Has it really been a third of a century since President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof? Has it really been over a quarter century since President Ronald Reagan yanked them down?

Yes and you betcha.

"On June 20th, 33 years ago, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof. Seven years after that, Ronald Reagan took them down," writes Brian Merchant in motherboard.com. "It was the end of 70s, a decade wracked with stagnant economic growth and a pair of debilitating oil price spikes—the second, caused by the Iranian revolution, actually occurred in 1979. The nation had seen firsthand the danger of rely ing too heavily on oil, and ordinary folks were sick of being besieged by high gas prices. So Jimmy Carter made what seemed to be a reasonable move: He started organizing a framework by which to wean us off the black stuff."

Today, as America limps through a recession that will never recover without the stimulus and savings promised by renewable energy, perhaps it is time to revisit the the "Carter Initiative" on a grander scale.

With the passing of Gore Vidal, we should honor his memory by reading his most historically significant work: his introduction to U.S. Congressman John Conyers' report on the 2004 election entitled, "What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Election.'

While other liberal and progressive writers turned away from Bush's open theft of the 2004 election, Vidal was on record prior to election asserting that Bush would lose the election in terms of actual vote count. But, Vidal wrote, Bush would likely win the election through a creative propaganda campaign and election rigging. Vidal had been clear-eyed in what was happening in our country, telling the Times of London in September 2009 that "We'll have a dictatorship soon in the United States."

Vidal acted courageously in lending his name to that Congressional report that concluded, "With regards to our factual findings, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio."

Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
by Eugene Robinson
As a professor of African American history, I often remind my students that the black community is not monolithic, nor is there any one black experience. There is no one voice speaking for all of black America–this idea is the creation of white America–just as there is no longer such a thing as an all encompassing state of black America, the Urban League’s annual report notwithstanding. Indeed, African Americans are as diverse as any other race. According to the Pulitzer Prize winning Robinson, “Black America, as we knew it, is history,” done in by integration, suburbanization, Reaganomics and the global economy. Instead, Robinson reports that there are now four distinct black communities.

History books often contain a chapter that tries to answer the question: What caused such-and-such a revolt or revolution?
For example: What caused the “Boston Massacre” in 1770 when British troops stationed in Boston fired on a crowd that was pelting them with frozen snowballs and oyster shells? What caused the “Boston Tea Party” of 1773 when chest after chest of tea imported from Great Britain was thrown into Boston harbor? (Hint: There had not been a new tax.) What caused the beginning of actual warfare at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775?

The truth is that it is very difficult to be sure why human beings suddenly throw caution to the winds, and, knowing that there may be enormous consequences, take a stand and risk everything. Unsure as to the real causes of a rebellion, the historian may take refuge in a chapter title like “The Gathering Storm.”

Let’s see if we can do better regarding the causes of the longest prison uprising in United States history in which lives were lost, at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) in Lucasville, April 11-21, 1993.

The Authorities’ Account of Causes

And keep guessing some more, because pollsters are unlikely to ask that question.
A year and a half ago, a poll found that Americans drastically underestimate how high U.S. military spending is.
This fits with consistent polling showing slim majority support for cutting military spending, but strong support for major military cuts when the people polled are told what the current budget it.

Setting aside, however, the absolute size of the U.S. military budget, its size in comparison to the rest of the world's militaries, or its size in comparison to the rest of the federal budget, are people able to process the fact that it's been growing every year for the past 15 years -- in the face of the steady news reports that it's shrinking?

I doubt it.

(The Office of Management and Budget can be expected again this week to claim that military spending is low as a percentage of GDP. But the idea that we should spend more on war because we can is probably best left to psychiatrists to handle.)