Power transmission lines are one of the ugliest thing mankind has ever produced. No one wants to look at them. Burying is initially more expensive, but maintenance costs go to almost zero. It's worth the expense. Just reduce the military budget by 2-3% and you'll have more than enough funding for this.

But as others have pointed out, you need to localize green power generation as much as possible. There is no excuse for every building everywhere in the country for not having solar panels on the roof, and there isn't a coastal area of the country that should have a wind farm just off shore.

We need to chew away at the margins as well as build the big projects.

. . . pols and press alike to guffaw in manners unique to each when Bush went looking for WMD under cushions and chairs at the National Press Club Dinner in 2004. Assholes.

Politicians of both parties have been beholden to moneyed interests from the beginning of time. It's just become more pronounced as the country has moved to the right over the last couple of decades.

Huckabee believes . . . -- Rich_Gibson

Huckabee's a poorly holy roller from the South. End of story.

The core AIG insurance business isn't bankrupt, and it is a fact that a relatively small (in terms of personnel) division of the company is to blame for AIG and, unfortunately, the world's financial problems.

Where AIG made the mistake, and people in every kind of business and in government do it almost every time, is that they didn't fire the assholes responsible and come clean with the problem. No one is going to "unravel" the mess at this point. It needs to simply be written off. If this means a few banks need to be taken over by the FDIC, so be it. Ditto for anyone in a hedge fund that suffers significant loses. You fly that high Icarus, you take your chances.

As the saying goes, that thing this the most difficult to do is almost always the proper thing to do.

. . . may have some similarities with the faults found in Russia. However, our economies do not otherwise share any similar traits. America may manufacture very little that it consumes today, but we could. I'm convinced, looking at its history, that Russian culture is just so self-defeatist and corrupt that it will never be anything but an authoritarian state with a dysfunctional society. In fact, at the rate it is going, it will probably cease to matter at all, oil revenue notwithstanding, in 25-50 years.

Volvo pioneered most of the safety and efficiency features that eventually became standards in automobile manufacturing world wide.

The Swedish government should have showed some pride and forbid the sale of the respective companies to GM and Ford. Detroit certainly has the Midas touch in reverse.

It’s hard to say how much of the Kool-aid McCain has drunk, . . .

As the daughter of a conservative Republican senator and part of the Republican "elite," she's a dispenser of Kool-aid. It's people who believe her bullshit that have consumed it.

Consider this possibility: As the Republicans became an ever more extreme party, they pulled the Democrats to the right. Ike and perhaps even Nixon seem more liberal than many Democrats today. . . -- bigguns

Ike and even Nixon were garden variety country club Republicans - a tad racist, fiscally conservative, still believed in government, and were geo-political realists. Today's Republicans are primarily like the John Birch yahoo-trash that got thrown out of the party after WWII, except, of course, in the South and Indiana.

Onboard computer replaced 3 times -- Cannibal

An onboard computer in a car some ten years before they even existed! Must have been a special model.

Sure this wasn't a 1987 model?

You may have had a lemon, taken real bad care of the cars you owned, or bought cars abused by previous owners. But Volvo's longevity and reliability in those days was pretty unmatched, even by Saab.

With Democratic leaders like Reid, who needs Republicans?

Who fucking cares?

Now, if you were complaining about the Obamas lowering themselves to appear in the magazine, you'd have a point.

. . . suffered a minor concussion while skiing (though wearing a helmet) marked by a blackout period (I never lost consciousness and skied to the base area after the fall). My wife suspected something was wrong as soon as she saw me and knew so when I couldn't tell her our children's names. I was fine, however, about 20 minutes later.

Long story short, the ski patrol called for an aid car that took me the fifty miles or so to the nearest hospital for a CT scan. Unless Richard had lost consciousness or had been unresponsive after her fall (not the case), there was no reason to take her to the hospital. Nothing, apparently, including a helicopter evacuation, could have saved her life by the time she began to have symptoms some four hours after the fall.

As per usual, the right is full of shit.

. . ., but that the wealthy person with ski-slope head injury per capita survival rate is higher in the US than it is anywhere else in the world. This is the kind of treatment that the US health care system excels at: high-tech heroic medicine. Comparatively, the Canadian system does not excel at plucking starlets off mountains and plopping them into neurosurgery wards.

-- Leahcim

She didn't even complain of a headache until several hours later. Nothing at the time of her fall suggests that she needed to be airlifted to a hospital. She declined to go to the hospital after the accident. The ski area was not negligent and there was no failure with the Canadian health care system. Pretty much the exact same thing would have happened in the U.S. under Richardson's circumstances.

. . . probably would have had problems with Kennedy.