Back in the summer of 1968, I got involved with an organization in northern California formed by a Methodist minister who claimed to have been abducted by space aliens near Mt. Hood in Oregon. After he returned from the abduction, he quit the ministry and filed a series of patents that made him very rich.

News media focused too much on how good a speech Obama gave and not on what he actually said.

Media need to focus now on policy implications of the oil spill. (Contributor Tony Collings is a former CNN Washington correspondent whose blog is capturingthenews.com.)

An alternative energy future is possible, but to get industry’s horses to take your there, you have to stop putting most of the hay in the wrong barns. Our government doesn’t seem to get that.

Oil rig explosion could become one of deadliest industry disasters in Gulf. It might be time for Louisiana to cut the oil and gas umbilical cord.

Originally posted at The Left Shue, this piece speaks to the perceived withering on the part of congressional Progressives in the face of their Health Care Reform defeat.

The state of the union is tomorrow, and I have a list of ideal messages that I’d like to hear him say.

Rather than sending taxpayer dollars to private property owners, we can more efficiently modify behavior by more accurately pricing the energy they use.

WaPo op eds are getting increasingly irritating with the passage of time. Yesterday, this formerly great American newspaper in free fall ran an article by Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie called “What’s Next Mr. President – Cardigans?” Welch and Gillespie think that Obama’s less than stellar results thus far suggest that he may be reviewing the history of past Democratic administrations to find a “road map” out of his difficulties, and also that “he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter.” In this way, they begin a transparent framing exercise suggesting that Obama is at a turning point, and that he must stop “running government as a perpetual crisis machine,” and “. . . stop doing harm. Throwing money all over the economy (and especially to sectors that match up with Democratic interests) . . . “ And also that: “. . . there’s no question that Obama’s massively ambitious domestic agenda is at a fork in the road: One route leads to Plains, Ga., and early retirement, the other to Hope, Ark., a second term and the revitalization of the American economy.”

Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey Tuesday at long last made public a discussion draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). Some are calling this the opening shot in the battle over what the United States will do about global warming. Rep. Markey, not one who is prone to understatement, told a conference call for environmental bloggers Tuesday that this is “the beginning of an incredibly intense period of political debate in our country.” Speaker Pelosi amplified this sentiment, explaining that “there’s an inevitability to this that everyone has to understand.”

Join us on the flip for a discussion of why this bill is so important, what the good and bad provisions are, and how this may play out over the next several months.