As Silicon Alley Insider reported today, Vice President Joe Biden officially opened a Twitter account this weekend. This is Joe “big f*#king deal” Biden, of course, so it could either be one of the best political Twitter feeds of all time or one of the most heavily edited, most-often ghostwritten Twitter feeds of all time. Judging by its 23 hours of life, it’s the latter, unfortunately! @VP has tweeted once. He has 11,700 followers but he follows no one.

Being outspoken and gaffe-ish prone doesn’t necessarily make you a bad tweeter. It might make you a very good tweeter. Here’s what not to do: Don’t take preening sexxy Twitpics of your physique, hairless or otherwise, and don’t send those Twitpics to random people on the other end of the tweet tube and don’t then tell people you were hacked when they make inquiries. Any of that would make you a bad tweeter and a general disgrace of a person, if you’re an elected official kind of person, anyway, as you are.

Happy Independence Day, Joe Biden. Be free, start tweeting!

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“Obama is captive to an ideology that thinks it would be beneficial for America not to be No. 1 in the world,” the Colorado Statesman reports D’Souza said. “What does Obama want us to be, in my opinion? No. 7, No. 32 — number whatever. He wants us to be just one country at the big dining table of nations.”

D’Souza went after the president in a way that would have made attack-author and leading birther Jerome Corsi proud. D’Souza said Obama was “not exactly” a socialist, that he wasn’t interested in keeping nuclear weapons out of North Korea and Iran and that he is angling to gain control of U.S. financial institutions as a way to decolonize the control of capital.

“My prediction — and it’s a rather startling one — is that Obama’s goal is to take us down from being No. 1. Again, not ’cause he hates us — he thinks that being a normal country would be really good for us. It’s kind of like the coach who wants his own team, the Lakers, to lose, because they’ve been winning too much.”

Statesman reporter Ernest Luning deadpans the scene in his report:

Because Obama doesn’t want the United States to be the preeminent country in the world, “you have the remarkable spectacle of the coach calling losing plays for his team,” D’Souza told an appreciative crowd gathered for a monthly state GOP fundraiser….

At the last Capital Club luncheon, Call hosted controversial social conservative and likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

Santorum seized on the occasion to warn the crowd that Obama was going to disappear their country and draw them further from God because his plan was to get Americans hooked on entitlements.

A week ago Vice President Joe Biden launched a broadside against these lines of attack on the administration, attacks that suggest the president is either deliberately trying to undermine the country or is insufficiently enthused about U.S. achievements or “exceptionalism.”

Speaking at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, Biden celebrated U.S. entrepreneurialism at length and touted the unique relationship between government and industry in the U.S. that has created a capitalist juggernaut over the last 200 years and become a model all around the world.

“We have the best engineers, physicians, human capital,” Biden said. “This isn’t chauvinism… People say China has already eaten our lunch. I say to them, look at what we’ve accomplished… The American spirit has risen to challenges time and time again. It’s not even close.”

[ Image of D'Souza by Ernest Luning ]

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Vice President Joe Biden visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, Friday to announce that Boulder-based U.S. e-Chromic won the first “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” challenge. Biden used the occasion to lay groundwork for the 2012 election, answering critics on the right who paint government as the enemy of free enterprise and who cast the Obama administration as insufficiently enthused over U.S. achievements or exceptionalism. Biden celebrated the long record of U.S. entrepreneurial success and argued that the relationship between government and industry in America has been vital in making the country a juggernaut of capitalist productivity and a model for countries around the world.

“Sometimes it takes national [government] investment to spark entrepreneurial innovation. That [relationship] is part of our national DNA,” Biden told the crowded events room off the main laboratory building as camera shutters whirred. Biden then ticked off a list of transformative pro-business U.S. government projects, including the drive to connect the nation by rail in the 1860s and to land on the moon 100 years later.

“[Pres.] Kennedy’s moonshot speech… go back and read it. It wasn’t just about the moon. It was about creating an army of scientists– and look what resulted from their work…. The free-enterprise spinoff that came from that investment was not able to be calculated.”

The computer revolution at the top of 21st century U.S. business success, for example, was a product of the NASA-led federal effort to get to the moon.

“You hear people saying government is anti-business. They say that [government investment] is socialism,” Biden said, speaking softly, as though intimately, and with an air of incredulousness. “That’s bizarre. It’s the most pro-business thing we can do.”

‘Science is back’

Biden came to the lab straight from a Denver 2012 fundraiser and he was flanked by Colorado U.S. Democratic lawmakers Sen. Michael Bennet and Reps Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter.

“I don’t mean to be chauvinistic,” Biden said at several points during his roughly 15-minute talk. The phrase came to seem like less of a statement of fact and more like a notice that he would be happily tooting the nation’s horn.

“We have the best engineers, physicians, human capital,” Biden said. “This isn’t chauvinism. I want China to succeed, but our economy is three times the size of China’s economy. People say China has already eaten our lunch. I say to them, look at what we’ve accomplished… The American spirit has risen to challenges time and time again. It’s not even close.”

Biden said that only one piece of the puzzle had been missing over the last eight years.

“It was missing until Obama came along,” he told the crowd of lab employees. “Science is back.”

Americans understand what we’re doing, he said, despite the abuse Republicans have heaped upon the stimulus package or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in the years since it passed.

“Americans can cut through the baloney about ‘choosing winners and losers,’” he said, referring to assertions that the government hinders productivity by meddling in free-market competition. “We can cut through that foliage. The American people are enthusiastic. They know this is an opportunity to create millions of green jobs, to expand the middle class, and to create an energy policy that increases national security.”

In his 1962 moonshot speech, Kennedy struck a similar note.

“This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined,” Kennedy said at Rice University in Houston. “That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year– a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority– even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.”

Jobs, environment, security

Speaking at NREL before Biden, Perlmutter said he’d just returned from Korea and wanted to add that the National Renewable Lab, which is sited in his 7th District, enjoys international acclaim.

“This facility is well known and it will be creating jobs for many years to come.”

Bennet said that everywhere he traveled around the state during his campaign last year, Coloradans expressed concern with the way the U.S. middle class has been shrinking and with the fact that the country has embraced an energy policy that “sends our treasure to the Gulf states for oil.”

“The work being done here at NREL will lead to the kind of private investment that will grow good middle class jobs and break our reliance on foreign oil,” he said.

The challenge

The “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” challenge is part of a larger effort by the Obama administration to streamline the process through which entrepreneurs can take technologies developed by the Department of Energy at government labs like NREL to the marketplace. The challenge allows startup companies to license government technologies for $1,000, a cost savings of up to tens of thousands of dollars in usual licensing fees. Right now there are roughly 15,000 unlicensed patents available through the program. Only about 10 percent of federal patents have been licensed for commercialization, according to the DOE.

U.S. e-Chromic is adopting technology developed at the lab to create thin-film window material that reflects sunlight as a way to increase efficiency and reduce energy costs.

Biden said that by reflecting scorching mid-day light from office and apartment buildings, the e-Chromic product could preserve vast amounts of energy and save the country billions of dollars each year.

“‘Science is back.’ I like that,” a Department of Energy public relations staffer was saying to reporters after Biden finished speaking and the crowd slowly filtered out of the building. “That was a good line, wasn’t it?”

[ Image: Ernest Luning ]

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Denver Archbishop Chaput asked Notre Dame University Catholics this weekend to press for Church policy that would deny communion to U.S. Catholic politicians who support pro-choice or pro-gay rights positions. The speech comes in the wake of surveys that show most Catholics don’t agree with Chaput on the issues.

“There is unity among the bishops about abortion always being wrong, and that you can’t be a Catholic and be in favor of abortion — the bishops all agree to that,” Chaput said. “But there’s just an inability among the bishops together to speak clearly on this matter and even to say that, if you’re Catholic and you’re pro-choice, you can’t receive holy communion.”

Chaput said the bishops should adopt a clear policy that directs priests to not give communion to pro-choice Catholics and that instructs pro-choice parishioners not to present themselves for communion at mass.

Chaput said he’s been trying to persuade the U.S. bishops conference to take his view on this issue for years but that some bishops believe a hard-line stand like the one he proposes would make it difficult for Catholic politicians to win election.

“Help me convince the bishops on this subject,” he asked the crowd.

Polling data published last month suggests the majority of Catholics in the pews will not help Chaput convince the bishops on the subject because they side with the bishops who oppose him.

On the issue of gay rights, for example, wide majorities of Catholics favor allowing gay people to marry or form civil unions and believe gay people should enjoy legal protections against workplace discrimination.

“It may come as a surprise to many that rank and file Catholics are more supportive of rights for gays and lesbians than are other Christians and the general public,” said Dr. Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, one of the organizations that polled Catholics last month. “The best data available paints this consistent portrait across a range of issues, including same-sex marriage, workplace non-discrimination, open military service, and adoption rights for gay and lesbian couples.”

Speaking on the Institute’s research, Dr. Michelle Dillon, chair of the Sociology Department at University of New Hampshire, told the Huffington Post that Catholics accept the fact that they will disagree with Church leaders on these sorts of issues as a matter of course.

“Most American Catholics believe that one can be a good Catholic and disagree with the Vatican and the bishops on issues of personal conscience. Gay-marriage has clearly become another issue, along with artificial contraception and divorce and remarriage, that Catholics believe is not core to what it means to be Catholic.”

On banning communion, Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter wrote that Chaput mischaracterized the debate around the issue in his talk at Notre Dame.

There isn’t an “inability to speak clearly on the matter,” he wrote; there is instead a genuine disagreement on the topic that includes opinion among the majority of bishops that Chaput is incorrectly interpreting Church law, specifically Canon 915 on refusing communion, and that he is promoting bad policy.

It would be more accurate to say that Chaput and very few other bishops interpret Canon 915 in such a way as to suggest that such denial of communion should be the norm, while the vast majority of bishops disagree. The reasons for their disagreement is obvious: It is lousy theology.

There are many reasons why someone might not support a certain piece of legislation that would restrict or criminalize abortion. Chaput’s simplistic approach is belied by the fact that he has never been able to suggest precisely what such anti-abortion legislation should look like. Would women who procured an abortion go to jail? If not, and only a fool would think our polity would tolerate women going to jail for this, what should the penalty be? Would abortion be considered simply as murder? Would the doctor go to jail or merely lose his or her license? These are not easy questions.

Winters believes Chaput is also wrong to suggest that the bishops who oppose him lack courage of conviction.

Those bishops who disagree with [Chaput]… are not cowards. They disagree with Chaput as to whether or not his understanding of Canon 915 constitutes sound theology and/or sound pastoral practice.

Chaput made headlines during the Denver-hosted Democratic Party National Convention in 2008 for saying national Catholic pro-choice politicians like Vice President Joe Biden should be denied communion. Chaput made news in Colorado this month for fighting to defeat same-sex civil unions legislation.

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The website Real Aspen rounds up some of the more heated slams of Biden, who flew into the Eagle County Airport Thursday night and proceeded on Interstate 70 in a motorcade using a “rolling roadblock” along U.S. Highway 82 to Aspen. Biden was back in Washington in time for Obama’s address on Libya.

Giving Biden little credit for attending the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic at Snowmass over the weekend, some of his critics pointed out the vice president’s threat to impeach former President George W. Bush if he attacked Iran without congressional approval.

Many leading Democrats, including Colorado’s senior congresswoman, Diana DeGette of Denver, feel Obama should have proceeded more cautiously before involving the nation in a third military conflict in a Muslim country. DeGette and other Colorado lawmakers are receiving a classified briefing on the situation today.

Michelle Obama

In the 1990s, Vail saw a series of high-profile leaders either on its slope during the winter months or for summer vacations. The late Princess Diana skied Vail in the early 1990s, setting off a skiing paparazzi frenzy, and President Bill Clinton also visited Vail during that same time period – but to play golf.

Vice President Dan Quayle learned to snowboard at Vail during the first Bush administration, and Clinton Vice President Al Gore made several trips to the Vail Valley, including to ski. Gore was in Aspen Friday evening, discussing the connection between global climate change and the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed millions of acres of pines trees in Colorado.

George W. Bush Vice President Dick Cheney frequently visited Beaver Creek during the summer for the conservative think tank the AEI World Forum, started by Ford. Cheney several years ago was accosted there by a Denver man angered by the Iraq war. Obama Vice President Joe Biden visited Vail for a skiing vacation last ski season.

According to the Vail Daily, Michelle Obama took her daughters to Ski Liberty in Pennsylvania last season. That was Malia and Sasha’s first ski trip. President Obama reportedly is not a skier.

“Some say we shouldn’t use tax dollars to provide seed money for green energy, but wouldn’t it be a bitter irony if we got off of foreign oil only to be tethered to foreign technologies in clean energy?” he asked the crowd of about 700 people at UQM Technologies.

UQM, founded in 1967, recently received a $45 million federal grant in order to expand production of electric motors used in cars, buses, military vehicles, and other mobility devices. The company raised matching funds from the private sector in order to move into a larger facility. They expect soon to be producing at least 80 motors a day as production of electric cars ramps up in the U.S.

The crowd was studded with VIPs, including Governor Bill Ritter, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey and CSU president Tony Frank and chancellor Joe Blake.

“The Recovery Act was a big deal– $787 billion. We’ve never done anything that big before, but something had to be done,” Biden said.

He said the recovery fund has been a huge success, creating millions of jobs, and providing seed money to lots of small green technology companies. “Some of them will strike out, sure, but some will hit grand slams.”

Many of the companies receiving funds, he said, are doing cutting edge work in the automotive field as well as solar, wind, and other technologies. Like UQM, he said most of the companies funded have used the funding as a way to attract venture capital funding, so that for every federal dollar spent, several more have been invested.

People have always opposed government spending. In 1860, he said, the U.S. decided to build a transcontinental railroad track. Back then Republicans were in favor of the investment, he said, while many Democrats opposed it.

“Where would we be if we had not made that investment? I’m serious. Where would we be? Where would Colorado be?”

Then, as now, he said, “We were building a path to the future.”

America’s history of innovation is what has always set the country apart, he said, but that the country has been in danger of seeing that competitive advantage dissipate.

In 2002, he said there were only two factories in the U.S. making advanced batteries for electric vehicles, with a marketshare of only about 2 percent. Today, he said, largely because of stimulus spending, there are 30 such factories, with a marketshare closer to 30 percent.

He said $400 million in stimulus funds is going to develop and build charging stations for electric vehicles. “We expect 16,000 charging stations to be up by 2012. We are committed.”

Noting that he served in the U.S. Senate through eight presidents, and that only 17 people have ever served longer, he said he is more optimistic today about the country’s future then ever before. “I’ve never been more optimistic about this great country, not even on the day when I was first elected to the Senate as a 29-year-old kid.”

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“I think that when people try to see the world through the tinged glasses of Democrat or Republican, that becomes an excuse to throw away critical thinking and duck the greatest responsibility a lawmaker has, which is to be independent and open minded and think of their constituents and country first.

“Those of you who know me know I did not come from a political background. I was a small business owner. It’s a long way from a small internet company and an ice cream and coffee shop to Congress. I have worked hard to take those business values to Congress. Values like keeping the budget balanced; don’t forget the people you serve; ultimately you, and no one else, are responsible for the decisions you make.”

Biden was in town to bolster Markey’s reelection campaign, which started just months after she was elected, when conservative Colorado University Regent Tom Lucero declared his candidacy for her seat. Markey was elected in November 2008. Lucero declared in January 2009. Markey has been under fire by a host of conservative candidates vying for her seat in the last year, candidacies that have benefited in particular from the momentum of the northern Colorado Tea Party movement. More recently, Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin targeted Markey as a vulnerable swing district Democrat who voted for health care reform. Palin’s targeting, though, was mostly bluster; her fundraising Political Action Committee has contributed almost no money to GOP candidates.

Still, the attention Markey has received as a targeted Democrat is surely part of what brought Biden to town this week.

“When I first met Vice President Biden in 2008 in Greeley, he told me I looked too young to have three grown children and I have really liked him ever since then,” Markey said. “We have come a long way together.

“Last time I stood with Vice President Biden, the country had never elected an African American president and had never seen an Hispanic woman serve on the Supreme Court. Health care reform was a pipe dream less than two years ago.

“To people who say elections don’t matter, I say talk to the 25-year-olds who can now stay on their parents’ health insurance.

“To people who say elections don’t matter, speak to the family of Matthew Shepard who waited ten years to see a federal hate crime bill pass. [Shepard was pistol-whipped in Wyoming and died at a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, in Markey's Fourth District, in 1998.]

“Talk to the women who were denied health insurance because they had breast cancer. Or to the family driven into bankruptcy paying for life-saving operations that their insurance wouldn’t cover.”

Biden stood next to Markey on stage during her remarks.

“A certain former governor of Alaska has put Congressman John Salazar and I on a list of targeted races for 2010. I wear that as a badge of honor, but it is also disheartening.

“When did hope and change become a bad thing?”

Minimum donations for the event, which was also attended by U.S. Reps. Ed Perlmutter and Dianna DeGette, were $150. Biden spoke in Longmont earlier in the day at an event open to press and public.

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* It’s a big f*%$ing deal for Betsy Markey.

* Not so much for Cory Gardner: Those Palin bullseyes may have backfired.

* It’s 4/20: Marijuana will be legalized but only after old Americans die.

* Democrats can’t find a single GOP co-sponsor for campaign finance legislation.

* Why was GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell for bailouts before he opposed them? Why is he opposed to Wall Street oversight? “Because he’s trying to sound like a populist while he does what he always does: Represent Wall Street’s biggest banks.” Or because he’s “completely dogged in his pursuit of money. That’s his great love, above everything else.”

Video after the jump.

T-shirts containing the un-bleeped phrase are already on sale.

Post by New Mexico Independent editor Gwyneth Doland.