After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Bush's energy fraud
Memo to Dubya, who said recently he was "deeply concerned" about California's energy crisis: Try to avoid applying the term "deep" to any of your thoughts.
As regards California, Bush is so shallow you can read a newspaper through him. He's simply exploiting California's problems as a cover to do favors for ARCO, BP Amoco, Exxon, and the other oil giants who ran a pipeline of cash into his presidential campaign.
He declared that the electrical crunch pointed up "a long-term issue . . . and that is, how do we find more energy supplies?" He answered his own question by tearing a page out of the oil lobby's wish list: Let the corporations rip into the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Little George said he would act "boldly and swiftly" to enact his plan.
This plan, of course, is a fraud. Piping oil out of the Alaskan wilderness will have zero impact on electric supplies in California. Oil accounts for about 1% of the source energy used for electrical generation in California. And even on the most absurdly accelerated schedule, ANWR's small reserves of oil wouldn't start flowing for over a decade.