to only hire conservatives. Today's WaPo article Report Says Partisanship Reigned in Justice Department Hiring Program says:

"High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks, according to an inspector general's report to be released today.

The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations. "

Why am I not surprised. I especially find the sentence "labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks" particularly telling. The very people who now are decrying Barack Obama as partisain are the very ones who carried out a stealth star chamber program. Hypocrisy. Utter hypocrisy.

We're all Americans. Conservatives aren't better Americans, they aren't worse Americans. Unfortunately many of the leaders of the Republican machine don't feel that way at all and aren't embarrassed about gaming our nations Justice Department.

Bet we don't hear any "conservatives" say this policy was un-american.

Kevin Drum has a post about McCain's battery prize that makes several good points.

He notes that these prizes are essentially harmless but also basically pointless- the amount is trivial. The companies serious about battery development are looking at a market of hundreds of billions. $300 million is simply not worth noticing. Certainly it is not going to spur them more than the threat of a competitor patenting a critical method will.

Then he makes a damn good point:

So why the enthusiasm? I guess it seems more free market-ish than doling out research grants, but if you're dedicated to market solutions why would you think the market needs the extra boost in the first place? It's all very strange.

Well...yeah, now that you mention it. Offering a market distorting prize as a way to support free markets is kind of odd.

He goes on to make another good point:

Speaking of batteries, though, here's a question. Lots of energy technologies (coal, wood, oil, uranium, etc.) seem like great ideas until you scale them up to service a planet of 6 billion people. Then it suddenly turns out that they create lots of problems. So how about batteries? What would happen if we needed to manufacture not a few thousand car-sized batteries a year, but a few billion? Could we do it? What would it take? Are there disposal issues when we reach that kind of scale? I can't find anyone talking about this, but I have to believe that if we managed to electrify our energy economy this would become a pretty serious issue. Anyone know anything more about this?

I've been saying this for a long time- every energy source runs into problems if you use it enough. When your usage model is unrestrained growth it simply doesn't matter what source or sources you use. They all hit critical limits eventually.

What we need is not a change in energy sources, or atleast that's not what we need most. What we need is a change in usage patterns. Without that we're quite simply screwed. The days of plentiful cheap energy are coming to an end. The question is whether we recognize this, recognize our shameful role in squandering a resource of unimaginable value, and if we transition to what human society must become in order to continue, or if we try to remain as we are and start the process of resource wars and decay that is an inevitable result of that path.

These days I take a fairly darwinian approach- if we aren't smart enough to do what needs to be done then we're better off dead anyway and let's just get on with it.

I've seen this linked to on several sites today.

I tried to find out where SwordsCrossed was but couldn't find it.

Former American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall said that deregulation has failed and called for some aspects of the airline industry to be re-regulated, according to a report in Aviation Daily.

From his speech:

...The consequences have been very adverse. Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality and international reputation. Fewer and fewer flights are on time. Airport congestion has become a staple of late-night comedy shows. An ever higher percentage of bags are lost or misplaced. Last-minute seats are harder and harder to find. Passenger complaints have skyrocketed. Airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable.

Meanwhile, the financial health of the industry, and of the individual carriers, has become ever more precarious. Most have been through the bankruptcy process at least once, and some have passed through on multiple occasions.

...

Fortunately, there is plenty of blame to go around. In my view, the industry's problems reflect several shortcomings:

• First and foremost, we have failed to confront the reality that unfettered competition just doesn't work very well in certain industries, as amply demonstrated by our airline experience and by the adverse outcomes associated with various state efforts to deregulate electricity rates. In my view, it is time to acknowledge that airlines look and are more like utilities than ordinary businesses.

• Second, our government has failed to develop a national transportation plan of any kind and has thus been indifferent to the continuing decline of our highways, our railroads and our airlines.

• And third, the government has failed to invest in the capabilities and resources which only it can provide, most notably by failing to implement the new air traffic control system that everyone agrees we desperately need.

In my view, it's time to do something about all three.

I feel little need to argue that deregulation has worked poorly in the airline industry. Three decades of deregulation have demonstrated that airlines have special characteristics incompatible with a completely unregulated environment. To put things bluntly, experience has established that market forces alone cannot and will not produce a satisfactory airline industry, which clearly needs some help to solve its pricing, cost and operating problems.

Well, "Duh." The main problem with Crandall's speech is that it pretends that deregulation has worked in other industries, and that the incapacities of the free market with regard to airlines are somehow special, rather than typical.

The case will come down shortly, so I predict a 6-3 or better strikedown of the DC gun ban law, if not unaminous. Anybody see if going the other way at all?

Here's the Reuters link .

Honestly, I haven't read the article. I know you can stick electrodes in water and run a current through them and separate out O2 & H2 but I had always assumed that took more energy than what ever catalytic reaction you could get from the hydrogen produced.

Here's a case of i should really read a link first. My bad.