So why is NotOrbitboy's selective and misleading description of Obama's energy plan an editor's choice but not the responses?

The key requirements for private industry development of alternative energy sources are tax credits, access and a floor to the price of energy. Huge government capital needn't be used if these things are in place, but no private capital is going to be risked if the return is uncertain, or access can be blocked or the project bankrupted by a sudden drop in energy prices. This base level of government support is also the difference between McCain and Obama.

After the 70's gas crisis, alternative energy blossomed but cratered when the price of gas came down again.

Nuclear has subsisted for years with huge price and delivery guarantees far larger than anything solar or wind are asking for.

Local versus distributed alternative power production is a complex question, large arrays can be more efficient and away from expensive real estate but require transmission. Some local production makes sense such as on big corporate glass boxes with windows ready made as smooth substrates, also at remote sites. Inbetween the money to plaster a house with solar cells can far exceed the return.

The quickest and cheapest returns are on home insulation, lighting and automobile mileage. You know the Democrats will push these things and the Republicans will try to block them.

Point out that O'Reilly is famous for bad statistics, including such winners as actually mixing inflation adjusted and nonadjusted numbers. Point out that he has that little screen or audio from his helpers that feeds him numbers that no real person can know to contradict him for some random period, then talk over his fake numbers with basics like the tax cuts are all on borrowed money and we're paying for it now with a huge debt, interest payments and a dollar half the value when Bush started office - which translates directly to higher prices, including for gas, for normal (not superrich) Americans. Perhaps finsh up by demanding he get his helpers to check his numbers, which forces him to acknowledge what a fraud his apparent omniscience is.

Even when TIME prints total garbage it still gets to pick and choose it's letters column - so criticisms about sloppy or misleading reporting that might undermine the paper's circulation are never printed. With a blog, you screw up or misrepresent something and there are many writers willing to let you know about it in a forum nearly as prominent as the original article.

Often relible bloggers can be distinguished from the liars by the existance of a method for outside comment such as this.

Unless you're willing to think every oil company and exploration scientist is a complete idiot it is clear that it will continue to become more and more difficult and expensive to mine oil. Rather than screaming to strip the last vestiges of oil on US shores to keep prices down now, true patriots want to prepare our nation for the future by creating renewable power sources now. Renewable sources can never be taken away from us by a bunch of Arabs and every cent we avoid sending to the despots and extremists of the middle East helps cut the funding of those attacking us.

Capitalism does a poor job of mediating externalities: costs that don't immediately affect the direct parties in transactions such as pollution, limited resources, overproduction, exuberance, and any time period beyond the immediate tenure of executives. Thus seas are overfished and oil overexploited until they are gone. Thus we have government crop limits, pollution laws, international fishing agreements, and banking regulations. It's not pretty, but there is a reason deregulation is suddenly a dirty word.

Renewable power is capital intensive and long term, investors need to know that power price fluctuations won't put them out of business. Thus price floors and subsidies. Nuclear energy receives far larger subsidies than solar or wind can even dream of. Oil and coal receive subsidies through cheap access to government land and no penalties for the pollution and resulting costs and deaths created by their products.

The renewable energy bills McCain avoided voting on had a reasonable chance to pass. The cutesy Lieberman-McCain carbon cap bill was DOA with a 49 Republican senators lined up against it at the peak of the Bush and Republican accendancy.

Since when do we have to pay attention to the ramblings of lunatics - lies are not a legitimate substitute for facts just because they raise charges you favor. Since when is being on a school committee or at someone's campaign event a crime?

Are all US Representative felons because they worked with Randy Cunningham? The Times looked into the Ayers non-connection and found nothing significant. Sarah Palin seems to think the Times is a valid source, albeit she seems to have trouble accurately representing it's conclusions. Hannity lied by presenting this clown Martin as a journalist when he was just a psycho.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/us/politics/10campaign.html?ref=todayspaper

In today's times, ELISABETH BUMILLER and PATRICK HEALY extend the same false equivalence between Obama's attacks on McCain policy statements and McCain's attacks on Obama as terrorist: "...The language and tone indicated that both men would continue their negative campaigning in the final weeks before Election Day, even as voters say they want solutions to the worsening economic conditions rather than back-and-forth blasts from the stump."

However they do continue: "But what has been most striking about the last 48 hours on the campaign trail is the increasingly hostile atmosphere at Mr. McCain’s rallies, where voters furiously booed any mention of Mr. Obama and lashed out at the Democrats, Wall Street and the news media."

Ask them if they think their fellow voters in the midwest (Illinois) are so stupid as to have elected Obama twice if he was a Commie Islamic terrorist.