Andrea Mitchell attacked by Republican balloons 

Today's links and ideas 

It's super-hot here in Calif today. Oy!

If you read one political article today, read this explanation of community service by Time's Joe Klein. Yesterday two Republicans, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin, mocked Obama for giving three years to community service betw college and law school. I wondered too what it meant, when I read this piece I couldn't believe how sloppy the Republicans were. This is exactly what McCain says people should do, and we all agree that giving to your country is a very American value. They should retract and apologize, and Republicans who applauded this should be ashamed. It's hugely hypocritical. The Republicans have been evangelizing faith-based community initiatives for decades, it's a big Republican thing -- what the heck do you think Obama was doing! Geez. Walk this one back, and vet your ideas before you run them in front of 40 million people. The corporate media hasn't figured this one out yet, but they will.

I wish more conservatives would write pieces like this. We agree on more than we disagree. I'm not voting for McCain for the exact reason he says he's reluctant to. "The only real risk in voting McCain-Palin -- and it's a huge one, possibly the biggest one -- is putting into office a bellicose, perhaps reckless, president." Yup. I've been impressed with how thoughtful and competent Obama is. That's why he's got my support. I also think our country is up shit's creek unless we can upgrade our economy, and to do so we need health and education, and that means public spending. It's not as if the Republicans don't believe in public spending, they do -- they just waste the money on destroying communities overseas. I want us to borrow to build strength here at home. I don't see it as a liberal vs conservative thing, rather a smart vs dumb thing.

When I was in Salt Lake City in August, I heard that ridership on their high speed rail link to Ogden (or is it Provo) went way up when gas prices went up. To me that says we need higher gas prices. Yes, we should help people cope with the economic hardship that causes, but we should build more of those high speed links. We need to reconfigure our geography in the US, we're totally set up for a cheap gasoline economy. If you can do that without government spending, let's go, but we've got to do it. The people who say we can drill our way out of this are wrong, we can't. Even if we had massive oil reserves, we can't afford to pump more carbon into the atmosphere than we are now.

Dell shipped their first netbook today. This is the hot new category. I have one, an Asus, and I love it. They're cheap, you can buy a Dell for under $400. Their netbooks only have 16GB of disk (and it's solid state, not really a disk). I think they're protecting (or trying to protect) their laptops. Others, such as the MSI Wind, have 80GB hard drives. They all come with either Windows XP or some flavor of Linux. HP and Acer also make netbooks. When oh when will Apple offer one? These beauties make the MacBook Air look like an overpriced albatross and as long as you use Firefox, you won't have the usual malware problems of Windows (or such has been my experience so far).