Paris Hilton for President.

Perish the thought!

Still, I have not been too nice about this vapid, talking mannequin, celebrity wannabe, but I have to give her credit. She makes more sense than these other cut-rate reality cuties (Brooke Hogan, Heidi Montag, the Kardashian chick, ad nauseum).

She actually sounded like an articulate young woman when describing what essentially is Barack Obama's energy proposal. I was chilled to my soul. Then she reverted back to her "normal" persona when she signed off with "See you at the debates, bitches". Made me think that maybe the shallow blond ditz thing was just an act all along. For just a moment. Then reality intruded.

Still, if she keeps doing this kind of stuff I might have to start taking her seriously, and, well my whole worldview would just collapse.

I can't let that happen.

That's pretty good!

No sarcasm intended whatsoever. That's actually quite good.

The conversation we need to have about energy policy in this country finally comes front and center. Thank God! And it would appear that Barack Obama gets this issue right on several fronts. First of all, realistically speaking, it's going to take a lot of money to make any appreciable difference on climate change and weaning us off foreign oil or oil in general. Naturally, John McCain's people (as well as George W. Bush's people, and Dick Cheney's people)would like to use falling gas prices as a sign that we don't need to do anything meaningful on the issue, but that's actually beside the point. The other truth is that we need a thriving economy in the short term to get any susbstantive government investment behind any of Obama's proposals. So gas prices have to come down at least a fair bit. People need to stop feeling squeezed. Then, the White House (presumably an Obama White House), Congress and the media are going to have to get behind a massive re-education effort to gather public support for the shift we're trying to make. THAT COSTS MONEY!! A sputtering economy won't generate the dollars needed to get us there and the so-called "free market" won't move fast enough without incentives. Because as much as conservatives worship an unregulated market and economic "survival of the fittest", they won't say no to government giveaways. The hypocrisy of that is lost on no one here, I'm sure. But I digress.

Barack Obama's energy proposal is chock full of all the things conservatives despise. On any new drilling there would be REGULATION and OVERSIGHT, which gives the modern GOP the shakes, since any sort of regulation is too much. It includes TAXES on oil company profits and GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS to people who have a hard time with making ends meet as a consequence of "trusting the market" to get it right. It also includes NEW SPENDING for auto companies to reconfigure and re-imagine our transportation sector, and our love affair with the automobile.

All of this would make the most moderate Republican break out in hives. It's a wonder that a bipartisan compromise of this type ever made it out of this Congress.

I agree with Andrew. This is the right plan.

Of course, George Bush will never sign it, but what else is new?

I have no moral objection to casual sex. Indeed, I wish I'd had more of it before I met my partner of now nearly 2 decades. Sometimes I wonder about the state of relationships here in the early 21st century. We seem so ambivalent now, and not necessarily without reason. On the other hand, it seems easier than ever to hook-up without any sort of feeling or caring for the other person. Now we have friends "with benefits" and even a growing percentage of so-called "happy" couples cheat. Of course, I never quite understood how a promise to never sleep with someone other than your partner constituted "being faithful". I'm as much for open relationships as I am for monogamy, which my partner and I have chosen. So I found Tracy Clark-Flory's essay quite brave and refreshing. She, like so many of us have thrown away the Puritan rule book about sex and decided to wade in and sort this whole relationship thing out hands-on. It's nice to see someone just doing it in a conscious way. It seems if you do that, you may just learn something. It's also nice to see someone not making excuses or referencing some sort of past trauma to inform his/her sleeping with different people. It's not always about that. We've had this notion that psychologically well-adjusted people don't rut about like...well, animals. Well, sometimes we do! What? Only Christians are psychologically well-adjusted? Anyone who's watched the current Administration in DC knows that aint so. Having said all that, we have a lot to learn about sex, trust, commitment, and faithfulness, yea even humanity in our connections with each other that they just didn't teach us in Sunday School. If there's one thing this 21st century iteration of "young lust" has taught me, it's that relationships are too vast to neatly categorize, and too complex for outdated "thou shalt not" morality. Since we don't have a rule book anymore, we're going to have to explore this terrain with as much awareness as we can muster and get ready to become more aware. Sounds to me like Tracy got hurt a bit, maybe made some not-great choices, but she learned from them and she's come out of it not really the worst for wear. Good on her, I say. And this relationship of "respect run amok" is not a bad place to be with someone.

SCULLY WAS SMOKING HOT!!

The red hair, the big wide blue eyes, the piercing intellect, the sheer soulfulness of the woman, oh yeah. She had me.

Of course I always did have a thing for redheads.