Barack Obama photo: David Katz/Obama for America.

As president-elect Barack Obama has identified dealing with our ‘planet in peril’ as a top priority of his administration, if I were him I’d start planning to put solar panels back on the White House roof and to have a re-dedication ceremony photo op with Jimmy Carter.

It may be more a symbolic act than anything else, but it would send a powerful message that renewable energy, green jobs and climate change are really on the top of the Obama administration’s agenda….

Continue reading " Be the Change… Obama Should Reinstall White House Solar Panels "

By David Roberts

Newsweek leads off an interview with Newt Gingrich by saying that when it comes to the challenges of energy policy, he "understands these challenges better than most."

Says who? What in Gingrich’s writing and record show that he is anything but a party-line conservative Republican on energy? It’s bizarre how the media repeats these things about Newt’s alleged policy acumen purely because, as far as I can tell, Newt tells them so. The interview itself doesn’t evince much understanding.

It’s late, so I’ll outsource debunking to others.

On this:

If Obama wins and you had a line-item veto on his energy plan, what would you eliminate?
His energy plan is largely pious hope. He hopes they can make breakthroughs and do this or that.

Matt says:

But if we change the structure of the market to ensure that emitters need to pay the true cost of their emissions, then the market will keep working and the economy will develop in a different direction. There’s nothing especially pious about the hope, it’s well-grounded in theory and in our experience with past environmental regulations. The real pious hope is the idea that if we do nothing to change incentives, a miracle solution will just emerge out of the ether for no reason.

On this:

Obama said in one of the debates that Americans need to sacrifice and cut back their energy usage. How do you think that’ll fly as part of the solution?
Just as well as it did with Jimmy Carter. People don’t elect presidents who tell them to sacrifice. They elect presidents who solve problems so they don’t have to sacrifice.

Brad points out that McCain calls for sacrifice virtually every time he opens his mouth. Also that Kennedy guy.

It’s the post-Reagan Republican Party that refuses to treat Americans like adults or ask for sacrifice in exchange for competent leadership, and indeed casts the very notion of paying taxes as an affront to Americans’ right to hoard. It is Gingrich Republicans that hold Americans in such incredibly low esteem. And coincidentally, they’re the ones “people” are busy “not electing.”

For my own vintage Newt-bashing, see “Newt Gingrich’s ‘green conservatism’,” “Newt? Seriously?,” and “A one-legged man at a butt-kickin’ contest.” See also this expose of Newt’s 527 group, and this update on it.

Continue reading " Rendered Newt "

: Photo: Bain News Service/Courtesy Library of Congress

Republican William Howard Taft (the portly gentleman at center) receives his ballot in November 1908. Taft won that election but lost his re-election bid in 1912. He is widely remembered (or remembered widely) today as the heaviest president (peaking near 350 pounds — girth of a nation, some have called it). He was also the first president to throw out the ceremonial first ball of the baseball season, in 1910.

From 1921 to 1930, Taft served as chief justice of the United States, the only president ever to do so. For that reason alone, he must be counted among the nation’s most successful ex-presidents.

: Photo: Courtesy Library of Congress

Democrat Thomas Woodrow Wilson (yes, that was his name) poses in the seat of power in the Oval Office in 1913, the year he was sworn in. Wilson had been president of Princeton University before moving on (but not necessarily up) to governor of New Jersey.

Although he had two full terms as president of the United States, he really didn’t serve the end of the second term, having suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution (covering presidential disability) wasn’t ratified until 1967, so Wilson’s wife and doctors effectively ran the White House for many months.

: Photo: National Photo Company/Courtesy Library of Congress

President Wilson (left) rides with the incoming Republican president, Warren G. Harding, in the back seat at Harding’s inauguration, March 4, 1921. Sen. Philander Knox (now, there’s a name) and Rep. Joseph Cannon, both Republicans, ride in front.

Harding was the first sitting U.S. senator elected to the presidency. He has a reputation as a White House philanderer. His death in San Francisco in 1923, supposedly by accidental food poisoning, is now thought by some to be no accident at all.

: Photo: National Photo Company/Courtesy Library of Congress

Republican John Calvin Coolidge (yep, his name) tips a ceremonial Smoki Indian hat on the grounds of the White House, Oct. 22, 1924. When Harding died, Coolidge succeeded to the presidency and was sworn in by his father, a notary public, in the middle of the night at their family home in Vermont. Coolidge was elected in his own right to a second term in November 1924.

Notoriously taciturn, he earned the nickname “Silent Cal.” It’s said that he once learned that a guest at a banquet had bet a friend that the president wouldn’t say three words all night. Coolidge learned of the bet and kept his mouth zipped until he was leaving the dinner. He then walked up to the gent who’d scoffed at tales of the president’s laconic habits, leaned over and said, “You lose.”

: Photo: National Photo Company/Courtesy Library of Congress

Republican Herbert Hoover (center, just to the right of first lady Lou Henry Hoover) and the presidential party stand for the national anthem on baseball’s opening day, April 17, 1929. It was a few weeks after Hoover’s inauguration and six months before the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.

Hoover, like Taft, had an extraordinary career following his presidency. He organized post-World War II food relief in Europe (as he had done after World War I), and heading the “Hoover Commission” on the reorganization of the executive branch.

Hoover was the last Republican president elected on a ticket that did not include a Nixon or a Bush.

: Photo: Courtesy Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum

Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, campaigns for vice president of the United States, in his hometown of Hyde Park, New York, Aug. 9, 1920. FDR lost that race and was stricken by polio the following year, but recovered sufficiently to win election to the governorship of New York in 1928.

Roosevelt is the only person elected to the presidency more than twice, winning the elections of 1932, ‘36, ‘40 and ‘44. He died in office April 12, 1945, just before the successful conclusion of World War II.

: Photo: Sammie Feeback

Former President Harry S. Truman comes out of the voting booth after casting his ballot in Independence, Missouri, April 10, 1956. Democratic Vice President Truman had succeeded FDR in 1945. He was elected in his own right in 1948, overcoming defections by both the left (Progressive) and right (Dixiecrat) wings of his own party and defying expectations of victory by Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

: Photo: U.S. Army/Courtesy 
Library of Congress

Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower talks to American paratroopers in England just before D-Day in 1944. Republican Eisenhower was a popular war hero who swept into office in the GOP landslide of 1952, and he was re-elected in 1956.

Ike followed Generals Washington, Jackson, W.H. Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, A. Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and B. Harrison in the presidency. Nonetheless, he warned in a farewell address to the nation in 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

: Photograph: Cecil Stoughton, White House/Courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

A young girl is lifted above the crowd to shake hands with Democratic President John F. Kennedy, Sept. 25, 1963, in Billings, Montana, during the president’s “conservation tour” of Western states. JFK would be shot and killed two months later while riding in a motorcade in Dallas.

Kennedy thus became the eighth U.S. president to die in office, the seventh consecutive president who’d been elected in a year ending in zero to die in office, and the fourth U.S. president to be assassinated.

Kennedy was the last sitting U.S. senator to be elected president. With Sen. John McCain running against Sen. Barack Obama, that 48-year losing streak is likely to end today.

: Photograph: Cecil Stoughton, White House/Courtesy Library of Congress

U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes administers the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, widowed just two hours before, stands at the new president’s side.

Johnson won election in his own right in 1964, but was forced out of the Democratic nomination race in 1968 by challengers to his conduct of the unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

: Photo: Courtesy Architect of the Capitol and Library of Congress

Republican Richard M. Nixon delivers his inaugural address on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 1969. Nixon served as Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961. He was defeated for president in 1960 and for governor of California in 1962, but rose from the political ashes to be elected president in 1968 and re-elected in 1972.

His conduct in the Watergate scandal forced him to resign in disgrace and under threat of impeachment in August 1974. He is the only president of the United States to resign. Ashes to ashes.

: Photo: David Hume Kennerly/White House/Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library

Musicians Billy Preston and George Harrison pose with President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office, Dec. 13, 1974.

Republican Ford reached the presidency through an extraordinary double fault. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973 in a bribery and tax scandal. Ford became the first person appointed to the vice presidency under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967. When Nixon resigned the presidency less than a year later, Ford became the first U.S. president who had not been elected to the presidency or vice presidency.

He ran for election to a second term in 1976 and lost.

: Photo: Courtesy the Carter Center

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin make a three-way handshake during the White House signing of the Middle East peace accord in March 1979.

Democrat Carter was elected in 1976, but his re-election bid in 1980 was derailed by an energy crisis, the Iranian hostage crisis and the campaigning ability of Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless, he followed in the footsteps of Presidents Taft and Hoover — and John Quincy Adams before them — in remaining a major political force after leaving the White House.

: Photo: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation

Professional golfer Raymond Floyd gives President Ronald Reagan putting lessons in the Oval Office, June 24, 1986.

Republican Reagan was a Hollywood actor of some repute who was elected governor of California in 1966 and 1970. He won the presidency in 1980 and 1984. His acting skills, which were considerable for a politician, and his ability to sell an idea, led his admirers to dub him, “The Great Communicator.”

: Photo: Courtesy Architect of the Capitol and Library of Congress

Chief Justice William Rehnquist (back to camera) administers the oath of office to George Herbert Walker Bush on the west front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 1989. First lady Barbara Bush is holding the Bible, and Vice President Dan Quayle stands just behind her.

Republican Bush, Reagan’s vice president for two terms, was elected in 1988 but defeated for re-election in 1992.

: Photo: White House

President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton dance at the inaugural ball, Jan. 20, 1993.

Democrat Clinton was elected in 1992 and 1996, but impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 over his testimony regarding a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate acquitted Clinton, and he completed his term in office, only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached.

: Photo: White House

President George W. Bush stands on the ashes of the destroyed World Trade Center towers, Sept. 14, 2001.

Republican Bush was elected in narrow, disputed contests in both 2000 and 2004. Bush is the son of George H.W. Bush. Presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison were related, as were Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But not since John Adams and John Quincy Adams, near the dawn of the republic, had a father and son both occupied the highest office in the land.

Bush is slated to complete his second term Jan. 20. With President Clinton before him, it will be the first time since 1825 that two consecutive presidents (James Madison and James Monroe) have served two complete terms in office.

Continue reading " Gallery: A Century of Presidents "