“The single most important step for polar bear conservation is decisive action to address Arctic warming,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) wrote this week in their draft recovery plan for polar bears, which are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The plan was issued after newly released data from the U.S. Geological Services (USGS) showed that greenhouse gas emissions are the species’ “primary threat,” due to the predicted Arctic sea ice loss that will diminish polar bears’ habitat and food supplies.
But don’t worry, polar bears are “doing just fine,” according to the Daily Caller.
To refute the federal agencies’ warnings, the conservative news publication turned to scientists affiliated with the fossil fuel-backed Heartland Institute. Daily Caller first quoted Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor, who dismissed the USGS’ report because he said it is “based on climate models, not empirical data.” The agency’s climate models are “an expression of their opinion,” said Taylor, adding that “it’s simply their idea of what will happen if the carbon models are correct.”
If only they showed such skepticism toward the junk science that says you will get cancer from abortion…
Just a short piece on the stay-at-home phenomenon among Democratic voters. Many of us have written about it, including myself, as a rejection of the wealth-serving direction of the mainstream of the party. As someone said to me lately, “If Democrats want my vote, they should give me someone I can vote for.”
I was therefore interested to see Alan Grayson’s thoughts on the subject. Where does he fall on the implied Bernie Sanders question, about government serving only the wealthy? Read on.
(If you’d like to help make Alan Grayson the next senator from Florida, click here. You can adjust the split in any way you like.)
This is a short essay on voter anger — its origin, its attributes, its meaning and its cure. Hint: Most Americans are worse off than they were a long time ago.
I started noticing voter anger around 2009. Initially, its locus was the Tea Party. They’re the ones who would form a circle around a political event, holding hands, and start chanting expletives. I attributed this to the Tea Party’s deep dissatisfaction with living in the 21st century. To them, basically, everything went south when Jane Wyatt stopped playing Robert Young’s Stepford wife on Father Knows Best, and started playing Spock’s mother, Amanda … Grayson, on Star Trek. (Does that mean that Spock and I are future relatives? I don’t know.) For them, things have never been the same since.
Generally speaking, the problem for Team Blue is not anger; it’s apathy. However, by roughly the year 2012, Team Blue had caught up in the Anger Games, and the score was tied.
An excellent start if you think living in “Piketty times” has anything to do with the problem. (Also, please notice the writing. Stylistically, this is very good work. This is not a congressman who can write. Grayson is a writer who’s in Congress.)
Then he makes an excellent point about just support for Congress and support for its incumbents (not the same thing). He ties this back to Fast Track:
Politically, we then entered very interesting territory. For many years up to that time, polling had showed that even when Congress had a negative approval rating, most voters wanted to reelect their individual members of Congress. (It’s as though Congress had become Garrison Keilor’s Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.) No more. Now polls showed a majority in favor of voting out one’s own member of Congress, a matter quite unnerving to one’s own member of Congress. Moreover, polls showed that most voters wished that voting booths offered a magic Shakespearean “let’s kill all the incumbents” button that would let them throw out all the bums by extending a single digit. (The middle one, I surmise.) And speaking of digits, Congress’s approval rating sank into single digits.
Why? Well, the superficial explanation is that voters feel that elected officials simply aren’t listening. We had a good example of that a few weeks ago, on the Fast Track bill. A GOP member of Congress confided in me that his calls and emails were running 100-to-1 against Fast Track. In some Democratic offices, the numbers probably were even more one-sided. (Many of the people reading these very words had something to do with that.) Nevertheless, in the Party of the People, 13 Democratic Senators initially voted against proceeding with Fast Track, and then voted for proceeding with Fast Track. So that gutless anti-egalitarian bill slipped past a Senate filibuster with no votes to spare. Then, in the House, 28 Democratic Congressmen broke ranks, passing Fast Track by only four extra votes. (Meaning that if four votes had switched, Fast Track would have been halted in its … tracks.) From the voters’ perspective, that’s a very good example of “you’re not listening to me!”
The bottom line comes next, in the middle (my emphasis):
But here is the deeper explanation for all of that anger: For most Americans, life simply is getting harder. … The net worth of the average American household dropped by more than one-third in ten years. The decline from the 2007 peak was almost 50 percent, in just six years. (Most of that loss was in the value of one’s home — home is where the heartache is.)
Pretty straightforward. Also, pretty bipartisan. Almost all voters feel this way. And no wonder — look at what causes this reaction. The numbers are these: “median net worth had dropped by 36 percent, from $87,992 to $56,335.”
That’s not only painful to look at, it’s painful to contemplate. Note that this is net worth (wealth), not income, another reflection of Piketty’s analysis, which focuses on wealth inequality, not just income inequality. What this says is that not only are people’s present lives more and more a struggle, but that the struggle is likely to continue into retirement. The result, as I see it, is a generation, presently in their fifties, who will retire almost immediately into poverty, and they and their families, their children, get that. More on those numbers later, but they are stark, as stark as the ones in Grayson’s essay. There’s more data like this in his piece; please do read.
Grayson closes with a plea to his party to get their heads straight on this issue.
[T]o sum it up, people’s lives are circling the drain, and nobody’s even talking about it, much less doing something about it. That’s why everyone is so angry. And I’m hoping against hope that my party, the Democratic Party, wakes up and does something about it.
Speaking for myself, I’ll try my best to do something about it. But you knew that already.
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson
He focuses on the voters and the party, hoping the second will finally serve the first to a greater degree. He could also have examined causes, because I know that he knows them. For example, money isn’t just disappearing in a fog of deflation. It’s being taken from the many by the few:
And those who are taking it have far too much influence on the mainstream end of the Democratic party. (Why mainstream “end”? Because despite what they’re called, most Democratic leaders, with just a few exceptions, are at the extreme end of where most voters are with respect to income inequality. Catfood and “free trade” Democrats want to increase it, unlike almost all voters.)
How much influence do people like Jamie Dimon have on the party? An Attorney General unenslaved to Wall Street, reporting to an actual populist president, would have put him in jail for the crimes Warren lists in the video above. Dimon gets bonuses for the same behavior instead, and for cutting sweet deals with Obama, Holder and their SEC.
GP
P.S. Seems a good time for a song to lighten the mood. Enjoy.
On Monday at 8 a.m. EDT, the North Carolina NAACP chapter takes NC Gov. Pat McCrory and the cheerfully nicknamed VIVA voter suppression act to court:
On July 13, a federal court in Winston-Salem will hear North Carolina NAACP v. McCrory, our lawsuit to reverse North Carolina’s unconstitutional and immoral voter suppression law. North Carolina’s law is the first and the worst since the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our voting rights, gained because people stood up despite great consequences in Selma and across the South, have been compromised. Now we must march!
The outcome of this historic case in North Carolina will have an impact on voting rights across the nation. This is a battle for voting rights for all of us. We will not surrender the most fundamental right of a democracy: the right to vote. Just like in Selma, we must march!
Join us in Winston-Salem on July 13 at 5:00 p.m. for a Mass Moral Monday March for Voting Rights.
This is Our Selma!
Activists believe Winston-Salem was chosen as the venue for hearing the case because its small size. Few observers will get inside and no audio or video feed will be available. The NAACP will nonetheless hold a press conference at 8 a.m. at the courthouse, plus other events during the day, prior to the planned march led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and leader of the weekly Moral Monday marches.
Republicans in the legislature appear nervous about the case. After hundreds of citizens spoke against the law at State Board of Elections forums held across the state, the legislature amended the law to loosen the ID requirements just weeks ahead of the July hearing. Think Progress:
[V]oters who lack the an ID will still be able to cast a ballot, but only if they sign an affidavit swearing they fall into one of the acceptable categories of reasons they couldn’t obtain a government photo ID: a lack of transportation, disability or illness, lost or stolen photo ID, a lack of a birth certificate or other documents to obtain a photo ID, work schedules or family responsibilities. The voter would also need to present an “alternate form of identification,” the last four digits of their Social Security number, and their date of birth.
That is, they swapped out some of the barricades against voting for hoops.
Yet the voter ID provision — which does not allow for the use of student IDs — is just one piece of the sweeping voting law overhaul that the state passed just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down a cornerstone of the Voting Rights Act. The law also eliminated same-day voter registration, cut a full week of early voting, barred voters from casting a ballot outside their home precinct, ended straight-ticket voting, and scrapped a program to pre-register high school students who would turn 18 by Election Day.
University of California law professor Richard Hasen, of Election Law Blog, described the law in 2013, saying:
It rolls into a single piece of legislation just about all of the tools we’ve seen legislatures use in recent years to try to make it harder for people to register and vote.
We should all be working for money every waking hour. For the good of the country.
Those charts are via The Fix blog which does also point out that there are other countries that work even more than we do so … let’s get cracking and be the number one working country in all the world! USA! USA!
“So many people want me to run as an independent — so many people,” Trump said. “I have been asked by — you have no idea, everybody wants me to do it. I think the best chance of defeating the Democrats and to make America great again is to win as a Republican because I don’t want to be splitting up votes.”
Pressed about whether he would back the Republican ticket if he fails to win the nomination himself, Trump left the door open for a third-party bid of his own. “I would have to see who the nominee is,” he said.
Right now, his numbers reflect a protest vote against what they see as a RINO. The base loves a wingnut blowhard. But if he had even the slightest encouragement, I could see him doing this.
Right now, he’s getting tons of free media which he loves. At some point that will wane and he’ll have to buy TV time. If he wants to do it and has the intelligence to hire someone who knows what they’re doing, he’s certainly got the money.
I still doubt he’ll push it that far. Running for president is actually a gruelling undertaking. Palin showed how these political celebrity types burn out on real politics. But if he wants to run a total TV campaign,sprinkled with a few speeches here and there, he could do it. Perot didn’t do much real retail politicking and he won 20% even after exposing himself as a total nutcase. There is a precedent for this sort of thing. The difference here is that Trump would only take GOP votes. Perot used to talk about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico but he didn’t call Mexicans rapists and criminals. He will only draw from the xenophobic right — aka the GOP base.
“Radical Islam is not going to be compromised with. They are religious Nazis. Somebody better go over there and hit them before they hit us,” Graham said Wednesday. “There is no alternative to going in on the ground and pulling the caliphate up by the roots. If that scares you, don’t vote for me.”..But on this day, Graham was at his most strident on what to do in Syria against both President Bashar Assad and the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
“We never fix Assad unless he goes,” Graham said. “The caliphate mainly exists in Syria. It would be a large military operation.” Graham envisions a U.S.-led multinational force, with significant contributions of both blood and treasure from countries in the region…Ten thousand — probably us because I don’t want to lose. You’re going to need a large force. There are … 30,000 or 40,000 ISIL guys, only God knows how many. I’m not looking for a fair fight here,” Graham said. “I’m looking for a large regional army where the vast majority would be Arabs and Turks, but I fear if they go in without us they could actually lose.”
I wish I knew who this large regional army is made up of because I certainly don’t see any evidence of one. And while I realize that Graham’s passion and charisma is sure to convince the whole region to follow him into battle as if he were Alexander the Great, I’m fairly sure he’ll have a little bit more difficulty in persuading the American people that we need to start WWIII immediately.
But he does offer one piece of good advice in there: “if that scares you don’t vote for me.”
I wrote about him again today for Salon and what his candidacy says about the GOP:
it’s important to remember in all of this that GOP’s immigration problem didn’t originate with Trump’s latest histrionics. Ever the opportunist, Trump has merely latched himself onto a sentiment that has become more and more abundant among the GOP electorate in recent years. One only has to look at the political earthquake that brought down the career of House Majority leader Eric Cantor in a primary election last year. Then as now, the beltway establishment ignored the obvious implications of a development that probably should not have been so shocking. They insisted that Cantor lost due to local concerns, and because the candidate who beat him, David Brat, ran on a libertarian platform they insisted was sweeping the Republican Party. The fact that Ingraham and the right-wing media backed Brat because of his strong anti-immigration message was seen as irrelevant. But it wasn’t.
During the border crisis last summer, when child refugees from Central America were converging on the border, Brat told Ingraham:
I think you referred to it in the news, I know Mark Levin did last night, the Washington Times reported 60,000 kids are expected to cross the border at 225.00 a day per child., and big business gets the cheap labor that’s what they want, Eric Cantor’s their guy, but who has to pay the 225.00 a day per kids who are coming over the border in what some are calling a humanitarian crisis because Eric Cantor is sending all the wrong signals? … He wanted to put illegal immigrants into our military, which makes no sense. You’ll have non-citizens in one of the most key positions in our society, serving in the most honored spot.
Despite the beltway’s insistence on ignoring the obvious, Brat’s upset had a profound effect on politics from the moment he was elected. As the Wall Street Journal reported:
[A] majority of GOP Members wanted an immigration reform to pass as long as they didn’t have to vote for it. Before Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary loss in Virginia last month, the House leadership’s private whip count was 144 GOP votes in favor of passing a bill this year. Afterwards it was half that.
The anti-immigrant faction flexed its muscle and scared the Republicans into submission. And here we are today.
More at the link, including some stuff about how the press is treating this.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) issued a statement on Thursday explaining his decision to introduce and then cancel a vote on an “important and sensitive issue,” namely his amendment that would have preserved the display of Confederate flag in national parks.
“The amendment offered last night to the Interior and Environment Appropriations bill was brought to me by Leadership at the request of some southern Members of the Republican Caucus,” he said in a statement obtained by TPM.
Republicans including Calvert called the vote on Wednesday evening after the House passed amendments to the Interior spending bill on Tuesday that restricted the display of the Confederate flags on federal land.
Calvert said that his amendement would have simply “codified existing National Park Service policy set by the Obama administration,” to make sure the flag could still be displayed in a “historical and educational context.”
“The intent of the Leadership’s amendment was to clear up any confusion and maintain the Obama administration’s policies with respect to those historical and educational exceptions,” he said.
Today they’re yelling on the floor of the US House of Representatives over this. It’s complicated but the upshot is that the Democrats out maneuvered the Republicans and are making them vote publicly on whether to keep the confederate flag in the US capital. A lot of them are feeling very uncomfortable right now …
It’s a big mess. For the Republicans. And one, I might add, of their own making. They’ve been enabling this nonsense for years for votes and profit. Live by the stars and bars, die by the stars and bars.
Update: Oh my
Dem presser on Confederate Flag is very heated. @RepJeffries charged that "the ghosts of the confederacy invaded the Republican conference"— Lauren French (@laurennfrench) July 9, 2015
I wandered over to Right Wing Watch to see what the media wingnuts are saying these days and this pretty much sums it up:
Right-wing radio host Michael Savage joined other conservative pundits on Tuesday in blaming San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” policy for the murder of a woman by an undocumented immigrant, which he then used to warn of impending government violence against Christians and veterans.
He predicted that once President Obama incites a civil war by overloading the nation’s welfare system, liberals will employ “illegal alien gangs” as their “army.”
“It’s all well and good, the welfare state, until you can’t afford it anymore,” Savage said. “And guess what happens then? The country collapses. And guess what happens then? Exactly what the government wants, which is civil war and insurrection. And guess what happens then? There’s martial law and autocratic control. And guess what happens then? There are internment camps.”
He said that while the government will only “come for the returning war veterans” and “come for the Christians,” liberals will feel protected with the knowledge that they “have the army of the night behind you, and who is the army of the night? It’s the illegal alien gangs that you have behind you, it’s those who burned the city to the ground in Baltimore behind you, that’s who you have, those are your armies, you think we don’t know it? We understand your entire plan, we understand why you feel protected, we understand why you let a murder like this go unindicted, we understand all of this.
