I'm in Michigan. I'd be very angry if our current primary results were counted. We couldn't vote anyone but Hillary or Kucinich so I decided to stay home. I was told that it wouldn't be counted anyway and it seemed a little pointless.

If these results were counted now, the effect would be to explicitly disenfranchise people like me who wanted to vote for Obama, Edwards or the others who had not yet dropped out. Worse than just plain not being involved in the electoral process, only those of us who supported a particular candidate would be enfranchised. It is hard to imagine a more corrupt system than this.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and I have to say that we did not consider ourselves to be in Appalachia. Near it? Sure, but the West Virginians thought that we were snooty elitists.

But, since Pittsburgh is, apparently in Appalachia, I'd like to point out this means that Appalachia is home some of our better engineering schools (Carnegie-Mellon) and medical schools (U of Pittsburgh). If you think that you can do without satellites, robotics, the internet, the polio vaccine, organ transplants, the MRI, and Mr. Roger's neighborhood, then you can do without Pittsburgh and Appalachia. (Sorry to the rest of Appalachia, I focused on Pittsburgh.)

Maybe next time we nominate an atheist instead. We won't get the problem of crazy preachers that way.

Up until I moved to NYC 4 days ago, me and my wife biked into work year round in Lansing, MI. It was about 5 miles each way and going home I often carried groceries in my panniers. It's really not as difficult as people think - even winter biking. You just have to deal with things a little differently. You don't but 50 lbs of food all at once. You buy 10 lbs five times.

That being said, no, I wouldn't expect the disabled to bike everywhere. (I don't see why the elderly would have a problem - I'd think cycling is one of the safest forms of exercise for old bones. Think of adult trikes.) I also don't expect most people will bike in the winter like I do. However, so what? Not every solution has to work for absolutely everyone at absolutely all times. If healthy, 15-55 year old southerners and Californians biked to work or school on even only on clear days, gasoline demand would be less and prices might abate.

In reality, Hillary stole the Michigan delegates that she was awarded. If Obama had been on the ticket in Michigan, turnout would have been much different. There were lots of people, like myself, who did not vote in the primary because we were told it didn't count and our desired candidate wasn't on the ticket anyway. Even write-ins were discarded.

There are alternative methods of adding in food and energy prices that would smooth out some of the volatility of small price spikes and dips. For instance, one could compute as if food and energy prices were their averages over the previous 12 months. You would get an indicator of their price which lags behind the price at the pump or grocery store, sure, but it would have the benefit of actually capturing long term rises in costs.

This seems like a fairly obvious solution. Is there a reason why it is not done?

Who wouldn't want to make that trade: a good job in exchange for high gas prices?

It doesn't help much if you can't afford to get to the job.

The problem is that right now a lot of our industry is in rural areas. This is for a lot of reasons. For instance, factories are big and city land is expensive. Bad actors find it easier to evade environmental regulation as there are less eyes to see the problems. Suffering rural areas often bend over backwards to get any kind of job. The list goes on.

The question really isn't about where we want and need to go; it's about how we get there. I can't help but think that there will be pain for a lot of people along the way.

On the other hand, places like LA just have no excuse.

Either a cap'n'trade or a carbon tax are certainly good ideas in the long run but is the cap and trade bill really the right climate change bill to pass first? I guess my question is: does US heavy industry (which has taken a beating for a long time now) have enough money to invest in carbon mitigation schemes? Are enough consumers going to be able to cope with the even higher fuel costs in the short term?

It seems like it would make a lot more sense to first introduce a bill which gives the carrot before we get the bill which gives the stick. I'm thinking low interest loans for companies which can decrease carbon or do electricity cogeneration with their existing carbon footprint. I'm also thinking of public transportation increases - in the short term, it wouldn't take that much money for the feds to buy a bunch of buses and distribute them around. We could make renewable energy tax credits stable for more than a year.

With such a bill in place for a year or two we could actually have some momentum in the right direction before a cap and trade system went online.

I'm suspicious of the Amtrak figures as well. It is certainly the case that rail freight has lower fuel usage than trucks. One only needs to look at current profits in the industries to see this. Passenger rail versus cars can't be so completely different.