I'm just full of great ideas...

To fix the hole in the levy at New Orleans - string two relatively fine mesh nets across the hole on both sides, extending plenty far on either side of the hole. Then dump a whole hell of a lot of that stuff that turns into a gel when mixed with water. That should hopefully slow the water down enough for them to get a functioning fix.

To fix both our dependence on foreign oil for energy, the obesity problem, and increase the number of jobs in our country - start building large rooms full of stationary bicycles that are attached to generators. Make time on the bicycle something that every american HAS to do, like paying taxes (without all the loopholes) - but like jury duty, you get paid some for the time. People who want to spend more than their mandated time on the bike are more than welcome to. Schoolchildren, who will be attending year round school, will have shorter days, and will get some daily exercise in not only their Phys Ed classes, but on stationary bike rooms set up in the schools - they will help power their own school. People who want to create some sort of power generating thing in their own house - whether it be a stationary bike, solar panels, or a waterwheel from a nearby stream (or maybe built in waterwheels that are turned by sewage flushing into the system...) would be given tax breaks to encourage such things, and any power that they created over and above what was needed for their own homes would be fed back to the grid. We know more about building green, energy efficient homes, with lots of recycled materials, that are safer to live in than standard construction - let's make the building codes a lot stronger, and if you want to build a standard construction home, then you'll have to pay more in insurance, energy costs, etc. We need to change our power structure - rather than having AC power, consider DC power and more local power generating places; that eliminates the energy wasted in transforming DC to AC (or do I have that backwards? Argh. Gotta check that.)

If 293,027,571 people spend ten hours a week on a bicycle that creates 150 to 200 watts at 12 to 20 volts DC an hour, that's 439,541,356,500 watts of power a week. (That's 439541357 kilowatts.) An average US household uses about 10000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity each year (or 192kWh a week). (A kWh is the expenditure of one kilowatt of power for one hour. A toaster running for an hour will use about this much energy.) So, I THINK (altho it's been a long time since I've tried to do these kind of conversions in my head) that the entire population of the US could create enough power for 84,527,184,038 households? That can't be right. I'm running late, however, and have to run get in the shower. I have a cheesecake to buy & deliver and a cake to bake & ice & a kid to pick up and it's already almost 11.