I just sat through the taping of tonight's Colbert Report.  If you recall,  a few weeks ago, Colbert did a bit where he noted all of the interesting things that Kucinich has in his pockets, and he challenged Kucinich to appear on the show and empty out his pockets.  At some point last week, they announced that Kucinich would appear.  Well, tonight's the night, and the skit is funny as hell.

I don't want to spoil the joke by trying to describe it, so all I will really say is that folks ought to watch or tape it tonight.

Tomorrow night we have tickets to the Daily Show.  What a blast!

Starting at 9PM Eastern, 8 Central. Repeat at 1AM EDT.

This is the academy award winning documentary about Robert McNamara - Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, who played a central role in the Vietnam war.

Most of the film is McNamara reminiscing about how badly we screwed up.  The mistakes we made, and the things that we didn't know that should have been obvious to us.

He was an extremely arrogant man, and he shares many of the same personality traits of Rumsfeld - in my mind I find it very easy to confuse the two.

The film was made in 2003.  I believe it came out before we went into Iraq - I believe it was intended as a warning in that he didn't think highly of the war in Iraq.

I have been long interested in questions of sustainability and the environment, and the global warming problem is one that has concerned me for some time.

The question I have had for some time though is whether Peak Oil will force us to act before it is too late to begin action on global warming.   In theory, oil scarcity and the higher prices that seem inevitable may have the side effect of reducing carbon emissions, but will it be enough??  It was with these questions in mind that I attended the "Sustainable Energy Forum 2006" conference a few weeks ago.  There were a number of speakers that many of you have heard of.  Governor Brian Schweitzer spoke on energy issues and coal liquefaction.   James Hansen (NASA scientist who has studied global climate change) spoke on the very question of whether or not peak oil will help force us to solve global warming, and Lester Brown (World Watch Institute) spoke about the need to restructure the global economy.

Many of these talks are now available for MP3 download, as are PDF files that contain the powerpoint slides (for those speakers that used them).

At this point we are dealing only with rumors, but here is a place to start looking:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/...

The UK's AutoExpress reports that Toyota's fuel economy target for the upcoming next-generation Prius is 40 kilometers/liter (2.5 l/100km, or 94 mpg US), and that the automaker is striving to have the new Prius on the road as early as 2008.

According to a Toyota engineer quoted by the publication, the entire electrical system is being redesigned to improve the fuel economy, and the automaker is working to switch to a lithium-ion battery system from the NiMH pack used in the current Prius.

Part of the impetus for the dramatic improvement in fuel consumption is to position the Prius to compete more effectively against the more fuel-efficient diesels that now dominate the European market, according to the report.

More below the fold...

There is a 1-hour documentary on the subject of Peak Oil that will be airing on CNN this weekend as a part of the "CNN Presents" program.  The program title is "We Were Warned", and is hosted by Frank Sesno.  Details for the program can be found here:

http://www.cnn.com/...

Airs: March 18 and 19 at 8 p.m., 11 p.m. ET on CNN.

For those of you overseas, it will air on CNN International, and I will put the showtimes at the end of the diary.

What if I told you about a car that could get 330 miles/gallon, and cost less than 20K$?  A two-seat three-wheel diesel-hybrid that has acceleration and handling similar to that of a Honda Insight?

Check this out:

There may be some here for whom the anti-war protests yesterday were their first.  In my case I was at the ellipse in Washington DC, but this march was not the first for me however.  My first goes back a long way, and today's march brought back a lot of memories..  Step with me into the wayback machine....

In the Friday WaPo: here

My sense is that these sentiments are likely to be common in Europe.  I don't know what the practical effect of these statements is likely to be other than to complicate foreign relations a little bit.  Higher fuel prices are going to change consumer behavior long before Bush acts in any positive way.

Katrina was still spinning northward through the United States when Germany's environment minister, Juergen Trittin, wrote a column for the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper blaming President Bush's environmental policies for increasing the risk of killer storms and floods around the world.

[crossposted at EuroTrib].

There is a good article in the NYT this morning.  In the magazine section.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21OIL.html

The author is Peter Maass, who is in the process of writing a book on the subject.  He gives good mention of Matt Simmons too.  He has the opportunity to ask Saudi officials about Peak Oil, and the Saudis seem to be somewhat sensitive about the issue.

More on the flip..

I have been looking for a way to encapsulate what the Republican right really means these days.  A frame, if you will.  Then I hit on it.  "A culture of lies"...

More on the flip...

I have had many conversations since Tuesday with various people, and I have read a lot of things that people have written here.  For a lot of people the emotions are still kind of raw - my feeling is that it is too soon for us to try and draw lasting conclusions about what we should do differently.

I had a couple of things I could have done this weekend.  I had a couple of parties I could have gone to - the problem is that the folks in this crowd are pretty split.  Some I know to be Democrats, and some of them are Republicans.  I wasn't in a sociable mood - especially if I was going to be around Republicans, so I ended up blowing these types of things off.

More after the break...

That wasn't part of the plan when I got out of bed at 5:30 this morning.  All I knew was that I would be boarding a bus in downtown Washington DC, and would heading somewhere to canvas - probably somewhere in Pennsylvania.

Once we boarded the bus, we were told we were going to Bucks county Pennsylvania.  At the time, I wasn't completely sure where that really was (I had heard the news-droids on CNN talk about that county, but I didn't connect it in any way with any specific part of the state). As the bus progressed down the highway it became clear that it was somewhere in eastern PA.  As we neared the destination, I started to think to myself that it would be a real kick to be canvassing in Ginny's district, but in the back of my mind I was reminding myself that there are 21 districts in the state, so what would be the odds of that happening?

On Spike TV.  The idea is that they take some Japanese weird reality type of show, and redo the dialog in a completely different fashion.

The teams tonight are the Kerry supporters and the Bush supporters.

Definitely quite silly - I don't know about the rest of you, but I definitely need some silliness right now.  We still have lots of work to do before the election.

Bush used this line last night, and now has started using it in his stump speech.  Whenever he does, he gets this smug look on his face like he thinks he said something really clever.  Whatever.

Anyways, my point here is that KE04 can destroy this theme quite easily.   Just ask about bin Laden.  Thus Kerry could suggest that instead of rushing into war with Iraq, they should have instead applied this "he can run but cannot hide" approach to Osama bin Laden.  Something along these lines - the speechwriters can take it and work it into their existing material in whatever way that makes the most sense.

Please recommend if you think this is worthwhile for Kerry and/or Edwards to add to their speeches.

I did a google search of dailykos.com to see if this had already been diaried, and didn't find anything.  I can delete this if this has already been brought up.

There have been stories in the news about how Bush might have been wearing a wire in the first debate.  The theory is that folks off-camera were feeding him the answers to the questions.

This could explain a couple of things.  First it could explain the way he said "Let me finish" when apparently nobody was trying to cut him off.  Secondly it could explain the way in which he seemed more incoherent at the start of the answer, and seemed to get a little better as the thing wore on.

Whether or not this is true, assume it to be the case for a moment, and assume that the technology was available to jam the signal and override it with anything else that you could think of, and assume it were up to you to choose what the signal were overridden with.  So the question is:

It seems that it is generally accepted outside of the United States that the real reason for the war in Iraq had to do with oil, and nothing to do with the war on terror.  If you did a poll here on dKos, I would expect that the majority of people would also feel this way.  Just to amuse myself and everyone else, I added such a poll to this diary.

Up until now, I haven't seen much in the way of documentation on this subject however.   There was a column in the Toronto Star over the weekend which is an excerpt from an upcoming book which explores all of these subjects in detail (thanks to another alert dKos reader for pointing out the article).

The title of the article is "Crude Dudes", by Linda McQuaig.  The article can be found at www.thestar.com.

I haven't read the book yet - it isn't yet available.  The book title is "It's the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil, and the Fight for the Planet", the publisher is Random House of Canada, and the publisher's website shows it here www.randomhouse.ca

I am not seeing the book on amazon.com yet, but on the Canadian Amazon I do see it listed: www.amazon.ca

Note that even if you are Canadian you cannot get the book yet - the official release date according to Amazon is September 28th (in about a week).  I was able to log into amazon.ca and order the book just like it was amazon.com - higher shipping rates apply, of course).  We will see whether the book actually arrives...

There is a longish article coming up in the Sunday NYT in the magazine section by David Brooks.  It isn't on the web yet, but I wanted to give folks a heads up about it.  I will edit the diary later once there is a web link that I can provide.

The subtitle for the article is The Death of Small-Government Conservatism

Essentially the gist of the article is that Brooks is looking at the failures of the Republican party, and how he thinks it needs to re-invent itself for the future.  Reading between the lines, perhaps he is anticipating an election defeat for Bush.

I was working the phonebank at the recently-opened KE headquarters in Fairfax VA, and we were told that according to Zogby, Virginia is now a battleground state.

http://www.zogby.com/features/features.dbm?ID=212

Zogby is also adding 3 other battleground states: Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina.

Virginia hasn't gone for a Democrat since LBJ.

Woot!