The idea for this Father’s Day post came when I was putting my daughter to bed a few weeks ago, and she started to repeat, “Want tiny dog” — one of her favorite stuffed animals.  The room was dark, and so I asked, “Is tiny dog in the crib?”  to which she replied, “Not yet” or, rather, you have to imagine a certain sly lilt, “Not ye-et,” which might be translated as, “You have to find him if you expect me to go to sleep.”

As I’m crawling around the room looking to see if she’s tossed him on the floor or if he somehow got under the furniture, she said, “Must be frustrating.”  And so a post was born.

Since the floor debate on the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy legislation is coming up (though probably not this week), let me, without further ado, offer

The Top 10 Ways the House GOP are like my Two-Year-Old daughter

10.  Core messaging is often infantile. It was, after all, on September 3, 2008 at 10:14 pm EST at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, that the entire GOP decided to make their central message a plea to the very youngest Americans — see “Drill baby, drill”: The moment the Republic died.

9.  Similar messaging tactics.  GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz once said, “There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it, is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.”  In my daughter’s case, the target audience is very small, and, her message, some variant  “Today is Carousel day,” gets heard the first time and the tenth.  For the GOP, the target audience is bigger, but the polling suggests that most people long ago understood they like drilling to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

8.  Very ego-centric.  My daughter has become fond of saying of various things around the house, “Mine!  Mine!  It’s mine!”  In the same vein, former House leader Gingrich is fond of saying, “I am not a citizen of the world!”

7.  Love nonsense phrases that amuse them, if no one else.  See House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.”

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Our guest blogger is Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

We all know about the August 2001 memo warning President Bush that terrorists were determined to strike inside the US. Thirty-six days later, they did. Well, today scientists tell us we have a ten-year window — if even that — before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible. We have to use the narrow window we have to forestall a crisis while we still can. We have to connect the dots, and we have to act. I agree with my friend Dick Armitage’s assessment on future national threats to the United States:

If I had to say what might be the biggest long term threat I’d say it might be climate change.

In 2007, eleven former Admirals and high-ranking generals issued a report from the Center for Naval Analysis warning that climate change is a “threat multiplier” with “the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today.” General Anthony Zinni, former commander of our forces in the Middle East, was characteristically blunt. He warned that without action — and I quote:

[W]e will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.

Why? Because climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.

We all know Darfur’s genocide is a brutal choice made by leaders in Khartoum. But the conflict between the so-called “Arabs” and “Africans” has its roots in shifts in climate over the last four decades. Inch by inch, year by year, the desert consumed already scarce farmland, forcing farmers and herders to compete over ever-dwindling resources. Eventually the desert had grown by 60 miles, rainfall diminished by as much as 30%, and tensions arose. This is one example of how climate change contributes to a more dangerous world.

Nowhere is the nexus between today’s threats and climate change more acute than in South Asia–the home of Al Qaeda and the center of our terrorist threat. Scientists are now warning that the Himalayan glaciers, which supply water to almost a billion people from China to Afghanistan, could disappear completely by 2035. At a moment when the American government is scrambling to ratchet down tensions and preparing to invest billions to strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to deliver for its people—it’s infuriating to think that climate change could work so powerfully in the opposite direction. Read more

Very off topic — but I know there are some very tech savvy folks out there.

I’ll probably be going to the Mac store tomorrow (if they still have them in stock).

I’m currently Verizon for both wireless and broadband.

I haven’t been Mac for a long time, but will be getting a MacBook in July, too.

Suggestions and advice are welcome!  Best Apps?