Ralph Nader and former House member Cynthia McKinney were on the ballot yesterday in California for both the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party.

Nader won convincingly on both, yet it’s not a given he wants the nomination. To my mind, McKinney would be a much stronger candidate and would bring badly needed new members into the GP. Nader has done a huge amount of progressive work in the past 45 years but, hey Ralph, take your laurels and rest on them. You deserve it.

Green Party
Nader 61%
McKinney 25%
total ballots cast: about 27,800

Peace and Freedom
Nader 40%
McKinney 21%
Gloria La Riva 20% (She is also running for president on the Party for Socialism and  Liberation, a non-ballot status party.)
total ballots cast: about 5,300

The ‘total ballots cast’ shows, unfortunately, that the two parties have a tiny presence. The Green Party of California has about half of the total Greens registered in the entire country. P&F has ballot status only in California, the GP in about 24 states.

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It would fly at 4,000 mph and use hydrogen as fuel. Which theoretically means it could be both sustainable and clean. It’s just a concept now, but shows how seemingly impossible global warming conundrums can potentially be solved.

Imagine, a world with low emission, fast jets using renewable energy. It could happen.

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New debit card borrows against 401k

Rumors that credit card companies will encourage borrowers to enter into indentured servitude as a means of debt repayment are probably unfounded.

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The Obama camp projects topping Clinton by nine delegates, 845 to 836.

Obama’s speech last night was inspiring and the only one by any candidate that wasn’t empty platitudes.. He’s the best of breed among the candidates although I’m still unconvinced he’s not just another Slick Willie.

(In ‘92, when I was a Clinton precinct captain and ecstatic  about Clinton’s victory, a friend warned, “Bill Clinton is no liberal.” He was right…)

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There are 12 years of wacko sermons by Huckabee somewhere, which could well leak, and most ordinary Americans will be completely turned off by the weird assertions in them.

Democratic oppo research already probably has all of them, researched and cross-indexed, ready to go.

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A worried parent on Democratic Underground tells how his daughter made partial payments on credit card debt for a few months only to find the credit card company is demanding full payment of the entire bill or it goes to collection and probably garnishment.

The new guidelines required that 4% of the principal was to be paid every month. Since my daughter had missed that more than once, they were calling up the entire debt. I cannot believe this. They are going after the people who are trying to pay, but fall short.

Credit card companies are tightening requirements and canceling cards both in the US and UK. No doubt they are getting squeezed by rising nonpayment rates and thus they are squeezing whoever they can.

Are the credit card companies in such dire straits, that they have resorted to this? Are they hoping to cash in on the folks that can’t cough up the balance in the 4 days notice that she was given?

We haven’t even begun to see the nightmare that is coming.

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Super-fast train debuts in France. It can travel 600 miles in just three hours.

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The philanthropic arm of Google plans to invest hundreds of million in cleantech development with a key goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal.

Sergey Brin says they are concentrating on three energy sources: solar-thermal, deep geothermal, and high-altitude wind; if he had to add one, it would be photovoltaic. He says that windmills are on a par with coal but are intermittent and they think it can be even cheaper by using high-altitude wind, through kites, which are cheaper to make than metal windmills. They’ve invested in this and solar-thermal. Deep geothermal is a bit farther off because it requires more fundamental research to get to scale.

Solar thermal converts solar power to heat first, rather than directly to electricity as in photovoltaics. Deep geothermal uses heat and steam from within the earth. High altitude wind power uses tethered airborne wind turbines. The big advantage here is that the wind is always blowing up in the jetstream and they are portable and thus can be set up anywhere.

Key quote:

“You can’t succeed just out of conservation because then you won’t have economic development,” [Google Foundation’s Larry] Brilliant explains. “Find a way to make electricity — not to cut back on it but to have more of it than you ever dreamed of.”

Smart grids and more efficient appliances and engines are coming. An emphasis on conservation is certainly important, after all, why waste energy? But the real answer is cheap, renewable energy and clean transportation. While I can admire the Jim Kunstler’s of the world for sounding the alarm on global warming and peak oil, they too often seem fatalistic about what’s coming, something which stands in sharp contrast with the Google Foundation’s determination to find solutions.

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