The United States has overtaken Germany to become the largest producer of wind energy in the world, generating enough capacity to eliminate the burning of 91 million barrels of oil per year.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), US wind producers reports a third consecutive record year of growth in 2008. The country now has an installed wind power capacity well in excess of 21,000 megawatts (MW), enough to supply electricity to over 5.5 million American homes.

According to Randall Swisher, AWEA Executive Director, “Wind energy installations are well ahead of the curve for contributing 20% of the U.S. electric power supply by 2030 as envisioned by the U.S. Department of Energy.”

This is good for the US economy in several ways.  First, it means a reduction of our need for foreign oil.  Second, the wind industry is one of the few sectors of our economy where jobs are being gained not lost. Wind power continued to provide a critically important stimulus to the faltering U.S. economy this year.  In the midst of the economic meltdown, the wind industry remained a bright spot as at least 50 new, expanded or announced wind-related manufacturing facilities were noted all across the nation.  Between the first quarter and third quarter of 2008, this expansion created 9,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone.  Also, in 2008, the wind industry invested more than $15 billion in domestic wind farm construction, which added thousands more domestic employees in construction and operations.

Now imagine if we had an entire large-scale green economy - creating jobs, revenue, and helping to make America safer and stronger.  Its not a bad concept and its time we adopt this vision.

What are the roots of the terror attack by Pakistani members of LAT that took place in India last month? Sociologists who explore the roots of hate, often mention the socialization of youth as an early harbinger of things to come.

The Times of India reports, “One factor that has played a crucial role in creating this culture of hate is the educational policy of the government of Pakistan pursued since 1977. The officially prescribed textbooks, especially for school students, are full of references that promote hate against India in general, and Hindus in particular.”

In militant regimes it is common to find references to the leader within textbooks. School children in Saddam’s Iraq were required to sing songs which praised the dictator. Textbooks were filled with stories glorifying him and demeaning to the enemies of Iraq. But isn’t Pakistan a democracy? Or at least, sorta a democracy?

Leading Pakistani educationist Tariq Rahman wrote, “It is a fact that the textbooks cannot mention Hindus without calling them cunning, scheming, deceptive or something equally insulting. Students are taught and made to believe that Pakistan needs strong and aggressive policies against India or else Pakistan will be annihilated by it.”

Yes, this is a problem.

On Monday, more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal sludge burst through a retention wall in eastern Tennessee, causing massive property and environmental damage and leaving residents holding their breath over possible long-term consequences. Environmentalists said the spill was more than 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The incident underscored the false nature of the “clean coal” propaganda.

There is no such thing as clean coal. Sadly, it takes a coal incident of such massive scale for people to realize this fundamental truth.

The spill occurred at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) generating plant about 40 miles west of Knoxville on the banks of the Emory River, which feeds into the Clinch and then the Tennessee River just downstream.

The spill reignited a debate over whether the federal government should regulate coal ash as a hazardous material. Similar ponds and mounds of ash exist at hundreds of coal plants nationwide.

The TVA has issued no warnings about the potential dangers of the spill, saying there was as yet no evidence of toxins. “Most of that material is inert,” said Gilbert Francis Jr., a TVA spokesman. “It does have some heavy metals within it, but it’s not toxic or anything.”

On Christmas Day, the New York Times reports, “Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can cause cancer and neurological problems. But with no official word on the dangers of the sludge in Tennessee, displaced residents spent Christmas Eve worried about their health and their property, and wondering what to do.”

Instead of celebrating this holiday season with family, residents of eastern Tennessee are pondering their future. Not only are their homes in jeopardy, but their health will be uncertain after breathing in the dangerous fumes.

According to the Hold the Carbon blog, “At Hold the Carbon, we believe the nation needs to invest all possible resources into clean energy - not clean coal. Its one of the primary reasons we have developed a 100% PETE reusable bag. Plastic bags are made of petroleum, and oil-based substance that fosters our reliance on more and more oil. The time has come for us to get away from oil and coal. The costs - human and environmental - are simply too high.”

The rap against bloggers and citizen journalist members is that they aren’t real journalists. I still have trouble defining what a real journalist means other than to stay you work for a member of the establishment media. Unless you live in Zimbabwe where one needs a license to be a journalist, the definition of one has always been rather tough to pin down. I suppose there are different metrics to use when comparing the two. Recently, the Committee to Project Journalists released some very revealing data. For the first time there are more online and than print journalists in prison.

The report from the committee to protect journalists says that:

45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors. Online journalists represent the largest professional category for the first time in CPJ’s prison census.

Not surprisingly, China continued to be world’s worst jailer of journalists, a dishonor it has held for 10 consecutive years. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five jailers from among the 29 nations that imprison journalists. Each of the top five nations has persistently placed among the world’s worst in detaining journalists.

What is the significance of this story? It means that foreign governments do not care if you are a blogger or a CBS Bureau Chief. They are aware that the web has democratized information and that news gather and reporting has changed.

Why is it that the Christmas season brings out the crazies just as much as it does those with good intentions? The coal industry is at it again, this time trying to further the myth of ‘clean coal.’ For the record, there is no such thing as clean coal. But don’t expect a little thing like the truth stop the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a front group for the coal industry. This latest PR ploy features animated lumps of coal singing Christmas carols with the wording changed to deliver pro-coal propaganda.

As the Center for Media and Democracy Found: The “Clean coal carolers” video appears on the ACCCE website, which lets you adorn each lump of coal with a festive holiday cap or scarf, and then have them sing a song of your choosing, from options that include “Clean Coal Night,” “Abundant, Affordable,” “O’ Technology” and “Deck the Halls.”

Here’s a sample of the lyrics to “Frosty the Coalman”:

Frosty the Coalman is a jolly happy soul.
He’s abundant here in America, and he helps our economy roll.
Frosty the Coalman’s getting cleaner every day.
He’s affordable and adorable and helps workers keep their pay.
There must have been some magic in clean coal technology,
for when they looked for pollutants there were nearly none to see.

Today is “Day Without a Gay Day,” a somewhat loosely organized protest aimed at recent anti-gay legislation like California’s Proposition 8 and Arkansas’ heinous adoption ban. The idea is simple:  On December 10, 2008 the gay community will take a historic stance against hatred by donating love to a variety of different causes.  On December 10, you are encouraged not to call in sick to work. You are encouraged to call in “gay”–and donate your time to service!

According to the Chicago Tribune, some are urging gay people to cease any and all economic activity for the day, also, in hopes of hitting haters in the purse as well. It’s a novel shift to “We’re queer, we’re not here, do you really want to get used to it?”

How well will this work? It’s tough to say. Participation in something like this depends heavily on getting the word out. Nut it can help to raise awareness for the gay community to pressing issues like the gay marriage ban movements across the country.

In today’s New York Times, William Ayers at last responds to right-wing attacks of him as an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” and other allegations tossed his way during the presidential campaign.

While this would have been far more powerful if it was published, or if he spoke out during the election, Ayers makes clear he had no interest of voluntarily thrusting himself into the vortex of presidential politics. Unlike Sarah Palin, perhaps this will put to ease in the minds of Americans who still worry about the “associations” of our next President.

Here is the text of the article:

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

50 votes. That is all the separates Al Franken from Norm Coleman, according the Franken campaign attorney Marc Elias. The closest Senate race in US history may very well come down to the very last voted counted.

Almost 200 ballots were ‘found’ today in one democratic leaning county and that is sure to add to Franken’s totals.

Politico is reporting:

Today’s announcement from Elias comes as election officials from Ramsey County have found 171 ballots that went uncounted Election Night at one of the county’s precincts, which has netted Franken an additional 37 votes. Ramsey County is one of the more reliable Democratic strongholds in Minnesota.

The votes are currently being tallied in the recount.

With over 91 percent of the vote recounted, the secretary of state’s official tally shows Coleman up by 340 votes. But Elias argued the number is misleading, given that none of the 5,952 disputed ballots are included in that tally. The Coleman campaign has challenged 191 more ballots than Franken’s team, skewing the results in its favor.

Elias said, based on the Franken campaign’s own count, they believe they have picked up 165 votes so far on Coleman so far.

“We’re confident we’re going to gain votes when the challenges are resolved because we believe our challenges are of a higher quality [than Coleman’s],” said Franken attorney Marc Elias. “The vast majority of these challenges are going to be thrown out.”

Franken’s campaign team is also attempting to count absentee ballots that it believes were wrongly rejected. About 9,000 absentee ballots were rejected, and Elias believes up to 1,000 of them were rejected unfairly.

At 10:40am EST on Monday, President-Elect Obama will introduce his national security team. He’s retaining Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon and is naming retired Marine Gen. James Jones as national security adviser. Then there is the matter of Secretary of State.

The negotiations are complete and a deal has been finalized. Hillary Clinton will be named to that all-important post, cementing the ‘team of rivals’ cabinet.

Here’s the full text of the internal agreement:

“At the request of President-elect Obama, and to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest between the work of President Clinton and the service of Hillary Clinton should she be nominated and confirmed as Secretary of State, President Clinton is taking the following steps above and beyond the requirements of current laws and regulations.

— The Clinton Foundation will publish the names of everyone who has contributed since its founding in 1997 (this year).

— Should Senator Clinton be nominated and confirmed as Secretary of State, during her time of service, the Foundation will also publish the names of everyone who contributes going forward on an annual basis.

— The Foundation will separately incorporate CGI [the Clinton Global Initiative] from the Foundation; President Clinton will continue to host CGI gatherings, such as the one in NYC and its meetings for college and university students, as Founding Chairman of CGI.

— Although President Clinton will continue to invite participants to CGI events (which involves normal registration fees), he will not solicit ’sponsorship’ contributions for CGI.

— CGI will also not host annual events outside the US and CGI will not solicit or accept foreign government contributions.

— Given the extensive and life-saving work of the Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Initiative which can and should continue, the Foundation will continue to fulfill its commitments funded by foreign governments (including, among others, Sweden Norway, France, Great Britain). In the event an existing contributing country chooses to substantially increase its commitment, or a new country, or government-owned entity, decides to contribute, the Foundation will share such proposed contributions with the State Department ethics officials. State may also share the issue to the WH Counsel’s office for review. To whatever extent there are conflict of interest concerns raised about such potential contributions related to Senator Clinton’s service as Secretary, they will be conveyed to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation for appropriate action.

— Same procedure to be followed for any foreign country contributors to CCI [Clinton Climate Initiative], CGSCI [Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative] and CHDI [Clinton Hunter Development Initiative].

— Regarding President Clinton’s private work, during her tenure, President Clinton will share proposed hosts of speeches with the State Department ethics officials for their review, and as appropriate for review by the White House Counsel. Again, should there be conflict of interest concerns related to the Senator’s anticipated service as Secretary, they will share those concerns with Senator and President Clinton for appropriate action.

— During her tenure as Secretary of State, should she be nominated and confirmed, President Clinton will share any proposed consultant relationships with State Department ethics officials, and the same procedures outlined above will apply here as well.

“None of these protocols is required by any law, and all of them go above and beyond the requirements of the law to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. The procedures are, of course, in addition, to the already extensive laws and regulations government the activities of spouses of federal officials (such as those outlined in 5 USC 208 and related regulations).”

President-Elect Barack Obama is looking to extend his Cabinet from a Team of Rivals to a bi-partisan team as well. Roberts Gates will remain as Defense Secretary. Considering who he replaced, Gates has served with nobility and humility, two characteristics lacking from Donald Rumsfeld. He will work well with the Obama team.

From US News and World Report:

Print and broadcast media are reporting that Defense Secretary Bob Gates will continue on in the Obama Administration for at least one year. ABC World News reported Gates “will stay on for at least the first year of the new Obama Administration.” NBC Nightly News also said Gates “will now likely remain in office at the Pentagon for at least another year,” while the CBS Evening News reported “the official announcement is expected early next week. The Chicago Tribune also reports the story.

On its front page, the Washington Post reports, “Some sources described a ‘rolling transition,’ in which Gates would stay on during a phased changeover of key political appointees at the Pentagon. Others said he could stay in the job indefinitely.” The Politico says “Gates has been negotiating with Obama emissaries over his deputies” and “how the Pentagon will be run.” The Wall Street Journal also reports the story.

Media analyses last night and this morning generally praised Gates’ performance at DOD, and cast Obama’s decision in markedly positive terms. The Chicago Tribune reports that “along with his non-partisan appeal, Gates is valued as a careful steward whose execution of White House policy.”

The Politico reports “the selection of a member of President George W. Bush’s inner circle allows Obama to deliver on his promise of a bipartisan Cabinet, even though Gates has an intelligence background and has not been an active Republican.”

CNN’s The Situation Room reported Gates’ “appeal…is obvious. He’s probably the most admired member of the Bush cabinet, winning plaudits for his pragmatic approach and willingness to hold people accountable.” On its front page, the New York Times reports, “Some Democrats who have advised his campaign quietly complained that he was undercutting his own message and risked alienating war critics who formed his initial base of support.”

Also on its front page, the Washington Post reports the move could “probably disappoint some on the left of the Democratic Party, who would prefer a clear and sharp break with Bush-era policies.” Bloomberg News, AP, AFP and Washington Times also report the story.

On MSNBC’s Hardball, Richard Wolffe of Newsweek said Gates “has been trying to maneuver for this one for a long time. He got a lot of support on the Hill. He convinced the incoming Administration.”