The premise of the study is correct. In a cold environment the heat from the incandescent lamp is not wasted. The biggest factor is the source of electricity. If the electricity is generated by a coal or NG fueled plant then all that extra heat is generated less efficiently than if it were generated by fossil fuels in a furnace, due to secondary efficiency considerations (only a small fraction of the energy in coal gets converted to electricity; the rest goes up a cooling tower). Thus it would be better to burn the fuel in a furnace. But if the electricity is generated by hydroelectric power, then the heat generated by the lamp saves the use of fossil fuel and spares us green-house gas.

Another consideration is waste disposal. Incandescent lamps are fairly inoffensive in a landfill; compact fluorescents are not, as they contain mercury. In an area where electricity is generated by non-mercury polluting hydroelectric power, using CF lamps would tend to offset this clean energy source with its own mercury pollution; whereas in an area supplied by coal fired plants, using CF lamps, even with their mercury, may actually decrease mercury pollution, particularly if they are recycled properly.

Incandescent lamp bans would seem to suggest the issue is clear cut. It is not.

He's got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media

Really, what kind of bank is Mr. Todd talking about? One that is engaging in sub-prime lending, no doubt. Only to these pundits could such a long history of being wrong about foreign policy issues constitute a positive bank balance.

Our system is broken when such a statement can be made. It shows that the political establishment unabashedly excludes entire viewpoints. Guys like Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky, who got the Iraq war right and have been getting things right for decades, are, among other things, Kooks, Extreme Leftists, Marxists even (gasp!) and must Hate America for doing so and cannot be countenanced in polite company. But Uncle John, demonstrably a walking foreign policy disaster, is okey dokey!

There just cannot be fair and honest discourse in such an environment. Throw in latent (and sometimes blatant) racism and misogyny, and I'm thinking we will need a bit of luck to avoid President McCain.

PS: Don't forget that McCain admits that his strength is foreign policy and that he's weak on domestic policy. With one of the worst economic crises facing us this sort of "expertise" is just what we don't need.

I know what you mean about the protest marches. I went to as many as I could in DC. Several I participated in were huge.

But the demonstrations received little coverage. Not only were pictures not widely published, but ridiculously low estimates of the crowd sizes were given. One I went to was massive, filling M St. shoulder to shoulder with people for several blocks, with people still crowded in the Mall area waiting their turn. The Washington Post put the number of marchers for that one at 20,000. I've been to DC United soccer games at RFK with 20,000+ other fans, and I know what it looks like. Only one of the marches I went to was even that small.

The most galling thing to me though was that later my companions and I saw a local news talking head assert, with an exaggerated sense of relief, that "fortunately" the demonstrators did not become "violent." Imagine that. We were marching against this administration's violent policies, and we were deemed the ones likely to become violent. That's the mindset you get, I guess, when you label as "extremists" those who don't agree that attacking sovereign nations is OK.

Consider this example: suppose you had a house that was off the grid (your own solar cells, batteries, etc.). Which one would you use? I think you'd be crazy to use incandescents, and heating with electricity is out of the question. So why is it OK to waste electricity if you're on the grid? Is it perhaps too cheap?

And may someone please drive a wooden stake through its heart to make doubly sure. Mr. Greenspan's tenure also coincides with one of the worst increases in the gap between rich and poor.

About the only good thing about Global "Free" Market Capitalism is that, having left its destructive wake all over the Third World, it has inspired many to start overthrowing it. We can see this effect in full bloom in South America, with Argentina giving the World Bank the heave-ho being one of the most satisfying.

There is a huge difference between government involvement where government acts as a check, acts to level the playing field, and acts to protect the powerless; as opposed to where government is involved, in the pocket of the plutocrats and acting as their facilitator. The latter is what we have now. True socialism is of the former kind.

Anyway, we don't have to guess at what Keynesian economics would bring us. That's the neat thing about history: we can go back and see what happened and why. Every period of laissez-faire has ended in disastrous excesses. You can read all about it from Marx, Engels, Dickens and others. Further, a reasonable argument can be made that laissez-faire ultimately led to some of the greatest catastrophes of European history: the Great Depression, Fascism, and WWII. Keyneysianism was adopted at the end of WWII, championed by the likes of Chancelor Konrad Adenauer (no commie he) who understood that never again should things be allowed to get so bad that people seek salvation in the extremes (i.e. Communism and Fascism). The following two decades saw spectacular economic growth, which seemed to benefit all classes, not just the privileged, as under Friedmanism.