"My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them"

What a revolutionary thing for any politician to say. Actual empiricism as policy.

"Elections Have Consequences" - Updated 3/5

For this count, I do not include purely procedural or symbolic actions, such as the open-government rules or treaty signings.

1. Obama reverses Global Gag Rule, restoring funding to family-planning groups that provide abortions, including UN Population Fund in China. This will provide some incremental benefit in slowing global population growth, the second-most-powerful determinant of human impact.

2. Obama grants (pending rulemaking completion) California the right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. This will marginally reduce global warming, and hopefully more significantly create some momentum in the industry toward more efficient cars nationwide.

3. Interior pulls 77 pending oil leases in Utah just before BLM was to cash the checks. Keep your fucking hands off my desert. And my new idol is the kid from the U of U who walked into the bidding, passed himself off as an oil rep, and messed with the petro-prostitutes at BLM.

4. Interior slow-walks the leasing of the OCS - this is the primary east and west coast federal territory whose moratorium lapsed in 2008. Technically he didn't cancel it, but when you extend the comment period by 180 days (the easiest way to intervene in a rulemaking), the message is clear.

5. Interior suspends oil shale leasing in Intermountain West. Some leases are on the books already, as are the underlying leasing regulations, but hopefully Secretary Salazar has sent the message that the BLM is not open for business in selling the dirtiest fuels in the world.

6. FWS restores the consultation rule for the Endangered Species Act. I hope and pray we will get the word any day that BLM will by sent back to FWS for consultation on WOPR.

7. Salazar suspends the oil shale leasing, pending a new rulemaking.

8. EPA makes official finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare. Duh. This doesn't have any immediate policy effect, but it moves the policy momentum global warming so significantly that I include it here.

9. (PENDING) EPA proposes new rules for accounting for the full-lifecycle impact of biofuels, which would exclude a lot of US corn ethanol from the federal ethanol mandate. It's quite heartining that Obama's science advisors "get it" on a complex issue like this so early in the Administration.

Fighting for What Doesn't Count? (aka Apoplepsy About Warren)

A note on the left's outcry over Rick Warren being invited to the inaugural prayer. The American left has devoted far too much time and energy to fighting symbolic battles over whose cultural iconography will reign. From school prayer to flag burning to the visibility of fundamentalist loonies, the left has fretted and frenzied over the cultural influence of the right, draining energy from the substantive contests over policy and power, and simultaneously offering kerosine to the right's bonfire of its particular enemy effigies.

Of course, the right exerts even more time and energy into this fight - to see entire elections revolve around whether stone inscriptions of the Ten Commandments will be publicly displayed in a Georgia courtroom attests to this. But these symbolic cultural tugs-of-war are a winning strategy for the right and not for the left, and we must recognize this key asymmetry in the playing field of American politics. To engage the right on their terms, fighting over whether or not a prayer is said before the high school football game, is a stupendous tactical error. It is political suicide, akin a tribal guerilla army donning a uniform and walking straight into a Soviet armored regimen for an open firefight. To fight over cultural symbols is to engage the right on their terms, within their cognitive framework of the world. Successful progressive coalitions have always been constructed around a scaffolding of pragmatism, practicality, fairness, and a broad agreement to ignore one another's quirks, peculiarities, and creeds, even when and if they assume a noxious dominance in the popular culture. Politics that concerns itself with the latter is not really a progressive politics at all, but really an expression of personal wishes and cultural discomfort masquerading as enlightened liberalism.

I say, let Warren have his day. From the grade school locker-room, to incongruent and abusive human relationships, to the rocky terrain of American politics, the most efficacious disarming of a bully is often achieved by simply walking away, and constructing your own better future. Without the cultural bogeyman of the "other" to fight, whether they be called "Communists", "Hollywood," "Atheists," the right's raging cultural and religious fires will diminish to a whimpering ember deprived of fuel.

My New Blog

This is my new Blog. This is my place to express what normally incubates inside my head, without the quaint annoyance of pen and paper, or the campy, self-consciously superficial strictures of Facebook or Myspace. I am writing for myself and for anyone at all. I am writing for the witness of anyone or anything that is keeping score or taking names.