Month: February 2013

The most terrifying graph you’ll see all year

by David Atkins

Data taken from the 2010 UN Climate Change report gives us this:

See that 5 degrees Celsius we’re projected to hit by 2050? That’s 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That means the end of human civilization, and possibly of the human race itself. Within our lifetimes.

The International Energy Agency agrees with the assessment.

The Science Pope blog makes clear exactly what this all means:

Your brain will fight it, even with the numbers on the page staring back at you, because the collapse of civilization is simply beyond human comprehension. To really internalize this information means you would need to accept things like:

– You are among the last people that will ever walk the Earth
– Your children won’t survive to middle age
– All of the beauty, culture, and scientific discoveries we’ve unlocked will return to the ether from whence they came.

Forgive my French, but that is some heavy shit. Yet our ability to understand and feel threatened by this information is hindered by the fact that things don’t seem that bad right now. Sure things feel a little “off”, but how can we be so close to oblivion when life is (generally speaking) so good, modern and happy?

The answer is exponentials. Climate change does not follow a linear path (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc…), it follow an exponential path (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc…). Global temperature is increasing exponentially, fueled by humanity’s exponential rise in energy use, population, and economic growth. As you can see from the chart, exponential functions look like a hockey stick: they stay low for a long time, and then rise very suddenly and rapidly once they turn the corner. Everyone has some experience with exponential growth in their daily lives…any bank account with compounded interest will follow this curve, and exponentials are the reason that sickness spreads so rapidly through your child’s school.

Next to this problem, the deficit isn’t just child’s play. It doesn’t even exist by comparison. Drones? Let’s get serious.

There is one problem on this planet that dwarfs all the others right now, and it barely gets mentioned by the national press except as a niche environmental issue.

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Guess which deficit fetishist has been making billions off of the misery of average Americans?



by digby

Get a load of this, from Lisa Graves at The Nation:

Fix the Debt financier Peter G. Peterson knows a thing or two about debt: he’s an expert at creating it. Peterson founded the private equity firm Blackstone Group in 1985 with Stephen Schwarzman (who compared raising taxes to “when Hitler invad- ed Poland”). Private equity firms don’t contribute much to the economy; they don’t make cars or milk the cows. Too frequently, they buy firms to loot them. After a leveraged buyout, they can leave companies so loaded up with debt they are forced to imme- diately slash their workforce or employees’ retirement security.

In 2006, Blackstone ransacked Travelport, a travel reservation conglomerate, piling on $4.3 billion in new debt, then pocketing $1.7 billion to pay shareholders and itself.

Travelport promptly fired 841 workers to meet its new debt obligations. It was a great deal for Blackstone but “a horrible one for Travelport,” according to one investment adviser, who described Blackstone as trading in “poisoned waters.”

Now Peterson wants to loot Social Security. For decades he has warned of a “Pearl Harbor scenario” in which spending on Social Security and Medicare causes an epic economic meltdown. Fix the Debt is only his latest project pushing the message that the deficit poses a “catastrophic threat,” and the media have been content to echo his warnings. But people should know better than to be frightened by this chorus of calamity. Peterson is no master of prediction when it comes to economic crises. When an actual threat to the economy—the $8 trillion housing bubble— loomed ominously overhead, Peterson said nothing, even as credit markets froze, subprime lenders filed for bankruptcy and economists like Dean Baker shouted from the rooftops.

The housing crisis provides a good window into the way Peterson operates. In 2007, Blackstone owned the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, the world’s fourth-largest insurer, which had branched out from municipal bonds into home-equity securities and subprime mortgage debt. FGIC went belly up in 2010, but by that time Peterson had sold most of his shares in a Blackstone IPO that netted $4 billion. Again, Peterson left oth- ers holding the bag. The AFL-CIO had warned the Securities and Exchange Commission that the Blackstone IPO was riddled with problems: the firm was structuring itself to avoid regulation and its real assets and values were unknown. Perhaps Chris Cox, George W. Bush’s man at the SEC, should have listened. A year later, Blackstone’s value had dropped 40 percent. Today, it is trading at $18 a share, showing no signs of the recovery that other Wall Street firms have enjoyed.

Blackstone shareholders may have been miffed, but Peterson walked away with $2 billion (on top of the fortune he already made from the carried interest tax loophole, which allows fund managers to be taxed at 15 percent rather than the standard 35 percent)—and pledged to spend half of that to convince Americans they have to take a harsher route to prosperity.

Yes, Mr Prudent himself, the man who “worries” for your grand kids, has been looting his shareholders for decades. I guess he knows a thing or two about debt, but not in the way you think.

I knew he was a phony, of course, by the fact that he didn’t say a peep when the budget was in surplus and the Democrats wanted to use it to shore up Social Security. (I guess he was too busy counting his billions during the tech boom to take the time.) But the minute President Bush pushed through his tax cuts (it’s yer muneee!) Peterson jumped back into the fray screaming that the sky is falling, we must cut Social Security.

Peterson is the guy who said two decades ago that he didn’t think America could afford to pay anymore for Americans’ “vacations”. He was, of course, referring to retirement. He literally thinks people should keep working until they drop dead. After all, he’s busy working well into his 80s — ripping off companies, laying off workers, scamming his shareholders and subsidizing projects to ensure that America’s already meager social insurance programs whither away and die. Why shouldn’t waitresses and travelling salesmen keep working too?

He is, in short, a horrible person of Dickensian proportions.

His most recent creation, Fix the Debt, is a scam. And the Center for Media and Democracy have done what the Village media should have done a long time ago if they wren’t so in thrall to Peterson and his plans for ritual human sacrifice: put together a dossier on the man:

Today, CMD is pleased to unveil — in partnership with The Nation — a new resource on the Campaign to Fix the Debt for the public and the media, that exposes the leaders, the Peterson-funded partners, the phony state chapters, the lobbyists and the stunt men (who convinced Alan Simpson to dance Gangnam Style) behind this massive PR effort.

This package includes:

Lisa Graves, Pete Peterson’s Long History of Deficit Scaremongering, The Nation.

John Nichols, The Austerity Agenda: An Electoral Loser, The Nation.

Dean Baker, Fix the Debt’s Fuzzy Math, The Nation.

Mary Bottari, Pete Peterson’s Puppet Populists, The Nation.

Fix the Debt Astroturf Supergroup Portal Page

Fix the Debt’s Leadership

Fix the Debt Leaders’ Conflicts of Interest

More here.

This is a great resource.  I urge you to use it by sending the link and some notes to every media parrot who screeches that the sky is falling if we don’t “deal with the deficit” immediately. We’ve got almost 8% unemployment in this country and it’s not getting any better. And our grandchildren really are under a looming threat that none of these people could give a damn about — climate change. This entire conversation is an absurd misdirection by disaster capitalists who are determined to re-order our society to their advantage — and the wealthy elites who want so badly to believe them.

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Your moment of zen: Eddie

by digby

Yay

LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant, you’ve been warned! Our new favorite basketball M.V.P. blows the competition out of the water – literally.

Meet Eddie, a 15-year-old sea otter living at the Oregon Zoo with major hoop dreams.

He mastered the sport last year to combat his elbow arthritis, according to the Today show. (Watch him in action below.) Within the first week of training, he started making baskets.

“He’s definitely got game,” said Jenny DeGroot, the zoo’s lead sea otter keeper. “Sea otters have incredible dexterity, so it makes sense Eddie would have this hidden talent. They’re famous for using rocks as tools to crack open clams.”

Although Eddie won’t be taking his moves to the court, his keepers say he enjoys the exercise, which helps him stay in tip-top shape for his age. At 15, he’s considered “geriatric.”

When zoo veterinarians discovered Eddie’s condition during an X-ray scan, they knew they “had to get creative,” DeGroot explained. “There aren’t many natural opportunities for Eddie to work those arthritic elbow joints because sea otters don’t use their front limbs to swim – they swim by moving their back legs and flippers.”

So what’s his signature move? The slam dunk.

“Eddie almost never misses,” DeGroot added in a YouTube video, “and if he does miss he keeps going until he makes it.”

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Cardinal on the hot seat

by digby

“I’ll have to get this molestation deposition done in a hurry. I’m on my way to Rome to elect a new pope”

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, will be deposed on Wednesday afternoon by lawyers representing hundreds of people who say they were sexually abused by priests in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which Cardinal Dolan led before his appointment to New York in 2009.

Cardinal Dolan is one of two American cardinals who are being deposed in sexual abuse lawsuits this week, and who plan to travel to Rome next week in advance of the proceedings to elect the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, who stunned the world last week with the announcement that he was resigning effective Feb. 28.

The other American is Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the retired archbishop of Los Angeles. He is expected to be deposed on Saturday in Los Angeles, and he has been under fire since the court-ordered release last month of 12,000 pages of internal church files revealing his role in shielding accused priests from the law.

Cardinal Dolan has been much discussed as a possible candidate for pope. The cardinal, who is the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is a charismatic figure at ease in parishes as well as in morning talk show studios, and he left a strong impression in the Vatican last year with speeches promoting what the church calls the “new evangelization.”

Yeah, he’s a heckuva guy. He led the Catholic Church hierarchy right into the arms of the right wing nuts of the Republican party:

A series of recent developments are renewing questions about the Catholic bishops’ alignment with the Republican Party, with much of the attention focusing on comments by Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, who said he “certainly can’t vote for somebody who’s either pro-choice or pro-abortion.”

In a wide-ranging interview published last week (Sept. 14), Chaput also echoed the views of a number of prominent bishops when he praised Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for trying to address the “immoral” practice of deficit spending through his libertarian-inflected budget proposals.

“Jesus tells us very clearly that if we don’t help the poor, we’re going to go to hell. Period. There’s just no doubt about it,” Chaput told National Catholic Reporter.

“But Jesus didn’t say the government has to take care of them, or that we have to pay taxes to take care of them. Those are prudential judgments. Anybody who would condemn someone because of their position on taxes is making a leap that I can’t make as a Catholic.”

Many church experts say Ryan’s views stand in contrast to traditional Catholic teaching on social justice, and Ryan’s policies have been the target of sharply critical statements from politically active nuns and the hierarchy’s own committee that deals with poverty and domestic issues.

But the dynamic within the USCCB appeared to shift even further to the right on Monday with the announcement that bishops had hired the head of Catholic Charities in Denver, Jonathan Reyes, as the new head of the bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development — in effect their chief lobbyist on domestic and international social justice issues.

The appointment was being closely watched because it is a critical post in trying to influence Congress on anti-poverty legislation.

The previous head of that office was John Carr, a widely respected social justice advocate who left the job last month after almost 25 years. Carr had come under increasingly sharp attack by the Catholic right for pushing church positions that did not always line up with conservative policies.
Many church experts say Ryan’s views stand in contrast to traditional Catholic teaching on social justice, and Ryan’s policies have been the target of sharply critical statements from politically active nuns and the hierarchy’s own committee that deals with poverty and domestic issues.

Dolan memorably had this to say on Bill O’Reilly’s show:

DOLAN: You’re a better historian than I am Bill, you know that every great movement in — in American history has been driven by people of religious conviction. And if we duct tape the churches — I’m just not talking about the Catholic Church — if we duct tape the role of religion and the churches and morally convince people in the marketplace that’s going to lead to a huge deficit a huge void.

And there are many people who want to fill it up, namely a new religion called secularism, ok, which — which would be as doctrinaire and would consider itself as infallible as they caricature the other religions doing.

So to — to see — to see that morally-driven religiously-convinced people want to exercise their political responsibility, I think that is not only at the heart of biblical religion, it is at the heart of American enterprise.

I’m guessing that Jesus didn’t see himself as a Master of the Universe — at least not in that way.

How shocking it will be if it turns out that he was heavily involved in one of the many Church molestation scandals. It certainly puts this comment in perspective:

Cardinal Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes.

“I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past,” he said. “But we bristle sometimes in that the church doesn’t get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy.”

Yeah, he’d be a great pope. Or a Fox news analyst. Either way.

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Democrats aren’t Republicans and other observations. (Why gun safety has a long way to go.)

by digby

David Frum understands a great many things about the Republican Party and how it operates. But he doesn’t know the Democrats. In this piece he offers up a compelling case for the President and the congress to take some specific action on the issue of gun control that goes beyond what they are currently proposing.

He suggests they take some bold steps to communicate to the nation the dangers of our free fire zone. First he says that the president should instruct the Surgeon General to write a report on the health implications of gun violence just as the Surgeon General did in the 60s with with the dangers of tobacco.

And then he wants to the Senate to hold hearings and have the gun manufacturers face questions like the tobacco executive back in the 90s.  You remember this:

Now I agree that both of those projects are worthy and would go a long way toward educating the public. But I think it’s obvious that just as the Republicans of those earlier eras are different, so are the Democrats. It’s almost impossible for me to believe they would do such a thing in an environment that features actions such as this:

Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill this month making Florida the first state in which it’s illegal for any physician to “ask questions concerning the ownership of a firearm” or “harass … a patient about firearm ownership during an examination.” The stated purpose of this law is to protect patient “privacy.” Which raises a very important legal and constitutional question: Huh?

Patient privacy is already protected by law, and the right to bear arms is also already protected by law. So the new bill mainly just protects patients from feeling bad or judged at their doctor’s office. Now if Florida doctors make their patients feel bad about their guns—or if patients only think their doctors are trying to make them feel bad about their guns—the doctors are on the hook for disciplinary proceedings, possible revocation of their medical license, and administrative fines up to $10,000 per count.

Or this:

Ashcroft ordered that all government lists — including voter registration, immigration and driver’s license lists — be checked for links to terrorists. But there was one list Ashcroft did not want used – the gun purchasers background check.

Every person who buys a gun from a dealer must pass an instant criminal background check. It’s called the National Instant Criminal Background check system or NICS. The records of those checks are kept by the FBI. After September 11th, the ATF wanted to review those records to see if any suspected terrorists had bought guns.

They wanted to know whether any of them had slipped through the system. The Department of Justice stepped in and stopped the FBI in their tracks. The Department of Justice said no, you can’t do that. You can’t use the records of approved gun purchasers in connection with a criminal investigation.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told the FBI to stop checking the NICS list…That mirrors the position of the National Rifle Association, which insists that the data collected when people buy guns is an invasion of privacy.

Even 9/11 couldn’t move the gun nuts. They eagerly went for torture, kidnapping and the suspension of habeas corpus but God Help Us, don’t mess with the 2nd Amendment.

And the Democrats didn’t exactly stand up and shout j’accuse! In fact, they pretty much fell all over each other to back the right wing all the way. Indeed, they became so enabling of this gun proliferation agenda that they allowed the assault weapons ban to expire with hardly a peep. I see little evidence that they have come far enough from that to stage some major confrontations with the gun lobby.

Frum knows the Republicans wouldn’t wait — they’d go for it. But that’s how they roll, not the Democrats. The Dems will fight for some benign regulations and they might even get them. And there’s no denying that the argument has at long last been taken up, at least. With the help of Bloomberg and some others, over time we might turn this around. But until it becomes obvious to the Democrats that they have more to win by fighting this than they do by enabling it, I doubt that anything dramatic will happen. There are some progressives in congress who are slowing changing this dynamic and over time it probably will. But not today. This scares them too much:

The National Rifle Association will launch a print advertising campaign targeting mostly Democratic senators up for re-election in 2014, according to sources close to the group.

On Thursday, full-page ads are scheduled to run in local newspapers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina and West Virginia. They will be supplemented by digital advertising in these states and 10 others, including Alaska, Colorado, Montana, New Hampshire and South Dakota. …

The campaign is estimated to cost north of $375,000, sources said. The NRA’s newspaper ads will run in three states with Democratic incumbents up in 2014: Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. In West Virginia, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller is retiring, but the race to replace him is competitive.

Remember, this is how West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin ran his winning race:

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Our post-racial society

by David Atkins

Dave Wasserman of the Cook Report tweets:

How polarized is the South? Of 120 majority white CDs, GOP holds 112. Of 39 majority non-white CDs, Dems hold 33.

His Google spreadsheet is here. And yet these are the same people who insist that we live in such a colorblind society that there’s no longer any need for the Voting Rights Act.

As whites decline in population, this situation is only going to get worse for conservatives and Republicans in general. And try as they might, their establishment gurus don’t have a lot of good answers for it.

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The moral judgement of politicians

by digby

Well, well well:

Former New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici told the Journal on Tuesday he fathered a son outside of his marriage over 30 years ago, revealing a secret kept for decades.

Statements given to the Journal by Domenici and the son’s mother, Michelle Laxalt of Alexandria, Va., identified the son as Adam Paul Laxalt, a Nevada lawyer. Michelle Laxalt formerly was a prominent government relations consultant and television political commentator in Washington, D.C. She is a daughter of former U.S. senator and Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt….

His secret is more than 30 years old.  Whatever. It’s a personal issue and it’s none of our business.  But I cannot help but recall this speech when his “secret” was only 15:

I have concluded that President Clinton’s actions do, indeed, rise to the level of impeachable offenses that the Founding Fathers envisioned.

How can anyone, after conceding that the President lied under oath and obstructed justice, listen to this quotation and not conclude that this President has committed acts which are clearly serious, which corrupt or subvert the political and government process, and which are plainly wrong to any honorable person or to a good citizen?

[…]

Truthfulness is the first pillar of good character in the Character Counts program of which I have been part of establishing in New Mexico. Many of you in this chamber have joined me in declaring the annual “Character Counts Weeks.” This program teaches grade school youngsters throughout America about six pillars of good character. Public and private schools in every corner of my state teach children that character counts; character makes a difference; indeed, character makes all the difference.

Guess which one of these pillars comes first? Trustworthiness. Trustworthiness.

So what do I say to the children in my state when they ask, “Didn’t the President lie? Doesn’t that mean he isn’t trustworthy? Then, Senator, why didn’t the Senate punish him?”

[…]

In this day and age of public yearning for heroes, we criticize basketball, football and baseball players, and actors and singers who commit crimes or otherwise fail to be “good role models.” One of those celebrities said a few years ago that he was only a basketball player, not a role model. He said in essence: “Want a role model, look to the President.”

Do not underestimate, my friends, the corrupting and cynical signal we will send if we fail to enforce the highest standards of conduct on the most powerful man in the nation.

[…]

The President has committed high crimes and misde meanors, in violation of his oath of office. He lied under oath. He obstructed justice. His behavior was unworthy of the Presidency of the United States.

Thus, I sadly conclude that the President is guilty of the charges made against him by the House of Representatives and I will vote to convict him on both counts before the Senate. 

Thank you, Mr. President.

I realize it’s tired to bring this up and it doesn’t have a whole lot of relevance to anything that’s happening today. But what it shows, once again, is that politicians are complicated people filled with many contradictory impulses. Also too, they lie, even the ones who seem to be the most morally upright.

There’s little choice but to rely to some extent on their judgement but we should maintain large quantities of skepticism about their moral judgement. All of them. They’re just human beings, no different from anyone else, and we only see these particular human beings from a very gauzy distance.

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“Get ’em off welfare and they’ll all go back!”

by digby

Oh Jesus, if anyone thinks the right wing base is going to go down quietly, they need to take a look at this:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

These are the people that right wing Republicans, in their safe, insular gerrymandered districts, all answer to. What are they going to do about that?

Now, it’s possible that some of these folks might wind up recognizing that they are out of power an unable to enact their agenda so they need to get real and recognize that these racist attitudes aren’t serving them well. Unfortunately, that would require that the Democrats stop enacting their agenda for them, so I’m afraid it’s going to be a while before that happens. In the meantime, they are going to be very, very upset at their politicians and their politicians are going to remain as confused as ever about what to do about it.

Look at poor old John McCain, doing his best over a period of years to pander while at the same time trying to preserve the party’s viability. He tries to explain that the undocumented workers aren’t on welfare but they won’t listen. And why would they? They’ve been spoonfed this drivel for decades by the right wing entertainment complex and there is no talking them out of it now, now matter how ridiculous it is to believe that non-citizen migrant workers could possibly go through all the hoops required to get on welfare. (Not that it stopped McCain’s BFF Huckleberry Graham from

I’m afraid their brainwashing has worked too well to conflate the hatred these people already felt for African Americans with Latinos. Feeding the sense of resentment some people have that such people are getting something they don’t deserve is what makes the right thrive. Always has. I’m not sure how they walk this back.

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The deficit fetishists take yet another stab at it

by digby

Who would have guessed that a corporate front group doesn’t actually represent the people?

The group Fix the Debt has been at it again, releasing another proposal designed to divert the nation’s attention to the so-called “debt crisis,” while the more pressing jobs crisis and poor-and-middle-class-squeeze crisis goes unaddressed. Watch here as opponents to Fix The Debt’s baloney counter with a different message.

Update: Here’s Fix the Debt’s Alive Rivlin flogging their latest atrosity on Mrs Alan Greenspan’s show:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Sequester tango: Boehner dogwhistling his donors


by digby

Byron York is worried that the Republicans aren’t as serious about allowing the sequester to happen as he’d like them to be:

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner describes the upcoming sequester as a policy “that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more.”

Which leads to the question: Why would Republicans support a measure that threatens national security and thousands of jobs? Boehner and the GOP are determined to allow the $1.2 trillion sequester go into effect unless President Obama and Democrats agree to replacement cuts, of an equal amount, that target entitlement spending. If that doesn’t happen — and it seems entirely unlikely — the sequester goes into effect, with the GOP’s blessing.

In addition, Boehner calls the cuts “deep,” when most conservatives emphasize that for the next year they amount to about $85 billion out of a $3,600 billion budget. Which leads to another question: Why would Boehner adopt the Democratic description of the cuts as “deep” when they would touch such a relatively small part of federal spending?

The reason is, of course, that Boehner remembers what happened in 1995 when the Republicans acted like asses as shut down the government. And he also knows that his defense contractor owners will be very upset if these cuts blow up their gravy train, even for a short time. They pay these guys to keep those tax dollars flowing. Even as he threatens to do it, Boehner needs to be on the record bemoaning that consequence or somebody is likely to blame him for it.

Wednesday morning, when Boehner’s op-ed appeared, I sent questions along these lines to Boehner’s office. Spokesman Michael Steel replied, “We support replacing the indiscriminate cuts in the sequester with smarter cuts and reforms (of an equal amount). That’s what we did with the sequester replacement bills written by Chairman Ryan that we passed last year.” Another spokesman, Brendan Buck, added that “it is not the amount of the cuts…it’s where they fall — disproportionately on accounts important to our national security.”

And don’t worry, there are plenty of Democrats who are scared to death that the Military Industrial Complex is going to be adversely affected as well. Perhaps we’re going to have some drama for a while, but the Village consensus that these cuts are going to go through in their entirety and the world is coming to an end still seems a bit hysterical to me.

All John Boehner has to do is ignore the Hastert Rule and pass a replacement with Democratic votes. He could lose his speakership, true.  But there are many grateful millionaires out there who will make it very worth his while. The Tea Partiers may not know on which side their bread is buttered, but he certainly does.

But you can’t blame him for holding out until the bitter end. It’s worked out very well for the GOP so far to have the White House and the Democrats panic and start offering up concessions by the barrel-full before they reach a deal:

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