When the congressional enablers of the Big Three automakers proposed a bailout for Detroit, I got to thinking about a friend of mine.

He took pity on a female acquaintance with a somewhat chaotic lifestyle and loaned her $200. I told him that he would never see that $200 again.

I was right.

Call me cynical, but I am not sanguine about handing over large gobs of public money to manufacturers with a rotten business model that has exacerbated U.S. dependence on a fossil fuel supplied by assorted crooks, cartels, and despots.

Call me someone who dwells on the past, but it’s difficult to forget that Detroit and its unions spent years stonewalling and stomping on reasonable legislation to boost fuel economy standards – until public outrage at high gasoline prices in 2007 finally shouted down the Big Three and their can’t-do culture of complaining.

Call me hard-hearted, but when companies are run into the ground by sclerotic executive bureaucracies that failed to anticipate oil price risks, failed to fix their product development systems, failed to sharpen their brands, and failed to bargain hard enough over labor costs, they deserve to die. ...

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First, a hearty congratulations to President-elect Obama. With a compelling life story, a strong message, and a superb ground game, he seized a moment in history. And, he gave us Republicans a thorough pasting. In many ways, we deserved it.

Already, the fight for the party's soul is on. The hard right has already begun plotting a campaign to push the party further to the margins of the spectrum. Those of us on the center-right had better fight back.

Because, as Margaret Thatcher once said, politics is like an airplane. The right and left wings may provide lift, but the middle is where the brains are. Alas, ...

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Democrats are effervescing over the possibility that they will win enough Senate seats on Tuesday to have 60 votes, a “filibuster-proof” majority.

Well, it’s not that simple. Issues drive the dynamics of each filibuster. It’s not a given that every Democrat would vote to shut down every Republican filibuster every time. Or vice versa, if the shoe were on the other foot.

But with one party holding 60 or more votes, the filibuster would be in a weakened state. And that is not necessarily a good thing. Here’s to the defense of the filibuster. Not because it is all the leverage that Republicans may have in a town awash in blue. Because filibusters are a check on excess. And that’s good for both parties.

A story, possibly apocryphal, has it that shortly after the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson was having coffee with George Washington. Jefferson asked why the convention had created the Senate. Washington asked Jefferson why he had just poured his coffee into a saucer. To cool it, Jefferson replied. Exactly why Congress needs a Senate, Washington responded. ...

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Rural values, family, and tradition are the warp and woof of conservative messaging. For better or worse, Sarah Palin has hit those hot buttons repeatedly at campaign rallies where the cultural prejudices of Big Media windbags are distinctly unwelcome.

Nothing could be more destructive of those conservative values than mountaintop removal coal mining. The high explosives and draglines that are gouging an alien topography onto West Virginia and neighboring states also are butchering old ways of life in the mountains.

The Bush administration has proposed a rule that would exacerbate the damage by easing stream buffering requirements. Since those requirements are largely honored in the breach, the rule would legitimize what has been going on anyway.

But it's not just Republicans who kowtow to mountaintop removal. At a Society of Environmental Journalists conference October 18, Congressman Nick Rahall, the West Virginia Democrat who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, listed all the great things that flattened mountains can be used for. Imagine the shopping centers ...

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How quickly things change.

In July, the price of light, sweet crude oil surged to $147 per barrel. The investment bank Goldman Sachs had projected two months earlier that the price could hit $200 per barrel in as little as six months.

Under the pressure of high prices, what didn’t happen in a Congress ruled by Tom DeLay, the bug-spraying scourge of all things environmental, happened on the watch of ultra-green Nancy Pelosi – the moratorium on offshore oil drilling fell away.

Now, the hubbub over high prices seems forgotten. In the eternity of the last several weeks of economic turmoil, energy largely disappeared as the lead campaign issue. The price of oil has fallen by more than half. Gasoline prices have dropped below $2.50 per gallon across the nation’s heartland. OPEC's barons of price rigging are holding an emergency meeting this week.

Can we cross oil overdependence off our enlarged list of things to worry about? Not a chance. Just as beginning investors are counseled to avoid obsessing over the short-term ups and downs of the stock market, our thinking about energy should not be pulled this way or that in response to price fluctuations.

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At the rate that the stock market has declined over the past week or so, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will fall to zero by Thanksgiving, by which time America’s system of industrial capitalism will have collapsed and we’ll all be herding goats for a living.

Then, we can stop worrying about climate change.

OK, I’m kidding — I hope. A little dark humor never hurts in times of trouble and uncertainty.

But seriously ...

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One of the media wise guys said before the vice presidential debate that it was like a NASCAR race – a good percentage of the fans came to see one or both candidates hit the wall and spin out.

The thrill-seekers were disappointed. Sarah Palin, the newest of newcomers on the national scene, held her own against Senate veteran Joe Biden, who seems to have been a DC figure since the Ice Age.

After a painful patch of bad interviews, Palin reverted to her appealing, just-plain-folks form, cheerfully punctured the pompousness of DC insiders, answered the questions, and even gave Biden a little chin music that scored a few hits.

For his part, Biden...

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These are the days that we should be grateful that the Founding Fathers built federalism into the Constitution and retained a strong governance role for the states.

Last Thursday, when the Capitol descended into conniption fits over high finance, was one of those days. Oh, and the renewable energy and energy efficiency tax incentives that expire December 31 have been caught in the maw of partisan tantrums also. Huge investments in wind and solar energy on tap for 2009 are circling the drain.

To paraphrase the late, great Barry Goldwater, we might be well served to saw off Washington, DC, from the rest of the country and let it float out to sea.

While the pols in DC were looking out for number one, states from one end of the country to the other were getting some useful work done for their citizens.

Start with the Northeast. ...

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Banking panics are supposed to be a forgotten relic of the 19th century, when laissez-faire reigned supreme and the federal government was composed mainly of clerks toiling away in a quiet Southern town by the Potomac River.

But there’s no getting away from human fears, which set off the old-fashioned banking panic that swept through the financial sector last week.

When the economy is fishtailing and the mentality is to circle the wagons, fear is taking hold. Which is not a sound environment for making decisions that have long-term environmental benefits.

The tendency is to deal with the short-term crisis and forget about long-term consequences. Understandable, but not always smart.

Here’s a sign of the times: A survey of chief marketing officers released this month by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shows that cause-related marketing has plunged to the bottom of the priority list for marketing messages.

Marketing officers increasingly believe that financially-stressed customers are more interested in getting a good deal on products than in hearing that products are nice to polar bears. ...

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This most unusual of presidential elections has become an all-consuming drama. The projection of 300 million sets of hopes and fears onto John McCain, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin is getting a wee bit close to the neurotic.

Whoops, sorry, Joe Biden, didn’t mean to leave you out, but your public profile seems to have gone out with the tide during the last two weeks.

Anyway, sometimes it helps to calm down, take a step back, and find out what we can learn from others about elections, policy debates, and leadership.

Take Canada, a great country, our biggest trading partner, and longtime friend that doesn't get enough attention from its giant, self-absorbed neighbor. It ought to be a tradition that a new U.S. president always goes to Canada for his or her first foreign trip.

Canada is holding a national election, which is getting scant notice south of the border. Parliament was dissolved last week and Canadians will go to the polls October 14. That’s the first thing that we can learn from our neighbors. What is taking us two years, Canada will accomplish in five weeks. ...

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You had to be there.

Once Sarah Palin stepped to the microphone, the reasons for her extraordinary appeal to Republican faithful and for the impression that she made on John McCain became instantly apparent.

Even veteran commentators jaded by political windbaggery likened her to Ronald Reagan, the gold standard of GOP charisma. Best speech at a GOP convention in years, they said.

That’s not media hyperbole. The hockey mom’s command of the audience in the St. Paul hockey arena was real, even from up in the rafters where I was seated. Those who dismiss Palin as a former beauty queen chosen for her double-X chromosomes do so at their peril. They'll be wondering what just hit them. Just ask Frank Murkowski and Tony Knowles, the veteran Alaska pols whom Palin flattened.

Quite a promotion for a former small town mayor and governor of a faraway state who could have walked incognito down any street in the lower 48 only one week before.

Yes, yes, say environmentalists, but look at her record of promoting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, her doubts about the human imprint on climate change, and her state government’s opposition to listing the polar bear as a threatened species. Her energy policy is all about drilling rigs and pipelines. Their fear is that she will cast a spell on McCain and make him change his mind about climate change and the Arctic refuge. ...

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Politics had something to do with the draft Republican platform including an acknowledgment that human activities play a role in global climate change and not including a call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The politicos decided it wouldn’t be politic to adopt a platform that contradicts their presidential candidate’s views favoring climate legislation and opposing Arctic drilling.

The muttering was palpable. One of the platform committee members, Jeff Grossman of Oregon, said that John McCain has some catching up to do with the rest of the party on drilling the refuge.

In John McCain’s Navy, that’s known as insubordination. An ensign who tells the admiral to get with the program will swiftly find himself reassigned to new quarters in the brig. Grossman, it’s you who needs to get with McCain’s program, not the other way around.

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I don’t know how many fireplaces Barack and Michelle Obama have in their home. I don’t know how many homes John and Cindy McCain own. Nor do I give a damn.

I do know that there are two houses that each American owns in addition to the ones he or she lives in. One is called the House of Representatives. The other is called the Senate. Those houses matter. Hold that thought.

Rather than counting fireplaces or real estate, let’s count megawatts. Eight hundred to be exact.

That’s how many megawatts of generating capacity will be added to California’s power grid from two mega solar projects planned for San Luis Obispo County. A week or so ago, Pacific Gas & Electric, one of California’s big utilities, signed contracts with two solar photovoltaic developers to build a 550-megawatt “solar farm” and a 250-megawatt “solar ranch.”

These won’t be penny-ante demonstration plants that produce more photo ops than power. Eight hundred megawatts is big. In capacity, 800 megawatts is about equal to a garden-variety coal plant and almost as big as your typical nuke. Together, the solar plants will produce enough carbon-free electricity to power an estimated 239,000 homes.

If they’re built, that is. Because if Congress doesn’t extend the solar investment tax credit, which expires Dec. 31, they may not get built. ...

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You need a scoreboard to keep track of the litigation vortex that has tied up conservation of national forest roadless areas for the better part of a decade.

The latest salvo was a ruling August 12 by U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer, who tossed out the Clinton roadless rule, which was reinstated in 2006 after Judge Elizabeth LaPorte tossed out the Bush roadless rule, which was adopted in 2005 after a 2003 Brimmer ruling tossed out the Clinton rule, which was adopted in 2001.

Got all that? In the national forests, all roads lead to the courthouse.

The good news is that the uncertainty created by the litigious interregnum has resulted in the Forest Service approving few new roads in the 58 million acres of roadless areas.

It’s good news because the national forest system has too many roads as it is. Roads cost money to build and maintain, they damage fish and wildlife habitat, and they degrade watersheds that supply clean drinking water for 60 million people. The Forest Service has better things to do with its limited funds than expand its too-large road network.

The bad news is that management by court edict is a bad way to run the forests. Rangers can’t manage land rationally when they’re on a lawsuit roller coaster.

Legislation might be the only way to fix the problem. Legislation offers the certainty and political buy-in that is not possible with administrative rules that can be erased by executive fiat or sued out of existence.

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The Antiquities Act, passed in 1906, is one of the lesser known gems of federal conservation law.

At four paragraphs, it is a model of statutory brevity. In execution, however, the Antiquities Act has been a powerful legal tool. Presidents from both parties have used the law’s authority to establish national monuments protecting America’s great heritage treasures – from the Statue of Liberty in the country’s biggest metropolis to the remotest wild lands of the West.

Off and on, presidential use of the Antiquities Act has driven conservation opponents and members of Congress to distraction. They have tried, and mostly failed, to curtail the president’s authority.

In 1950, a Democratic Congress revoked the president’s authority to apply the Antiquities Act in Wyoming, after a political firestorm over Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the law to protect an area that is now part of Grand Teton National Park.

Nearly five decades later, Bill Clinton drove congressional Republicans nuts when he took up Bruce Babbitt’s suggestion that he use the Antiquities Act to create a conservation legacy for his presidency. Riders to drain the ink from Clinton’s monument proclamation pen were attached repeatedly to appropriations bills, but none were enacted into law.

Now, along comes Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, for another go at weakening the Antiquities Act. ...

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