In his most recent NY Times column, Fly Me to the Moon, Tom Friedman (the Moustached One) calls for a national science project to give us energy independence:

nice idea, Friedman, but what does it have to do with your subject - foreign policy?

Everything! You give me an America that is energy-independent and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran.

Nice to see he's catching on. Energy independence, thermodynamic strategy, the Apollo Alliance... whatever you want to call it, a national initiative to make up for the Market's complete lack of a solution to the global energy situation would be a great use of government. A quick look at Bush's biography will tell you why it will never happen, but that doesn't mean it's still not a great idea.

I've considered before what we might have gotten done in response to 9/11 if there'd been different leadership. Bush used the political capital he got there to start the country down the path of hard empire and to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to the upper class. A different mind could have gotten us off foreign oil and given us single-payer health care.

How's that? Well, Tommy boy's spouting the rationale for energy independence, which also pays a peace dividend that would be a comparable economic stimulus to Bush's trickle-down booster shot. As for health care I've got one word for you: bioterrorism. Somebody maken a simple powerpoint on what smallpox would do to our highly urbanized population which contains 50 million people without insurance who don't go to the doctor until they're very ill (if at all). That would get that shit taken care of ASAP.