Imagine a Department of Energy run by... A SCIENTIST! Chu is his name, and Nobel Prizes (and the Berkeley Livermore Lab) are his game. This is the first appointment by Obama I think qualifies as "kick ass."

Applause broke out when he described how companies, after claiming efficiency gains and lowered costs were impossible, “miraculously” achieved them once they “had to assign the jobs from the lobbyists to the engineers.”

Background courtesy Brad, everyone's favorite revolutionary plant in the DC establishment: