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...useful antidote to the current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing the other side make its case. The recent televised meeting between Obama and the House Republican leadership was a reminder that honest but civil debate can show people that their side isn't infallible and that not everyone on the other side is evil and foolish. (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House...
Above all, new Perots would remind Washington that although Americans disagree on lots of things, the country isn't as divided as its capital. Every four or eight years, a new President gets elected by pledging to bring the country together. And every time he fails, the pressure on our two-party system builds. When government acts to solve problems, even if the solutions aren't perfect, it breaks the vicious circle of political failure and mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of government's role - Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans' health care system...
...President is ignoring a much fresher debate: between theory and reality. Even if Obama were correct that a nuclear rebirth is needed to address the climate crisis - and he isn't correct - the fact is that the rebirth isn't happening. Despite the prospect of new taxpayer guarantees - and the cradle-to-grave subsidies that already support this 50-year-old industry at the federal and state level - utilities keep scrapping or delaying plans for new reactors...
...cents per kilowatt-hour, about four times the cost of producing juice with new wind or coal plants, or 10 times the cost of reducing the need for electricity through investments in efficiency. Nuclear energy is much cleaner than coal, and it provides baseload power when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, so it sounds like a sensible way to accommodate increasing electricity demand. But it's not nearly as sensible or feasible or affordable as decreasing electricity demand altogether...
Perhaps this isn't surprising. With the economy shaken and unemployment sky-high, with the federal debt mounting by the trillion as Washington politicians pay lip service to fiscal responsibility (picture a sermon on humility delivered by Shaquille O'Neal), an outbreak of outrage was inevitable. The Tea Party movement is just one expression of a vast discontent unsettling the country. Recent polls have found that two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as dissatisfied or angry with their government - a huge, not-so-silent majority that ranges from conservatives convinced that Obama is a Maoist to liberals convinced that...