Month: August 2014

Time for a drink my friends

by digby

First pour yourself a tall one. With ice. Then read this:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.— Jason Box (@climate_ice) July 29, 2014

Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he’s made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA’s State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor.

In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change—and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the F bombs.

Now take a long swallow (if there’s any left) and read the rest.

Don’t mess with your plutocrat daddy

by digby

What happens when right wingers try to capitalize on the populist strain in American politics?

There’s at least one Republican uncomfortable with attacks on Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke for being a millionaire and for the way her family’s bicycle firm pays taxes and uses outsourcing.

That would be U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.

Johnson indicated that instead of hitting Burke on her wealth and the outsourcing by Trek Bicycle Corp., Gov. Scott Walker, a fellow Republican, and his campaign should promote the successes of his first term before the November election.

“I think there are far better areas to address,” Johnson said Tuesday during an interview with editors and reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “From my standpoint, we ought to be talking about…how do you make Wisconsin a more attractive place for risk-taking, business investment, business expansion.”

He lauded Walker for declaring early and often that Wisconsin was “open for business.”

“I think that’s a powerful statement,” Johnson said.

But when asked specifically what he thought of Republicans tagging Burke as “Millionaire Mary,” Johnson said, “I would prefer they not do it.”

“Far too often in the political realm, we demonize success, we demagogue against it,” he added. “What we should be doing is incentivizing success.”

Johnson said: “I don’t want to demonize or demagogue against” outsourcing at Trek Bicycle Corp., which manufactures 99% of its bicycles overseas. Walker’s campaign has criticized Burke for profiting from those overseas operations.

Walker has tried distanced himself from the attacks but his campaign’s fingerprints are all over them. Poor Scott. He’s between a rock and a hard place. The Club for Growth owns him but he needs to tap into that pitchfork energy in order to win …

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Wingnut scam ‘o the decade: they’re even ripping off the veterans

by digby

My piece in Salon today talks about the epic wingnut hustle Pro Publica exposed this week about none other than California’s own Sal Russo and his “veterans” organization Move American Forward:

One of the more amusing aspects of the right-wing freakout over the former chief IRS jackbooted thug Lois Lerner – and her battalion of brown-shirted CPAs allegedly putting the strong arm on the poor little Tea Party groups — is the extent to which so much of right-wing “activism” is made up of professional grifters who really are defrauding the government (but, more importantly, defrauding grassroots conservatives themselves). You’d think they’d be grateful that somebody is trying to put a stop to this thievery, but no. They’d rather line the pockets of a cynical right-wing flim-flam artist than pay the bills for the military, the roads, the untainted meat and the police protection they all enjoy.

Yesterday, I wrote about the resurgence of the Abramoff con game down in Alabama. Now Pro Publica exposes yet another scam from one of the right wing’s most prolific scammers, a man named Sal Russo. In an act of chutzpah that’s aggressive even by conservative hustler standards, Russo is accused of making millions by skimming large sums of money from his veteran’s charity called Move America Forward.

Yes, in case you were wondering, this is the same Sal Russo of Tea Party Express fame, yet another grand wingnut scam.

But hey, these folks are happy to give their social security and disability money to Sal Russo an his cohorts. At least they know it isn’t going to the “wrong” people — if you know what I mean.


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Two really stupid complaints about Perlstein’s book

by digby

Dday has done a definitive piece on the bogus Perlstein controversy, covering all the bases from wingnut operative Craig Shirley’s hackish history to his idiotic contention that repeatedly citing someone’s work is akin to plagiarism. Read the whole thing. It pretty much covers it all.

I just want to expand on a couple of the complaints in this trumped up controversy that have nothing to do with the plagiarism hit job.

First, contrary to the pearl clutching of a few critics, the idea of putting footnotes online is an amazing innovation. The only people who read footnotes are those who are mentioned in them, reviewers and scholars. And all of them, even those who really love to delve into the footnotes just for fun, can very easily access them on the device they are likely to be reading the book — their tablet. It won’t be long before the vast majority of readers read books that way.  Now I know this is very modern and strange to a lot of people my age and older but it’s just silly.  I too love to hold a book in my hand and make notes in the margins. But I’m adapting and everyone else will too.

Honestly, this complaint sounds like someone who still has a VCR and it’s still blinking at 12:00 because they still haven’t learned how to program it. That’s fine — not everyone has to adopt all this fancy modern technology. But you should be aware that you sound like a cranky old coot for carping about the changes and nobody under the age of 40 takes you seriously when you complain about it.

Second, is this completely daft idea in Sam Tanenhaus’s equally daft review of the book in which he takes Perlstein to task for being nothing more than a “web aggregater” because he liberally uses the contemporaneous media accounts of the day to tell his story.  I don’t even know what he’s talking about and pretty clearly, neither does he. This stuff mostly isn’t on “the web” and even the material from that era that is, isn’t easily accessed simply by “googling” it. Most of the contemporaneous media Perlstein cites is from his physically digging into media and academic archives and following long trails in contemporaneous books and magazines. You know, the job historians are supposed to do. That he chooses to lay out his narrative using many of these sources (what Tanenhaus calls “crowd-sourced scholarship” thus proving he doesn’t know what crowd sourcing is) is part of the genius of his books — we see how the history of the era unfolded in the national conversation.  In a culture in which the conventional wisdom was both reflected by an elite, national media and created by it, these accounts are primary documents. So too are the local and regional news stories, along with various subterranean strands of popular culture, which revealed the undercurrents the big national media failed to grasp.

Maybe Tanenhaus thinks history is more accurately rendere by conducting interviews with aged elites who are burnishing their legacies and consulting official government press releases and that’s his privilege. But if so his idea of history is not only extremely limited it’s dull as dishwater.

Part of what makes Perlstein’s history so special is that by reading all the popular accounts, watching the movies, checking out the fashions and obsessions of the era, he gives context to these cross currents of American politics in the culture of the time. You simply cannot understand anything about the 1960s and 1970s without understanding the culture — and that includes a right wing culture that wasn’t just sitting around feeling all forlorn that those kids in bell-bottoms and long hair were acting the fool. It had agency and lots of it — and it wasn’t any “nicer” or full of “ideas” then than it is today. Tanenhaus seems to think Perlstein misrepresents this.

Sorry, Perlstein gets it right. They weren’t quoting Edmund Burke or even William F Buckley when they were screaming at the hippies.

They were saying “love it or leave it”:

Ronald Reagan just made it cute for public consumption:

“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah”

Hahaha. So loveable.

But then I’m going to guess that people who think that citing contemporaneous media sources from a certain period is “crowd-sourcing” haven’t been too hip to actual American culture for a very, very long time. Maybe ever.  Which also explains why they have zero understanding of Perlstein’s work.

More to come on this later.

The Village and mortal sin

by digby

I honestly cannot believe someone actually wrote this, but he did. Ron Fournier:

Obama needs to hold high-ranking CIA officials accountable for misleading the White House, Congress, and the people, and for spying on Senate investigators. Patriots may get away with torture. Not with lying about it.

It’s not that you slept with another woman that bothers me, sweetheart, it’s that you lied about it.

Does anyone ever believe that bullshit?

Apparently Ron Fournier thinks everyone does:

Most Americans are likely to agree with President Obama, who said Friday that the tactics went too far (“We tortured some folks”), but that those who ordered and committed torture did so out of dire public interest. He called them patriots. “It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the job that those folks had.”

I’d laugh if it wasn’t such a serious subject.

I’d like to see a poll with this question: “Do you believe it it worse that the government tortured people or that they lied about torturing people?”

I don’t know how the American people would respond to that. But I know what is worse: the fucking torture is worse.

I’m not a Catholic, but I think they have a good way of looking at situations like this. There’s the venial sin of lying. And there’s the mortal sin of torture.

One of those will send you straight to hell.

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Tweet ‘O the Day

by digby

Principled libertarian edition:

Rand Paul, asked whether he would sign a federal marriage amendment: “I’m in favor of the concept. I am in favor of traditional marriage.”
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) August 6, 2014

I wonder if there are any politicians calling themselves libertarians who would be willing to 86 their hostility to taxes and regulations or Obamacare in order to pander to the Democratic base to achieve higher office? I didn’t think so. It’s pretty clear what they really care about. And civil liberties and anti-imperialism aren’t at the top of their list.

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No, legalizing pot doesn’t lead to “drugged drivers.” Do conservatives ever tire of being wrong?

by David Atkins

Another conservative zombie lie gets disproven:

It seems to me that the best way to gauge the effect legalization has had on the roadways is to look at what has happened on the roads since legalization took effect. Here’s a month-by-month comparison of highway fatalities in Colorado through the first seven months of this year and last year. For a more thorough comparison, I’ve also included the highest fatality figures for each month since 2002, the lowest for each month since 2002 and the average for each month since 2002.

As you can see, roadway fatalities this year are down from last year, and down from the 13-year average. Of the seven months so far this year, five months saw a lower fatality figure this year than last, two months saw a slightly higher figure this year, and in one month the two figures were equal.

As the author notes, there are obviously a variety of factors that play into traffic safety. But one thing is for sure: there wasn’t suddenly a rash of drugged driving accidents.

Conservatives are wrong again. But then, that’s a familiar story. Conservatives are almost always wrong about almost everything.

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Torture delay

by digby

Of course they did:

The chief author of the Senate’s so-called “torture report” urged President Obama on Tuesday to make more of the document available to the public, over the objections of the CIA. She charged the intelligence agency’s edits “eliminate or obscure key facts” about controversial interrogation practices during the Bush administration.

“I am sending a letter today to the president laying out a series of changes to the redactions that we believe are necessary prior to public release,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) said in a statement. The letter itself was not made public.

“The White House and the intelligence community have committed to working through these changes in good faith,” she said, adding that “this process will take some time, and the report will not be released until I am satisfied that all redactions are appropriate.”

Feinstein’s comments came one day after White House press secretary Josh Earnest defended the redactions, which the intelligence community argues are necessary to protect operatives and allies who took part in the CIA’s controversial detention and interrogation programs.

Hey some patriotic folks tortured some folks. There’s no need to wallow in it. I’m sure it won’t happen again.

This is just ridiculous. This is a Senate document and they went to some lengths already to protect sources and methods and yada, yadda. This White House edit is ridiculous. The Senate is an equal branch charged with oversight.

Daniel Ellsberg says that someone should leak the entire unredacted report and I suspect that will happen at some point. The question is if anyone in the Senate right now has the cojones. (It’s possible the leak could come from the WH or the CIA, but it’s obviously less likely.)

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It’s a turnout and gerrymandering problem, not a persuasion problem

by David Atkins

The latest poll from the Washington Post is out, and the headline everyone is paying attention to is the one about most people disliking their own member of Congress. After this much inaction and malaise, that doesn’t surprise me. What jumps out to me is the numbers for each of the political parties:

So let’s be clear. People despise Congress and its inability to solve problems. But they absolutely hate Republicans. Democrats aren’t exactly sweethearts, but a majority do have a favorable impression of the party.

If everyone voted, Republicans would be bounced out of influence. But people don’t vote.

The problem isn’t convincing more people. The problem isn’t Fox News or the right-wing media machine or anything like that. Most people aren’t fooled.

The problem is getting the people who do see the world the right way to vote. In the parlance of campaing operatives, it’s a turnout problem, not a persuasion problem.

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Where’s Bibi’s jumpsuit?

by digby

Mission accomplished: We have destroyed Hamas’ tunnels leading from Gaza into Israel. All of Israel is now safer. pic.twitter.com/aDz3XKWdIN
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) August 5, 2014