The MaddowBlog has the article Foreign policy and the definition of ‘manhood’.

Right off the bat, let’s note that it’s arguably well past time for the political world to stop equating “manhood” with “cruise missiles.” Being an “alpha male” or an “alpha dog” may somehow seem impressive, in a junior-high-school-yard sort of way, but when analyzing geopolitical crises, we need a different kind of framework.

There’s apparently a knee-jerk assumption among too many that “real men” use bombs, not diplomacy. If memory serves, President Obama’s predecessor, whom no one accused of having a perceived “manhood problem,” often thought the same way. The foreign policy consequences, however, were nevertheless disastrous.

Are you willing to die so that Obama can prove he doesn’t have a “manhood” problem?  Are you willing to send your children and grand-children, or even great-grand-children to war to prove that the current president has “balls”, even if that President is eventually a woman?

For about a microsecond I was thinking that having a woman President might solve this problem of trying to prove “manhood”.  The trouble is that a woman President will have to act even more warlike than a man to prove that she is strong enough to be President.  I am not sure that even Elizabeth Warren would be strong enough to stand against this tide.  Maybe if she were in the same administration as Bernie Sanders, the two of them could resist this foolish talk.  And please don’t say something as silly as Hillary Clinton would be less of a war hawk than even George W. Bush.

Who do you think could possibly have the courage to say no to fomenting war?  Does the President control the CIA, or does the CIA control the President?  Once in office, will the CIA whine to the new President, “You can’t stop this war, we’ve put too much effort into getting it started.  If you stop it now, you will just confuse our allies and our enemies.”  Is this the kind of foolish rhetoric that has finally got Obama out proving his “manhood”?

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog has the article Kochs, conservative allies align against solar.

This is arguably evidence of an energy breakthrough: up until fairly recently the right never really cared enough about solar power to move aggressively against it.
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The power industry argues that net metering provides an unfair advantage to solar consumers, who don’t pay to maintain the power grid although they draw money from it and rely on it for backup on cloudy days. The more people produce their own electricity through solar, the fewer are left being billed for the transmission lines, substations and computer systems that make up the grid, industry officials say.

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As for whether industry claims have merit, the L.A. Times report also reported, “The arguments over who benefits from net metering, meanwhile, are hotly disputed. Some studies, including one published recently by regulators in Vermont, conclude that solar customers bring enough benefits to a regional power supply to fully defray the cost of the incentive.”

Not to mention that having a distributed power supply is more robust in the face of catastrophes than having a concentrated one. Or not to mention that utilities being a regulated monopoly is enough insurance against insufficient capital to pay for the infrastructure.

Is it a coincidence that the Kochs and conservatives have taken such notice of solar energy and the rise of the Bundy incident discussed in my previous post The Case For Cliven Bundy?  The fact that right wingers could connect a defiance of the federal government, an attack on Harry Reid, and an attack on the solar industry must have been irresistible whether or not any of it was true.