Month: December 2015

2015 Lie of the Year: A big, beautiful trophy

by Tom Sullivan

It is Tuesday, and already it’s tedious reading (and writing) about Donald Trump. Yesterday Trump received PolitiFact’s annual Lie of the Year Award for 2015:

In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s — his various statements also led our Readers’ Poll. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy.

A big, beautiful trophy.

Trump has “perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool,” says Michael LaBossiere. The philosophy professor at Florida A&M University tells PolitiFact, “He makes a clearly false or even absurdly false claim, which draws the attention of the media. He then rides that wave until it comes time to call up another one.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with NPR, President Obama made no apologies for combating ISIS “appropriately and in a way that is consistent with American values.” We have to remember “who we are.”

Good advice. We seem to have forgotten. Americans who once admired George Washington, who according to legend could not tell a lie, now prefer a candidate who cannot tell the truth. And they themselves cannot even tell the truth about that.

An analysis by Morning Consult finds that Trump’s support may be more than what polls reflect. He does better in online polls than in those done over the phone. About six points better, according to Morning Consult’s polling director, Kyle Dropp:

“People are slightly less likely to say that they support him when they’re talking to a live human” than when they are in the “anonymous environment” of an online survey, Dropp said.
The most telling part of the experiment, however, was that not all types of people responded the same way. Among blue-collar Republicans, who have formed the core of Trump’s support, the polls were about the same regardless of method. But among college-educated Republicans, a bigger difference appeared, with Trump scoring 9 points better in the online poll.

Social-desirability bias — the well-known tendency of people to hesitate to confess certain unpopular views to a pollster — provides the most likely explanation for that education gap, Dropp and his colleagues believe.

Blue-collar voters are simply not embarrassed about supporting Trump. Take that, you lefty, politically correct, Muslim lovers.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank looks at how “political correctness” has become Republicans’ one-size-fits-all evasion for any question in this election season:

The notion of political correctness became popular on college campuses a quarter-century ago but has recently grown into the mother of all straw men. Once a pejorative term applied to liberals’ determination not to offend any ethnic or other identity group, it now is used lazily by some conservatives to label everything classified under “that with which I disagree.” GOP candidates are now using the “politically correct” label to shut down debate — exactly what conservatives complained politically correct liberals were doing in the first place.

But that’s okay. When you’re in love, the whole world is Trumpish. “I’m right and you’re wrong,” writes Catherine Rampell writes (also at the Washington Post):

In a country that has become not just polarized, but also atomized; in which we root unwaveringly for our own political “teams” composed of those who look, think, vote and raise children exactly as we do; and in which we treat opposing viewpoints as motivated by malice or stupidity rather than honest disagreement, perhaps it is not so surprising that so many Americans have come down with a serious case of dictator envy, a longing for a political strongman (such as, say, Donald Trump) who will put our neighbors in their place and skirt the pluralistic niceties and nonsense of democracy.

Trump himself respects a strongman like Vladimir Putin. When he’s not boasting about how strong he is himself.

“Putin hasn’t changed,” writes Dante Ramos of the Boston Globe. The GOP has. To defense hawks, Putin is a former KGB head who “stole an entire peninsula from a pro-Western government in Ukraine and joined the Syrian conflict on the side of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator whom the United States has tried to isolate.” But to the Trump faction, Putin is their kind of guy, like Trump. They admire the kind of leader who would torture confessions out of prisoners (as seen on TV!). Stability. Strength. Casting aside niceties such as the rule of law for law by rulers.

Be careful, America. You are not so exceptional that it can’t happen here.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

The horror, the horror

by digby

If you’re looking for a last minute stocking stuffer …

The Holiday fundraiser continues and I hope you’ll consider throwing a little something in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Oh Huckleberry, I will miss you so

by digby

I can’t begin to tell you how sad I am the Lindsey Graham has dropped out of the race. He brings a southern camp quality that no one else can match.

This remains my favorite moment:

Presidential candidate and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has “had it” with Donald Trump.


After Trump undermined the military service of Graham’s longtime colleague Sen. John McCain, Graham had a clear message for his GOP rival.


“I don’t care if he drops out. Stay in the race, just stop being a jackass,” Graham said Tuesday on “CBS This Morning.”


Graham, who recently retired from the Air Force reserve, said the attention surrounding Trump is “turning into a circus.”


“I’m looking for him to be a responsible member of the 16-person primary and stop saying stuff like this,” Graham said. “The world is falling apart. We’re becoming Greece. The Ayatollah’s on the verge of having a nuclear weapon, and you’re slandering anybody and everybody to stay in the news. You know, run for president, but don’t be the world’s biggest jackass.”

Then he threw his apron over his head and ran in around in circles…

Trump’s rejoinder?

Speaking at his first campaign rally in South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump addressed his critics and fellow Republican presidential candidates calling for him to step out of the race.

He specifically fired back at Sen. Lindsey Graham’s comments calling Trump a “jackass” yesterday by giving out his personal cell phone number.

Keeping in line with his obsession over who is and who is not smart, Trump said of Graham, “He doesn’t seem like a very bright guy. He actually probably seems to me not as bright as Rick Perry. I think Rick Perry probably is smarter than Lindsey Graham.”

Other lowlights included in the near 45-minute stump speech include, “If you can’t get rich dealing with politicians, there’s something wrong with you” and “I’m the most militaristic person ever.”

The Holiday fundraiser continues and I hope you’ll consider throwing a little something in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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Yes, Rubio sucks at this

by digby

I got a lot of blowback for writing that Rubio was making a mistake in attacking Cruz on immigration, essentially saying that Cruz is just as bad he is on the issue. To me that seems well … kind of dumb.

I wrote:

Bottom line: Rubio is the establishment choice at the moment but he’s getting nowhere fast because he’s running a lethargic campaign that just isn’t very good. And it’s not getting any better. Apparently he’s decided that the best way to make people forget his immigration apostasy, when he joined with Democrats on the notorious Gang of 8 to hammer out a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, is to draw as much attention to it as possible by picking a losing fight with Ted Cruz. He seems to think that aggressively accusing his rival of abandoning his conservative principles in the same way he did will somehow make his own betrayal go away.

All it’s accomplished is to make every conservative in the land think even less of him than they did before.

Mark Levin, anti-immigrant zealot, seems to agree.

Rubio blunders by highlighting immigration; his disastrous Gang of 8 role puts him at complete odds with Cruz &… https://t.co/UIRzqAukaA

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) December 21, 2015

That story by Byron York at the Washington Examiner lays it all out. Rubio’s signature achievement as a Senator was the Gang of Eight’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. He cannot run away from it so he’s trying to drag Cruz into the mud with him. Conservatives know better. Cruz is anti-immigrant from way back, despite his father being an immigrant himself, all everything he did during that legislative process was in service of tanking the CIR.

And yes, Rubio is daft for drawing so much attention to this. It only makes everyone pore over both records even more closely and he doesn’t benefit from that.

The Holiday fundraiser continues and I hope you’ll consider throwing a little something in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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Get ready folks, it’s going to be just awful

by digby

This is from Red State, but it’s making the rounds pretty heavily:

[D]uring the debate, wee old white lady Hillary Clinton took one heck of a bathroom break. It took her so long to come back that they went ahead and started without her. After what seemed like hours, she finally returned, although to be fair each and every two minute stretch of the debate seemed like hours.

Does this really matter? I’d say it … Depends®.

Did Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 94% taking a sip of water matter? It sure did to Democrats. We still hear about it all the time, nearly three years later. So I guess that matters.

Did John McCain’s age matter? You know it did. They brought it up more frequently than Rudy Giuliani brought up 9/11. They never stopped talking about his age. They still, in fact, have the temerity to talk about the age of current GOP candidates. So it seems that matters.

Imagine if McCain had been late to return to the debate because he was in the bathroom. Seriously, they would not only bring up his age but they’d make jokes about his time as POW and whether he was permanently damaged or afraid to leave the toilet.

Imagine if Donald Trump came on stage late and the audience cheered. We’d be treated to think pieces about how it is impossible for him to do wrong in the eyes of the Republican electorate, who wet themselves every time he burps. But Hillary comes traipsing on stage with toilet paper metaphorically stuck to her orthopedic shoes and you’re a jerk if you bring it up.

I’m sure Sanders will be hit with ageism as well if he becomes the nominee. And it wouldn’t matter if theirs was Trump who is older than Clinton.

This, however, is both ageist and sexist because the woman’s bathroom, as is so often the case in public areas, was much further than the men’s room:

As the third Democratic debate faded to a five-minute commercial break, Hillary Clinton had exactly one minute and 45 seconds to walk out of the gymnasium at St. Anselm College to the ladies’ restroom and one minute and 45 seconds to return to her place on stage.

Not a lot of wiggle room.

With the men’s room significantly closer to the debate stage, Mrs. Clinton’s male opponents, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, made it back quicker and, well, it takes women longer, as Mrs. Clinton pointed out after returning slightly late from a commercial break during the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas.

She could have whined like the Republicans did about their green rooms and the temperature but she just soldiered on instead. Not that any of that matters. You get the gist of what the right is saying about Clinton’s age with that post. Trump’s actually being the subtle one. So far …

By the way, it’s not true that ABC was locked into starting the debate and could do nothing else. They handle live TV all the time, which is often unpredictable, obviously. In fact, they had a bunch of analysts vamping for half an hour after the announced time. They just weren’t nimble enough to deal with it.

The Holiday fundraiser continues and I hope you’ll consider throwing a little something in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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Oh no, yet another terrorist in our midst

by digby

This sounds quite serious to me:

A neighborhood in Richmond had to be evacuated Sunday when police say a man was making explosives in his home with the intent of harming the Muslim community.

Police received a tip from a caller on December 17th who said a man was making the devices and threatening to harm Muslims.

Police removed a device from the home on the 5100 block of Mcbryde Avenue, and the Walnut Creek bomb squad detonated a device before neighbors were allowed to return to their homes.

The suspect was identified by police as 55 year old William Celli. He was arrested, and booked into the Contra Costa County jail Sunday afternoon.

Richmond police said they can’t elaborate on the threats other than to say that Celli’s actions and statements drew the attention of law enforcement, and were very concerning to officers.

Celli appeared to be a supporter of Presidential candidate Donald Trump. A post on his Facebook page said he would follow Trump “to the end of the world.”

For some odd reason, there were no screaming Breaking News headlines about this all over the TV. Odd, don’t you think?

But then there haven’t been any white men with guns and an a political trying to kill people in America in recent years so … oh wait…

The Holiday fundraiser continues and I hope you’ll consider throwing a little something in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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We have to look in the mirror when it comes to gun violence

by digby

After the 2000 election it was taken as an article of faith that the “gun issue” was a loser for Democrats because Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee and everyone assumed that failing to be properly reverent toward gun culture was the reason the reason. It always struck me as a shockingly fatuous assumption in the first place, and an immoral abdication of common sense in the other. Without some kind of opposition it was obvious that the gun lobby would be able to enact its entire agenda without any restraint and that’s exactly what happened. By 2008, the right wing Supreme Court declared the “right to bear arms” a individual right for the first time and the assault ban had been lifted and open carry, “stand your ground” “castle doctrine” and other expansions of guns rights were being enacted all over the country. We are now awash in gun violence.

I don’t know if the Democratic Party’s abdication of the issue would have made a difference. maybe it wouldn’t have. But it was a mistake on principle in any case. If you give these people and inch they will take a mile — and people will die.

I’ve been writing about this issue since I started blogging.  I’ve simply never been able to understand how we can call ourselves and civilized country and live with this deadly violence so that people can have what amounts to a toy for their amusement. It’s insane.

This is an excerpt of a piece I wrote after one of the many mass shootings we’ve had this year:

Unfortunately, even the shock of a man gunning down rooms full of first graders was not enough to get us to face up to our problem. And there’s really one man who bears most of the responsibility for that: the head of the NRA Wayne LaPierre. After the Newtown massacre, most Americans believed it was inconceivable that nothing would be done. There was tremendous momentum to start making some necessary changes. But as a recent PBS Frontline documentary called “Gunned Down: The Power of the NRA” put it, LaPierre would have none of it: 

NARRATOR: His advisers wanted him to lie low, but LaPierre had a very different idea. Expecting trouble, he hired personal security guards, and headed into Washington. 

ROBERT DRAPER, The New York Times Magazine: Without telling anyone, LaPierre himself staged a press conference in Washington, D.C. 

NARRATOR: The media gathered. Many expected a chastened and conciliatory LaPierre. 

ROBERT DRAPER: I think there was an assumption that, surely, he’s going to throw the gun safety advocates, and for that matter the Newtown parents, some kind of bone. 

NARRATOR: But LaPierre had something else in mind. 

WAYNE LaPIERRE: The only way — the only way — to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. 

ED O’KEEFE: And he almost immediately goes right back to what they usually say, which is that the answer to this is more guns. 

WAYNE LaPIERRE: What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security? 

SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, The New York Times: His comments are aimed directly at the gun owners of America, to rile them up, to get them behind the NRA’s no holds barred, never say die, you know, no compromise position. 

WAYNE LaPIERRE: Our children— we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless, and the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it. 

NARRATOR: In Washington, they said the speech was a political disaster. 

PROTESTER: The NRA stop killing our children! 

NARRATOR: In New York City, LaPierre was called the craziest man on earth and a gun nut. But those who know LaPierre say the speech was no miscalculation. 

PAUL BARRETT: This was not off the cuff. He didn’t lose it. This was very thought out. And they decided on a strategy and they executed the strategy. 

JOHN AQUILINO: Because the people that it resonated with gave more money, and this is what you need to do in order to keep that— that tough persona. 

PAUL BARRETT: And we’ve got to send the signal that this is not the time to compromise, that Obama is the enemy, and they want to take your guns away. Yes, it’s too bad about the kids, but we are not going to back down.

And that was that. 

(The documentary is well worth watching in full if you are unfamiliar with LaPierre’s history with NRA and the dramatic influence this one man has had on our country.) 

Would sensible gun control put an end to violence? Of course not. Will it stop all murder and suicide? Obviously not. But we are experiencing an epidemic of gun violence in this country the likes of which no one else in the world has to live with. And the way to deal with that is by treating it as an epidemic. 

There is a famous story about a British doctor by the name of John Snow who had a theory that cholera was spread through water contaminated by sewage. In the 1850s, it was widely assumed that the disease was caused by breathing vapors or a “miasma in the atmosphere” and Snow was unable to convince his colleagues otherwise. In 1854 there was a bad outbreak in the London suburb of Soho, where Snow happened to live. He suspected that the outbreak was due to a very busy public water pump in the center of town and set about tracking it meticulously through hospital records and interviews. By creating a geographical grid to chart of deaths, connecting them to the pump and eliminating other possible sources, Dr Snow was able to create what he considered proof that the drinking water was causing the outbreak. He took the evidence to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump. The epidemic ceased almost immediately. 

It was years before the medical profession fully understood the bacteriological basis for the disease and develop treatments for it. But the point is that it wasn’t necessary to cure the disease to end the epidemic. What ended it was shutting down that pump. 

What Clinton said in her statement yesterday is indisputably true. We have all the epidemiological evidence we need to know that gun control will save lives. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, after DC banned handguns, gun homicides fell by 25 percent and gun suicides fell by 23 percent. Even more dramatically, after Australia banned automatic, semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns and initiated a buyback program to take 700,000 guns out of private hands after a horrific mass shooting nearly 20 years ago, they have not had a single mass shooting since. Gun homicides fell by 59 per cent and firearm-related suicides fell by 65 per cent with no consequential rise in homicides and suicides by other means. 

They didn’t cure violence or hatred or depression or death. They just shut down the pump. We could too. It’s really not that complicated.

A lot of people are writing about gun violence these days and hopefully it will, in the end, amount to some changes.  I can guarantee that I will keep writing about it no matter what.  (And will deal with the truly ugly trolling that goes along with it.) But Democrats need to take stock of their own complicity in this bloody mess and see it as a lesson in political cynicism. It was very convenient to let the “gun issue” go.  It didn’t result in any political advantage at all. But it did result in lax laws, more violence and many deaths. Some things you just don’t play politics with.

If you feel as strongly as I do about this, I hope you’ll donate to the holiday fundraiser this year so we can keep the Hullabaloo doors open for another year.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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Donald Trump didn’t invent wingnut Putinphilia. He’s channeling it.

by digby

Despite the fact that this past weekend featured a Democratic Party presidential deb ate, the news continues to be Donald Trump and the GOP race. One assumes the press was not interested in the debate simply because the three candidates are professional, intelligent, well-informed and serious. In other words they are not a circus act. Luckily we still have Trump to entertain them, and he’s doing a bang up job.

For instance, when “Fox and Friends” ran a clip on Sunday of Clinton criticizing him in the debate the night before, Trump, on the phone, responded, “could you imagine that as president? I’m just watching and to see that as president just doesn’t work.” That got a big smile from one of the hosts, Tucker Carlson, who is known for a famous quip about Clinton which he repeated often in the last election:

“She scares me. I cross my legs every time she talks…every time, involuntarily. It is like those pictures you see of the soccer goalie when they’re about to get the free kick. That’s me when she talks. I can’t help it.”

But Trump’s comment about Clinton was a throwaway line. What the Sabbath Gasbags were most interested in were his comments about Vladimir Putin. Trump has been saying for some time that he and Putin would get along great. Months ago he told Anderson Cooper, “I think the biggest thing we have is that we were on ’60 Minutes’ together and we had fantastic ratings. One of your best-rated shows in a long time. So that was good, right? So we were stable mates.” They weren’t actually on “60 Minutes” together, there were simply stories about each of them on the same program, but that’s Trump. They made ratings together so that makes them blood brothers.

In fact, they’ve never met.

Nonetheless, on that and on numerous other occasions, Trump has said that he believed he and Putin would “probably work together much more so than right now.” And last week, Putin returned the compliment. In an end of year press conference he called Trump “a very bright and talented man,” and an “absolute leader.”

Trump nearly swooned at the compliment saying, “it is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.” It didn’t matter in the least that the media was gobsmacked, he was thrilled, telling Joe Scarborough “when people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.” He even went out of his way to defend him against the charges that Putin had been responsible for the deaths of opposition journalists, saying “our country does plenty of killing.”

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday he went to the mat for him:

“They are allegations. Yeah sure there are allegations. I’ve read those allegations over the years. But nobody’s proven that he’s killed anybody, as far as I’m concerned. He hasn’t killed reporters that’s been proven.”

He said it would be terrible if true, but “this isn’t like somebody that stood with the gun and taken the blame or admitted that he’s killed. He’s always denied it. He’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody. You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country.”

This is the same man who calls for the summary execution of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in every stump speech, usually followed by a nostalgic comment about how we used to do such things “when we were strong.” It’s also the same man who routinely points to the press in the back of the hall at his rallies and calls reporters disgusting and “scum,” sometimes even naming names.

The GOP establishment is clutching their pearls over all this under the assumption that saying you admire Vladimir Putin surely will be the ultimate put-away shot. After all, we just had a debate in which the candidates were variously vowing to “punch Russia in the nose” and to shoot Russian planes out of the sky. Perhaps the most bellicose was Chris Christie who has long criticized President Obama for being soft, saying a few months back, “I don’t believe, given who I am, that [Putin] would make the same judgment. Let’s leave it at that.” Evidently, “who he is” is so macho that Putin will roll himself into a ball and have a good old fashioned cry if Christie looks at him sideways.

Mitt Romney tweeted furiously about Trump’s coziness with Putin and his former advisers were all up in arms throughout the week-end calling him a “seriously damaged individual.” Trump responded by saying, “they’re jealous as hell because he’s not mentioning” them.

Trump doesn’t care one whit about any of this carping. His reasoning is clear in this one comment:

“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.”

Later he said, “I think that my words represent toughness and strength.”

Trump understands the base of the GOP a lot better than Mitt Romney and the Sunday talking heads. These GOP base voters like Putin. Like so much else, Trump is just channeling an existing right wing phenomenon.

Marin Cogan at National Journal wrote about the right wing Putin cult two years ago:

Putin­phil­ia is not, of course, the pre­dom­in­ant po­s­i­tion of the con­ser­vat­ive move­ment. But in cer­tain corners of the In­ter­net, ad­or­a­tion for the lead­er of Amer­ica’s No. 1 frenemy is un­ex­cep­tion­al. They are not his coun­try­men, Rus­si­an ex­pats, or any of the oth­er re­gion­al al­lies you might ex­pect to find al­lied with the Rus­si­an lead­er. Some, like Young and his read­ers, are earn­est out­doorsy types who like Putin’s Rough Rider sens­ib­il­ity. Oth­ers more cheekily ad­mire Putin’s cult of mas­culin­ity and claim re­l­at­ive in­dif­fer­ence to the polit­ic­al stances — the anti-Amer­ic­an­ism, the sup­port for lead­ers like Bashar al-As­sad, the op­pres­sion of minor­it­ies, gays, journ­al­ists, dis­sid­ents, in­de­pend­ent-minded ol­ig­archs — that drive most Amer­ic­ans mad. A few even ar­rive at their Putin ad­mir­a­tion through a strange brew of an­ti­pathy to everything they think Pres­id­ent Obama stands for, a re­flex­ive dis­trust of what the gov­ern­ment and me­dia tells them, and polit­ic­al be­liefs that go un­rep­res­en­ted by either of the main Amer­ic­an polit­ic­al parties… 

[T]he Obama’s-so-bad-Putin-al­most-looks-good sen­ti­ment can be found on plenty of con­ser­vat­ive mes­sage boards. Earli­er this year, when Putin sup­posedly caught — and kissed — a 46-pound pike fish, posters on Free Re­pub­lic, a ma­jor grass­roots mes­sage board for the Right, were over­whelm­ingly pro-Putin: 

“I won­der what photoup [sic] of his va­ca­tion will the Usurp­er show us? Maybe clip­ping his fin­ger­nails I sup­pose or maybe hanging some cur­tains. Yep manly. I can’t be­lieve I’m sid­ing with Putin,” one wrote. “I have Pres­id­ent envy,” an­oth­er said. “Bet­ter than our met­ro­sexu­al pres­id­ent,” said a third. One riffed that a Putin-Sarah Pal­in tick­et would lead to a more mor­al United States.

Is it any wonder that Trump is saying he’s “honored” that Putin thinks highly of him?

But the pearl clutching about all this Putin love from the other presidential candidates is seriously hypocritical. They may not be tapping into the macho Putin cult as directly as Trump, but they are very much on Putin’s authoritarian wavelength. Just like Putin they are very upset at the idea gay people might have equal rights and they are prepared to use government power to discriminate against them:

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee vowed to push for the passage of the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), legislation that would prohibit the federal government from stopping discrimination by people or businesses that believe “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman” or that “sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.” 

The pledge is supported by three conservative groups: the American Principles Project, Heritage Action for America, and Family Research Council Action.

Apparently, Bush, Graham, Paul and Trump, have also publicly expressed support for FADA. In the name of freedom, of course, just as the old Soviets would have done. These liberty lovers may shake their fists and pretend they are in opposition to Putin’s tyrannical ways, but when you get down to it they’re all on the same page.

And the rest of us should probably stop laughing and start paying attention according to a warning from someone who knows what she’s talking about, Maria Alekhina, aka Masha of Pussy Riot:

“When Putin came to his first term or second term, nobody [in Russia] actually thought that this is serious. Everybody was joking about it. And nobody could imagine that after five, six years, we would have a war in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, and these problems in Syria,” in which Russia has become involved. 

“Everybody [is] joking about Donald Trump now, but it’s a very short way from joke to sad reality when you have a really crazy president speaking about breaking every moral and logic norm. So I hope that he will not be president. That’s very simple.”

Strongman cults of the likes of Putin and Trump are often dismissed as silly and unserious at first. And then, all at once, it’s too late.

The Holiday fundraiser continues and I hope you’ll consider throwing a little something in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

About that “Chinese Century”…

by Gaius Publius

Yes, this is a climate post.

It’s amazing what can be done by a government determined to do it. In the U.S., our approach to the climate crisis is to use the “invisible hand” of the market and be careful not to get in the way of “wealth creation” (for billionaires). The Chinese don’t have those constraints. Yes, they want to make their billionaires wealthier, but that’s not their primary goal. There’s a very nationalist strain in China, and to a greater extent, I think, than in the U.S., the Chinese government wants what’s best for China, and not just its wealthy.

Put differently, the economic policy of the Chinese government is to grow the country, including its billionaires. It often seems that U.S. economic policy is to grow our billionaires at the expense of the country. That may be no more evident than in the following story.

“You talk about fixing the climate, but what about China?”

One of the main reasons the climate foot-draggers, in both parties, want to go slow on climate in the U.S. (aside both parties’ allegiance to “wealth creation”) is the China argument. In simple form, it says, “Whatever the U.S. does to save the climate will be undone by China, so why bother?” I don’t think that argument holds true any longer.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in The Telegraph (my emphasis):

China is the low-carbon superpower and will be the ultimate enforcer of the COP21 climate deal in Paris

Chinese scientists have published two alarming reports in a matter of weeks. Both conclude that the Himalayan glaciers and the Tibetan permafrost are succumbing to catastrophic climate change, threatening the water systems of the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Mekong.

The Tibetan plateau is the world’s “third pole”, the biggest reservoir of fresh water outside the Arctic and Antarctica. The area is warming at twice the global pace, making it the epicentre of global climate risk.

One report was by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The other was a 900-page door-stopper from the science ministry, called the “Third National Assessment Report on Climate Change”.

The latter is the official line of the Communist Party. It states that China has already warmed by 0.9-1.5 degrees over the past century – higher than the global average – and may warm by a further five degrees by 2100, with effects that would overwhelm the coastal cities of Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou. The message is that China faces a civilizational threat.

Whether or not you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming is irrelevant. The Chinese Academy and the Politburo do accept it. So does President Xi Jinping, who spent his Cultural Revolution carting coal in the mining region of Shaanxi. This political fact is tectonic for the global fossil industry and the economics of energy.

Until last Saturday, it was an article of faith among Western climate sceptics and some in the fossil industry that China would never sign up to the COP21 accord in Paris or accept the “ratchet” of five-year reviews.

They have since fallen back to a second argument, claiming that the deal is meaningless because China will not sacrifice coal-driven growth to please the West, and without China the accord unravels since it now emits as much CO2 as the US and Europe combined.

This political judgment was perhaps plausible three or four years ago in the dying days of the Hu Jintao era. Today it is clutching at straws.

Eight of the world’s biggest solar companies are Chinese. So is the second biggest wind power group, GoldWind. China invested $90bn in renewable energy last year and is already the superpower of low-carbon industries. It installed more solar in the first quarter than currently exists in France.

The Chinese plan to build six to eight nuclear plants every year, reaching 110 by 2030. They intend to lever this into worldwide nuclear dominance, as we glimpsed from the Hinkley Point saga.

Home-grown energy is central to Xi Jinping’s drive for strategic security. China’s leaders know what happened to Japan under Roosevelt’s energy embargo in the late 1930s, and they don’t trust the sea lanes for supplies of coal and liquefied natural gas. Nor do they relish reliance on Russian gas.

Isabel Hilton from China Dialogue says the energy shift has reached a point where Beijing has a vested commercial interest in holding the world to the Paris deal. “The Chinese think they can dominate low-carbon technologies,” she said….

Do read the rest; it’s fascinating.

The Chinese Century & the next great power source

There are a couple of takeaways here. One relates to the fact that, as we all know, the U.S. has been competing economically with China to make sure the 21st century won’t be the Chinese Century the way the 20th century was the American Century.

So the first takeaway is this — thanks to our billionaires and their control of the U.S. political process, that competition is over. In a world without a climate crisis, China will win economically. The U.S. has already, as part of an unspoken national economic policy, handed China control of the world’s manufacturing, in exchange for major additions to American CEO bottom lines, like Phil Knight’s at Nike. Put simply, U.S. national economic policy is to make China and Phil Knight rich at the expense of most Americans. Both China and Phil Knight have taken that deal.

The second takeaway is an insight from Kevin Phillips’ book American Theocracy, that world power (“greatness”) moves to the country that adopts the next great power source. For a while, the Dutch dominated with wind power (they really did), until coal power allowed the British to take their place as the world’s leading nation. The U.S. ran its economy on oil, not coal, and supplanted the British. The next great energy source is going to be renewables (if we can get to a stable world run on renewables).

The Chinese are counting on that being true, that the first nation that owns and runs on renewables is the next great national power. They want to control the world’s manufacturing and control the next-generation power source. They see this as their path to the Chinese Century, and they’re going to try very hard to get there. Again, from the article: “The Chinese think they can dominate low-carbon technologies”. In a world without catastrophic climate change, it’s likely they’re right.

But the third takeaway is this:

• If I’m right that we have at most 10 years to start a massive conversion to zero-carbon power generation in the U.S….
   
• If warming of at least +1.5 °C is “baked in” and guaranteed no matter what we do, and not stopping means we can only go higher that that…
   
• If we don’t soon have a national “wake up call” that motivates us to emergency action…

… then no one will own this century, not us, not the Chinese, not anyone, because it won’t be ownable. If we’re lucky, civilization will survive this century more or less intact. Period. Every nation will spend its energy in adaptation, not expansion; in survival and self-preservation, not dominance. Consider, for example, that if 45°N latitude is the cutoff point for livability in the second half of a hot next century, China’s breadbasket, the North China Plain, at about 39°N could be at risk. That’s where China will spend its time and money. We may have similar problems.

Dismissing the “China Argument”

It’s true that we can’t “fix” (mitigate, in climate-speak) or avoid the worst of the climate crisis without both the U.S. and China lending a serious hand. If the Chinese are going to do their part — and it looks like they are — it does come down to us then. The Chinese are not saying, “Let’s wait for the U.S. before we get serious.” They’re taking a leadership role and acting. Time to take a page from that book and do our own part? Looks like the “China argument” just went away.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Power, strength, power, and more strengthby Tom Sullivan Over the weekend, the would-be next president of the United States seems to expressed a certain respect for strongman Vladimir Putin, defending him from allegations that he, you know, might have had a journalist or two killed: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has.” [video] See, unlike Obama, Donald would get along with the Russian leader. Donald understands Putin. Because strong. A boy named Trump‘s fixation with the importance of power, strength, more strength, and power (it’s so important) is truly something to behold. When during last week’s debate Hugh Hewitt asked Donald Trump what his priority would be as president for updating the nuclear triad, Trump rambled. It’s not clear the would-be commander-in-chief knew what the nuclear triad is. This was his reply (emphasis mine):

TRUMP: Well, first of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible; who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important. And one of the things that I’m frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you’re going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important. But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out — if we didn’t have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can’t just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn’t care. It was hand-to-hand combat. The biggest problem this world has today is not President Obama with global warming, which is inconceivable, this is what he’s saying. The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now. HEWITT: Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? I want to go to Senator Rubio after that and ask him. TRUMP: I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.

It reminded me of this scene from Spielberg’s 1941. Tim Matheson is giving Nancy Allen a private, evening tour of a B-17 sitting on the tarmac. But really, he’s trying to get laid in the cockpit:

Captain Loomis Birkhead: [to Donna] It’s big. The biggest one here. You know what else? It’s got a lot of range. You know what I mean by range, don’t you? I mean it can stay up for a long time. A very long time. And it’s built firm and solid. Because it has to be. Because of its tremendous forward thrust. And when this baby delivers its payload… devastating.

Donald J. Trump would be devastating, ladies and gentlemen. You won’t believe how devastating he would be.
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