That, and it’s a slow news day.

Let us think of more awesome things. The sinking of the Titanic must have been awesome, for example. Pickett’s Charge. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Great white sharks. Awesome.

We have already described the importance of the environmental impact of climate policy. It has an important competitive impact as well. If the U.S. fails to adopt an economy-wide carbon abatement program, we will continue to cede leadership in energy technology to other nations. The U.S. is now home to only two of the ten largest solar Photo-Voltaic producers in the world, two of the top ten wind turbine producers and one of the top ten advanced battery manufacturers. That is, only one-sixth of the top renewable energy manufacturers are based in the United States. To lose our advantage in technologies that were pioneered in the U.S. may cost us dearly if not reversed.

Sustainable technologies in solar, wind, electric vehicles, nuclear and other innovations will, in the view of many on our board, drive the future global economy. We can either invest in policies to build U.S. leadership in these new industries and jobs today, or we can continue with business as usual and buy windmills from Europe, batteries from Japan and solar panels from Asia.

The new green economy could be transformational for our country. Compare it to the internet. Fifteen years ago there was no web browser. There was no internet at your fingertips, no ecommerce, no search engines. Now, the internet has transformed our lives: how we learn and inform, how we entertain and communicate, how we buy and sell goods. Today, the internet economy is estimated at $1 trillion with 1.5 billion internet users worldwide—and growing.

The new green economy has greater potential. Energy is a large and growing global market with 4 billion users of electricity—and usage doubling in 25 years. It is perhaps the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century. With the right policies driving innovation and investment, America can retake the lead in energy technology and create millions of new green jobs and industries, preserve millions of indirect jobs and repower our economy.

Unfortunately, that’s a lot harder to chant than “drill, baby, drill,” and it won’t fit on a bumper sticker.

In recent years China has been moving ahead of us in green technology. James Fallows has written some articles for The Atlantic on this; see especially “China’s Silver Lining” from the June 2008 issue. Yes, China has been a horrific polluter. But in his column Friedman quotes Hal Harvey, the chief executive of ClimateWorks:

“They want to be leaders in green technology. China has already adopted the most aggressive energy efficiency program in the world. It is committed to reducing the energy intensity of its economy — energy used per dollar of goods produced — by 20 percent in five years. They are doing this by implementing fuel efficiency standards for cars that far exceed our own and by going after their top thousand industries with very aggressive efficiency targets. And they have the most aggressive renewable energy deployment in the world, for wind, solar and nuclear, and are already beating their targets.”

Although Friedman is not clear in exactly what we are lagging behind, we are apparently lagging behind Japan, Europe, and China (in that order) in something related to new energy technology.

Why is it so hard for us to commit to even keeping up with green technology? Oh, yes. We have to fight the Right about it.

Remember when that great meathead Reagan — excuse me, Saint Ronald of Blessed Memory — ripped the solar panels off the White House? That signaled to the Right that to be pro-environment is to be a wuss, and possibly a liberal-socialist wuss. I might argue that this works for manufacturers too, but … what manufacturers? Do we still have any?

Anyway, I think 99 percent of the Right’s pathological refusal to back anything with the prefixes “enviro-” or “eco-” attached to them dates to that. Their lips would curl up and fall off their faces if they had to admit maybe, about something, Jimmy Carter was right and Reagan was wrong. They’ll pawn the whole bleeping country to China first.

Update: A consensus is forming on the Right that Sarah Palin quit because liberals kept saying nasty things about Trig. (I do think HuffPo went too far yesterday with the “retardation” post, but I see the author removed it.)

Update: At Comment Is Free — Mark Sanford and Me.

Update: Put this in the “what I said” department. I wrote after the first round of “tea parties” last April:

There are plans for a bigger event on July 4, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the powers behind yesterday’s tea parties quietly drop plans for follow-up events.

David Weigel reports for the Washington Independent that the local organizers of the April “parties” have organized more events for today. But unlike the April events, this time the GOP and right-wing media are not hyping them.

But the collaboration between the official Republican establishment and the Tea Parties has not lasted into June. The RNC has no plans to get involved with any Tea Parties. A spokesman for Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who jaunted around northern California to attend several Tea Parties, said that his holiday plans were private but would probably not include Tea Parties. Gingrich will not attend any of the Tea Parties, although he recorded video messages for events in Birmingham and Nashville “at the request of the respective organizers,” according to spokesman Dan Kotman.

Media coverage has also gotten a little bit more scarce. Coverage on Fox News has largely been limited to interviews with Tea Party organizers on the network’s morning shows. While sources at Fox would not discuss their plans for covering the weekend events, they confirmed that no anchors would be attending and that the attendance and news value of the events looked to be lower than that of the April rallies. Tea Party organizers are counting, instead, on local news coverage and on distributed reporting such as the conservative news site PajamasTV, which hosts an “American Tea Party” show and has asked readers to submit their own videos from their rallies.

Excuses are being made for lack of media coverage — “it’s not a novelty any more” is one — and one of the local organizers says she likes having a smaller event so she can meet more of the people who show up. We can all enjoy reflecting on the logic of that, I think.

However, I think the real reason the Powers That Be in rightie politics and media are drawing back from supporting the “tea parties” is that they were genuinely embarrassed by the April events. The April parties may have involved only as many as 300,000 people nationwide, which was pathetic enough. But more than that, the parties turned into freak shows. Many of the participants who got the attention of television crews were genuinely demented, and frightening. Not to mention confused.

I’m saying the financial backers of “The Movement” decided to keep some distance between themselves and the “teabaggers.” As I predicted.

• She wants to concentrate on a 2012 presidential bid.
• She’s tired of being crucified by the liberal media.
• She hates seeing taxpayer money being wasted investigating her.
• Whatever she’s being investigated for is about to hit the fan.

Mark Halperin has ten possible reasons she might have resigned, most of them focusing on a possible presidential bid.

Brad Friedman thinks some major scandal might be about to break that could involve indictments.

Update: Once again, some things snark themselves.

Yet as their state prepares to go over the cliff, California’s citizens seem weirdly oblivious, or resigned, or numb. Like inhabitants of a corrupt third-world country who have utterly lost faith in their government and in politics itself, or ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, Californians are behaving as if the whole thing is out of their control. Or even that it isn’t happening at all.

The immediate problem is that a minority extremist right faction is able, because of the supermajority requirement, to prevent California from governing itself. But of course, that’s the problem everywhere, isn’t it?

The extremist right hijacked government by exploiting weaknesses in government designed to prevent tyranny. As I wrote recently in “The U.S. as a Failed State,” the result of the Right’s undermining of legitimate, representative government has been the slow takeover of government by oligarchic special interests. Something like that happened in California, too, by exploiting the initiative process.

The initiative process was originally passed by voters in 1911 to circumvent the power of the oligarchic railroad trusts by restoring direct democracy. And it still offers citizens a chance to take control of important issues. But it has gone out of control, abused by powerful interests who hire people to collect signatures and ram through bills that no ordinary citizen can be expected to comprehend. By sidelining elected officials, it achieves the worst of both worlds: It gives ordinary citizens, who lack requisite expertise, institutional memory and accountability, too much power, and then forces legislators to clean up their mess — except that because of ideological gridlock and the supermajority requirement, they can’t.

What the Right can’t get is that tyranny doesn’t come from government; it comes from the concentration of power. It makes no real difference whether the concentration is public or private. When power is concentrated in government, private interests become its puppet. When power is concentrated in private hands, government becomes its puppet. Either way, the people lose.

The U.S. federal government was set up so that power would be diffused through the three branches and among Washington and the states, and in this way power in government wouldn’t concentrate in any one place and become too strong for citizens to control.

But in their monomaniacal quest to destroy government in the name of “liberty,” the Right left government vulnerable to takeover by non-governmental powers that are not answerable to citizens at all. By fighting a phantom tyranny they have gone a long way toward creating a real one.

Of course, for some, especially for the wealthy extremists who bankrolled the Movement, this was the plan all along. But I don’t think the enormous majority of the tools who show up for “tea parties” and Palin rallies have any idea they are, in effect, begging for dictatorship.

The results of the last two national elections show us that a majority of U.S. citizens want progress, and they want functional government is that responsible to them and which can address issues in a way that makes a difference in their lives. Watching the helpless flopping about in Washington has tried even my faith in American democracy. In spite of their minority status, in spite of the fact that a crushing majority of Americans disagrees with their agenda, the Right still is dictating policy. I’m beginning to wonder if our form of government can survive at all.

Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive “salon” at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

Weymouth is saying the fliers weren’t vetted before being released and that they misrepresented what she had intended. Everyone is appalled that WaPo tried to sell “access.” Chris Good at The Atlantic explains how it’s normally done:

The business of media-organized conferences, roundtables, seminars, and presentations works, in most cases, similarly to the everyday sale of newspapers and magazines. The editorial staff has something to offer in the way of content–information, expertise, relationships with prominent sources who will talk about health care in front of an audience (booking power), good questions for the experts and an ability to moderate the discussion–and the business side sells that content to advertisers or attendees.

Still too cozy if you ask me.

Even so, I would like to see the bill passed, as it at least provides a framework for future improvements. But why do we expect so little from the US? Why do we treat the world’s most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?

And then he says,

You have only to read the comments that follow this article to find out.

Bravo, Mr. Monbiot! He correctly anticipated that the comments would feature some prime American wingnut apologia.

Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle. The ranking Republican on the House energy and commerce committee is Joe Barton, the man who in 2005 launched a congressional investigation of three US scientists whose work reveals the historical pattern of climate change. Like those of many of his peers, his political career is kept on life support by the fossil fuel and electricity companies. He returns the favour by vociferously denying that manmade climate change exists.

A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we’re going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed. Whether he is seeking environmental reforms, health reforms or any other improvement in the life of the American people, this is Obama’s real challenge.

Also at The Guardian, Michael Tomasky writes,

You might wonder, as many American liberals wonder: OK, we’ve elected probably the most progressive president in decades, and Democrats have big majorities in both houses of Congress. In addition, the Republican party is at a historic low point. So why can’t the Democrats get more done? Why is Barack Obama so timid?

I’m not sure I agree with his answer:

The answer has less to do with Obama’s DNA than with our constitution’s. The GOP may be a laughing stock nationally, the last redoubt of high-profile mistress-shaggers and witless pit bulls with lipstick, but that has absolutely no bearing on its level of power in Washington. Congress was designed so that minorities can wield power well out of proportion to their number if they stick together.

We’ve been through times in the fading, distant past in which the federal government accomplished remarkable things done in spite of itself. Speaking as a history nerd, I don’t know when Washington has been more helplessly dysfunctional than it is now, except maybe for the stretch of years just before the Civil War. Not a cheerful thought.

As Tomasky says, the federal government was set up the way it was with the prevention of tyranny in mind.

Our founders were concerned first and foremost with the potential for authoritarian tyranny, since there was a lot of that afoot in those days. So they built a system of divided government, compulsively concerned with checks and balances so that few actions could be taken quickly.

True. But the terrible irony that you will never ever not in a million years get a conservative or libertarian to admit is that this very weakness now is allowing a different sort of tyranny to emerge. We, the People, no longer have anything to say about our own country. It’s all in the hands of corporations and lobbyists. The result is a loss of genuine political liberty, the loss of government by the consent of the governed, as surely as if Congress had been taken over by a military junta.

Tomasky concludes:

Today’s liberals need to give more thought and devote more energy to this problem than they do. When progressive legislation is weakened, as the emissions bill was last week, most people just reflexively chalk it up to a presidential failure of will. And sure, to some extent, Obama is perhaps too quick to seek compromise.

But the more pressing issue – and the hidden one that most big-time pundits don’t write about – is how messed up Congress has become. This is on the brink of becoming a disaster for this country. Reforming Congress, something we call a “process” reform rather than an actual matter of “substance”, is something most liberal interest groups don’t give much thought to. But today, process is substance – or is killing it. Obama and the advocacy groups that support his goals need to grasp this and do something about it, or the whole agenda will sink into the quicksand down the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I think this is exactly right. Although I agree that President Obama is too quick to seek compromise, he’s not the real problem. The real problem is that the U.S. really is on the brink of being a new kind of failed state.

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—”a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.

When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

Some things snark themselves.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Well, yes. No one denies the science behind global climate change is hard to grasp. The very fact of calling it “global warming” even is a problem since it doesn’t mean the globe is getting uniformly warmer, a point lost on the wingnuts who celebrate as vindication every time some part of the planet is unseasonably cool.

It’s an article of faith among the wingnuts that there is a vast underground of scientists who believe global climate change is a hoax, and their beliefs are somehow being suppressed by a minority of powerful scientific uber-lords who are using the global warming issue to create a socialistic one-world government.

In fact, not only do the overwhelming majority of earth scientists think that global climate change is real, 97 percent of climatologists say humans play a role. The biggest doubters are petroleum geologists — wonder why? — and meteorologists, who are not especially knowledgeable about long-term climate trends.

Reactions to Krugman’s column reveal much about peoples’ inner craziness. Libertarians, for example, are less afraid the planet will become inhabitable than they are afraid Krugman will line them up against a wall and have them shot. See also some meathead at the American Enterprise Institute — “Is Paul Krugman Inciting Violence?“)

Others think that not to give the tiny minority of scientists who deny global climate change at least as much credibility and debate time (more, actually) than the majority is denying free speech, or the right to dissent, or some such thing.

Of course, the Right is accustomed to being thus catered to by media. As Krugman himself once said, “If Bush said that the world was flat, the headline on the news analysis would read ‘Shape of Earth: Views Differ’.”

The one thing they absolutely will not allow themselves to admit is that climate changes might be the real danger. Not Paul Krugman, not liberals, not even climatologists. If Steven Spielberg were to cast them in a film, they’d be the mayor wanting to keep the beach open (until the shark attack) or the investment lawyer worried about profits and PR (until eaten by a T Rex).