As a former sojouner in the halls of spookdom, I am uncomfortable with the current trend in Washington. It appears, from these words of a wordsmith who I admire, Paul Greenberg, there are two Obamas in the Oval Office

"…the president hopped across the river to CIA headquarters at Langley to buck up our terrorist-hunters. And he did. He got cheers from the assembled CIA officers when he told them he was with them all the way. ("I know the last few days have been difficult. You need to know you've got my full support.") His pep talk would have done credit to Knute Rockne at halftime. The president assured all present that he was not going to prosecute those agents who'd waterboarded three top al-Qaida prisoners, and garnered life-saving information in the process. After all, they had every reason to believe they were acting legally and properly.

"A fair and prudent decision on the president's part: Why criminalize legal advice?

"But the Monday of the president's pep talk to the CIA was followed by a Tuesday and President Obama No. 1 was immediately replaced by President Obama No. 2, who announced that his Justice Department might just prosecute officials in the previous administration after all, including those who had advised the CIA. And who'd concluded it would be legal to use harsh measures when interrogating prisoners who might have valuable information about the next pending terrorist attack on these shores.

"(For prime example, one Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had organized the 9/11 attacks and boasted of having personally beheaded American reporter Daniel Pearl. When asked when and where the next series of attacks on this country would take place, a pre-waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would only say, ominously: "Soon, you will know.")

"But the post-waterboaded KSM was a different man. He could not have been more cooperative, revealing al-Qaida's plans for a "Second Wave" of assaults that would use "East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles ." A scheme that was duly thwarted, thank goodness. All this is according to one of those revealing Justice Department memos President Obama has just released. But none of that prevented him from accusing Americans of having lost "our moral bearings" during the war on terror."

This evokes Shades of the Church Committee which crippled the ability of the CIA to conduct on-the- ground spying and agent recruitment! In effect, the Church Committee threw people under the bus then told the survivors, "Spy but spy nice!" 9/11 was a direct result.

Your libertarian friend,

Maxim Gross
For government that
delivers the mail,
guards our shores,

Have you ever noticed how often the current President and his predecessors, Senators and Representatives toss off the line “to end our dependence on foreign oil”? Or it may be phrased, “to enable us to end our dependence on imported oil” or “to break our imported oil habit.” They mouth the phrase automatically, like programmed automatons without even thinking about it and pretend that it is a great objective of this nation. Bull s---! It was never the objective of this nation! Since Roosevelt ’s day we have planned on using foreign oil, especially Arab oil till the day the earth ends. We in this country are sitting atop vast deposits of oil and natural gas that, if exploited and extracted, would actually end our dependence on any other country. But that little catch phrase has been an excuse for all kinds of games, gargantuan expansion of government (e. g., DOE) and just about anything else the politicians wanted to use it for.

We have a big problem with energy in this country but the problem is sure as hell not caused by lack of natural resources. It’s caused by politicians charging off in all directions with absolutely no coherent plan of how to reduce or end the atmospheric pollution caused by carbon based fuels. Instead, we get hysterics from major buffoons like Al Gore who scream “we are all doomed” based on cherry-picked “facts” and a continuous propaganda machine known as the national press whipping the paranoid into hysterics and clouding or ignoring the actual science involved in the whole thing. The only message we absorb is the one that says “we’ve got to do something immediately” and in that doing, we are not supposed to stop and read the fine print and check the facts or hear opposing viewpoints. We have seen the current administration play upon our fears to cram through monumental benefits for the squeaky wheels (read “contributors”) while impoverishing future generations of Americans. So let’s get off that kick.

As these words are written, Henry Waxman et al, are writing draconian laws that will drive the costs of everything, fuel, electricity and food to untold heights. They intend to penalize everyone and everything that produces carbon dioxide with the objective of “encouraging the use of alternative fuels.” The biggest problem with what they are doing is that there are no alternative fuels. And what’s more, there are yet none on the horizon. So what the politicians are doing is writing laws to enable themselves to tell us what to do and how to do it while collecting taxes with which to promote their favorite toys and pet projects. Right now, half our electricity in this country comes from coal-fired generating plants. Clean Coal? What a marvelous idea! Too damned bad there is no such thing!

What do we have as alternatives? Ethanol, the moonshine they’re cooking up in those great huge stills in corn country and getting subsidized with taxpayer money? It actually aggravates California ’s smog problem!

Windmills? The Big O says he’s going to double the output of those things in the next two years. Sure, why not? Bush did. But if he doubles the output in two years and continues to double the output every two years, its going to be decades before they supply enough juice for a quarter of what they are suppose to support. And windmills generate electricity only 25% of the time! What do we use to provide power when the wind doesn’t blow? Solar cells? Yep, as long as the sun is up and there are no clouds. Some very clever people are working on ways to store electricity by various means including using microbes to eat electricity and emit methane which can be used when the windmills aren’t turning. How far away is that? Who knows? And wouldn’t you know it, already the solar people are catching Billy Hell from the Greens for bulldozing thousands of acres and putting up thousands of solar cells displacing cute fuzzy little animals from their homes. Whoops, here we are, right back to relying on coal fired generators!

There are 30 some-odd American nuclear generating plants now in the planning stage. Obviously, nukes are the way to go if you don’t want to pollute the air. And let’s face it kids, we have got to stop polluting the air someday or we’ll (or more likely our descendants) strangle on our own mucous. How long will it take for those plants to be built and go into business? If you’re religious, now’s the time to say “Only God knows.” The truth is that it will take decades to get those nukes on line after they get the red tape out of the way sometime in the uncertain future, move the environmental protestors out of the way so they can scrape off the land so foundations can be poured, and actually build the blasted things. Spent nuke material disposal you ask? Sure it’s a problem, a political problem, not a technical one. We’ve had the ability to safely store it underground for many years, but digging the inside out of a mountain is a piece of cake compared to convincing the guy in the street he isn’t going to glow in the dark.

What I’m saying is this. There is no coherent plan for “weaning” ourselves from carbon based fuels. Obviously, the nasty old coal burners could be replaced with natural gas burners and we’d gain a couple of steps on the pollution problem. But natural gas is a fossil fuel itself, cleaner, but not all the way. When are the nukes coming on line? Has anyone inside the Beltway even thought of putting together a schedule? We know that ethanol is an abject failure and there is no other fuel even envisaged to be available in the foreseeable future to take the place of gasoline and diesel fuel for transportation. So we are looking for oil and gas to get us around for the next half-century as a minimum. Sure, we can make vehicles more efficient and even ExxonMobile is working on that one along with a lot of other folks because it will actually work and it doesn't have to be subsidized!

And by the way, while Henry Waxman is driving us into penury with cap and trade or something equally pointless, China and India are trying to raise their eleventy gazillion poor people up to middle class status and pouring out terratons of coal smoke, even more than we ever did. Did you know that some 25% of LA’s smog is coming from China ? So the fact is, we could shut down all our generating plants, all our industries, park all our SUVs, tractors, bulldozers, 18-wheelers, locomotives and tamp out our camp fires and sit around and freeze to death in the dark, it wouldn’t reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere by 1%.

Why do I say that? Back in 2000, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. “of the 160 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere annually, only about seven billions tons are anthropogenic, or human caused.” That’s a lousy 4.375 % of the total that's caused by humans. Where does the other 95.625 % come from? It occurs naturally, volcanoes and all that sort of thing. At the time, everyone in the world was pointing at the United States and shrieking that we were responsible for 25 % of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide. So had we been seized by a great spasm of conscience, shut the country completely down and meekly died in our beds from starvation and killed the greatest creator of wealth the Earth has ever seen, we would have reduced the world’s carbon dioxide annual production rate by 1 %.

And now, China has overtaken us in carbon dioxide output. And when is it the Chinese are going to do something about their contribution? Huh? I didn’t hear you!

The bottom line of what I’m saying is this: There is no plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels other than make them so expensive to use, our standard of living goes straight to hell and we end up a third-world country. If our government is as wonderful and heaven-sent as we are told, why can’t they come up with a schedule for doing all these things in some kind of a logical sequence that won’t completely deep-six our economy and allow us to continue to be a world leader. The Greenland ice gap is melting at the rate of .04% per century. We have time to deal with the problem. Let’s get rid of the coal, or by some miracle clean it up (and I don’t believe in miracles), substitute natural gas for the coal until sufficient nukes come on line. While this is happening, improve the efficiency of transportation modes to use less fuel, improve homes and buildings to make them as self-supporting as possible with solar panels and start reducing our energy needs in some carefully-controlled 50-year sequence which maintains our quality of life and lets us all plan for the long haul and for our grandchildren and their children. But we are told we have to suffer to do this? That’s bulls--- coming out of a politician’s mouth, not the mouths of the kind of people who built this country and continue to make the wheels go round!

Trying to solve a world problem that has been developing for centuries in 100 days or even in four years makes no sense. Let’s get real, folks.

Your libertarian friend,

Maxim Gross
For free markets,
and unfettered science.

“Did you catch the Big O grinning in Hugo Chavez’s face at the conference?” I asked Max.

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “But he made up for it. He had lunch with Uribe and they worked something out.”

“You’re talking about Columbia ’s President?"

“Verily! It looks like they are going to get the Columbia free trade agreement off the ground,” Max said, smiling. “It is very important to Columbia and they are still on our side, unlike those idiots from Nicaragua or Bolivia .”

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that. What’s his name, Ortega, going into a big rant about the US of A and that paranoid idiot Morales going on about a conspiracy or something. I wanted Obama to tell Ortega to shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

Max laughed. “Obama’s too concerned about his international image to do something like that. I fondly remember Spain ’s president telling Chavez to shut up, and he got away with it. But the trade agreement has been stuck on dead center and it looks like they may be getting something going. If so, that fatuous conference actually accomplished something and we can mark up one in the good column for Obama.”

“He needs one in the good column after worrying us to death with all that damned spending,” I mumbled. “Did you get a look at the market today? Bank of America reported a first quarter profit of $4.2 billion and their stock dropped 24%. The Dow itself dropped off 290 points. Geez!”

“Some pro-trade Democrats have been down in Columbia doing some chit chat,” Max said. “I think they’ve been doing some low-profile groundwork with the Columbians.”

“You mean there are some Democrats who aren’t against free trade?”

“You have to remember the House Blue Dogs still know what it takes to create wealth, plugging away, letting the big-mouthed lefties get all the ink but doing what’s important.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I sighed.

“So not all is lost,” Max smiled. “It may be unfashionable to admit it, but someone has to make enough profit to pay for Obama’s plans.”

“I hear that. But I wonder what was in that book that Chavez gave Obama. Was it something he wrote himself?”

“If it was, it must be the most forgettable book anyone ever wasted paper on,” Max chuckled. “That thug probably never had an original thought in his life.”

“I’ll bet some poor Venezuelan person somewhere is doing without toilet paper because that book was printed,” I speculated.

“How clever!” Max remarked. “An apt extrapolation.”

“Thank you,” I said

“Max, the scientists have reached new, undreamed-of heights. I just read of a triumph of imagination, intelligence and daring which may solve one of the problems with renewable energy sources you have been fretting about.”

Max looked at me with his left eyebrow raised, a sure tip-off he didn’t believe a thing I was saying.

He grunted, “When you walk in spouting hyperbole I know you’re up to something.” Putting down his newspaper and settling back in his chair, he said, “Okay, let’s have it. What caprice, outrage or sheer act of lunacy is in the headlines now?”

I answered with a flourish, “A scientific team at Penn State has discovered a microorganism that eats electricity and farts methane.”

Max looked stunned for a moment then threw back his head and guffawed. “That beats the hell out of the microbe that ate grass and crapped diesel fuel!” he roared, slapping his thigh. Suddenly, his smile faded and he snapped, “Wait a minute, you’re talking about a storage medium for electrical power!”

“You got it,” I chuckled. “The idea is the little devils would gobble up excess power generated by windmills or solar panels, emit methane which would be piped to storage, then after the sun goes down and the wind dies, they burn the methane to drive backup generators. How about that?”

“That’s outrageous!” he replied. Then he looked serious and leaned forward. “Tell me about it. Who came up with this?”

“A Penn State team under a fellow named Bruce Logan found out about it, or actually they just used something already in the body of knowledge.. They mixed up a culture of organisms.” I looked at the page in my hand. “The main one is something called Methanobacterium palustre and they planted it on the cathode of an electrolytic cell. It took in electrons and emitted methane.”

“Sounds like a science fiction story,” Max chuckled. "Something like the Andromeda Strain."

I read from the printout. “And Tom Curtis at Newcastle University in the UK has validated the idea. ‘Using microorganisms is a big plus,’ he says. '(Unlike catalytic converters) there are no noble metals involved, so it should be very cheap.’ And he goes on to say that burning the methane will give back 80% of the original energy. That’s pretty darned efficient.”

“How far away is this technique from being useable in the real world?” Max asked, again raising his eyebrow.

“Well, Logan thinks it’s just a few years down the road.”

“Since hydrogen isn’t working out like I hoped it would, maybe this is the answer,” Max mused, looking thoughtful. “But as you know, there has to be plenty of unknowns to deal with yet. Like calculating how many pounds of that bug it will take to absorb several thousand kilowatt hours of juice at a time and still keep its digestive system fully functional. There’s also the complications of cultivating all that bacteria and housing it properly. I hope this palustre bug is benign and won’t start something we can’t control.”

“I’ve already thought of that, Max. I’m in the concept stage of a screenplay for a really bad B-grade horror movie.”

“Oh no!”

“Yes. Get this! A freak wind runs a wind farm in the desert at max capacity for weeks on end without a pause. The bugs eat all the electricity they get, they grow and want more. The whole colony goes out of control. Then, the containment breaks down and the great mass of bugs escapes, looking for an even bigger source of power. The bugs attack Hoover Dam, latch on to its output and start sucking it up! Las Vegas goes dark. There’s a panic, people and showgirls and gamblers and hookers running around willy nilly….”

“That’s enough!” Max shouted, holding up his hand in the 'stop' gesture. I think I’ve seen that picture already, back in the ‘50s. Besides, I’m already thinking about the electrical storage angle. If it has potential, the oil companies will start putting money into it. Keep your ears open for an IPO!”

“Good ol’ Max,” I said, “true to his free enterprise roots.”

“Just thinking of greening the planet!” he replied, striking a noble pose.

“You disappeared for a few days, Max,” I said when he answered the front door. “Where in hell have you been?”

“I had to take care of some business down in Louisiana , if it’s any business of yours,” he replied sarcastically.

“More than likely monkey business,” I sneered.

He smiled and said, “To each his own.”

Giving up on getting any juicy information out of him I asked, “Do anything interesting there?”

“I woke up Sunday morning and found myself in a pleasant little French Quarter hotel in the Big Easy,” he replied. “So I grabbed a Times-Picayune and got some cafe-au-lait and a couple of beignets and caught up on what was going on in town. Right off, I ran across a story with one of your favorite people in a starring role, so I brought you a copy.”

“How kind of you; no doubt a story about graft and skullduggery?”

Max laughed. “How’d you guess?”

I looked at the story and, of course, it dealt with Ray Nagin and certain other luminaries that held Hizzoner’s job before him. It seems that sub-contractors to city prime contractors have been getting away with the family silver for some time. It started off by mentioning Stan “Pampy” Barre’, a pal of former mayor Marc Morial who took kickbacks from subcontractors that he steered to the city’s energy-efficient contractor, Johnson Controls. It also mentioned former City Councilman Oliver Thomas who went to prison after being caught taking bribes from Barre’, who wanted the councilman to help him hold on to a subcontract to run a series of downtown parking lots. It also mentioned a grand jury investigating post-Katrina work done for the Sewerage and Water Board by a subcontractor, with “close ties” to a Water Board member, who was paid for work never done.

The stuff most recently hit the fan when it was disclosed that a subcontractor, Net Methods, had paid for a trip to Hawaii for Ray Nagin and his family and city Chief Technology Officer Greg Meffert and his family. Nagin’s defense was that there was no direct business between Net Methods and the city, therefore no harm was done. (The citizens of the Big Easy were being asked by Nagin to believe the trip offer was made merely out of the generosity of Net Methods’ municipally-minded CEO and had no connection to business.)

Up to then, all subcontractors’ names never seemed to make their way into the public domain and were invisible for all practical purposes. The upshot is that now certain heavy-hitters are demanding that the law be changed to ensure sub-contractors be named for all city contracts.

I put the paper down and shook my head.

“Did you notice that neither the city nor FEMA are able to name the subcontractors?” Max asked. “It seems they don’t have the resources to go that deep.”

“Yes, I saw that,” I replied. “I think they said it would place an undue burden on their civil-servant staff.”

“Yeah,” Max laughed. “All those deadbeats on the payroll would actually have to show up for work.”

“It’s good to know that some things never change, Max,” I said.

When I walked in, Max was at his desk with sheaves of paper all over the place.

“What in the world are you doing?” I asked.

He replied brightly, “I have been looking at some of the recent polls and they are very interesting. For one thing, we atheists are growing in numbers.”

“No kidding?” I said. “People getting disillusioned?”

“This poll doesn’t give reasons, just the changes in numbers and percentages. It’s based on the changes in numbers between 1990 and 2008. The “No religion” group went from 8.2% of the population to 15%. How ‘bout that? Some folks have stopped buying the ol’ pitch.”

“What happened to the churched?”

“The Papists dropped from 26.2% of the population to 25.1%. But that means there are still 57.2 million of them. Actually, they are not all Papists to be entirely truthful. Those figures include the Greek and Eastern Rite Catholics as well.”

“How’d the Protestants do?”

“The mainline Protestants dropped from 18.7% to 12.9% of the population. You guys aren’t doing too well it appears. Somebody’s on to you.”

I ignored his sarcasm and asked, “Did any group add people?”

“The new movements, like the Wiccans and other newbies added four tenths of a percentage point. They are now 2.8% of the population, not enough to intimidate anyone. And of course, the Eastern religions and the Muslims grew. Oh, yeah, the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements grew by three tenths of one percent of the population.”

“I assume you have an interpretation of these Earth-shaking changes?”

“No, not really,” he answered, sighing. “These numbers are too small to pronounce doom over any of your arcane sects. It looks like religion is going to go sputtering on, looking for a messiah.”

“But by the way, come to think of it.” He rummaged in some papers. “The Papists are changing the way they look at things. According to a Gallup poll, 54% of Catholics say homosexual relations are morally acceptable.”

“Holy cow!” I blurted, “if you’ll pardon the religious expression, that’s a surprise.”

“It’s especially shocking when you compare that number to only 45% of non-Catholics who think the same way. And get this: 67% of Catholics say premarital sex is morally acceptable compared to 57% of non-Catholics,” Max said with a chuckle.

“Good night nurse!” I exclaimed. What’s the world coming to?”

Max put his fingers together in front of his chest, pointing upward, like when he’s about to deliver a great truth.

“I’d say that modern times with its dropped pretenses and free and open communications are pulling the old church out of the 16th century, in fact it’s pulling a lot of churches into the 21st century.”

“Are we growing increasingly immoral?” I wondered.

Max smiled and said, “That’s a big question and the answer depends on whom you query. For example, the Rasmussan poll just announced that 60% of voters now have an unfavorable opinion of Nancy Pelosi.”

“Land o’ Goshen !” I exclaimed.

“Not only that,” Max went on, “that includes 42% who say their view is ‘very unfavorable.’”

“The Almighty has not totally abandoned us,” I said, looking skyward piously.

“You Republicans!” he exclaimed. “Still grasping at straws.”

I had been busy for a couple of days and hadn’t seen Max so I stopped in his place on my way home from my daily workout. He was watching the toob when I went in and he hit the mute button.

“Have you been watching the President’s town hall meeting in Europe ?” he asked, smiling.

“No, I have been busy in the perspiring arts and have denied myself that pleasure,” I replied.

Max smiled smugly and said, “Our glorious leader observed that the per capita carbon footprint in the United States is too large compared to China and India and we are going to have to reduce it to set an example for those countries.”

I was stunned for a moment. I finally gathered myself together, trying to think of something profound to say and finally uttered, “You’re shitting me, Max!”

Max laughed out loud. “No really, that’s what he said. I wouldn’t make that up, it’s too damned ridiculous.”

I started talking but had to slow down because I wasn’t making sense. Finally I said, “But China is catching up to us on CO2 emissions if they haven’t already passed us and they’ve got over four times the population that we do. Good grief! They could increase their CO2 output four times and we’d still have a bigger per capita footprint!”

“To be precise, our measly population will divide into theirs 4.2 times,” he corrected.

“I can’t believe he actually said that on television, Max,” I blurted. “Surely to God he knows we can’t get our carbon footprint smaller than theirs on a per capita basis.”

Max chuckled. “Tell me again about that course you wanted to teach over at A & M. What was it called, ‘How to Lie with Statistics?’”

“Yeah, that was it. The Dean was blue nosed and didn’t want the title appearing in the business school catalog.”

“It would have been a big draw on registration day,” Max opined.

“No doubt,” I agreed, sighing. “But back to China ; already something like 780,000 people die every year in that country from the industrial pollution and 25% of the smog in Los Angeles already comes from China ! Those guys could put out pollution, CO2, methane, sulfur dioxide, particulates and Heaven knows what else, people would be dying in the streets coughing themselves to death, babies would be suffocating in their cribs and the ones that survived infancy would grow up with lungs that look like a coal miner’s, and our per person carbon footprint would still be bigger!”

“But we’re talking about hope and change,” Max said, coyly. “That excuses a lot of things.”

“And I thought George Bush was an idiot when he signed off on that ethanol bill,” I said, collapsing into a chair. “I expect Al Jolson to jump up grinning and say, “Folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”