Month: August 2013

2012 in the top ten hottest years in recorded history

by David Atkins

Whatever you do, don’t be alarmed. I’m sure there are more important issues out there when those annoying “climate people” stop yapping:

Last year was one of the 10 hottest since global average temperatures have been recorded, according to an assessment of worldwide climate trends by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The State of the Climate in 2012,” released Tuesday, paints a sobering portrait of vast swaths of the planet transformed by rising temperatures. Arctic sea ice reached record lows during the summer thaw. In Greenland, about 97% of its ice sheet melted in the summer, far greater than in years past.

Greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise. In early May, the ratio of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, thought to be the highest concentration in millions of years.

The report is a like “an annual check-up for the planet,” said Kathryn Sullivan, undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA’s acting administrator. It documents “remarkable changes” in crucial areas like Arctic ice, sea levels and greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

Sullivan said she hoped the report would help businesses, communities, farmers and governments gauge their vulnerability to climate change and better prepare.

“Many of the planning models for infrastructure rely on the future being statistically a lot like the past, and certainly the data should lead one to question if that will be so,” Sullivan said. “Extreme weather events are more frequent and more intense than what we have presumed.”

In case anyone has bought into the lie that warming is tapering off, that’s a mistake:

Over the last 150 years, the annual average global temperature has risen sharply, and is now about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than in pre-industrial times, NOAA said. Nine of the 10 hottest years have been recorded since the late 1990s, with 2012 ranking number 8 or 9, depending on the methodology. In January, NOAA reported that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the lower 48 states.

Heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels are the primary cause of higher global temperatures.

From a media criticism perspective, it’s nice to see journalists finally just telling the truth about climate change without giving equal shrift to the deniers. That’s a step forward.

But it’s hard to know what it will motivate people to take this stuff seriously. Even among progressives, climate change tends to rank far below other concerns like the economy, healthcare, taxes, war, and a host of other issues. That’s understandable since other issues tend to have more immediate salience in people’s lives. But progressives are also supposed to be forward thinkers, able to model the effects of decisions better than our conservative counterparts.

The day is coming soon when climate change is going to be an ever-present problem in all our lives, and getting worse every day.

Unfortunately, by the time most of the world wakes up and gets into true crisis mode about it, it will likely already be too late to stop it. It really is a question of whether we as a species have the capacity to move beyond immediate self-gratification and use the power of reason to save ourselves. The jury is still out.

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The Queen of Versailles, Part Deux

by digby

How did I miss this?

Several years ago we had a screening and dinner party for C.C. Goldwater, the granddaughter of Barry. She had just done a documentary film for HBO about her grandfather. Barry Goldwater was my parents’ closest friend. In fact, he gave me my first job when I was 16, working in his Senate office on Capitol Hill.

When his wife, Peggy, became ill and moved back to Arizona, Barry lived with my parents. He was like a surrogate father to me. When he met my husband, Ben Bradlee, who was the editor of The Washington Post, everyone simply assumed that the conservative Republican former presidential candidate and the Watergate editor would never hit it off. But they became fast friends. In fact, Barry was one of Ben’s best sources toward the end of Watergate when Richard Nixon was about to resign. They even did speaking gigs together.

The tribute film was brilliant and poignant and really showed what an extraordinary man Barry Goldwater was in so many respects, but also what a great American he was. We had a large tent and I invited half Republicans and half Democrats, something you rarely see in Washington these days. They all came. I was seated next to Republican Sen. John Warner from Virginia, who had been close to Barry. Everyone marveled at the fact that Goldwater and his rival for the presidency, Jack Kennedy, were actually buddies and that at one point they discussed flying together on the same plane, while campaigning against each other. At the end of dinner both John Warner and I, like many of the guests, were in tears. What had made us cry? As Warner said that night, “It will never be that way again.”

What he was talking about was the intractable rancor and divisiveness in Washington today. You have a congressman calling the president a liar in mid-sentence during an address on Capitol Hill. You have others actually saying that they want Obama to fail. You have name-calling and ad hominem attacks on a regular basis. You have politicians and administration officials questioning each other’s patriotism and in some cases even accusing those who don’t agree with them of treason.

Two weeks ago, an online reader wondered how one entertains both Republicans and Democrats in Washington at the same event without having all that tension.

I was struck by the question because I have never thought of entertaining in that way. But when I considered whom I might invite to my own parties, it became clear that some people wouldn’t fit well together. It made me sad to think that John Warner could have been right. It may never be the same again. However, I refuse to give up, despite the toxic atmosphere in Washington spilling into social events.

There’s an old saying that you should never discuss politics or religion at dinner parties. I disagree. I think you can talk about money and sex as well. It’s all about how you bring up these things, which are after all on everyone’s minds. I believe in dialogue, whether it’s interfaith, interpolitics or anything else. And I know, dialogue just sounds boring. It’s not. I believe in trying to learn and understand the other person’s point of view. Particularly on subjects about politics and religion, it is always a mistake to ascribe evil motives to someone just because that person has a different point of view. Today Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialists and communists (doesn’t that sound so retro) and Democrats accuse Republicans of being fascists and demagogues. The terms McCarthyism and Nazism are much too frequently bandied about.

My experience living in Washington for some decades is that the majority of people who come here to work for the government are idealistic and care deeply about their country. That doesn’t mean that power, ego and money don’t often corrupt. Those who live and work here just believe in different ways to make it a better place. What I find, though, is that people will generally open up and relax if they feel listened to and respected.

I’ve been at the table with Dick Cheney and a group of bloodthirsty liberal journalists, and everyone had a rollicking time talking about fly-fishing, of all things. The Rumsfelds and Ronald Reagan loved talking with anyone about the movies. Nancy Pelosi, Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Susan Collins, John Kerry, Orrin Hatch and John McCain, to name a few, can keep a conversation going, regardless of political persuasions, after-hours. People have so much in common: children, faith (or lack of faith), aging parents, relatives at war, pet charities — or even pets! Of course, when all else fails, there’s nobody who won’t lean in when the topic turns to sex.

I’ve been in recent discussions at dinner parties among friends where people disagreed vehemently on Afghanistan, health care, the economy and whether Brad and Angelina would split up, but ultimately they respected one another’s point of view.

Nobody understood this better than Teddy Kennedy. In fact, all of the Kennedys have been good at befriending political adversaries. Teddy never impugned another’s motives for disagreeing with him. We had a dinner once for the conservative prime minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, and his wife, Mila. Teddy and Vicky Kennedy were there, and by the end of the evening Brian and Teddy were arm-in-arm singing Irish songs.

That’s the way it used to be. It’s the way it should be and can be again. I, for one, refuse to give up.

That was Sally Quinn in January 2010.

She has a point though. What is the world coming to when our elites get so serious about their petty little differences that they can’t even get together at a DC salon and let their hair down among members of their own class?

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Your Daily Grayson: on a progressive platform

by digby

Here he is talking with Nicole Sandler yesterday. Fascinating conversation:

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Hooray for K Street!

by David Atkins

This brings warm fuzzies to my heart:

K Street is getting its mojo back.

After a disastrous first quarter of falling revenue, most lobby firms saw an uptick in the spring and early summer as Congress made moves on issues like immigration and tax reform.

While the revenue at most shops remains down when compared to this point last year, lobbyists said they are seeing the “green shoots” of a recovery that could blossom this fall.

“This town is slowly coming back,” said Smitty Davis, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Washington’s No. 2 lobbying firm by revenue.

Akin Gump, which took in $8.6 million in the second quarter, is one of the rare firms where profits rose by every metric: Revenue jumped 9 percent over the first three months of the year, and 11 percent when compared to the second quarter of 2012.

Lobbyists attributed the bounce back from the winter months — a slow period that many described as “hangover” from the fiscal-cliff fight — to a growing sense that collaborative legislating is again possible in Congress.

“A lot of clients had taken a step back” in 2012 as legislating gave way to campaign messaging, said Kevin O’Neill, the deputy chairman of Patton Boggs’s public policy department.

Now, with movement on issues like immigration, tax reform and the online sales tax, “you’re starting to see some bipartisan compromise,” O’Neill said, adding that the nature of those efforts are more likely to engage the business community.

Could it be that the desperation in Washington for bipartisanship and just passing bills regardless of their merits could have something to do with the army of lobbyists who want to get paid for corrupting the process?

Nah…

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The WSJ celebrates its favorite deadly sin

by digby

The Editorial Board:

Greed has existed since man committed original sin, and no doubt it has always existed on Wall Street and most other places. Greed in moderation might even be called ambition. While the media most often attribute it to bonus-seeking traders on Wall Street, greed can exist in other locations, too. Perhaps you have noticed how frequently prosecutors leave their government jobs for higher pay as corporate attorneys. Mr. Martens may eventually be one of them.

But for the Beltway, Wall Street greed is good—perfect, in fact—because it serves as an all-purpose explanation for the financial crisis. The word can help persuade jurors looking to find someone accountable as a symbol of the crisis. It is also useful because it absolves Washington of its pre-crisis sins. The same political crowd that encouraged Americans to buy houses with easy money and distorted incentives needs to blame the bankers for the crisis, and what better way than to assail their greed. The bankers played their role, but if you believe greed caused the crisis you’ll believe anything.

I dunno. I think it sounded better in the original, don’t you?

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VIPR is the pits

by digby

Fergawdsakes. Just how many squads of armed Robocops running around rousting citizens for no good reason does this land of the free need?:

As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds.

The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States.

“The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the squad. “I thought they were just at the airports.”

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

T.S.A. and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.

“Our mandate is to provide security and counterterrorism operations for all high-risk transportation targets, not just airports and aviation,” said John S. Pistole, the administrator of the agency. “The VIPR teams are a big part of that.”

Some in Congress, however, say the T.S.A. has not demonstrated that the teams are effective. Auditors at the Department of Homeland Security are asking questions about whether the teams are properly trained and deployed based on actual security threats.

They even admit that this is mostly Security Theater. And that sounds so sweetly benign, doesn’t it? But the effect of this isn’t, in the end, to make little old ladies feel safer by confiscating the 8oz bottle of Geritol in their handbags. It’s to train citizens to submit to authorities without probable cause. That’s exactly what’s happened in airports, after all. Americans are so docile about it that people in other countries are astonished to see us taking off our shoes and otherwise disrobing at airport security without even being told. (They don’t have to.)

If what you desire is to make the Bill of Rights an anachronism, this is the sort of thing that works over time to make people wonder why they ever cared that they had any privacy or right to demand that authorities have good reason to stop and search them.  Arguments against it already have the tone of something from another era:

“The problem with T.S.A. stopping and searching people in public places outside the airport is that there are no real legal standards, or probable cause,” said Khaliah Barnes, administrative law counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “It’s something that is easily abused because the reason that they are conducting the stops is shrouded in secrecy.”

T.S.A. officials respond that the random searches are “special needs” or “administrative searches” that are exempt from probable cause because they further the government’s need to prevent terrorist attacks.

That mentality says that the War on Terror means anything goes. Forever. And it’s much more convenient than the communist threat ever was because they could actually declare the cold war over at some point. This one will never end. How could it? It’s not a war against a state or even against certain people, it’s a war against asymmetric war. That’s not going anywhere.

And anyway, so far it hasn’t really been about terrorism at all. Surprise:

In 2011, the VIPR teams were criticized for screening and patting down people after they got off an Amtrak train in Savannah, Ga. As a result, the Amtrak police chief briefly banned the teams from the railroad’s property, saying the searches were illegal.

In April 2012, during a joint operation with the Houston police and the local transit police, people boarding and leaving city buses complained that T.S.A. officers were stopping them and searching their bags. (Local law enforcement denied that the bags were searched.)

The operation resulted in several arrests by the local transit police, mostly for passengers with warrants for prostitution and minor drug possession. Afterward, dozens of angry residents packed a public meeting with Houston transit officials to object to what they saw as an unnecessary intrusion by the T.S.A.

“It was an incredible waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Robert Fickman, a local defense lawyer who attended the meeting. “Did we need to have T.S.A. in here for a couple of minor busts?”

Smell that freedom people!

Also too: they called it “VIPR” like some cheesy cop show from 1976. Doesn’t that say it all?

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QOTD: Michael Hayden


by digby

If anyone wants to know why so many of us find the fatuous hand-wringing over Edward Snowden’s revelations a bit much, look no further than this from Emptywheel about the various leaks and sources on this embassy threat story:

Remember, Saudis and Yemeni sources have a well-established history of leaking sensitive intelligence about our thwarted plots. But in this case, the original source (to the NYT) seems to be American, with a Yemeni first providing the really remarkable level of detail. 

And thus far, no one from the government has called for the NYT, McClatchy, and WaPo sources to be jailed. How … telling.
[…]
…And here’s Michael Hayden, who for weeks has been arguing that Edward Snowden should be made an example of, suggesting this alert is good because it lets the bad guys know we’re onto them:

 “The announcement itself may also be designed to interrupt Al Qaeda planning, to put them off stride,” Michael V. Hayden, a former C.I.A. director, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “To put them on the back foot, to let them know that we’re alert and that we’re on at least to a portion of this plotline.”

And here I thought that letting them know that we can figure out their plots was tantamount to treason. It’s so hard to keep up.

There’s much more at Emptywheel about the various anomalies and strange contradictions in this whole event. I’m not sure it adds up to anything more than a reasonable desire to avoid anything that could look like another Benghazi.  That’s just run of the mill politics.  But it’s also not unreasonable to suspect the government might be inclined to raise the threat level for a variety of other reasons as well.  It’s not as if it hasn’t done so before.

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The wimps and the bully boys

by digby

These excerpts from Dan Balz’s new book about the 2012 campaign make you want to take a shower:

Here is Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, explaining to Dan Balz how he intends to run the 2012 campaign:

“My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson,” Messina says. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore. [The Republicans] may have a plan to beat my guy. My job is to punch them in the face.”

Here is Tagg Romney, Mitt Romney’s son, telling Balz that his father was not quite fired up and ready to go less than three weeks before he announced his candidacy. “He was hoping for an exit,” Tagg says. “I think he wanted to have an excuse not to run.” During the Christmas holiday of 2010, the Romney family had gathered in Hawaii and voted on whether Romney should run. Ten of the 12 family members voted no. Mitt Romney was among the no votes.

Here is Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, still undecided about his own candidacy. He orders those Republicans who had decided to run not to troll for support or money in his state. It was like something out of “The Sopranos.” Jersey was his territory. “Governor Romney didn’t like that too much,” Christie tells Balz.

Nancy Reagan sends a handwritten note inviting Christie to give a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Christie shows up, he is seated on the stage and Nancy Reagan leans over to him and points out the podium from which he will speak. “That was one of Ronnie’s podiums from the White House,” she says. Christie tells Balz: “I sat there for a second, and I just turned to her and I said, ‘You’re bad, you know that?’ She had this big smile on her face.”

Here is Ron Kaufman, one of Romney’s top advisers, on election night after Romney’s defeat, sitting in a nearly empty staff room after Romney has made a gracious concession call to Obama and a concession speech. Romney walks into the staff room. “This is scary,” Romney says. “This is a bad thing for the country.”

Romney sounds like a a petulant little boy and everyone else sounds like a thug. (Well, Nancy Reagan just sounds like her old self.) This is the best our nation can do?

According to Roger Simon, who gathered those excerpts, Balz sees the 2012 campaign as a unique low point in which both sides scrambled to be as dirty as possible. But do you know why he thinks they did it? Because they decided that independent voter didn’t matter and they needed to get out their own vote. To the Village, American politics are only considered to be “uplifting” when a politician tells his most ardent voters to go to hell. (Whatever. I assume the anecdotes are true even if Balz’s analysis is typical village bilge.)

Still, it would appear that Chris Christie is a man of his time. And they’re going to love him. When he tells his own voters to go to hell, he’ll do it in a way that makes them feel like they’ve been dissed by a real man. And regardless of Balz’s rather courtly disdain for the crudeness of the 2012 players, that’s what both the Republican Party and the Villagers crave more than anything.

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This is what a flailing party looks like

by David Atkins

It’s a little thing, to be sure, but little things can be instructive:

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus threatened to pull the group’s partnership with NBC and CNN for 2016 GOP presidential primary debates if the networks moved ahead with plans to air films on Hillary Clinton.

“If they have not agreed to pull this programming prior to the start of the RNC’s Summer Meeting on August 14, I will seek a binding vote stating that the RNC will neither partner with these networks in 2016 primary debates nor sanction primary debates they sponsor,” Preibus said in a statement.

CNN’s response?

CNN said their Hillary Clinton documentary had been commissioned by CNN Films, a division of CNN Worldwide and would be a “non-fiction look at the life of a former First Lady and Secretary of State.”

“Instead of making premature decisions about a project that is in the very early stages of development and months from completion, we would encourage the members of the Republican National Committee to reserve judgment until they know more,” said the news network in a statement. “Should they decide not to participate in debates on CNN, we would find it curious, as limiting their debate participation seems to be the ultimate disservice to voters.”

Gee, I wonder who has the upper hand in that fight?

As infuriatingly powerful as conservatives seem to be right now, it’s important to remember that Republicans are a party increasingly out of options. Their voters are literally dying, and the fastest growing voter populations despise them. They no have well-known and well-respected political celebrities of any note. Their ideas poll terribly. They still have money and power, to be sure, and politics is a fickle thing. But right now their backs are against a wall.

Much of what happens in the political trench warfare must be seen in that context. These are desperate people in a hole, few of whom are frantically trying to crawl out, but most of whom are furiously digging deeper to escape.

All they have is obstruction and the fervent hope that something magical happens to save their national chances before the dreaded 2020 census comes calling.

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QOTD: Congressman Ted Yoho (R-Pluto)

by digby

Yoho makes a doodie:

I had a little fun with [John] Boehner and told him about the sun tanning tax. He goes, ‘I didn’t know it was in there,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s a ten percent tax.’ He goes, ‘Well, that’s not that big of a deal.’ I said, ‘It’s a racist tax.’ He goes, ‘You know what, it is.’ I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin, with two non-dark skin people, and I asked this to him, I said, ‘Have you ever been to a tanning booth?’ and he goes, ‘No, no need.’ So therefore it’s a racist tax and I thought I might need to get to a sun tanning booth so I can come out and say I’ve been disenfranchised because I got taxed because of the color of my skin. As crazy as that sounds, that’s what the left does right…

It’s a joke, but not really. They honestly believe that any accusation of racism is purely an unfair partisan political weapon gleefully deployed by Democrats to make Republicans look bad. Because they do this with religion and patriotism, they assume that must be what liberals are doing as well.

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