The morning line, Dec. 12, 2008
The Washington Post's Al Kamen reports that Steve Heminger, executive director of the commission that oversees transportation planning in the San Francisco area, is the favorite for Transportation secretary. Former FAA chief Jane Garvey, former Deputy Secretary of Transportation Mortimer L. Downey and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk are other candidates. (More after the break.)
Fans of clean energy and skeptics of "clean" coal and nuclear energy (like us) might take comfort in this Wall Street Journal blog post about expected Energy secretary nominee Stephen Chu. "Coal is my worst enemy" the Journal reports Chu said "repeatedly" in a speech earlier this year in which he raised doubts about the feasibility of "storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground" as a way to stop coal from furthering global warming. On nuclear, Chu said, “The waste and proliferation issues still haven’t been completely solved.”
The Wall Street Journal blog also carries this interesting piece, summarizing a paper submitted by an unidentified outside party and posted on the Transition's Web site that calls on the administration to pursue a strategy of using orbiting satellites to harness electricity, then beam it back to earth via microwaves or other transmission methods. "Some transition team members are known to look favorably on the general idea," the Journal says.
In a season of czars, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling on Obama to appoint a congressionally mandated intellectual property czar in the first 100 days, National Journal reports.
The LA Times chides Obama for being too vague in the first two days of the Blagojevich scandal but praises him for his comments yesterday in which he said his staff had no involvement in deal-making for the Senate seat and promised to "gather the facts of any contacts" his staff had with the governor's office to share them with the public.
The Washington Post has follow up coverage on an encounter between controversial NASA administrator Michael Griffin and Lori Garver, head of the Transition's NASA team. Griffin is disputing the tenor of a report the Orlando Sentinel carried earlier this week of a conversation witnesses said Griffin had with Garver:
In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses.
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“Mike, I don’t understand what the problem is. We are just trying to look under the hood,” Garver said.
“If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar,” Griffin replied. “Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.
The Post quotes a NASA spokesman paraphrasing Griffin's reaction to the conversation, "He said to me this morning, 'I sure didn't think that was an argument. We were having a discussion about stuff.' "
