose hand is on the tap is going to be increasingly more important.

TL: You wrote that bottled water is one of the greatest marketing coups -- can you explain that?

ER: Bottled water has a long history. People did see the need for it hundreds of years ago as public water supplies weren't safe. There was a need then. But we haven't seen that need since the 1920s when chlorine became ubiquitous in water supplies.

The real growth in the bottled water industry started in 1977 when Perrier came to this country. It was a niche product then, and it was connected to health and wellness, and the ads talked about how Perrier would help your digestion. It was very successful, but only among a certain demographic.

There was one turning point: Perrier was in glass bottles, so people weren't lugging this stuff around. But in 1989 PET plastic was introduced, and all of a sudden you could carry around a lightweight, clear, cheap plastic bottle of water. After that, things just took off, and soon there were tens of millions of dollars spent on promoting it. You'd see models and celebrities photographed with bottles of Evian. And people were told it would make them feel better and look better. It was chic. It signified.

Things grew through the '80s, and in the '90s Coke and Pepsi introduced their waters. They were being attacked for selling high-calorie sugary drinks and for the obesity epidemic. They thought people would start moving away from soda, so they introduced Aquafina and Dasani. The figures were just out for 2007, and it was an $11.5 billion market. In the '90s when Evian hit big here, the market was only $115 million dollars.

TL: I like that you write about how kids these days are growing up thinking that water comes from bottles and not taps and that water fountains are unclean.

ER: I talk a lot about tap water. When people started drinking bottled water, no one was worried about their tap water -- it was just fashionable to drink bottled water. Marketers also played on the need for hydration. But if you were supposed to drink eight glasses a day, affordability became really important. Marketers did play a bit on fears of tap water in a backhanded way. They wouldn't come right out and say tap was unhealthy or dirty. But by emphasizing the purity of their water, it was an implication that tap water wasn't pure.

As we've neglected our infrastructure and the Bush administration has scaled back on clean water protection, tap water has declined in quality. I think a lot of people don't like to talk about this but if I can say anything in this book, it is that we can't abandon tap water and we have to protect municipal water supplies so that we can all be drinking safe water from our taps.

Tap water isn't perfect, but as I say in the book, it is the devil we know and the devil we have standing to negotiate with. We can't negotiate with private water companies over water protection or what is in their products or when it was inspected and the results of those inspections.

TL: As you know, Food & Water Watch is pushing for a federal clean water trust fund. What do you think of that?

ER: Oh yes, I know that Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) is among the Congress members to push for a study to identify sustainable funding sources and is in favor of legislation to support a trust fund. I haven't looked at the details of his plan, but it sounds like a smart idea. There is an incredible funding shortfall -- we need $277 billion to keep our water infrastructure functioning in next 20 years.

We haven't been paying attention for a really long time, and things are crumbling. Every single day there is a water main break in this country -- between 250,000 and 300,000 water main breaks a year, and people are told to boil the water. And people usually take "boil water" to mean "buy water," and they usually distrust the water a little bit more.

TL: I like that in the book you referred to it as an infrastructure disconnect -- that we don't know where our water comes from. But we have this with not just water; many people also have no idea where our food comes from, or our energy.

ER: Right, and my last book (Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash) was about where things go after they leave us and then how they come around to bite us again in our water and food. So many people, it seems, don't understand the social and environmental impacts of it all.

TL: So how do we get out of it this cycle of disconnect?

ER: Well, education. Be aware of it. Make smarter decisions about what you buy and how you use energy and water. When you realize that everything is connected, you will be more careful about how you live and I hope, lighten your impact on the planet. I just did a story for the New York Times Magazine about Orange County's toilet-to-tap program, where wastewater is being reclaimed for drinking.

At first I wondered -- if people know that they are going to be drinking this water again, it would be nice to think that people would take better care of what they put down the toilet, like would we switch to biodegradable cleaning products, would industry use nontoxic materials, would farmers cut their use of pesticides? Then I realized that is a false hope, because everyone is relying on the technology to clean it up, and it might even have the effect of letting polluters off the hook while we are spending $29 billion a year to run this very high-tech plant, and it gets everything out, so why should we bother. That's the "faith in technology" problem.

TL: Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on reclaimed water -- you seem to find a lot of hope in it.

ER: I do, and I think when my piece comes out in the Times I'll seem even more hopeful than when I wrote the book. I do realize that in water-stressed areas, conservation on its own can go a long way, but we have to start thinking of wastewater as a resource that we can clean up to use for not-potable purposes, or for potable if it comes to that.

It comes back to the infrastructure issue. I think we need to go with lower-impact development. We need to keep rainwater out of our sewer systems, unhook gutters from storm drains, have more permeable surfaces, and let the water recharge back into the aquifers and let the earth go through the natural cleaning processes. Then we wouldn't be spending so much on cleaning up water to use on our lawns or for washing our cars. I think we need to rethink our infrastructure and use more gray water.

The idea of smaller, local plants that deal with the waste from smaller communities helps put more water back into the ground. It is part of keeping things local, knowing where water comes from and cycling it back. It is like eating local food, composting it and putting it back on the land -- small networks.

TL: You mentioned Bill McKibben's idea of hyper-individualism and countering that through local communities.

ER: Right, investing in local communities and economies. Reconnecting people with each other.

TL: In the book you mention that you tested your own drinking water. How easy is it to do that, and how much does it cost?

ER: The whole point of my book is to let people know what is going on with their water -- both bottled water and tap -- and before deciding to drink one or the other, that they know what the facts are. You should know what is in your watershed and what are the potential problems with your tap water. Know what is in your pipes, whether there is lead or copper. Know what your physical situation is -- your health -- whether you are in an at-risk group. And then if you have questions about your water after knowing what the potential problems might be, then test it. It cost me $140, and I tested it for over 70 contaminants.

In this country, 89.3 percent of public water supplies met or exceeded federal guidelines in 2006. That is a lot of people whose water is fine according to the federal government.

TL: But that is not taking into account things like pharmaceuticals, right? Because municipalities aren't required to test for them.

ER: Right -- they are not regulated, so most utilities don't test for them. I think the "drugs in tap water" story is worrisome but not alarming, and this is after talking to a lot of scientists about this. The government has fallen behind on looking at this. They were charged with investigating this many, many years ago, and they haven't. So we have to figure out what is in the water and what it is doing to us.

There are some things we should be working on now to minimize drugs in the water, including establishing take-back programs for unused pharmaceuticals so they aren't flushed; encouraging healthier lifestyles so we don't have to take so many drugs in the first place; and reducing the amount of drugs in confined animal feeding operations because those are the biggest users of antibiotics and maybe hormones. If we didn't raise animals in unhealthy conditions, we wouldn't have to be drugging them.

I think we should stop using antibacterial soap indiscriminately, and I don't know if it is possible for drug makers to reformulate drugs so they break down faster in water, but I think the drug manufacturers do have some responsibility, too.

TL: Do you think that federal guidelines may catch up with this eventually?

ER: It is going to take a long time because they don't want to regulate anything they can't tell people how to get rid of and can't supply the money to help with. It is like with perchlorate or MTBE. If they decide we need to regulate it, then utilities will have to test for it, and they won't be meeting standards because they don't have the money for the equipment.

It has to be done in stages. First, know what is out there and how fast the drugs are degrading or not. You have to know how long the drugs stay out there, what sunlight does to them, what temperature does and what happens in various mixtures.

TL: What surprised you most about what you learned working on this book?

ER: I was surprised by how complicated it was. I thought there was a clean, simple story line about these people in Fryeburg fighting a big company, and I learned there are many shades of gray in Fryeburg and elsewhere and tap water isn't always perfect all the time. I was surprised by what is allowed to be in tap water and that the issues about what you should be drinking aren't always clean-cut. Although most of the time we should all drink tap, and if there are problems, we should be filtering our water. But moving to bottled water is not answer.

TL: I appreciated that you explained a bit about Brita and other filters because I've always wondered how effective they are.

ER: Yeah, I had this Brita and I didn't really know what it was doing, so I thought I'd find out. I wondered: What does Brita do, what doesn't it do, and what other kinds of filters are there? If you do find problems with your tap water, a pour through a Brita isn't going to do it for you. So learn about the other filters or point-of-use filters and see what you need to deal with whatever your issue is.

There are lots of sources on my website if people want to learn about filters or fluoride and which groups are working on these issues.

TL: Probably one of the biggest problems with bottled water is the environmental impact. Talk about the carbon footprint of it.

ER: In 2007 there was an awakening and an enormous backlash against bottled water, and it was because of the carbon footprint. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute did some calculations, and if you figure in the energy it takes to produce, transport and dispose of each bottle, it would be the equivalent of filling each one a quarter of the way with oil. Only 14 percent of the bottles make it into recycling systems, and the rest go to landfills or incinerators, and it takes 17 million barrels a year to make water bottles for the U.S.

TL: There are a lot of reasons not to drink bottled water.

ER: There are. But if you absolutely have to drink bottled water and you cannot filter your water, then I say find the most local source and the largest container that can be reused, preferably glass.

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/86690/

Friday Night Video Blogging

If you've never had the chance to hear Justin King, I highly recommend it if he ever plays in your locale. That said, the John Butler Trio, traveling this summer with G.Love, gives Justin a good run for his picking money... observe