Ten Minutes With Bill Maher June 15, 2012June 15, 2012 If you read yesterday’s post between about 3am and 8am, Eastern time, you missed the rather important UPDATE. (Executive summary: the President will be reelected.) Sorry about that. LIGHT! The quality of LED lighting is apparently much improved, even as the cost seems to be half what it was the last time I ordered bulbs. Watch this video, as described here: By now, we hope that most of you know that swapping incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs saves money and energy, but there’s still a lingering misconception that LED bulbs emit a cold, bluish light that is just not as warm or attractive as the old filament-filled bulbs we grew up with. To dispel this fallacy, we sought out a group of people with a critical eye for light bulb color and ambiance – lighting designers on the show floor of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at New York Design Week. These meticulous designers take light warmth and quality very seriously (that is their job after all), so we couldn’t think of anyone better suited to give an honest opinion about the latest generation of high-tech LED light bulbs. Watch our video above to see how we retrofitted five gorgeous designer lamps with new Philips LED light bulbs – and in the process saved $1,732.86 in energy costs and won over some designer converts to the future of LED lighting. This is the kind of news we should be working together to make — for fuel efficiency in lighting, in weatherizing homes, in retrofitting office buildings (the poster child for which is the Empire State Building, which has cut a projected 38%, which is to say $4.4 million, from its annual energy bill). It’s part of the economic renewal Republicans have blocked at every turn that will put our unemployed back to work and restore our economic competitiveness. How can we afford to put people to work restoring our infrastructure? The better question is: how can we not? It’s the same situation we faced in World War II: only there, no one was filibustering our way forward. Of course we needed to do what we needed to do, even if it meant running up huge deficits to do it. Now we have to do that again; only instead of running up massive debt to blow things up, we’d be running up massive debt to rebuild the nation and, by the way, tremendously improve our energy efficiency and, with it, our competitiveness, prosperity, and national security. AND NOW . . . I saved these for the weekend, on the theory that you might more easily be able to find the time to watch. WARNING: Bill Maher’s sense of humor, as you probably know, springs from outrageous tastelessness. There is a reason his show was long called, “Politically Incorrect.” That barely begins to describe his irreverence. Which on some levels is too bad, because if some of what he says makes me cringe, what chance has it to keep someone watching who doesn’t already agree with him? But he’s so right about this stuff: Clip #1: “If he’s a socialist, he’s a lousy one.” From the estimable Matt Ball: “Best New Rule ever? Start at 1:58 and watch the last 5 minutes – about how ‘socialist’ Obama has let him down.” Maher is scathing on Obama — you really have to watch — to make the point that the President has done largely what the conservatives wanted. Concluding: “So just admit it. This isn’t about what Obama is, it’s about what you need him to be, because hating him is what gets you up in the morning.” Clip #2: “Occupy Wall Street” And what about last week’s “new rules”? Even better? Much of the first two and a half minutes are very funny but if time is really short start watching at 2:42: “Now that summer is upon us, the Occupy Wall Street movement must think of a more effective form of protest than . . . camping. To be considered a real movement, it has to start moving asses off the streets and into the voting booth.” Have a great weekend.