Month: October 2012

15 minutes on gas prices, none on climate change

by David Atkins

It’s true that the second presidential debate was much more substantive than the first. But then, that’s like saying that cotton candy is more nutritious than bubble gum.

Consider, for instance, that the debate featured fifteen minutes of discussion of gas prices, an issue over which the President has very little control. But it featured no discussion of climate change, the greatest threat facing humanity and countless other species, an issue over which the President and Congress do have considerably great power.

Not that the answers from either candidate would have been anything short of terrifying. While Obama placed significantly more emphasis on renewables than did Romney, both candidates stepped over one another to proclaim their love of drilling for more carbon. And no surprise, as candidates who don’t support more “domestic drilling” get reamed in the predominantly coal, gas and auto oriented swing states that dominate our presidential elections.

But we almost got a climate change question from Candy Crowley for us “climate change people:”

I had that question for all of you climate change people. We just, you know, again, we knew that the economy was still the main thing so you knew you kind of wanted to go with the economy.

Because “climate change people” are a niche group concerned about a pet issue of no consequence unlike, say, people obsessed with firearms or the President’s particular vocabulary in the wake of an embassy attack.

But who knows? After three debates in which the subject of climate change hasn’t come up even once, perhaps the final debate on foreign policy will dare broach the subject. With the Pentagon and CIA calling climate change a destabilizing force in the world, perhaps the issue will get the attention of the bleeding heart softies in the American military enough to merit even five minutes of the cumulative six hours of debates on the policies of the biggest economy in the world.

Let’s not hold our breath, though.

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Trust him?

by digby

Romney was nearly 60 years old before he had this “change of heart.” (Oh, and he was planning to run for president):

I have begun to believe that Mitt Romney may be the most cunningly evil Republican … ever.  Most politicians are liars, and they all talk out of both sides of their moths to some degree. But this one has something extra. I don’t honestly honestly know what his “real agenda” is, but after watching him closely for the past year or so, my intuition is screaming that he is a very dangerous man.

Update: This is so slick I have an urge to do a full body cleanse with some of that toxic BP dispersant just from reading it. Ugh.

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And they say tasers make us safer

by digby

Well, maybe not:

An innocent blind man with a white stick has been shot in the back by police with a 50,000-volt Taser after officers mistook it for a samurai sword.

Colin Farmer, 61, was hit following reports of a man walking through Chorley, Lancashire, early on Friday evening, with a sword. He said that he initially thought he was being attacked by hooligans when he was struck by the Taser.

The matter is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) after Farmer, who has said he intends to take legal action, made a complaint to the force.

Farmer, who used to run an architects’ practice and is a fellow of the Institute of Directors, was on his way to meet friends at 5.45pm and was walking along Peter Street near a restaurant. “I didn’t even know the police were there,” he said. “I heard this man shouting. I thought they were shouting at some people.”

Farmer, who has suffered two strokes, the most recent requiring two months in hospital in March, was fearful he would suffer another stroke.

He said the whole thing was like being “trapped in a nightmare”: “I thought I was going to be attacked by hooligans. The next thing they fired a Taser at me, although I didn’t know it was a Taser at the time. I just felt a thump in my back. As soon as the Taser hit me, I hit the ground.”

He repeatedly attempted to explain to the officer that he was blind, but he knelt on him and dragged his hands behind his back and handcuffed him. Farmer, who has bruises on his hand, said he was “absolutely terrified.”

“I walk at a snail’s pace, they could have walked past me, driven past me in a van or said: ‘Drop your weapon.'”

This truly is the death of common sense, isn’t it? The police have become lazy with these weapons and don’t try to use their heads anymore. And people are getting hurt. (If you think it’s actually worse in the UK, think again. Our cops are using these things at the drop of a hat on anyone who looks at them sideways.)

Just remember to tell any blind relatives to be careful. Whenever some moron reports that his white stick is a samurai sword they can’t be counted on to be reasonable, they just shoot people full of electricity and ask questions later.

Remember citizens, if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about.

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Two pieces of big planetary news today

by David Atkins

Two pieces of planetary news make todayvery cool. First, crowdsourced amateur scientists discovered a planet in a quadruple star system originally thought too hostile for planetary formation:

The planet, which has been designated “PH1” in honor of it being the first such extrasolar planet spotted through the Planet Hunters website, is a burning hot gas giant slightly larger than Neptune, about six times the radius of Earth and located some 3,200 light years from our home planet.

Most remarkably, PH1 not only orbits two stars in what’s known as a circumbinary system, but those two stars are themselves orbited by two other stars located far away, some 900 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to NASA.

Although PH1 is not located in its the habitable zone — a distance relative to its stars where liquid water could form on the planet — the view from the planet would include a fascinating four-star sky.

“All four would be visible,” wrote Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at Oxford University and an author on a scientific paper describing the find, in an email to TPM. “The two more distant ones might each be as bright as the Moon was on Earth.”

PH1 was spotted first by two users of the Planet Hunters website combing through the mounds of data captured by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, a photometer, or light meter telescope, launched into orbit above Earth in March 2009, specifically designed to hunt for Earthlike, habitable planets around other stars based on “light curves,” brightness measurements from those stars that may dip if a foreign object, such as a planet, crosses in front of them.

However, the Kepler mission produces an enormous volume of data, capturing brightness of 150,000 new stars every 30 minutes, on Kepler’s quest to survey the region of the Milky Way Galaxy around Earth.

Planet Hunters, an offshoot of the citizen science website Zooniverse, believes that human volunteers may be better equipped to sort through the numerous “light curves” than computer algorithms, “because of the outstanding pattern recognition of the human brain.”

Not only is it an awesome find, it also means there are more potential planetary environments than originally thought:

PH1 is the first planet to be found in a system with four stars, a gravitational environment that until now was thought to be far too intense for planet formation to occur.

“We think that planets form from a disk of leftover material around young stars, but we would have expected that disk to be disrupted by the presence of the other stars,” Lintott told TPM. “We will need to go back to the models and see if we can explain what’s happened, because right now it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.”

In another story, we’ve found a small, rocky Mercury-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri just four light years away:

The hunt for planets like our own has come up with a striking discovery: There’s a planet about the same size as Earth in the nearby Alpha Centauri system, and it’s the closest planet found outside our solar system.

“Close,” of course, is a relative term. No one’s getting there anytime soon: The newly found planet, which orbits a star called Alpha Centauri B, is about 4 light-years, or 23.5 trillion miles, away.

Based on its mass, the planet is a rocky world and not gaseous, said Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. He and his colleagues published the findings in the journal Nature.

t’s located extremely close to its parent star – Earth has a 365-day orbit around our sun, and this other planet orbits its star in only three days. Temperatures on the surface could be in the area of 1300 degrees Fahrenheit, scientists estimate. Rather than solid, the surface is likely to be lava.

But there is hope for life in that neighborhood: Small-mass planets like the one orbiting Alpha Centauri B are usually not alone with their sun, Dumusque said. Often there are other planets in the system, farther away from the parent star.

The next step would be to continue monitoring the shifts in light from the star, looking for other planets. Time is of the essence, however: As Alpha Centauri B and another star, Alpha Centauri A, move closer to each other, finding any planets in the area will become more difficult. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, may be related to this binary system.

Just keep in mind: this sort of research and activity on behalf of the human race and expansion of knowledge is what conservatives want to cut, in order to give billionaires bigger tax breaks. That’s not just morally corrupt. It’s treasonous to the human race itself.

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Mitt Romney, (Affirmative) Action Hero

by digby

Everyone’s talking about Romney’s “binder full of women” comment last night and it’s clear that, once again, he lied. But I think it’s worth taking a second look at it anyway:

ROMNEY: Thank you. And important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs are — are all men.” They said, “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?”

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Atrios make a very good point that I don’t think I’ve heard from anyone else:

Jokes aside, the binders of women comment was basically the core of all of the mostly mythical affirmative action in this country. It’s about recognizing that if you’re a product of a good old white boy network, it’s a good idea to make the effort to read those binders, to make the extra effort to look at qualified women and minorities.

This isn’t a comment on what actually happened when Mitt was in office, just pointing out that if you embrace that story you embrace affirmative action, because aside from a teeny bit of minority business contracting and civil service hiring provisions, that’s what affirmative action actually means in this country.

Romney made a great case for affirmative action, something his party adamantly opposes. But it’s so common sense that he could say it in the debate and nobody even noticed. Not even Fox.

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Bain the scrappy little start-up

by digby

Krugman is as gobsmacked as the rest of us by Romney’s claim last night that he “came through small business” and “understands how hard it is to start a small business”:

Now, as I understand it, Romney first went to work for Bain and Company, a management consultancy. Then he founded Bain Capital, the private-equity spinoff that took him from being rich — his starting point — to being incredibly rich.

This merits the claim, ” I came though small business”???

Well, it certainly explains why he’s so adamant about keeping those tax rates low for millionaires. He sees vulture capitalists like himself as scrappy small businessmen — the backbone of the American economy struggling to get by. Which is why they need some “tax relief.” It isn’t the first time that he’s sold this bogus tale as “pulling himself up by his bootstraps.” Here’s an excerpt from his acceptance speech in Tampa:

I learned the real lessons about how America works from experience.

When I was 37, I helped start a small company. My partners and I had been working for a company that was in the business of helping other businesses.

So some of us had this idea that if we really believed our advice was helping companies, we should invest in companies. We should bet on ourselves and on our advice.

So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn’t get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church’s pension fund to invest, but I didn’t. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors’ money, but I didn’t want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him.

That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story.

It was tough. Some of his investors — among them central American right wing oligarchs who were funding the death squads — were upset about the quality of the caviar at one of their meetings and threatened to walk. Nightmare.

I think he sincerely believes that his experience is akin to the guy in Nebraska who’s trying to open up a Burger King franchise. And he’s right. Except for the famous name, the Harvard education, the ties to Bain and Company, the political connections, the personal wealth and the golden rolodex, there’s very little difference. He knows that all that guy needs is a capital gains tax break and the next thing you know he’ll have a 200 million dollar IRA too.

Update: Howie has more.  Much more.

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“He does like pranks but he doesn’t like to get pranked. We’ve learned that the hard way”

by digby

Michael Moore points out that Romney proved last night that he plays by different rules.  Here’s the president making the claim:

OBAMA: Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules.That’s been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate.

Moore says:

You might expect Romney would say this wasn’t true. You might expect Romney would say this wasn’t true. Instead, right away he showed that this is his philosophy – including during presidential debates.

They had agreed that the candidates would not ask each other questions directly. Romney broke that rule almost immediately and then got in the president’s face demanding that he answer his answer. (At one point I thought he was going to start pounding on his stool and screaming  “I want to know, I want to know!” like an ex of mine used to do.)

ROMNEY: In the last four years, you cut permits and licenses on federal land and federal waters in half.
OBAMA: Not true, Governor Romney.
ROMNEY: So how much did you cut (inaudible)?
OBAMA: Not true.
ROMNEY: How much did you cut them by, then?
OBAMA: Governor, we have actually produced more oil —
ROMNEY: No, no. How much did you cut licenses and permits on federal land and federal waters?
OBAMA: Governor Romney, here’s what we did. There were a whole bunch of oil companies.
ROMNEY: No, no, I had a question and the question was how much did you cut them by?
OBAMA: You want me to answer a question —
ROMNEY: How much did you cut them by?

But there is a bigger point than Romney just being a jerk. As Moore pithily observes:

Maybe the no-questions rule was a bad idea. But Romney certainly proved Obama was right: whatever the rules are, Romney doesn’t believe people like him need to follow them.

Mitt must have been a real pip to work for, that’s all I can say. Certainly the tales of his bullying as a young man and a father, indicate that he’s a real jackass.  Like this, for instance:

The Republican presidential candidate dispatched his five adult sons onto a late night television show where they jokingly told stories of their father’s pranks in an effort to humanise the former businessman who critics accuse of being boring. 

But the light-hearted anecdotes carried an uncomfortable echo of earlier allegations that Mr Romney had been a bully while at prep school and has a long history of uncaring behaviour.

Matt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor’s second son, told how his father would present his children with a stick of butter, telling them “it’s so rotten you have to smell it”. When they leaned down he would gleefully shove their faces into the plate.

Mr Romney apparently repeated the trick recently with one of his grandsons, pushing the shocked child’s head into a platter of whipped cream. 

During the rare joint appearance by all five sons on Conan O’Brien’s talk show, Josh Romney told how he once ambushed his father in a darkened basement as Mr Romney groped for the light switch.

The startled private equity boss responded by tackling him to the ground and wrestling him on the floor.

“He does like pranks but he doesn’t like to get pranked. We’ve learned that the hard way,” Josh said.

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More female moderators, please

by David Atkins

After last night’s debate, it wouldn’t be surprising if Mitt Romney wanted to stuff Candy Crowley in a binder. In many ways the consummate Villager, Ms. Crowley nonetheless reined in both candidates, committing wanton acts of journalism and fact-checking in the middle of the debate. It was quite something to behold:

But it wasn’t simply that Ms. Crowley refused to be bowled over. It was also that by being a woman, the bully tactic favored by Romney came off more as insecure and asinine than as strong and commanding, even in Romney’s fact-free environment of postmodern campaigning. With a more passive, male moderator a debate can become nothing but a preening show of alpha male dominance. As I said last week:

When debaters can’t even argue from a single set of facts, the argument ceases to be a debate and becomes a pissing contest instead, with each interlocutor interrupting and shouting the other down. Respect is impossible to maintain. With a female politician the negative effects of this are mitigated somewhat thanks to sexist cultural expectations. But especially in a debate between two men, when factual ground rules disappear the contest goes almost entirely to the alpha dog with the bigger bite, louder bark and broader grin.

More female politicians on the biggest stage would be extremely welcome. But even in a debate between two men, a female moderator can help make a lot of difference in turning an empty show of dominance into a weighty show of substance.

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QOTN: Andrew Sullivan

by digby

I’m watching Fox right now and they don’t seem to agree. (Well, they do agree that he was lethal, but I think it’s more of scary black thing.) As for Benghazi, they are saying that Obama lied when he insisted (and Crowley confirmed) that he had said the next day that the Benghazi attack was “an act of terror.”

Here’s a transcript:

Today, the loss of these four Americans is fresh, but our memories of them linger on. I have no doubt that their legacy will live on through the work that they did far from our shores and in the hearts of those who love them back home.

Of course, yesterday was already a painful day for our nation as we marked the solemn memory of the 9/11 attacks. We mourned with the families who were lost on that day. I visited the graves of troops who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hallowed grounds of Arlington Cemetery, and had the opportunity to say thank you and visit some of our wounded warriors at Walter Reed. And then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi.

As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it. Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe.

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

They seem to think that was a non sequitur that had nothing to do with the attacks. Go figure.

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Obama and the vision thing


by digby

The other day Ezra Klein wrote a piece about how Obama has lost his mojo by not running on the vision thing as he did in 2008. He reported that the campaign thinks the American people are skeptical of big promises so they don’t think it’s helpful for him to run on his real second term agenda  — of huge change. They apparently don’t think that change message has quite the resonance that it once did. Go figure.

First of all, I’m a little bit surprised that the guy who wrote this thinks such lofty speechifying would have that much of an impact. Granted, it’s a campaign so people are perhaps more motivated to listen, but if the bully pulpit is completely superfluous during the president’s term it’s hard to see how it’s so powerful during the election campaign, particularly for the incumbent.

But anyway, Ezra wrote:

Romney prevailed in last week’s debate in part because his vision filled the stage. Reading Obama’s answers, it’s startling how many of them are about Romney. On the heels of a workmanlike convention speech that was particularly lacking in what used to be called “the vision thing,” his debate performance speaks of a deeper problem. Obama, at the moment, doesn’t have anything particularly inspiring to say.

It might be that polls and focus groups have given the Obama campaign reason to retreat from presenting a bold agenda for a second term. But the dulling of the vision has led to the dulling of the candidate. A quick glance at the polls suggests voters don’t seem to like that, either.

I think the problem here is something else. Obama was very inspiring to a lot of people during the last campaign, most certainly to Ezra, who wrote at the time:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

I’m sure Ezra is just a tiny bit embarrassed by that now, but he was far from alone in feeling that way. And that’s the problem. Obama never had that power. People just wanted to believe he did. His speeches were larded with those fatuous phrases like “we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for” and “yes we can” but I can tell you from experience asking many, many people during that campaign, most of them didn’t have the vaguest idea what it was they were supposed to be doing other than voting for Barack Obama. I asked dozens of them, “what does he really care about?” and the vast majority said he cared about “changing Washington” and “bringing the two sides together.” Well, that didn’t work out too well, as anyone who had been observing the political dynamic closely could have told them. There were a few wonkish types who said they really though he cared about civil liberties and changing America’s foreign policy. A couple said it was climate change. But overall, the consensus was that he was going to change the way our politics works. And it was quite clear he would do this by the pure force of his personality. (And he believed his own hype for a very long time.)

My point is this: Obama didn’t “overpromise” as Ezra claims all presidents do and are then hit by a cold splash of reality once in office. He promised things that were fantasies. They were nice fantasies, but they weren’t a “bold agenda” of major change. Sure, his platform had some good liberal objectives in them, but they weren’t substantially different than any other center-leftish Democrat in this era. And he even managed to obtain some of them, despite an obstructionist opposition party like we haven’t seen for more than a century, which is an achievement. But the central promise of his campaign was always that he was “the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair” and now that he is just another president, his claim to office has become just another prosaic exercise in partisan politics. And that’s pretty damned dull compared to the promise of 2008.

I still do not know what his vision is aside from that glittering promise to transcend all divisions and make us all one. If he has a policy vision that’s consumed him for his entire first term, I’d say it’s what Matt Yglesias called his white whale: the Grand Bargain. But I still have no idea why he thinks that’s such a worthy goal, except as a way to tick off a bunch of discrete policy objectives all at once, ostensibly in order to clear contentious politics from the deck so we can all get together an govern for the common good. More fantasy.

Ezra claims that he could run on his jobs proposal and other big ticket items that would inspire the nation.  In a memo declaring their data shows the people want bold change more than ever, Democracy Corps wrote that he needs to express a huge message of change like this:

I agree with that. So do two-thirds of the respondents.  And it’s the polar opposite of the message of crippling debt that’s overtaken Washington (partially at the direction of the president.)  I’d be downright inspired myself if he’d used that idea to parry all the deficit talk during his first term and run on it throughout this campaign.

At this point I have to hope that the tepid reception to his speech at the convention, the downright poor reception to his debate performance (and the clear potential for an upset in this election) will have finally shaken the last of the gauzy cobwebs of 2008 out of the campaign’s memories  — and forced them to recognize that for all the happy talk on the trail about how “we” did this and that, the problem is that people don’t know what “he” is going to do. I don’t think they need any more big vision statements about “bringing people together” — they’ve learned about that the hard way.  What they probably would like to hear from the president is some conviction that he will fight for them.

Tonight is the beginning of the last leg of this campaign and it’s looking very close. I really hate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and I think the world will be worse off if they are elected.  So, I’m sincerely rooting for the president to do well tonight. I assume he has it in him — he’s a talented, professional politician with far more human appeal than that corporation in a suit Mitt Romney. I think people still want to believe in him. Here’s hoping he’s searched his soul and found a different vision, tempered by hard experience, that will make the American people see that he’s no longer up in the clouds promising unattainable dreams but down in the political trenches leading the battle on their behalf.

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