The junior U.S. Senator from New York really likes me. I can tell, because she sends me emails addressing me by my first name. Here are a few lines from her latest note to all of us close personal friends:

Yesterday, in my latest HillCast, I described a plan for an Apollo-like effort to make clean, alternative energy the energy of America. This plan would create a strategic energy fund to invest in developing and deploying clean and alternative energy — home grown energy.

Sounds cool to me, Diane (we longtime close personal friends call her that). Can our household budget cover this?

We can create the fund without new taxes on Americans by asking the oil companies to “Play or Pay”: either they invest in alternative energy themselves, or they pay a portion of their windfall profits earned from the spike in oil prices into the strategic energy fund.

Well obviously, this must be some kind of a test flag-raising to see if anybody salutes. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s something wrong about that “without new taxes” phrase. Unless it means you don’t consider oil companies American, then it must mean that you don’t see compulsory payments to government programs as taxes. Let me explain it, Diane.

If the alternatives are paying into this fund “voluntarily” or being forced to pay into it anyway, there is no choice involved. If they refuse to pay, the Energy Department (or whatever other agency gets this task) will just take the money. If they hide it under the bed, arm themselves, and refuse to give it up, then armed goverment agents will overwhelm them with firepower, and if necessary, kill them. Just like admitted taxes, these payments are made at the implicit or explicit point of a gunbarrel.

Now you might believe there are good reasons to advocate this program. It might even be wildly popular. But it is insulting to my intelligence to try and deny that this is taxation. Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.

much ado is being made about al gore’s utility bills as of late. but the nytimes finds out that, as usual, the numbers don’t really add up:

the group, the tennessee center for policy research, issued its statement a day after the film “an inconvenient truth,” which tracked mr. gore’s campaign to educate the world about the ravages of global warming, won an academy award for best documentary feature. by its count, mr. gore’s mansion “consumes more electricity every month than the average american household uses in an entire year,” the statement said.

but here is where the story gets a little blurry.

the group cited some damning kilowatt-consumption figures — 221,000 for the gores in 2006, compared with the american average of 10,656, for instance — which, it said, were obtained from the nashville electric service. it put the gores’ average monthly electric bill at $1,359. of course, those figures immediately rocketed through cyberspace…

the associated press, however, apparently asked a spokeswoman from the nashville utility company, laurie parker, if the policy group had actually obtained the information from them, and she said the utility never got a request from the policy center and that no information was ever turned over to them.

so the a.p. decided to review the utility records itself, and came up with slightly different kilowatt consumption numbers: 191,000 for the gores in 2006 — compared to a typical nashville home of 15,500 kilowatts.

it remains unclear at this point why there would be two contradictory sets of numbers floating around — even if both sets do show mr. gore’s mansion to be a bit of an energy hog.

we shan’t get into gore’s offset argument here. needlenose does an excellent job describing, step-by-step, how everyone can follow gore’s lead and purchase renewable energy credits for their own carbon footprint.

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This is the list of Congresspeople the Chamber of Commerce is targeting in their fight against the Employee Fair Choice Act.  If you see your congress member on the list, it’s even more important that you make that call (and get five of your friends to do the same) today:

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Elizabeth Dole’s in trouble and they’ve turned hard against the war president. Will NC go blue in ‘08? If Edwards os the nominee, the odds would be highest.