More on the game theory in the Energy Bill, this from the Washington Post:

Negotiators sprinkled in dozens of sweeteners sought by states and congressional districts, ranging from nearly $1 billion in shoreline restoration projects to tax credits for a company that produces fuel by compressing turkey carcasses.

So I showed my continuing ignorance of how Washington, D.C., works this week in grand fashion pronouncing to anyone who would listen (poor sops) that there wouldn’t be an energy bill. There is. Still unclear whether it can pass the senate, but I clearly was wrong.

I’ve been looking at it as a hideously complex game theory problem, Here’s a great example, from today’s New York Times story:

Lobbyists and lawmakers said the key to passage might be the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle, who has pushed the ethanol plan to benefit corn growers in his home state, South Dakota, and across the Midwest. If Mr. Daschle supports the measure, they say, the threat of a filibuster will fade.

There are so many interests pro and con to be balanced here that the game theoretical alliances and defections may very well be intrinsically too complex to grasp.

Watch and learn.

On this date 14 years ago, the Germans opened the Berlin wall.

One is reminded of Ronald Reagan’s remarkable speech two years before:

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Great political speeches are all sleight of hand, because things are never that simple:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge?and more.

Of course we were unwilling to pay an price. Of course it took far more and different than Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Reagan. But great political moments are crystalline, because the complexities are so much harder to understand at the time, and even harder still to grasp from even the short distance of history that separates us now.

Here is the complexity I learned today. It was proposed that German Day of Unity be celebrated today, Nov. 9, in honor of that first accidental opening of the wall, until it was realized this was also the anniversary of the first night of Kristallnacht.

For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.

Kennedy was too optimistic and too pessimistic there by a long measure, we weren’t watching his hands closely enough, but damn it was a great speech.

Went to a talk last night by Bill Perry, former defense secretary during the Clinton Administration. He was bent on scaring the crap out of us in his discussion of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and the danger they pose to the world. He suggested that, if North Korea’s program is not constrained, there is a grave likelihood of a North Korean-suppled nuke ending up in the hands of some transnational thugs who don’t like us and want to blow up Tulsa or Manhattan Beach or Manhattan or something.