The elephant in the room

I was watching a celebrity golf tournament supporting a charity called "Folds of Honor," which looks like a worthy attempt to help wounded returned veterans and also the families of the wounded and the dead.  As I watched the stories of families with lost sons, daughters, spouses, and parents, and the wounded men and women trying to piece their lives together, I felt anger rising in me.

Many of the wounded and dead were from the Iraq war.  The atmosphere of the show was, rightly, one of praise for the valiant sacrifices these men and women made to keep America safe.  But what we owe the Iraq War veterans, we can never repay, because their sacrifice was so needless.  They were sent to a war that should never have been fought, by that fool, George W. Bush.

The TV show about the golf tournament, for the laudable purpose of acknowledging the veterans in a positive way, left the gaping matter of the shameless way they were sent into combat under false pretenses unmentioned.

When and how will that matter be addressed?

Political correctness would seem to be dead...

To all the folks who have long railed against it, I hope you're happy in the newer, smellier world of political discourse.

I've been wondering for a while if the widespread opprobrium that has served to drive racial insults underground since the 1960s would result in explosive resentment in time, and it looks like maybe it has.  The dog whistle code words of the Republican Party have given way to overt racial slurs by elected officials.

When I was young, before political correctness, white people used insulting language about blacks, but even then, outside of the South, it was understood that it was just lowlifes who talked that way.  Now, the lowlifes are getting elected to public office at an alarming rate.

Have you voted for any of them?  Did you do it on purpose, or did you not know what you were getting?

Vote carefully.  These days, that means don't vote Republican.

Like the free market? Let it work.

Bill Moyers tells us that America is on the verge of a solar power boom.  He links to an October 29 article from bloomberg.com, noting that solar electricity will be cheaper than electricity provided by conventional power plants in more than half the states in the U.S. by 2016.

From the Bloomberg article:

After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states--in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week.  That's assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.

Even if the tax credit drops to 10 percent, solar will soon reach price parity with conventional electricity in well over half the nation: 36 states.  Gone are the days when solar panels were an exotic plaything of Earth-loving rich people.  Solar is becoming mainstream, and prices will continue to drop as the technology improves and financing becomes more affordable, according to the report.

One would think that the Republican Party, champions of the sacred free market, would welcome the chance for America to lead the world in development of a technology that would save us from dependence on demon foreign oil, while saving their beachfront property from erosion.  But, as usual, the Republicans say one thing and do another.  Bought and paid for by the oil and coal industries, they fight solar and wind power at every turn.

Solar electricity:  It's just one more thing in a changing world that the political right won't be able to stop.  Bloomberg:

Because of solar's small market share today, no matter how quickly capacity expands, it won't have much immediate impact on the price of other forms of energy.  But soon, for the first time, the reverse may also be true:  Gas and coal prices will lose their sway over the solar industry.