Listen to the show on BlogTalkRadio or on iTunes. With Steve Hynd of Newshoggers, Josh Mull (@joshmull) and myself.
Topics were:
Republican presidential race
The Republican field is jumbled with no obvious choice. The candidates will all endorse the Ryan Plan in the primary and whoever gets the nomination will then run away from it. Retirees detest the Ryan Plan for obvious reasons and they tend to always vote. This is something the Republicans have apparently not considered.
Huntsman could be a dark horse candidate if the convention is deadlocked. He was a popular moderate Republican governor of Utah, a conservative state.
Palin will run and continue her focus on resentment of elites. But does she have appeal beyond the Beltway pundits and the Tea Party, which is waning in influence?
The big issues will be the economy, Medicare, and foreign intervention.
A centrist Republican could do well in debates against Obama while a fringe candidate would probably get clobbered.
Neither party is talking about the bailout of the big banks by the Fed or the continuing corruption on Wall Street. These topics are off-limits.
Climate change
Weather patterns are shifting, getting more extreme. Arctic ice is melting. Clearly, something is happening and it doesn’t bode well for us. But ending climate change means international agreements that are legally binding. No big country wants to do this, especially considering the price. So, events may be what forces the issue. Gas goes to $10 a gallon or a major city floods. We need to wean ourselves from using oil for transportation and reserve it for plastics. Further, we need a smart grid, one which can handle multiple sources of widely distributed and flucuating power going in all directions and which can store energy for future use.
We need to wean ourselves from plastic as well. It’s production carries a far greater footprint, of which the emissions resulting from our paying the oil/plastics companies to dispose of the toxic waste generated by their production are but a toe.