Recall Arnold over electricity blackouts

Just four years ago, Gov. Gray Davis was recalled largely because he “panicked” during the electricity grid and power outages earlier in the decade. Then Arnold came into office promising to “terminate” the power problems.

Now the California power outages are back. Reported AP:

Southern California Edison said 20,000 customers in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties had no electricity, spokesman Steve Conroy said.

Gray at least had an excuse: That few knew how badly the 1996 regulatory changes (not “deregulation,” as was falsely reported) had messed up the state’s electricity system.

But Arnold has no excuses. He came into office in 2003 promising to end the blackouts and fix the electricity system. He’s had four years to do so, but has not fixed the problems. The blackouts are back.

He should go.

Recall Arnold.

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Is Gray Davis running Iraq’s electrity grid?

In the early 2000, then-California Gov. Gray Davis “panicked” during an electricity crisis, causing blackouts across the state. It was a major reason why he was recalled.

Is he running Iraq’s electricity grid now? ABC News reports:

Iraq’s power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.

Oh, wait. Bush is in charge of Iraq. Maybe Bush should leave there and let the Iraqis solve their own problems.

Gore Vidal vs. the electric grid

Author Gore Vidal is hard to classify. He’s a supporter of the old Republic, meaning non-interventionism in foreign affairs and at least some controls on government. Yet he’s a big fan of FDR, who did more than anyone to turn the old, limited-government American Republic into an empire without limit.

Now he’s in an amusing battle to put on line solar panels in his home in Hollywood Hills. The city-run Los Angles Department of Water and Power shut down the solar panels because they’re not part of the electricity grid.

Which would seem to be the point of the panels, wouldn’t it? To get off the grid? Not to bureaucrats. Currently, TruthDig reports,

Vidal is still “on the grid,” unable to use solar until the system is fully re-inspected….Simply put, he tells Truthdig’s Associate Editor Kasia Anderson, “[utility companies] have no intention for anyone to use solar power so long as there’s a drop of oil anywhere in the world.”

Actually, the LADWP isn’t a private utility company, but calls itself “the nation’s largest municipal utility,” meaning it’s run by the government. And in California, the vast majority of electricity comes from nuclear power and natural gas, not oil. The LADWP even offers rebates to those with solar panels, so Vidal might get some money back.

But never mind. Vidal is feisty in his opposition to the bureaucrats. Why shouldn’t he be able to install and operate solar panels on his home? He says that he installed the solar panels because, a year ago, “for eight days we are without any power of any kind in the house, and some genius somewhere in the municipal divisions had managed to turn my telephone off.” He’s old and needs an elevator to get around his house, yet the elevator won’t work without power.

Maybe Vidal, whose family came from Tennessee (he’s related to Al Gore), will write a novel about how FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority was a fascist imposition on a once-free country and should be privatized. (That’s FDR signing the TVA bill in 1933 in the picture.) The sequel could be on the privatization of the LADWP.