January 20, 2012.  Today marks the beginning of Barack Obama's fourth year as president.  Three years ago today he stood out in the cold and said, "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America."  He promised "an open government" and "a new beginning."   I've been around for many televised inaugurations, starting with JFK's when I was but a mere child/adult and, for me, this one equaled or might have even surpassed that one for good, old-fashioned stirring moments.
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Back in the 1980s, no one could replicate Pons and Fleischmann's claims about cold fusion, and the idea of controlled fusion without tremendous costs became a sort of atomic snake oil. ITER's tremendously expensive controlled "hot" fusion is still decades away from practicality, but the hydrogen bomb seems to suffice as proof of concept. Cold fusion has crept back into the news, but not into peer-reviewed discussion. Skeptics attack the few articles published with a fury. Peak Oil guru Tom Whipple is used to doubt, and has followed the issue dispassionately in a handful of articles. His Cold Fusion Update discusses the current claims of Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi: [Read more]

A number of Republican presidential hopefuls and not so hopefuls have attacked Mitt Romney as a heartless capitalist who destroyed jobs while a partner at Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich compared Romney to a looter. Rick Perry called him a vulture. Jon Huntsman suggested that Romney likes firing people.

The anti-Romney offensive has raised the ire of many Republican leaders, who have condemned the charges as disrespectful to heartless capitalism. Their concern is understandable. Heartless capitalism is the very soul of Republican Party. Without it, the party would resemble some toothless decomposing zombie that blunders haplessly into disgusted voters while gurgling about taking back the country. [Read more]

It's a great life. You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you're honest you're poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.

Lon Chaney, Jr., asking Marshal Will Kane played by Gary Cooper why he goes out into the street to get shot at. High Noon. [Read more]

By now you will have heard that included in the tumble of new disclosures (I pay close to (how close? Are you missing above or below?) 15%) from Romney's cabinet of plutocrat horrors, is the tidbit that his tax planning relies heavily on Cayman Island accounts.

(I fear being tarred forensically with those enemies of freedom who hector those who complain about warrantless surveillance, but, here goes).  I ask Romney (as will we all with one voice),

What have you got to hide? [Read more]

Recently, a new blogger here by the name of Iron Bolt Bruce has posted a couple of provocative pieces about the rise of fascism in America.  He's twice traced a timeline, of sorts, describing the evolution of various security legislation, ending at a proposal to strip suspected domestic terrorists of their rights of citizenship. [Read more]

If there’s one thing that’s glaringly apparent in the GOP nomination process, it’s this – Mitt Romney is just not a very good candidate for office.

It shouldn’t be this way. Romney is very intelligent, attractive to the point it almost appears he was assembled by a crack team of human designers, and well spoken. Add to that the fact that he can afford the best campaign advisors money can by, and he truly should be a juggernaut of a candidate.

But here’s Romney’s flaw in a nutshell – he is unwilling and unable to own up to who he is and what he has done. [Read more]

We're half a month into 2012. Novak Djokovic's streak is long gone and most of the top names are at the Australian Open. Even though Australia is not presently as big a tennis powerhouse as say, Russia, tradition has the AO as the first major of the year. While planning the first Grand Slam—winning all four majors in one year—Don Budge was advised to skip the Australian Championships. In 1938, Australia took several weeks to reach by steamship, and his friends warned that he was such an attraction that the Aussies would play him to death in preliminary tournaments. But Budge schemed to win all four majors before turning pro, and had to start down under—as did Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver (twice), Margaret Smith Court and Steffi Graf. [Read more]

 In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin. One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink. It was also a world in which the Queen of Hearts had a simple solution to everything. “Off with his head!” Likewise in the world currently being created by the incessant chatter of Republican presidential wannabes, small characters want to be large, grinning is a substitute for substance, and all solutions are simple.  In the inverted world of Republican primaries, our present scale of unemployment is entirely Obama’s fault. Through the looking glass on offer from Romney and company, there was no unemployment before Obama shrank the economy by excessive spending, burdensome taxation and intrusive business regulation. Down the rabbit hole into which they would have us fall, a Republican Queen of Hearts can end unemployment at a stroke by taking those three evils away. [Read more]

It is a wonderful coincidence that Muhammad Ali's 70th birthday comes the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While the two essentially ran in different circles, as it were, both were amazing parts of a time that saw America change dramatically for the better.

While yesterday saw Americans look to King's words and actions, all would be remiss to overlook what Ali did to change social and cultural norms in the United States. [Read more]

In the beginning, racial equality was not a progressive ideal. Early progressives rarely paid much attention to persecuted minorities such as blacks, Jews, American Indians, or Irish and Chinese immigrants. They focused instead on defending an oppressed majority--farmers and workers--from a predatory minority--industry titans and bankers.

When progressives in the early 20th century did address minority rights, their positions tended to reflect party affiliation rather than progressive ideology. In those days, race politics split at the party line with Republicans supporting racial equality and Democrats opposing. Class politics, on the other hand, produced internal divisions within each party.

As a result, Republican progressives tended to be concerned about racial oppression, while Democratic progressives ignored or even condoned it. When the moderately progressive Republican president Teddy Roosevelt shocked the nation by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, William Jennings Bryan, a radically progressive Democrat, publicly denounced him. [Read more]

Well, certain ignoramuses who are taking over our educational system would ban Shakespeare, amend the actual history of the United States of America and completely abolish the basic sciences that took us to the moon and enabled us to send pictures of our naked girl friends to computer users all over the world.

We have had fine discussions here at Dagblog lately concerning tenure and the banning of books and the new Texas textbooks emerging on the primary educational market today. [Read more]

It is almost impossible to understate the achievements of Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, but I'll try.

Bain capital financed a new Mall store retail chain called Staples. The idea came from two veteran Retailers. Home Depot, for example, had been in existence for over 15 years before Staples and served as a model of how a bunch of Mom and Pop building supply stores could be put out of business, products bought from China and prices reduced for the benefit of consumers. Staples is one of about fifty retail segments so reorganized and financed in the U.S. Its total sales are a fraction of Walmart, for example, and about one one thousandth of the retail sector as a whole. [Read more]

Today, the brave and serious campaign of John Huntsmann will end. And we are all the lesser for it. [Read more]

Three weeks into this weird, compacted four month NBA season, the experts who rated the Chicago Bulls less likely than the Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, and even the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship look pretty dumb.  The Bulls are 12-2 (and an eye-popping 7-2 on the road), and are easily the class of the league to this point.  Here's why the Bulls look like they are set to repeat as the best regular-season team, and have the best chance to win the 2012 NBA championship. [Read more]

Zandar, at Balloon Juice, points out that Missouri's new Creationism-in-the-schools bill, HB 1227, applies not only to K-12 schools but to the state's public colleges and universities as well. According to the bill, [Read more]

Some numbers about US medical costs came out this week.

o Last year the total was $2.6 trillion.  That's about $8,000 per person. [Read more]

In August, Standard & Poor's downgraded U.S. Treasury debt, judging our political system broken enough to create some miniscule risk of default, whereas their previous rating judged our political system a smidgen competent enough to likely avoid a miniscule risk of default.

Bondholders knew that S&P was all wet and bid up the prices of Treasuries so long as stocks looked risky.  That's what happens when you're a sovereign that controls your own currency and controls a currency that the world uses as it's reserve. [Read more]

Yes, it's FRIDAY FOLLIES!  I know, it's been a while, and I keep getting requests to bring it back so here it is.  (Two requests so far, one of them a relative, but still. . .)  I have no explanation for why I've neglected it for so long.  I could say I just wasn't feeling it but that's so unprofessional. [Read more]