Being the Change I Wish to See

If you watched to second Presidential debate Tuesday night, you heard Barack Obama give a call to action to the American people about the energy crisis.

Finally, a candidate calling the people to action!

Obama said all Americans must do our part to help solve the energy crisis. We all must do whatever we can to conserve energy and use alternative forms of energy instead of oil.

As John F. Kennedy said

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!

Barack Obama finally said what we can do not only for our country, but for the world: conserve energy and use alternative fuels. So let’s get to it:

• Combine car trips and drive less
• Walk or bike where you can
• Turn up the thermostat in the summer
• Turn down the thermostat in the winter
• Open windows instead of heating or air-conditioning in spring and fall
• Turn off lights you’re not using
• As you change burned-out light bulbs, convert some to compact fluorescent bulbs where it makes sense
• Recycle
• Buy cars with better gas mileage, hybrids, or that use alternative fuels entirely

It’s time for a new Apollo Project, but this time it’s for energy independence.

What are you doing to conserve energy? Please leave your ideas in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Call to Action, Energy, energy independence

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I have been wracking my brain for weeks trying to figure out why in the world John McCain would choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

• She’s basically ignorant of most issues, though don’t underestimate her, she’s smart.
• She’s ignorant of a great deal of American history and politics that a lot of us have come to expect most people to know.
• She has practically no experience.
• She’s clearly not ready to step up and be President should, God forbid, something happen to John McCain early in his term of office.

She is a social conservative and she is young, two things McCain had to deal with on his ticket. Some also see Palin as a maverick, something McCain hasn’t been much lately.

So why pick Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska as a running mate?

Thoughts about Palin, the VP debate last Thursday, what Palin said about wanting to emulate current VP Richard Cheney, and John McCain’s very pro-Bush voting record have been buzzing around in my head. I’ve been trying to make sense of all this and it’s been beyond me. I was out working in the yard just now, letting my thoughts flow freely, and it came to me.

Sarah Palin is from one of the states in the Union that has some of America’s biggest untapped oil reserves. I looked it up and Governor Palin has some strong connections to big oil. She is not much of an environmentalist so taking protections away that currently keep big oil from drilling in many parts of Alaska would be something she would work toward.

McCain is another George W. Bush, but to pull it off, who does he get to play the part of Dick Cheney? The governor of a big oil state.

McCain-Palin aren’t just more of the same, they are exactly the same as Bush-Cheney. McCain will continue the policies of the George W. Bush administration and groom a young, healthy version of Dick Cheney for the Presidency in the 2012 election.

Any talk of alternative energy research and development from this proposed administration, I believe, is just that, talk. There will be drilling and nothing else. The big oil companies will have the opportunity to rape the pristine areas of Alaska that have been protected. Big oil will continue to run the country at just the time in American history when we need to stop investing in oil and start working on lots of alternatives to our energy needs. Their profits will skyrocket, and middle-class America will go broke paying higher and higher gas prices.

It would be a second Halliburton administration designed to continue what Bush-Cheney started.

Now I’m really scared…

Technorati Tags: big oil, Bush-Cheney, Halliburton, John McCain, Sarah Palin

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